“Your boys are throwing too far,” he said. He said it gently, and he was looking at Colt. “You are wasting your arms. Let us show you. Then we will go back.”
He did not wait for me to say yes. He walked to the front of the line, where the melons came up off the ground, and he put Colt one step closer to the next boy.
The other two men took spots in the middle, one between each pair of boys.
And then the melons started moving. I mean moving. I had been watching seven people for four hours, and I knew what that looked like. This was different. This was the bucket brigade I remembered.
The crew boss would pick a melon up out of the row and turn and toss it, all in one motion, never really looking.
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The boys watched how he did it. Within ten minutes they were doing it the same way, catching low and close and turning.
Isaiah laughed out loud at one point. “That is how you do it,” he said. “I have been throwing it like a chest pass all morning.”
“You were doing all right,” the crew boss said. “You were just working too hard. A melon does not want to go far. It wants to go to the next pair of hands.”
My mother brought the cooler over and handed each of the three men a cup of ice water.
The youngest one, who could not have been more than twenty two, said thank you, ma’am, and drank it in one swallow.
The second wagon filled faster than the first. We pulled it up to the trailer, and the men stayed in the rows and kept the line going there while the boys and I pitched the wagon up to Nadine.
I looked at my watch. It was twelve forty. Their lunch hour ended at twelve thirty.
They were ten minutes late going back to Dwayne’s field, and not one of them looked at a clock.
At five till one the crew boss straightened up and pulled off his gloves. “We have to go,” he said.
“He is going to be looking for us. But you will make it now. You know how.”
“I will pay you for this hour,” I said.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “You paid us for every hour we worked your ground since April. You paid us on time every Friday. This one is ours.”
He started back across the road. The other two followed him. At the edge of the blacktop the youngest one turned around and lifted his hand to Bryce, and Bryce lifted his hand back.
I stood there watching them go. My mother came and stood next to me and took my arm.
She did not say anything. Neither did I. There was nothing either of us needed to say just then.
Before he left, the crew boss had moved Colt down next to me at the wagon, because the last toss is the heaviest. Bryce climbed up into the trailer to help Nadine stack.
The boys went back to it. They worked that afternoon like they had been doing it all their lives.