The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

Colt picked up a melon off the wagon and tossed it to me without looking at his hands, and I heard Amos say, “Look at him, he is a melon man now.”

At one fifteen I did the figures again. We had about eighteen hundred melons in the trailer.

Six hundred more, maybe a few less, and Nadine said the trailer was getting full toward the back.

With the crew’s hour behind us, three o’clock was going to be close, but it was there to be had.

So we went on until three. The heat was the worst it had been all day, ninety four degrees on the thermometer by the shed.

The boys’ faces were red as the inside of a melon. My mother kept walking the line with water.

At two fifteen I looked up from the wagon and saw Dwayne’s pickup come out of his drive across the road.

It stopped at the edge of the blacktop, the same spot where his men had set down their coolers.

He did not get out. He sat in the truck with the engine running and looked across at my field.

At the trailer. At his boys in the line, shirts soaked through, tossing melons he should have sent men to pitch.

Colt saw him first. He did not stop working. He took the next melon off the wagon and tossed it to me, and I handed it up to Bryce, and Bryce laid it in the stack beside Nadine.

After a while Dwayne’s door opened and he got out and walked across the road. He walked slowly.

He had his hands in his back pockets. He came up to the end of the line and stood there.

“Colt,” he said.

Colt did not stop. “Hey, Dad,” he said. He picked up a melon and tossed it.

“I did not know you all were doing this,” Dwayne said.

“You knew the truck was coming,” Colt said. He said it plain. He did not raise his voice. “Mom told you Monday and Wednesday. I heard her tell you.”

Dwayne did not have anything to say to that. He stood there with his hands in his back pockets and watched his son pitch a melon down the line. I could see his jaw working.

“Tammy’s melons were going soft,” he said finally. “She lost half a row. I did not know what else to do.”

“I know, Dad,” Colt said. He tossed another melon. “But Mom’s melons were going to go soft too. You picked which ones. That is all.”

Dwayne looked at me. I was standing at the trailer door with a melon in my arms. I did not say anything to him.

I did not have to. Colt had said all of it, and he had said it better than I could have.

Then Dwayne looked up at Bryce in the trailer, who had not said one word. Bryce took the next melon from me and laid it in the stack without looking at his father. His face was quiet and closed.

I think that was what did it. Dwayne could take Colt telling him. Colt had always told him. But Bryce did not tell anybody anything, and Bryce would not look at him.