The Melon Load My Boys Pitched By Hand

Dwayne stood there another minute. Then he pulled a pair of gloves out of his back pocket, the same gloves he had been carrying in that pocket for twenty years, and he put them on, and he climbed up onto the wagon and started handing melons down to Colt.

Nobody said anything. Dwayne handed a melon down, and Colt tossed it to me, and I handed it up into the trailer, and Bryce reached down and took it from me with both hands, looking at his father the whole time.

We pitched like that for forty minutes. Dwayne did not say one word, and none of us said one to him.

My mother walked the line with the water, and when she came to Dwayne she held out a cup, and he took it and said, “Thank you, Loretta.”

At two fifty five the last melon went up into the trailer. Nadine laid it in the stack at the back, right at the doors.

She stood up and put both hands on the small of her back and said, “That is a load.”

The boys stood in the field with their hands on their knees, breathing hard.

Then Isaiah started laughing, and the juniors started laughing, and Amos lay down flat on his back in the dirt between the rows and said, “I am never eating watermelon again.”

“Yes, you are,” my mother said. “Tonight. I have one in the refrigerator.”

Nadine pulled the doors shut and latched them and climbed into her cab.

She leaned out the window and said, “I weighed empty at the elevator scale on the way in. I will weigh loaded on the way out of town and call you with the net ticket.”

“Thank you, Nadine,” I said. “I mean it. I do not know how to thank you.”

“You just did,” she said. “Have your next load look as clean as this one. That is thanks enough.”

And she pulled the semi out onto the field road and down to the blacktop and was gone.

Dwayne stood at the edge of the field. He had his gloves off again and was holding them in one hand.

He looked at the boys, and at me, and at the empty field road where the trailer had been.

“Jodi,” he said. “That should not have happened.”

“No,” I said. “It should not have.”

He nodded. He looked at the ground. “The crew will be on your ground at six tomorrow,” he said. “Before Tammy’s. Before mine. Whatever you need loaded, it goes first.”

I did not thank him. I did not say anything ugly to him either.

I just said, “All right,” and I turned and went to help my mother put the ice chests in the back of the pickup.

Nadine called at three thirty from the scale at the elevator in town, with the net worked out.

My mother handed me the phone, and Nadine said, “Forty three thousand pounds, Jodi, right at it. That is a full load, and every melon of it clean.”

At sixteen cents a pound that was a little under seven thousand dollars.

That was one load, my first one on my own, and it was the load that told the buyer I could do it. He booked my second truck that same evening.