Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

At ten that Saturday morning my uncle Roger pulled his pickup onto the field road, leaned on the horn twice, and climbed out holding a cooler. He walked straight past my son to hand his own boys two cold Gatorades each.

I was standing three rows from Bryce with a borrowed hoe in my hand and my shirt stuck to my back. Ninety-one degrees by nine o’clock, the radio had said, and the humidity sat on the field like a wet blanket.

Roger set the cooler on his tailgate and looked down the bean rows with his thumbs in his belt loops. He nodded at the stand, at the clean passes, at the weeds laid out in the middles.

“Looking good, boys,” he said. “That’s the way to do it.”

Caden was sixteen and Carson was fifteen. They had been leaning on their hoes at the end of the pass for twenty minutes, scrolling their phones in the shade of the pickup, and neither one had pulled a weed since eight.

Bryce was still working. He was thirteen, and he was bent over a patch of waterhemp taller than the beans, working the roots loose with the corner of his hoe so they would not snap and grow back.

He did not look up. He did not ask for a drink. He wiped his face with the front of his shirt and moved down to the next stand, and that was the moment I stopped being polite about it.

I did not say anything to Roger that day, though. I want you to know that. I smiled, I said it was hot, and I went back to my row. What I did instead took me another eight days, and it started with a plat map and a spiral notebook.

Let me back up and tell you how my son came to be out there at all.

If you did not grow up in central Illinois, walking beans probably means nothing to you. If you did, you just felt your back ache. Every July, before the soybeans canopy over, farm kids walk the rows with hoes and cane knives, pulling waterhemp, velvetleaf and the volunteer corn that sprouts from last year’s dropped ears.

Miss it, and the weeds steal the crop. A good walker saves a farmer real yield, and a field that gets walked in July looks different from a field that does not, all the way until harvest.

It is hot, dull, wet work, and it is how nearly every kid in our county gets a first paycheck. My husband Mitch walked beans for his uncle at twelve. I walked them at fourteen for a man named Mr. Kramer who paid me in a coffee can full of cash on Friday afternoons.

Bryce had been asking since March. He turned thirteen in April and he had decided, all on his own, that he wanted his own money and his own boots, the good ones from the farm store that cost a hundred and forty dollars.

I drive a school bus for the Lincoln district, so summers are mine. Mitch hauls grain for the elevator and spends July and August sleeping four hours a night, then climbing back in the truck. We were not a family with a lot of slack, and I liked that my boy wanted to earn.