Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

I knew the name. Grandma had said it at the table. The Gantzes lost a hundred and ten.

“I understand Bryce’s about done with his summer,” he said. “Is he around?”

Bryce came out of the barn wiping his hands on his jeans. He is a bashful boy, and he stood a little behind me.

“Son, I watched you out there for three weeks,” Kermit said. “I drive the fence line every morning, and I saw a boy finishing other people’s rows in a hundred degrees. I’ve hired a lot of kids and I haven’t seen that in thirty years.”

Bryce’s mouth opened and nothing came out.

“I need a walker next July,” Kermit said. “Two hundred ten acres, and I pay fifteen dollars an hour, same as I’d pay anybody. You think about it. Come see me in June.”

He stuck out a big, scarred hand. Bryce looked at me, and I nodded, and my boy shook it. He did it firmly and looked the old man square in the eye, the way Mitch taught him.

“Yes, sir,” Bryce said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good.” Kermit tipped his cap to me, climbed back into the green truck, and then rolled the window down once more. “Tell your grandmother Gantz says hello. Tell her I said Abner would’ve been proud.”

After he drove off, Bryce stood there in the yard for a long time, looking at the dust the truck had left.

“He said fifteen,” he said finally. “Mom. Fifteen.”

“I heard.”

“I didn’t even ask.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”

That night, after the kids were in bed, I took the plat map out of my purse and smoothed it flat on the kitchen table, all those yellow shapes in a neat row with my red number at the bottom. I thought about throwing it out. Then I thought about Grandpa Abner, and the number in pencil that can’t be argued with.

I folded it along its old creases, and I put it in the kitchen drawer with the school bus route sheets, where I keep the things I intend to be able to find.

Bryce kept the check in the front of his notebook for two weeks before he would let Mitch take him to the bank. He did not spend a penny of it on himself. In the end he put every dollar of it in a savings account, and when I asked him what for, he thought about it very seriously.

“Next year I want to buy a hoe that fits me,” he said. “A good one. And I want to be able to say I paid for it.”

He still has his new boots. They are scuffed now at the toes, and he will not let me clean them.

On the first day of school I drove my regular route, route twelve, the long one that runs out past the Home Eighty, and I slowed down at the field road near the machine shed like I always do.

The beans were turning gold. The rows were clean and straight all the way to the tracks, and every one of them had been walked by somebody who cared how it turned out.

Bryce sat in the front seat behind me, where the eighth graders sit. When we passed the field he did not say anything. He just opened a spiral notebook with a dog on the cover and wrote down the date.