Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

So in June I called my mother’s brother. Roger farms three hundred twenty acres of corn and beans out past Lincoln, and a good half of it is ground he rents from my grandmother, his mother, who is seventy-nine and still keeps her checkbook in a kitchen drawer.

“Sure, I’ll take him,” Roger said on the phone. “My boys are walking anyway. He can walk with them.”

“What are you paying?” I asked.

“Same as everybody gets,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, Tara. We take care of family.”

I should have asked what everybody got. I did not. I trusted him, and in our family you did not ask your uncle to say a number out loud, because it sounded like calling him a liar.

Bryce started the first Monday of July. He left the house at 5:40 in the morning with his hoe over his shoulder and a gallon jug of water, and he came home around one every afternoon looking like something the dog dragged in.

He did not complain once. Not once, in nearly four weeks. He ate supper, soaked his feet, fell asleep on the couch with the television going, and I carried a flashlight into the living room every night to check whether he had burned his neck.

He had. I rubbed aloe on it and he never woke up.

Now here is something you should know about my boy. I drive a bus, which means I keep a log. Pre-trip checklist, start mileage, every stop, every time. I have done it for eleven years and it has rubbed off on my son in a way I never planned.

On his first morning Bryce asked for a spiral notebook, and I gave him one from the junk drawer with a dog on the cover.

He wrote in it every single day. I never looked, because it was his, and I thought it was a boy thing, like keeping score of a ball game.

I found out the way you find out everything in a small town, which is from a kid with a mouth, standing around a swimming pool.

It was the Wednesday of the third week. Mitch’s mother had taken Bryce’s little sister Delaney to the county pool, and I went along to sit in the shade with a paperback and a lemonade.

Carson was there with two friends from the football team, and I heard him before I saw him. He was telling a story about a pair of sneakers he had bought with beans money, and he said the number out loud like it was a score.

“Fifteen an hour, man. Dad pays us fifteen. I made seven hundred and fifty dollars in two weeks and I barely sweat.”

One of the friends whistled. Then Carson looked over and saw me, and his face did something I will not forget, a flicker of the kind of knowledge a kid gets before he knows what to do with it.

“Hey, Aunt Tara,” he said. “Bryce’s the best one out there, you know. Dad says he’s still learning, though.”

“Does he,” I said.

“Yeah. I think he gets eight, since it’s his first year.” Carson shrugged. “Or whatever. Dad figures him different because he’s not, like, on the farm.”

I smiled at him, I want to be clear. He was fifteen and none of this was his doing. I said, “Thank you for telling me,” picked up my lemonade, and finished my chapter without reading a word of it.