Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

I did not say anything to Bryce on the way home. I did not say anything at supper, either. But after he fell asleep on the couch that night with his sunburned neck and his bare feet hanging off the cushion, I did something I had never done in his life. I picked up the spiral notebook with the dog on the cover and I opened it.

The first page was dated July 6. In block letters, the way he writes when he is being serious, it said: Home Eighty. Start 6:00. Quit 1:00. Caden left 11:15. Carson left 10:40.

The second page said the same thing, with different times. So did the third.

I turned pages for forty minutes, sitting on the floor beside the couch. Every day, every field, every start time and every quit time, and every time his cousins walked off the job early and left their rows unfinished.

Then, in the margins, small and in pencil, the other part. Beside nearly every page where his cousins had quit, there was a short line.

July 9: Finished Caden’s end so Uncle R. wouldn’t be short. Didn’t say.

July 14: Carson’s rows too. Rained after. Fine.

July 17: Caden asked me not to tell his dad he left. Said okay.

I put the notebook down on my knee and I could not see it for a minute.

Because that was the part I was not prepared for. It was not the pay. My son had been covering for the two boys who were making almost twice his wage, and he had been doing it quietly, without a word, because he thought that was what family did.

And there was a last thing, at the very bottom of the July 20 page, in a smaller hand. I almost missed it.

Their envelopes are thicker. Mine is $8 an hr. Maybe they work more. Mom says don’t make things weird.

I had said that. I did say that, back in June, when he asked whether he should ask Roger about the rate. I told him not to make things weird.

I sat there on the living room carpet at eleven at night with my hand flat on the carpet, and I made a decision. It was not a loud one. It was the kind where a door in you quietly closes.

I did not wake him. I went into the kitchen, pulled the farm plat book off the shelf where Mitch keeps it for the elevator, and found the page I wanted.

Every farm in the county is in that book, field by field, with the acres written in. I had a yellow highlighter in the junk drawer.

By midnight I knew what I was going to do, and I knew where. Mitch came in at 12:40 with grain dust in his hair, read the notebook over my shoulder, said “Roger” once like a curse word, and went to put the coffee on.

I should explain why I did not simply call my uncle that Thursday morning and say, Roger, pay my boy the same as yours. People ask me that, and it is a fair question.

Two reasons. First, Bryce. He had begged me back in June to let him earn this on his own, and a phone call from his mother in the middle of the season was exactly the kind of weird he meant.