Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

If I had pushed, Roger might have taken it out on him, or sent him home with four days left, and my boy would have lost the thing he was proudest of.

Second, the family. Roger rents ground from my grandmother, and the whole clan sits down at her table every Sunday after church. A fight on the phone just becomes whispers. A fight at Grandma’s table, in front of her, becomes the truth.

So I waited. I kept my mouth shut, I kept Bryce going, and I walked the field that Saturday to see it with my own eyes. That was the morning of the Gatorade, the one I told you about at the start. I saw the whole thing, and it was worse than the notebook.

Roger drove up at ten, honked, handed his boys two drinks apiece, praised them for the stand, and walked right back to his pickup without so much as a glance at the kid who was still on his knees in the waterhemp.

On the way home, Bryce sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window.

“Did you see Uncle Roger?” I asked him, carefully.

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t say hi to you.”

“He doesn’t really see me out there,” Bryce said. “It’s okay. He’s busy.”

He was thirteen. He said it the way a grown man would, the way my grandfather used to say things were fine when they were not. I kept both hands on the wheel and I drove home very slowly.

The last day of walking was Friday, July 31. Bryce came home at 1:20 with a cream-colored envelope in his back pocket and a face full of sun.

“Aunt Lorene gave it to me,” he said, setting it on the kitchen table like a trophy. “I did the math in the truck. It’s right.”

I opened it and counted. Ten hundreds, one fifty, a ten and four ones, exactly what eight dollars an hour comes to over a hundred and thirty-three hours, ten sixty-four. The arithmetic was right. Only the wage was wrong, and my son did not know that I knew.

“Good job,” I said, and I hugged him until he squirmed. “I’m proud of you.”

“Can I get my boots tomorrow?”

“You can get your boots tomorrow.”

I took him to the farm store that Saturday morning and he picked out the hundred-forty-dollar pair himself, and he carried the box to the register held out in front of him like a full bucket.

He paid in cash. The clerk asked him where he had worked, and he said, “My uncle’s,” and he was so proud that I had to go stand in the aisle with the work gloves.

That Saturday night, I laid the plat book on the kitchen table and got to work.

I started with the fields. Bryce’s notebook named them by what everyone calls them, not by number. The Home Eighty, behind Roger’s machine shed. The Schoolhouse Forty, where the old one-room school used to stand. The Creek Sixty, down the gravel road past the culvert. The Railroad Eighty, along the tracks.

Two hundred sixty acres in all. I found each one on the plat map and ran my highlighter over it in yellow, and next to each one I wrote the dates my son had walked it, straight out of his notebook.

Then I made a table on a sheet of lined paper, the way I make a route sheet for the bus. Three columns. Bryce. Caden. Carson.