The grease in the fry basket was still hissing when the truck of Junior came up the lane. Junior is my yard foreman, sixty two, a lean man with a gray ponytail who has run my yard for thirty years. He climbed down from the cab with a folded paper in his fist and walked straight to me past the picnic tables. “Hollis, I got a call from a man in Tifton,” he said. “He is asking if Unit 8 is still for sale. At one hundred sixty five thousand. He says Bo listed it Tuesday.” Behind me, the whole Kicklighter family stopped eating.
Royce Kicklighter set down his paper plate. He is sixty seven, a thick, sunburned man in a seed cap, who has called me nut shaker for thirty years, always with a laugh that was not a laugh. “Now hold on,” he said. “Bo only borrowed a few machines that were sitting idle. Family does that.” “Idle,” I said, and wiped my hands. I took from my back pocket the paper I had carried all week and unfolded it on the table. “Eleven weeks ago I sold Reed Pecan Harvesting. Ten million, eight hundred thousand dollars. To a farm equipment company out of Dallas.”
“Unit 8 was working the groves two weeks ago,” I went on. “The sweeper and the harvester too. And on Tuesday Bo drove them out the gate on a lowboy and told Junior I had given him the lot.” I looked across the lawn at my nephew, a broad, ruddy man of thirty three standing very still by the cooler with a beer halfway to his mouth. “Bo, there is a sign on the side of that trailer that says Kicklighter Orchard Services. I am told it is painted fresh.” Bo set down the beer. “Uncle Hollis, I was going to pay you,” he said. “Everybody knows you are about to retire.”
A fry basket hissed on a reunion lawn and gave one pecan man the whole afternoon to bring his nephew back to the orchard.
“Pay me,” I said, “with what?” Royce stepped forward. “Hollis, who did you sell to?” he demanded, and his voice had risen. “And why in the world did you not tell Paula?” At that, my wife, who had been sitting in a lawn chair under the oak with a plate of cake in her lap, looked up. Paula is sixty four, small and straight backed, with the eyes of a schoolteacher. “Royce,” she said, “I have known for eleven weeks. He told me the night he signed.”
“I asked him to keep it quiet,” Paula went on, standing, brushing crumbs from her skirt. “I said, let us see how they treat you when they think you are only a man with a shaker. And I have watched. Forty dollars to fry onion rings for sixty people in July. Nut shaker, nut shaker, in front of the children. I watched my own brother do it.” She did not raise her voice. “Royce, I am so ashamed that I almost could not say it. But I have said it now.” Royce had gone the color of old brick.
I told them what would happen. The machines would go back to the yard by Monday noon, on the same lowboy, with Junior watching and a fresh coat of paint across the sign. Bo would sign a paper stating that he had taken equipment without permission. In exchange, the buyer, who had already been told, would not press charges, because I had asked them not to. “Bo,” I said, “you are a good operator. I have watched you run a shaker since you were nineteen. That is the only reason this is a family matter.”
The face of Bo crumpled. He cried like a boy. He said he owed money on a house and a truck, that Royce had told him all his life that the Reeds would get what they deserved, that when he heard about the sale he thought, they have so much, I only need a little. “You thought you could take it,” I said, “because you thought I would not notice. Son, a man who takes from you quietly is not stealing a machine. He is stealing the idea that you are worth noticing.” He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Royce apologized in the driveway, long after the cake was gone. He took off his seed cap and held it in both hands. He said that his father had always called mine a shaker and he had never thought what it meant. “It means I shake pecans,” I said. “I have a lot of friends who shake pecans.” He laughed, finally, a real one. “I would like to buy you a fish dinner,” he said. “And I would like you to call me Hollis.” I said that was the first sensible thing he had ever said to me.
The machines went back on Monday. Junior counted them off the lowboy like calves. The buyer, a quiet woman named Carol from the Dallas office, offered Bo a job running Unit 8 for the harvest, at a real wage, with a real contract, and Bo took it and cried again. He drove it with his head up all October, down the long rows of the Bulloch County groves, and the nuts came down in a great brown rain, and he did not miss a row. I went out to watch one morning in a lawn chair, with Paula, and a thermos.
At Thanksgiving, Royce brought onion rings. He had fried them himself, in my fry basket, which I had left on his porch in July by mistake. They were burnt on one side and raw on the other, and I ate nine. Paula pretended not to notice. When the plates were cleared, Royce raised his glass and said, in front of all of us, “To the nut shaker.” He said it with such love that Paula laughed until she cried. I raised my glass. “To the family,” I said, and for once I meant every word.
