Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I suppose there is nowhere in the world a more elemental exchange of goods than among ourselves at the Creek. The exchange does not even become barter and trade. We merely return favors. Old Boss uses my truck to haul his vegetable crops to the station and I use his mules for my occasional light plowing. We have never sat down to figure which has the higher rental value, for it does not matter. I have the only pecan trees at the Creek, so each fall two or three families pick the crop for me, by their request, and take for pay only enough pecans to last them through the winter. They refuse the actual cash value of the work. As a matter of fact, they could not have been hired. One fisherman borrows a few dollars of me in lean times, and I have a drawing account for fish, never calculated exactly, but well tipped in my favor. Another man borrows between jobs and appears unsummoned when a freeze comes in and I must fire my young orange grove. Sometimes his two or three nights of the cold and arduous work come to much more than he has borrowed and he waves aside the proffered difference.

-"You don't owe me a nickel," he says.