One Nearly Perfect Day

BECAUSE he was not free to farm every day, Wheeler Catlett, Andy’s father, had a way of thinking up, of foreseeing in detail, farm jobs for his boys on days when they were out of school—and thus, to his happiness, even when they were as young as eight or nine, granting to them the freedom that he had denied himself by being responsibly employed. Sometimes they were capable of the work he gave them. At other times the “little jobs” he had thought of would not turn out as he supposed, but would take all day and would involve much difficulty or frustration or even failure. What he had conceived as a freedom would become involuntary servitude and a trial.

As inheritors of their father’s freedom, or of his visions of what he might have felt free to do if he had been his own son and heir, Andy and Henry learned to anticipate his “little jobs” with doubt, sometimes with dread. But one of the jobs he gave Andy turned out so splendidly that Andy was as delighted as he was surprised. Wheeler would have been surprised too, if Andy had ever told him.

It was a Saturday in the spring of 1947, and help was scarce. There was a new hired hand now living with his wife in the little house down by the woods. This was Henry Bevel, a white man. Henry did not want to be “tied down” by milk cows, and so Wheeler had given him, in addition to his daily wage, a small tobacco crop to grow on the shares. Of the six Jersey cows that Henry’s predecessor had milked, Wheeler had sold five, leaving one for Andy to milk for himself and his grandma.

One of the fences at the home-place had finally, after many repairs, become useless. The wire was rusted through and brittle, and the posts were rotten. The crop year was beginning, and none of the regular hands of the place could be spared. The Brightleaf brothers, Scorchy Dole, and Henry Bevel were hard at it, daylight to dark, every day. To take out the old fence, Wheeler had hired the only available help: two of Hargrave’s jacks-of-all-trades (-and-good-at-none), who in their abundance of spare time were faithful historians of public life from the vantage of the shady benches in front of the courthouse.

It was not a long fence. The job, Wheeler rightly thought, ought to take no more than a day.

“Andy,” Wheeler said, “I’ve hired Dingus Riggens and Les Sublett to take out that stretch of fence I showed you. I’ve told them what to do, and now I’m going to tell you.”

His father’s drift was plain enough, and Andy caught it. Dingus and Les were not to be depended on to remember exactly what Wheeler had told them. It would be Andy who would have to remember.

“They’ll have to take the wire loose from the posts,” Wheeler said, “and roll it up. Some of the posts have broken off. The others I think they can pull up. But they’ll have to dig around some of them, maybe pretty deep. Take a log chain and the spud bar and the other digging tools. They’re to load the wire and the posts on the sled and put them in the sink hole. I’ll have Henry harness Beck and Catherine before he goes to work. They’ll be in their stalls.”

And then Wheeler’s voice became even more precise and cautionary. “Now listen. You’re to stay along with them, remember what they’re to do in case they don’t remember, and help them a little if they need it. You understand?”

“Yessir,” Andy said. And he did understand. He understood the job and how it was to be done. And not then but later, he understood entirely the part his father had intended him to play. He was sending him not just to remember but to be a witness and, imaginably, a tattletale. With...