Because he was not free to farm every day, Andy Catlett’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, even when they were as young as eight or nine, Wheeler Catlett granted to his sons 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 had 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, 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.
One of the fences at the home place, after many repairs, had at last 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. To take out the old fence, Wheeler had hired the only available help: two of Hargrave’s semi-employed jacks-of-all-trades, 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 in the summer and from several indoor points of view in the winter.
It was not a long fence. The job, Wheeler rightly thought, ought to take no more than a day. It would be a trifling job that would clear the way for a new fence to be built when experienced hands would have the time. Or that was the explanation Wheeler gave Andy. Later Andy would suspect his father of contriving the project to focus the often-wandering mind of his son by a dose of responsibility.
“Andy,” Wheeler said, “I’ve hired Dingus Riggins and Les Stout 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 wagon and put them in the sink hole. I’ll have Snazz 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 that his father was sending him not just to remember but to be a witness and, imaginably, an informer. With Andy there, the job would get done in one day. Otherwise, it would take two.
Andy was staying with his grandma, pretty conscientiously filling the place of the man of the house after the death of his grandfather. He had finished his morning chores and his breakfast and was waiting at the barn when Wheeler drove in with Dingus and Les, each with his lunch in a paper sack. For drinking water, Andy had filled a jug at the well. He had also loaded the digging tools, a log chain, a hammer, and a pair of fencing pliers onto the wagon, ready to go.
When Dingus and Les had got out of the car and were standing with Andy in the barn door, Wheeler said, “All right. You fellows know what to do. Andy here will go with you to show you the fence.”
“We got it,” Dingus said.
“Yes, sir,” said Les.
“You know what to do,” Wheeler said to Andy.
“Yessir,” Andy said.
And then abruptly, as his way was, Wheeler was heading back out to the road, the atmosphere of the place palpably altered by his departure.
“Now this here boy,” Les said to Dingus as if Andy were not present, and though he knew perfectly who Andy was, “he would be Mr. Catlett’s son? Am I right?”
“This here would be young Mr. Andy Catlett,” Dingus replied. “He is Wheeler Catlett’s boy. Or, anyhow, he was caught in Wheeler’s trap. And he is supposed to show us where is what and what is where. His daddy said.”
And then, turning to Andy, Dingus began again. “Now, young Mr. Catlett, your daddy said you would know where this team for us to use is.”
“Yessir, Mr. Riggins,” Andy said. “I’ll get ’em for you.”
He went to Beck’s stall and brought her out. “If you’ll hold this one, please, Mr. Riggins, I’ll get the other one.”
Andy noticed in passing that he was having perfect manners, and he was pleased. He went to Catherine’s stall, brought her out, and stood her in her place beside Beck. And then occurred a small crisis that would have a large influence upon all the rest of the day.
Having by his better knowledge made the team available to them, Andy was prepared to defer to the two men who, as grownups, he expected to take charge of him, the team, and the job of work. There was a critical moment when they should have done that, when it was up to them, or one of them, to do that, but they allowed the moment to pass. If they were going to take charge, they should have attached the check lines to the bridle bits of the two mules, driven them out of the barn, and hitched them to the wagon that waited, loaded with the tools, in plain sight in front of the corncrib.
They did nothing. They seemed to have abandoned the field of adult authority. Andy felt this a social embarrassment that he needed to put an end to. And so he detached the lines from the mules’ hames, shook them out, snapped them to the bits, and then, sensing again that the initiative had been left to him, he stepped behind the team and picked up the lines.
By then he was nearly twelve years old. He had not only watched the experienced teamsters and under their supervision taken the lines into his own hands during most of his life, but he had even been allowed on his own to work a team at a few simple jobs. And so he knew what to do. He spoke to the mules and drove them out to the wagon. He backed them into their places on either side of the tongue.
“This here boy,” Les said, “he ain’t hardly no more than weaned, and he’s a teamster?”
“Aw, that boy’s a teamster!” Dingus said. “He’s a driver! Ain’t you seen him handle them mules?”
“I seen! I seen!” Les said. “Yeah, I seen!”
At that time Andy was still supposing that Les’s first name was spelled with two s’s.
Beck and Catherine were knowing and dependable. Andy had been cautioned more than once not to argue with them “because they know their business better than you do.”
Wheeler had designated the old team for that job, as Andy even then understood, not because the two mules could be entrusted to Dingus and Les, but because Dingus and Les could be entrusted to the mules.
Dingus did go so far as to help Andy hitch the trace chains to the singletrees. “Drop two links,” Andy told him. But then Dingus hoisted himself up beside Les on the edge of the wagon bed and dangled his feet. Clearly there was nothing for Andy to do but take the lines.
He drove the team out of the lot and back through the fields, first Dingus and then Les opening and shutting the gates as they went through.
When they got to the place of their work and Andy stopped the team, Les said, his tone suggesting that they had already accomplished a great deal, “And now what’s next?”
“Why,” Dingus said, “we’re a-going to take out that there fence.”
“And how are we a-going to do that?” Les seemed to suggest that they would have to do so by some method not yet invented.
“Why, we’re a-going to start at this here end here and go to that there end yonder.”
Confronted with yet a further vacancy of authority, Andy finally recognized what a day this was. Not only was it going to be up to him to be the teamster, and under the authority of no grownup. It was going to be up to him to run the whole show. Or so he concluded, and so it went.
Later he would be obliged to wonder if the show had not been run, in fact, by Dingus. Perhaps by more subtlety than Andy had given him credit for, Dingus had employed Andy for that day to do a lot more work than Wheeler had expected him to do, though Dingus paid for this probably by a harder day’s work than he had intended for himself. Andy would come eventually to meditate at some length on the possible difficulty of distinguishing between stupidity and low cunning—and, for that matter, between stupidity and certain kinds of intelligence.
Owing to whatever cause, Andy had the upper hand of that day. He was free to work a team of mules, to work himself, to manage the work of others without, for once, the intervention of higher authority. Such a day, he knew, was not likely to come to him again, not maybe for a time longer than he had so far lived, and he now became cunning himself in order to safeguard his authority. It was a fine, bright day, neither too hot nor too cool, and Andy exerted himself to keep anything bad from happening in it.
Assuming again his extremely good manners, he said, “Mr. Riggins, if you please, sir, you could knock the staples out of them posts, and I’ll help Mr. Stout to roll up the wire.”
And Dingus said, “Yes, sir, young Mr. Catlett.”
And so it went. They did the work in stages: loosening and rolling up a section of wire, working the still-standing posts out of the ground, loading wire and posts onto the wagon, hauling them to the sinkhole. The decision as to when and how much to load the wagon was, each time, left to Andy. Otherwise, he ran the show only by staying at work himself and thus keeping the other two at work. The rest of the bossing was done by Dingus. At each step of the work, no matter how many times they had already done it, Les asked how to do it, and Dingus told him. Les was the man with the questions, Dingus the man with the answers. Otherwise, their talk was devoted to speculation, very instructive, upon Andy’s future transactions with girls, to memories, equally instructive, of similar transactions committed by themselves, and to elaborations upon what they would accomplish if they were vouchsafed a new beginning at the age of this here boy.
At the approach of dinnertime, signaled by the whistle of a dependable train as it raced through Smallwood, three miles across the fields, they returned to the barn. Andy unhitched and unbridled the mules, watered them, and gave them their ration of corn. Dingus and Les sat on the well top, the freshened water jug between them, and opened their lunch sacks. Andy went to the house where Grandma Catlett had his dinner ready. She also had ready some comments that she had meditated upon for several hours.
“That’s a fine pair of strays your daddy has brought here to put you to work with,” she said as she took the pan of hot biscuits from the oven and put two on each of their plates. She said, as she always did, “Butter ’em while they’re hot.”
And then she said, “Common as pig tracks! I knew ’em before they were born. They’re nobody for you to be associating with. I don’t know what your daddy’s thinking about. Nothing, I reckon.”
It was strange, her way of speaking of Wheeler at times as if he were no older than Andy. And then Andy sometimes would take up the strange duty of defending his father to his father’s mother, as if she were the mother merely of another boy.
“I imagine they were the best he could find,” Andy said. “Somebody’s got to do the work, and they’re working right along. We’ll get it finished today.”
She said, “Psssht! I reckon!”
And then she said, “Well, let them do it. You keep where you don’t have to listen to ’em.”
Andy thought, “Too late!” But he said, “Well, somebody’s got to drive the team.”
“And that’s got to be you, I reckon! Nobody ever heard the like!”
When Andy got back to the barn, Dingus and Les were sitting propped against the water trough, legs flat before them on the ground, their heads wobbled over, dead asleep. This was another social embarrassment. Andy did not have the seniority or standing that would have made him eligible to wake them up.
He knew how Rufus Brightleaf would have handled the situation. Rufus would have shouted out, “Off your ass and on your feet!”
And then when they needed to be humored past the jolt of that waking and back into the mood for work, Rufus would have said, “Stay with me, boys! First thing you know, you’ll be living in one of them penthouses, plenty of good drinking whiskey, couple of old ladies about twenty years old to keep house for you. You’ll have it made!”
But Andy could only go to Beck’s stall, bring her into the light of the big doorway and shout “Whoa!” too loud, though the mule, knowing what to do, had already stopped. And then he brought out Catherine, again shouting “Whoa!” as she also was stopping in her place.
“Ain’t that that damned boy back at it again?” Les asked.
“Aw, that’s that boy back at it,” Dingus said. “That boy’s a driver!” He grunted as he got to his feet. “Oh! Lordy Lordy Lord!”
They went back to work then. The afternoon proceeded about as the morning had. By a reasonable quitting time, even somewhat earlier, they had finished the job.
To Andy’s great relief, his father had not shown up to see how they were getting along. He was not going to show up until quite a bit later, when he would drive up to where the three of them were standing in the barn door. He would be in one of his better moods.
“Well, boys. How did you get along?”
And Dingus would reply in a tone of authority, “We got her done,” implying that, contrary to Wheeler’s expectation, they might have accomplished a great deal more, if only they had had it to do.
“Good! And Andy here, did he earn his keep?”
Indulgently, as an adult commending a child, Dingus would say, “When we needed help, that boy give it. He was right there. Aw, Mr. Wheeler, that there is some boy.”
Dingus’s tone, in fact, was worse than indulgent. It was patronizing—implying that if Andy had not been in the way the work would have been easier and faster.
But Andy’s freedom of that day lasted as long as he needed it to. He drove the team and wagon and the two passengers back to the barn. As far as Dingus and Les were concerned, their day’s work had been completed, and so once more Andy alone unhitched the mules, did up their lines, unbridled them, watered them, put them in their stalls, and gave them their corn. Though he was small for his age, he could have unharnessed them, but not, he knew, with the proper grace and dignity, and so he left the unharnessing for Snazz Goodall when he would come in from his own day’s work.
Except for that slight defect, Andy now had his day of running the show intact behind him. It had been one of the best days of his life. It was ever to be one of the best days of his life. After that day, he would work again under the supervision of grownups. Again, leaving the thinking and authority to them, he would make mistakes or shortcut a job and be reprimanded. He would have a lazy spell, and he would shirk. He would be absentminded. He would revert, that is to say, to being a boy. But he had made that one day good, had satisfied himself, from start to finish.
When he had completed his obligation to the mules and come to stand in the doorway with the other two, Les said, “Now this here boy, ain’t he a fair hand, not to be nothing but a pup?”
“You got it,” Dingus said. “You seen it through. This here boy’s liable to grow up to be a ramrod of a lawyer like his daddy.”
“Now that Wheeler Catlett, he’s a right smart of a lawyer, am I right?”
“You’re right!” Dingus said.
And then Dingus offered a revelation that astonished Andy then and for a while afterward.
“Aw, that Wheeler’s a hoss pistol! Like I say. Anything you can think of, he’s got the words for it. I seen him one time defending this old boy had got into a little shooting scrape. Wheeler claimed he was really a good boy, had just made a mistake, and they ought to go light on him and give him another chance. When the jury got up to go out, Wheeler told ’em, ‘Remember, boys, there’s a little black-eyed mother up there in Heaven, watching what you do!’ And he just cried!”
“How you reckon them lawyers can cry the way they do?”
“Aw, they just go without pissing about three weeks.”
It had been a splendid day, a sort of crescendo in Andy’s childhood. And it was a day that he would grow into as adult knowledge and understanding grew in his mind. He would come to see that it was only the latest war and the consequent shortage of good farm hands—a shortage that would be permanent, and ever worse—that could have brought his father to consider Dingus and Les as possibly more than detachable pieces of courthouse furniture. And in due time he would locate the peculiar poise and confidence of those old workmates in their perfect assurance that being white was an accomplishment.
Though Andy was hardly a “good boy,” in those old days he had granted to adult authority a credit almost superstitious. And Dingus, as a self-appointed historian of the courthouse and teller of its tales, spoke with perfect Dingusian authority. Andy saw clearly the vision of his father pleading with the jury, which at the time he had become old enough to imagine but never had imagined before. As to Dingus’s elucidation of the lawyerly mystery of tear-storage, Andy withheld complete faith even in the moment. Later he grew to enjoy it, and he has enjoyed it ever since.