How It Went, page 10
When they had got to the fenceline and dismounted, he said to Nub, “I suppose your dad told you what we’re doing here?”
“Well I reckon!”
But Shad, who was perhaps a competent human, still had not come. So far that was not necessarily a problem, for the line would have to be cleared and the old wire removed before the new materials would be needed.
Andy showed Nub everything he had shown his father. “Now you see what has to be done?”
“Well I reckon!”
By now Andy was conscientiously restraining his dislike for this slack-fleshed young man whose favorite three words bore invariably the whiff of condescension.
The two Juniors and Clay were unloading tools from the truck.
Andy had work of his own waiting on him that morning. He resolutely abandoned the fencing job to Nub and his crew and walked away. But he carried with him the insinuating small ache of his uneasiness, and his footing on the slope felt unsure, as if he were walking on mud.
When he went back, Shad had come with the supplies, which had been unloaded, and he and the crew were finishing their lunch in the shade of a tree midway of the fencerow. From there all the results of their morning’s work were revealed to Andy. The brush, instead of piling it neatly as he had asked, they had merely flung out of their way. The old wire too they had rolled or wadded and flung out of the way. And they had removed not only the old barbed wire, but beyond that also perhaps two hundred feet of still very good woven wire they had so mangled in tearing it out that it could not be put back. Had Nub, the all-reckoning one, started the others and forgotten to tell them to stop? Had he been asleep? Was he perhaps awake only when at the wheel of his magnificent pickup truck?
After he had succeeded in believing his eyes, Andy turned to look at Shad, who was with perfect candor looking at him. Needing very much to say something, Andy thought of nothing.
It was Nub who first spoke. “It wasn’t no sense in tearing out that good wire.” His tone was corrective, even instructive, implying that the senselessness belonged to Andy, that they would never have thought of doing such a thing had they not been told to do so.
So far as Andy could think in the moment, and he was a slow thinker, he was licked. They had, however clumsily, taken him hostage. His old fence now was gone, he needed it, and they were the ones most available to replace it. Further thoughts, as he knew and feared, would come later. But when he replied his voice was quiet.
“No. There was no sense in it. Don’t tear out any more.”
He looked at Shad. “You’re going to be with these people until they’re finished, I hope.”
“Aw yeah. I’ll be here.”
“And you remember how to space the strands?”
Shad recited the measurements, which encouraged Andy a little.
He said, “Well. All right.”
He went back a few times to see what they were doing and to signify his distrust, but his judgment of them had turned hard and he went near them only by forcing himself. He was looking forward now only to being rid of them.
The full wherewithal of speech having returned to him, he was cursing them in his thoughts for their ignorance, idiocy, laziness, violence, and haste. He saw that wherever there had been a choice, they had preferred the easiest way to the right way. He was filled with an exasperation that he recognized as his father’s: “Barely, by God, sense enough to swallow.” He knew that he would not outlive their bad work. And he felt with a sickness almost physical their insult to his place, to himself, and to the history, the legacy, of the good work of his forebears and friends. He reminded himself that there had been a time when he had known hired hands, black and white, who had never possessed a square foot of their own land, who out of the common sense of their culture and upbringing would have recognized the badness of this work for what it was, and would have resented it.
But he had also begun an agenda of self-reproach that would be with him for a while. Why had he not fired Nub on general principles and on suspicion before he even started? Why had he not stayed with Nub and the others to watch, to supervise, at least until Shad had come? He began the suffering of self-knowledge.
He knew well his inclination to trust people, a weakness perhaps that he had nevertheless made a principle, for he knew, and upon enough evidence, that without trust there can be no end to the expense and effort of distrust. But now that it had been so flagrantly abused, his trust looked foolish to him. He looked foolish to himself. Those who had brought him up, whose ghosts accompanied him now, had told him plenty about caution, about responsibility, about the importance of “seeing to things” and “tending to business.” And he had once in fact gone so far himself as to fire a man who had come to replace a barn door, and whose work was so careless and slovenly as to be destructive. The man apparently had concluded, as apparently Nub and Company had done, that a place so obviously inferior, so far off the road and out of the modern world as this old Harford place, did not deserve his respect or his best work.
But firing the man, Andy’s one exploit as a firer, had given him no pleasure, not even in his initial anger, and the lapse of more than enough time had not taken away his distaste. But now, as he accused himself of not having fired or supervised Nub when he should have done so, it came to him that on the farms he had known in his early life he remembered nothing at all of supervising and firing. His grandfather Catlett, for example, had one hired hand: Dick Watson, a black man, whom as a child Andy had looked up to and loved, whom he still loves. Andy spent hundreds of hours in the company of Grandpa Catlett and Dick Watson. Though the order of work was set of course by Grandpa, he never in Andy’s hearing told Dick how to do anything or made a supervisory remark. Past work himself, Grandpa would often be watching, but he spoke of Dick’s work to Andy only to commend it, to speak of Dick as an example for Andy to learn from. “Look yonder at how old Dick sets up and takes hold of his mules.”
Thinking back, Andy can see that Grandpa Catlett trusted Dick Watson to work well because Dick was capable of working well, did so willingly, took pride in doing so, and trusted Grandpa to see that this was so. They were, to the extent of their mutual trust, free of each other—free, that is, to sit down together on upturned buckets in the doorway of the barn to talk and look out at the rain. In that trust and freedom, limited as it was, there was something of peace, maybe even a promise of peace, unregarded and bypassed as history wore on through its wars into a time when no two men would sit together in a barn door to talk and watch the rain.
During his first twenty or so years, Andy played and then worked in the company of a good many hands, black and white, who worked by the day, straight time or temporarily as through a harvest. They and their work varied a good deal in quality, but with few exceptions, they were like Dick Watson far more than they were like Shad Harbison’s fencing crew. Long ago the good ones, farm-raised and self-respecting, had either died or gone to jobs in industry. To replace them now were only the machines, the chemicals, and, in a pinch, the barely awake, the barely sober, the barely conscious, the incompetent, indifferent, and more or less accidently destructive.
At last, actually fairly soon, the Harbison crew messed and blundered its way to the completion of a passable fence, newer, shinier, and tighter at least than the old one. Andy wrote Shad a check for the too much that they had agreed on, that had now become much more than too much. Shad graciously accepted the check and hoped that Andy, if he ever had more fence to build, would just let him know.
“Thanks,” Andy said, and watched their vehicles go down the lane and out of sight, he hoped, forever.
III.
And so he was left to submit his outrage to time, hoping, praying in fact, that before he died he would come to some manner of forgiveness both for Shad Harbison’s crew and for himself.
Unignorably in the way of that lay the mess that the fencers had left behind: the scatters and tangles of brush and small logs, the randomly discarded rolls and wads and bits and pieces of old wire that now defaced and affronted the beautiful field that for fifty years he had housekept. There had been a time when in his strength he would have thought nothing of cleaning it up. He could have done it by himself in a few hours. Now he was depressed and diminished by it. It looked impossible.
He thought of calling his son to come and help him, but he rejected that thought as soon as it came. It was too late now to ask Marcie. If he had asked when he should have, the two of them working together would have built a good fence with no mess or shortcutting. Moreover, they would have enjoyed working together.
Now, grieved by that loss and dismayed by the result, he was also embarrassed. He could not bear the thought that Marcie might see the mess. He knew Marcie would not say, but he dreaded that he would think: “Well. You oughtn’t have dealt with those damned counterfeits in the first place.”
Andy knew very well why he had dealt with them: He was ignorant and knew it and was in a hurry and went ahead anyhow. And so he didn’t call Marcie.
But there was one recourse he might still have. There was a good boy from down at Hargrave, Austin Page, a boy not farm-raised but interested in farming, who had asked to work for Andy while he was in high school, and Andy often had been glad to hire him, to have his help, and to have his company. He liked Austin, who was intelligent, eager to learn, willing to work, and humorous enough to put up with the correction he sometimes received. Andy had put him to the test a number of times, and Austin had always passed. By way of Andy’s instruction, and sometimes his impatience, Austin had learned to work with Andy. Now more often than not he knew where to get, and more often than not he could anticipate what came next. Now he was in college, majoring in music, in which he was perhaps exceptionally gifted. As Andy had grown older and weaker, Austin had grown older and stronger. He was a big boy now, well-muscled, with freckles and tightly curled hair the color of a new penny. He was easily embarrassed and a radiant blusher, which made him especially valuable to Andy.
“I can turn that boy on and off like a light bulb,” he said to Daisy Page, Austin’s mother. Daisy Page was a woman whom Andy somewhat excessively admired, and all the more when she replied, “Mister. Catlett. You are too near the dropoff to be a smartass.”
She said that as a prelude to saying that Austin soon would be done with his summer courses and was wondering: Might Andy have work for him before he had to return for the fall semester? Andy said yes, he might.
And so it happened that about three days after the departure of Harbison and crew, when Andy was sorely needing him, Austin called him up.
“Mr. Catlett, this is Austin. Do you need some help?”
“Do you mean am I helpless?”
“Oh nosir. I mean, do you have something to do that I could help you with?”
“Yes, Mr. Austin, my friend, I do. Come in the morning.”
Andy had a small, low-wheeled wagon that was easy to load. It was not often used, and he and Austin had to go to some trouble to get it out from among the other implements where it had been put away. When they had it unencumbered and in the clear, they brought out Andy’s old team of horses, the white one and the black, and hitched them to the wagon. By then Andy felt that he too had come into the clear. The oppression of the fencers and their mess had lifted from him like a cloud.
In his new clarity he had a sort of vision of himself and Austin there with the team and wagon at the start of their morning’s work: an old man full of an outdated pride and demand, counting his losses, still suffering his dream, two nights ago, of the handtools of all the tradesmen of Old Port William heaped up and auctioned off to “collectors” who did not know their uses—and, standing beside him, this vivid boy, his mind on fire, his hair burning his cap off, this Austin Page, fresh from his summer courses, clearly glad now to be with Andy, outdoors, going to work.
Andy handed the lines to Austin and was amused, also much pleased, that Austin took them as a matter of course into his own hands and spoke to the team.
They went up to the fencerow. When they had come to their starting place Andy said “Whoa,” and he and Austin stepped off the wagon.
Andy said, “You see what we’ve got to do. It’s a mess.”
And Austin, quoting and correcting, said, “A damned mess,” and Andy laughed.
“We’ll pick up the brush first,” he said, “and we’ll pile up the wire as we find it. It’s scattered everywhere. We’ll pick that up last. Finding all of it’ll be the problem.” In fact they would not find it all that day. As Andy expected, he would be finding the smaller pieces by surprise for a long time. Once, as he had feared, he found a fugitive hank of the heaviest of it by cutting into it with his mowing machine.
He picked up the first limb and laid it on the wagon. And then Austin picked up a somewhat larger one and, from a distance of perhaps a dozen feet, with a young athlete’s depreciating nonchalance, tossed it over onto the one Andy had loaded.
“Hold on!” Andy said. “Wait a minute.” He had spoken almost before he thought.
In his happiness at Austin’s arrival to help him, Andy had seemed to himself to be both in the moment and outside it, watching. And now, his mind as if alerted in all the strata of its years, he was inhabiting also a moment much older. He was fourteen years old and had been formally hired, not at last by his father but by Elton Penn, to help in the tobacco harvest, and thus, small for his age as he was, had arrived at last at the status and dignity of a hand. But he had just handed Elton a stick of tobacco, turning loose his end as soon as Elton took hold of the other and greatly increasing the effort for Elton.
“Now wait a minute!” Elton had a transfixing grin, and Andy was transfixed, knowing well by then that his situation could get worse.
“You handed that stick to me wrong. Now I’m handing it to you right. Now you hand it back to me right. That’s the way. That’s the way I want you to hand it to me from now on.”
Andy said, “Austin, my good boy, damn it, wait a minute. We ain’t going to make a mess to clean up a mess. Do you want to put one load into three loads or into one load?”
He looked at Austin until Austin said, “Well. Obviously. I would rather put one load into one load.”
Andy saw that Austin’s ears were turning red, and he was amused, but he said fairly sternly, “Well, come and pick up that branch you just threw on and turn it over so it takes up less room. Now snug the butt up against the headboard of the wagon.
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the way we do it. We pick up every piece and look at it and put it on the load in the place where it belongs. We think of the shape of every limb and stem and chunk and pole, and that’s the way we shape the load.
“It’s the use of the mind,” he said, “what they ought to be teaching you in school.”
Andy and Henry, his brother, had gone to see Elton one day maybe two years after Old Jack Beechum had died and Elton had bought the Beechum place. In Old Jack’s declining years he had been for a while dependent on hired hands, each of whom had left a deposit of things unwanted, things put down and forgotten. Now Elton had torn down the small house built for hired help and was setting the place to rights. The Catlett brothers found nobody at home that day, but in the barn lot there was a wagon loaded with trash, unusable scraps of old lumber, and the rocks that Elton had picked up here and there. Henry stopped the car and he and Andy sat for a few minutes, admiring the load, which was, of its kind, a masterwork. Every piece, every scrap conferred upon the whole load the happiness of its right placement.
“He couldn’t make an ugly job of work to save his life,” Henry said.
“Now you’re shouting,” Andy said to Austin. “Now you’re doing it right.
“Now,” he said, “we’re practicing the art of loading brush. It is a fundamental art. An indispensible art. Now I know about your ‘fine arts,’ your music and literature and all that—I’ve been to school too—and I’m telling you they’re optional. The art of loading brush is not optional.”
“You talking about symphonies?” Austin had stopped and was standing still to signify the importance, to him, of symphonies.
“Symphonies! Hell yes!” Andy said. “You take a society of people who can write symphonies and conduct symphonies and play symphonies and can’t put on a decent load of brush, they’re going to be shit out of luck.”
Austin’s face, starting with his ears, had become almost astonishingly red, and Andy rejoiced. He was bearing joyfully now the burden of knowing better. Maybe in the passing on of his ghostly knowledge he was doing his duty to Austin. He was sure that a man hiring a boy had a duty to help him along if he could. But his thoughts were moved now by a parental fear for this Austin, this boy with his mind on fire, kindled by symphonies and God knows what. Andy was entirely familiar with that fire. Any sorry poor human having a mind, some time or another it would be on fire, with the old prospect of burning the mind’s owner or burning the world, invoking always the old familial hope, for every grown boy anyhow, that the heat might be so contained as to warm a hearth or boil a kettle without burning down the house. So an old man, leaning toward a young one, would try to dampen a little the omnivorous blaze. But also he would be warming his hands. He felt a strange elation coming into his heart, so familiar now among the dead, so strange among the living. He wasn’t going to say much more, but for the moment he was standing his ground.
“My dear Austin, my good boy, maybe it’s possible to blow things up and burn things up and tear things down and throw things away and make music all at the same time. Some, it looks like, think you can. But: If you don’t have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, you’re going to be shit out of luck. And in my opinion, if the art of loading brush dies out, the art of making music finally will die out too. You tell your professors, when you go back, that you met an old provincial man, a leftover, who told you: No high culture without low culture, and when low culture is the scarcest it is the highest. Tell ’em that. And then tell me what they say.”
