Passing through Perfect (Wyattsville #3)(3)

The next morning Benjamin hitched Henry to a wagon that was older than the mule and headed for town. With the mustering out pay in his pocket and what he’d saved during the past years, he bought enough silver corn seed to plant the back lot and paid fifteen dollars for a 1930 Model A Ford that couldn’t cough up enough energy to start.

“That’s okay,” Benjamin said. “I been taught to fix motors. Sooner or later I’ll get her going.”

It was later.

He tied the old car to the back of the wagon, and Henry pulled it home.





It was the hottest summer Alabama had seen in more than a decade yet every day, even Sundays, Benjamin was out there working in the field. He worked until a river of sweat rolled down his face and stung his eyes. When that happened he’d stop long enough to wipe his face and gulp down a few swigs of water; then he’d go right back to work. He pushed and Henry pulled the plow until little by little spaced out furrows began to appear. Then walking side by side with his daddy, they dropped in the seeds that would in a few months be a waving field of corn.

Otis’s steps were slow and his back hunched even when he wasn’t carrying a bag of seed. Benjamin saw this and put less than a third of what he carried in his daddy’s bag. He knew that doing it alone he could have finished the job sooner, but sharing the work was a way of giving his daddy reason for living.

Before the end of April the back lot was filled with sprouts of green coming from the ground, and by mid-June those shoots were knee-high.

“It’s gonna be a good year,” Otis said, but a week later a dry spell started up.

For the first few days, Benjamin and his daddy paid little attention. In the evening they sat on the front porch and waited for the cool breezes that generally followed a rainstorm, but none came. By nightfall the house was so stifling that Benjamin stripped off his clothes and lay naked across the bed. Even lying still as a dead man, beads of sweat rose up on his face and his back stuck to the sheet.

Otis didn’t even bother going to bed. He sat in the rocking chair on the porch and creaked back and forth until sometime in the wee hours of morning when his eyes finally fell shut.

After nine days of blistering sun and not a drop of rain, the leaves on the newly-planted corn began to droop.

“Dammit, Daddy,” Benjamin said, “when’s it gonna rain?”

Sitting on the porch waving a piece of cardboard back and forth in front of his face, Otis shrugged. “Could be today, could be tomorrow. We got no way of knowing.”

Benjamin looked up at the sky. It was a hazy blue, the kind of color that gave no indication of either rain or sun. In the distance there was a scattering of clouds but they drifted lazily, moving off towards Tennessee.

“I’m gonna take a look at how them plants is doing,” he said, then left Otis sitting on the porch and headed for the back cornfield.

Several stalks had already toppled over. The ground, now dry as dust, wasn’t enough to hold on to them. Benjamin walked up one row and down the other. They were all the same, most of the stalks still standing, but another day without water and they too would fall. He straightened a few plants then bent and tried to pack the dirt around them, but grains of sandy earth rolled through his fingers and fell away. Without rain the entire crop would be gone in a day, two at the most.

That afternoon Benjamin began drawing buckets of water from the well and carrying them to the back lot cornfield. He worked throughout the day, stopping only long enough to splash water on his face and drink from the canteen he kept sitting on the porch. After a dozen trips back and forth Otis began helping, but before he’d finished a single run the old man’s face turned ashen grey and he began gasping for air.

Benjamin grabbed hold of the bucket Otis was carrying. “You trying to kill your fool self? Go sit down, Daddy, this ain’t work you need to be doing.”

Otis protested, saying he was perfectly capable of doing a man’s work. But after a second trip with a half-full bucket, he plopped down on the porch step.

“It ain’t right for a young’un to be doing his daddy’s work,” he said sorrowfully.

Benjamin laughed. “I ain’t a young’un no more. I’m a full-growed man.”

“Don’t go getting cocky,” Otis replied. “You ain’t never gonna be too growed for listening to your daddy.”

“Yes, sir!” Benjamin smiled and saluted Otis the way he would a senior officer. He eased down beside his daddy and looped a long arm over the old man’s shoulder. For several minutes he sat there trying to think of the right thing to say, the thing that would make Otis feel better. The thing that would give back what he was missing.

Unfortunately time is the master of us all; it takes what it will, and often there are no words to ease the emptiness of what is gone. They sat in silence for a long while, and Benjamin thought back to the days when their roles had been reversed. Otis was muscular and strong, capable of packing a day-and-a-half’s worth of work into a single day. Benjamin, a boy, trailed behind with a sack of seed not half the weight of his daddy’s. He could almost hear his own voice asking for a heavier bag, and Otis saying he was too young for such a load.

His daddy had laughed. “In time. When I’m an old man, you’ll have to carry my weight along with your own.”

As a boy Benjamin couldn’t envision the possibility of such a thing. Back then he’d seen his daddy and mama as two towers of strength, forces so powerful they woke the sun in the morning and pulled the moon into place at night. They’d been the makers of his world; now he struggled to be half what they’d been. Coming to grips with the thought that he could one day be walking in Otis’ shoes, Benjamin gave a heartfelt sigh. He stood, went to the well, drew a bucket of icy cold water, and handed a cupful to Otis.