The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

The trees along the fencerows were just starting to turn. The maples had a little red in them, and the hickories were going yellow. It was one of those October mornings in Kentucky that make you want to stand still and breathe.

I pulled over where the lane bends by the north pasture fence. I got the wheelchair out of the back and opened it up and set the brake. Then I helped Daddy turn and get his feet down and we got him from the seat to the chair the way the therapist showed us, slow, on the count of three.

He was breathing hard when we were done. I tucked the jacket around him and set his hat right. He let me fuss more than he usually does.

“You warm enough?”

“I’m fine. Push me down to the corner.”

I pushed him along the gravel. My arms are not what they were and the gravel is loose, and I had to lean into it. The wheels crunched and threw little stones. Daddy held on to the armrests.

At the corner of the north pasture there is a big old wooden corner post, cedar, gray as the barn, with the brace post leaning into it and the wire stapled tight. I stopped him beside it.

He reached out and laid his hand on that post. He just held it there, flat against the wood, the way you would lay your hand on the neck of a horse you had known a long time.

“I set this in 1961,” he said. “Me and my daddy. Dug the hole with a set of posthole diggers and a tamping bar. Took us all of one afternoon. Daddy said a corner post is the one you don’t cut corners on.”

He laughed a little at that, the old joke. Then his fingers started to shake on the wood, and I saw his chin go, and I had to look away across the pasture so he would not see me see it.

“Sixty-five years,” he said quietly. “And it’s still standing. That’s more than you can say for me.”

“You’re still sitting, though,” I said, and he laughed again, and that helped us both.

That was when I saw Bobby.

He had been feeding hay at the far end of the hill pasture, and he must have seen my car come down the lane. He had parked his tractor up the lane and was walking toward us on the gravel, fast for a big man.

Bobby Whitt is sixty years old and stocky, built like a feed sack. He had on a gray seed cap and his blue work coat. Even from a distance I could see he was worried, the way you get when an old man shows up somewhere he is not supposed to be.

He came down the lane to us puffing a little. “Clayton? Teresa? Everything all right? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Daddy said. He put his hand out. “Good to see you, Bobby.”

They shook hands. Bobby held on to Daddy’s hand a little longer than a handshake, the way men do when they have known each other most of their lives and do not have the words for being glad.

Bobby asked about the food at the home, and Daddy told him the meat loaf would not hold a candle to Mama’s but the pie was decent. Daddy asked what the beans made, and Bobby told him fifty-two bushels on the bottom.