The leather folder held seventeen recipes, and after the last one Amos told the whole household to flop the book shut and go eat. But the folder was never the whole of the man, and tucked flat against the back cover, held in by an old boot lace, was a sheaf of loose pages that didn’t hold a single recipe. They’re dated, one line apiece at the top, the way a man writes when he’s too tired for decoration. Diary pages. Amos kept no ledger and owed nobody an account of himself, so these little entries are about as close as he ever came to writing his own history down.
This one is dated Wednesday, July 8, 1903, and it’s the first page I can read clean. The ink is brown as rust and the letters lean hard to the right.
Wednesday, July 8, 1903
Hot as a skillet lid. Corn’s waist high and the fence row’s gone to blackberry so thick a man has to fight his way in with a stick. I went down to mend the old wire along the south pasture fore the sun got mean, and I found the whole thing pulled slack in one spot like somebody’d been through it in the night. Not broke clean, the way a deer busts it. Sagged and gapped, the way a hog roots under it.
Amos’s note in the margin, scratched with the same pencil he kept behind his ear: “a hog dont go through a fence he goes under it. and when he’s done he aint gone far. he’s layin in the shade waitin on you to come fix what he tore up.”
I tracked him half the morning by the wallows and the broke canes, and the track led me out past the creek bottom to the Halberts’ place. Old man Halbert met me at his gate with a shotgun across his arm, not pointed at me but not set down neither, and I asked him had he seen a shoat loose. He said he aint seen my hog but he seen my fences and they aint worth the wire they’re strung on. I told him the hog’s comin out of his side on account of the gate he leaves open when he goes to town. He spat and said a man that cant mend a fence aint got no call to keep hogs.
Amos, later, close to the bottom of the page: “i aint never met a fence that was wearin out so much as it was bein wore down. two men can split a good neighbor short or a bad one long, and the fence dont care which.”
I found the shoat near dusk, wallered down in the mud at the edge of the creek with his snout full of roots, slick and pleased as if the whole county was his. I drove him home with a green switch and he went through my own gate like he owned it, which I expect he does, on account of he’s beat me to it three summers runnin now.
Supper was cold cornbread and a slice of side meat, because I spent the day chasin a hog that never meant to be caught and mendin a fence I’ll mend again next month. Martha says the Lord gives a man the animal to humble him. I told her the Lord could of just sent a smaller one.
