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Joe's next pre-sunup chore was an esthetic delight; it dealt with 20 top-quality Angus steers soon to be translated into dollars and cents at the Tennessee Fat Cattle Show. Joe snapped on the lights in the main barn, climbed into the loft and scooped measured feed mixtures into the chute leading to the cattle shed below.
Swinging down from the loft, Joe took a shaker of sulfa powder to the barn's northeast stall and tenderly dusted the mangled ankle flesh of a calf. A few weeks before, the calf had been taken away from its mother, one of Joe's six milk cows. First night away, the weaning calf tried to climb the wall of a barn stall. Next morning Joe found the struggling animal hanging by its right forefoot, caught high in a crack and badly cut. Old Sam Carver, neighbors remember, had hands as gentle as Joe's—but Sam had never had any sulfa and, very probably, would have lost the calf.
While Zoni Williamson, Joe's ancient Negro farmhand, milked some cows, Joe walked out to the farrowing barn that he built while he was still in high school. In one of the six concrete-floored stalls lay a monstrous (upwards of 600 lbs.) Duroc sow with eleven week-old pigs. She gave a grunting roar as Joe eased a trough past her jaws to the floor and filled it with slop from a bucket. Joe worked carefully, talking softly: a sow with new pigs is one of the farm's most dangerous animals, both to humans and to her pigs. If not fed with supplement containing tankage, a sow may indulge in the money-losing practice of eating her young.
The Slugabed. Half an hour after his alarm clock went off, Joe was back at the kitchen door, wiping his shoes on the grass. It was only half an hour before sunrise—and again there is a change to be noted in life on the American farm. Getting up sometimes at 4:30, generally at 5, and occasionally lolling in bed until 6, Joe Moore would have been considered a slugabed by his great-grandfather, who, out of the necessity of his era, turned out at an invariable 4 a.m. When a man is working three to ten farmhands, as Sam Carver did, he must act as a sort of platoon leader, setting a disciplined example so as not to leave his labor force drifting around idle. Joe Moore, who could not find ten available farmhands in his area even if he needed them, can afford some flexibility.
This flexibility lasts throughout the day, which Joe can fill in numberless planned ways, from stripping tobacco to hauling feed in his truck, from supervising the work of a bulldozer, hired for $10 an hour, to stretching fence. The midday quitting time is 11:30 and, after a big meal, Joe stretches out on the parlor floor (which saves taking off pants and shoes to lie on a bed) for a half-hour nap to "let my eats settle." By 12:30 he is back at work. Ordinarily he stops at 6 or 7 o'clock, but in "pinchin' times" he often mans an after-supper shift, and the buckety-buck of his tractor can be heard until 10 or 11.