“Whitewashing the Fence”

“Whitewashing the Fence” is the Tom Sawyer episode that James Eric Gardener uses to connect a childhood recitation, his friendship with Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson, and the exhausting excavation of the buried ship. Its central image—work passed from one person to another until it seems desirable—becomes both a joke about the crew Gard has worn out and a pointed question about whether the newly changed Bobbi still remembers the story they once recited together.

The episode Gard recites

Sitting cross-legged on a dirty tarp in the woods, hung over, with the ship’s reflective surface casting moving ripples across his cheek, Gard begins reciting the scene from Tom Sawyer. He recalls Tom giving up the brush with reluctance in his expression but eagerness in his heart, then sitting in the shade while the steamer works in the sun and planning how to draw more boys into the task. Boys arrive to jeer and stay to whitewash; when one tires, another takes his place, trading for the next turn with a kite or even a dead rat and a string. Gard delivers the passages with his eyes half-closed and his face turned toward the warm morning sun, a small cynical smile gradually widening into a grin.

The performance unsettles Andy Bozeman, who fears that Gard may yell or attack him as he had Johnny Enders. Instead, Gard’s schoolboy-like recitation appears to Bozeman as evidence of instability. The scene lets the literary quotation do two things at once: it displays Gard’s unlikely command of a memorized passage, and it makes Bozeman, who had left college after two years of business administration, feel that Gard is showing off a cultural advantage. Bozeman resents the implication that knowing an old book makes a person superior to ordinary people.

Bobbi and Gard’s shared memory

Gard explains that the passage comes from chapter two of Tom Sawyer and tells Bozeman how it became bound up with Bobbi’s childhood. When Bobbi was in seventh grade in Utica, her sister Anne decided she should compete in Junior Exhibition, a recitation contest. Bobbi did not want to participate, but Anne’s decision was final. Gard describes Anne as a forceful presence then and assumes she remains much the same, although he has not seen her in a long time.

Years later, when Gard had Bobbi in freshman composition, she wrote about freezing while trying to recite Tom Sawyer. He asked her after class whether she still remembered “Whitewashing the Fence.” She did. Gard let her recite several sentences before joining in, and the two continued together, word for word. Their shared recall came from parallel childhood pressures: Bobbi’s sister and Gard’s mother had each pushed a shy child into the public performance that frightened them most. The piece had become lodged in memory not simply because it was assigned, but because each had been made to face a dreaded situation.

Gard contrasts their different outcomes. Bobbi froze; he did not, and won a second-prize ribbon. The prize failed to cure his fear of speaking before crowds and, in his account, made it worse. When he later stands before a group to read poetry, the audience’s hungry eyes bring the fence scene back to him. Remembering the passage—and sometimes remembering Bobbi—is enough to help him get through. The childhood ordeal thus becomes a private bond: Gard says it made them friends.

From recitation to the excavation

The allusion becomes practical when Gard points toward the ship, which leans skyward at a perfect forty-five-degree angle from the wide trench. The crew is digging the ship up rather than whitewashing a fence, he says, but the principle is unchanged. Tom’s staged transfer of the brush supplies Gard with a comic model for the labor he has been organizing: he has worn out Bobby Tremain and John Enders, and expects Bozeman to return the next day. The comparison makes the dig sound less like a simple assignment than a task whose burden can be handed along, with each new worker drawn into it.

Gard turns that comparison into a request framed as a joke. Since he has not received a prize for his work, he tells Bozeman to bring him a dead rat and a string to swing it by, or at least a bully taw. These imagined rewards echo the boys’ trades in the passage and expose the difference between Tom’s playful economy and the real exertion at the trench. Gard’s humor does not erase the work; it gives him a language in which to tease Bozeman about the crew’s exhaustion and his own lack of prizes.

The reference also becomes a test directed at Bobbi. Gard first asks Bozeman to get her out to the dig the next day, then wonders whether the “New Improved Bobbi” can still recite “Whitewashing the Fence.” The altered description makes their old memory newly uncertain: Gard invokes the Bobbi he knew while acknowledging that she may have changed. The passage that once joined them therefore serves as a measure of continuity, not merely as a nostalgic anecdote.

Repetition, pressure, and the joke’s edge

The episode’s pattern of work passing from one person to another shadows the diggers’ situation, but Gard’s version is more than a neat literary analogy. Its humor is sharpened by the physical facts around him: he is hung over, the ship is exposed in the trench, and the people he names have already been worn out. The shifting reflections on his face connect the recited story to the object they are excavating, while the sunny, relaxed manner of his performance contrasts with the labor he describes. The scene makes a remembered children’s story carry the strain and oddness of the present work.

Gard’s manner also turns the allusion into a performance for a reluctant audience. He recites, explains the memory behind the passage, abruptly screams a line from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and watches Bozeman drop his thermos and spill cold coffee on his trousers. He then returns to the fence analogy and laughs at Bozeman’s failure to see its relevance. The abrupt shift from literary reminiscence to a startling outburst makes Bozeman fear that Gard has gone insane, even as Gard treats the incident as another opportunity for teasing.

At the end, Gard stops halfway to the trench, asks for Bobbi, and then says nothing more before going to the sling to be lowered down. The sequence leaves the old recitation suspended between intimacy and unease: it recalls how Gard and Bobbi became friends, but now attaches that memory to a changed Bobbi and to a dangerous excavation. “Whitewashing the Fence” functions as a remembered performance, a joke about recruitment, and a fragile link to a shared past that Gard wants to find again.