45. Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Five
BEN
At five, I open the door to Silas who greets me with two words and a coffee.
“Pruitt fence.”
I take the coffee and get my boots, because work is the one language I’ve still got all the words for.
We patched the Pruitt line in a hurry the day the bakery went famous. Now it needs doing right before the wedding weekend so nobody’s chasing cattle in their church clothes. We load the truck in the dark without talking. Dolly jumps in the bed like she’s been invited.
The fence work goes the way I expect. He digs, I set. I stretch, he crimps. And neither of us says a thing for the first hour that isn’t post depth or wire gauge.
Then, tamping the fourth post, without looking up, Silas speaks.
“I’ve got things that want saying, and a captive audience with a wire stretcher, so I’ll say them while we work. You can drive off whenever you like. Truck keys are in it.”
“I’ll stay for the fence.”
“Good enough.”
He works a while longer before he starts.
“Ella broke her arm when she was ten. You know that story?”
“No.”
He sets the next post in the hole, eyeballs it plumb.
“Beth’s birthday party. Whole yard full of kids, pony rides, May’s cake.
Ella comes off the fence rail mid-morning, lands wrong.
She gets up, tucks that arm against her, and runs the party.
Serves cake one-handed. Organizes the sack race.
Six hours, Ben. We found out at supper when she couldn’t lift her fork.
By then the swelling had her wrist looking like a loaf of bread.
” He tamps, steady, unhurried. “Doctor asked her why she didn’t say.
Ten years old, arm in a cast, and she looks at him like he’s stupid.
It was Beth’s day, she said. I’d have wrecked it. ”
I stretch the wire and say nothing.
“Second story. You know she left college for Evelyn. You don’t know how.
We got the diagnosis on a Thursday. May called her, just to tell her, mind, not to ask anything.
Friday night Ella’s truck is in the yard.
Monday morning we find out she’d already withdrawn.
Already. Called the registrar from a gas station in Knoxville.
Didn’t ask us. Didn’t ask Evelyn. Told us after it was done, so nobody could talk her out of it.
” He straightens up, puts a hand to his back, looks down the fence line at nothing.
“Five years. And here’s the part that’ll cost me to say, so mind it.
We let her. Every one of us. It’s the easiest thing in the world, letting the strong one carry.
She made it look like a calling, and we let her answer it.
I’ll be square with God about that one day.
I’m not looking forward to the conversation. ”
He picks up the tamper again. Down the slope Dolly’s holding the gap in the old wire, lying in it like a gate.
“What she did was wrong. I won’t dress my daughter’s wrong in ribbons.
She owed you the truth from day one. Every day after that, the debt compounded.
She knows it better than either of us.” Tamp.
“But I’ve known that girl every minute of her life.
So I’ll tell you what I know, and then I’m done, and you can decide what to make of it. ”
“Say it.”
“She’d set herself on fire to keep someone else warm.
” He lets that stand a second, the valley quiet around it.
“And in June, a woman she’d never met gets caught wrecking a wedding, and begs her, and what does Ella do?
Same thing she’s done since she was ten.
Tucks the broken thing against her body and keeps the party going.
It was your day, the way it was Beth’s day.
She thought she was absorbing the damage.
That the hurt could stop at her if she just held still and carried it.
” He shakes his head slow. “She was wrong.” He kicks the loose dirt in around the post. “But Ben. She didn’t keep it from you to catch you.
There was no us to protect in June, you were a stranger in a nice truck.
She kept it the way she keeps everything. Alone, and smiling, and wrong.”
We work through most of a wire spool before I trust my voice with the thing I want to ask.
“What would you do? In my boots.”
“Nope.” He says it with a smile. “Not my place, son. I’m her daddy. I’d forgive that girl the moon and both halves of the valley, and that’s exactly why my vote’s no use to you.”
“Then tell me something that is.”
He hangs the coil on the post and looks at me straight under the hat brim.
“May kept a secret from me once. Early on.” He lets me sit with that.
“I forgave her, but I can’t tell you it was easy.
Forgiving’s not a gate you swing open one morning because the weather’s nice.
It’s fence.” He nods at the line we’ve built, post by post up the slope, straight and true in the morning sun.
“You build it a post at a time. Some mornings you don’t feel like building, and you build anyway, or you don’t, and either way’s a life.
I built. Forty years on, I’ll tell you it was the best fence I ever put up.
” He picks up the tamper, done. “That’s all I’ve got. The rest is yours.”
We move the pairs through at noon, Dolly sweeping the drags.
We’re loading tools when Silas says the last thing, casual, into the truck bed.
“She offered Naomi a way out yesterday. Different coordinator, so her trouble wouldn’t shadow the day.
Naomi refused.” He slides the tamper in beside the post-hole digger.
“Wasn’t going to mention it. Then I figured, no, that one you should have.
It’s the first time in her life I’ve watched that girl try to hand somebody a weight instead of taking one.
” He climbs in the cab. “Might mean nothing. Might be the whole ballgame. Not my fence.”
We come down the track at four. And her light’s on.
Not the venue. The big house, the east corner, second floor, her window, gold in the afternoon shade of the hill. She’s up there with the wedding binder, most likely, doing the finest work of her life with her heart in pieces.
I get out of the truck and make it halfway across the yard. Dolly comes off the porch and falls in beside me like this was scheduled.
I stop at the gate and take my hand off the latch. Dolly sits down in the gateway, looks at me, and for once, offers no opinion.
“Not yet,” I tell her. I’m not ready.
But there is something else I can do. I turn away from my cabin and head toward the Tobacco Barn.