Chapter 5
We rode out on horseback instead of trucks, which we hadn’t done together in longer than either of us probably wanted to count, just to feel the ground at a walk, with time enough to notice things a truck window blurs past. The morning had that October clarity to it, air cold enough to fog on the exhale, light coming in low and gold across pasture that hadn’t changed its shape in a hundred and fifteen years even while everything standing on top of it had.
“He set these posts a hundred feet apart on account of he only had so much wire and no money to waste guessing,” I told Deacon, running my hand along a post that had been replaced maybe six times in a hundred and fifteen years but still sat in the exact hole his shovel had first dug.
The wood under my palm was silvered with age, split in a few places, but solid all the way through when I pressed my thumb against the grain.
“My grandmother used to say he could look at a stretch of ground and tell you to the foot how much wire it’d cost him, before he ever ran a tape. ”
“You’ve got the same trick,” Deacon said. “Saw you do it with Ellis’s transit line. Called the stake before you could see it.”
“Learned it here.” I looked out over ground that had fed four generations of Larkin cattle and, as of three weeks ago, exactly none of Boone Teague’s opinion about who deserved to own it.
Somewhere off to the east, a hawk rode a thermal in slow circles, the only thing moving besides us and the cattle.
“This is the part nobody at that supper understood, watching him say what he said. It’s not that the land’s worth more than I am.
It’s that the land and I have been the same thing since before he showed up.
He married into that. He never quite got that he was the one joining something, not the other way around. ”
Deacon didn’t say anything to that right away. He got down off his horse, crouched by the base of the old post, ran his own hand along it the way you’d check a horse’s leg for heat.
“Your great-granddad build all of this alone?” he asked.
“First two years, mostly. Had one hired man, according to the journal my grandmother kept. After that, my grandfather was old enough to swing a post maul, and it went faster.” I got down too, let my horse graze on the lead.
“There’s a photograph in the house somewhere.
The two of them standing right about here, both of them looking like they hadn’t slept in a week, which they probably hadn’t.
I used to think it was just an old picture.
Took me until I was grown to understand it was a receipt.
Proof of what this ground actually cost somebody, once. ”
Deacon straightened up, looked out at the same horizon I was looking at.
He’d worked for my father before me, and he’d watched Boone Teague arrive on this place eleven years ago a decent cattleman with more charm than money, and he’d watched, same as I had, the exact shape of what Boone became once the Teague name started meaning something on a rodeo circuit that had never once heard of Larkin.
“He wasn’t always like this,” I said, mostly to myself. “First few years, he used to ask before he made a decision on stock. Used to walk the pens with me of an evening, ask what I thought about a bull before he committed to buying him. Now he doesn’t ask. He announces.”
“Man gets handed a fortune’s worth of somebody else’s family land and told it’s half his,” Deacon said, careful, working his way around something he didn’t want to say straight out.
“Some men carry that fine. Some men can’t stop feeling like they’re renting the ground they’re standing on.
Doesn’t excuse what he said. Might explain it. ”
“I don’t need it explained. I need it fenced.”
“Fenced it is, then.” Deacon almost smiled, the closest thing to humor he’d offered all morning.
He crouched again, checking the post for rot with the flat of his knife, the same practical attention he gave every fence post on the place whether it was a hundred years old or a hundred days.
“Wood’s still good. Whoever set this knew what they were doing. ”
“Everybody who’s ever worked this land knew what they were doing, Deacon. That was never the question.”
“No.” He stood, wiped the knife clean on his jeans, put it away. “Question was always whether the man standing next to you knew it too. Or figured out he didn’t, before it cost you something you couldn’t get back.”
We rode the rest of the north section slow, not talking much, the kind of quiet that isn’t awkward between two people who’ve worked cattle together long enough to trust each other’s silences.
Somewhere past the old windmill, a covey of quail broke from the grass ahead of us, and my horse shied half a step before settling, and neither Deacon nor I said anything about it, because some things a body just handles without needing a conversation to go with it.
We got back to the house around noon, put the horses up, and left it there. Some subjects kept better set down before they went sour in your hands.
? ? ?
Faye showed up that evening, true to her word, a duffel bag in the truck bed and a thermos of what she insisted was better coffee than mine, which turned out to be true and which I refused to admit out loud.
“You look like hell,” she said, by way of greeting, climbing the porch steps two at a time. “Good hell. Working hell. Not the kind I was worried about at midnight two weeks ago.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“I mean it as a compliment. You look like a woman doing something with her hands instead of just carrying a thing around in her chest.” She dropped the duffel by the door, poured us both coffee from the thermos without asking, and settled into the porch chair beside mine like she’d never left, which was more or less how it always went between us, no matter how many months or counties separated one visit from the next. “Tell me about the fence.”
So I told her, the whole of it, Ellis and his toothpick, the survey stakes, Wyatt showing up before six with his hat in his hands, Deacon getting the foreman title he’d already been carrying without the name.
Faye listened like she’d listened since vet school, no phone in her hand, no half-attention saved back for something else.
“You know what strikes me,” she said, once I’d run down, “is you haven’t once described this as revenge.
Every other version of this story I’ve heard, and I’ve heard three secondhand already, small towns being small towns, makes it sound like you’re punishing him.
You’re not talking about it like punishment. ”
“What am I talking about it like, then?”
“Like a woman drawing a line so she can finally see her own shape again.” She said it easy, no drama attached, easy as the morning she’d called a colicky mare’s real problem while three other vets argued about symptoms. “Eleven years married to a man who was busy becoming somebody’s brand ambassador, and somewhere in there you probably stopped being able to tell where the marriage ended and the operation began.
The fence isn’t punishing him, Roz. It’s the first honest boundary you’ve drawn around yourself in over a decade.
That’s not the same thing as revenge, even if it looks the same from a distance. ”
I turned that over a while, coffee cooling in my hands, the last of the evening light going gold and then gray over pasture I’d walked that same morning with Deacon.
“That’s a lot of insight for a woman who diagnoses horses for a living.”
“Horses and marriages aren’t as different as people like to think.
Both of them, you’re mostly just watching for the thing that’s not being said out loud.
” She stretched her legs out, boots up on the porch rail, comfortable in a way only an old friend gets to be comfortable in somebody else’s house.
“For what it’s worth, I liked him, back at the wedding.
Thought he had decent hands with a nervous animal. ”
“That’s the second time somebody’s told me that this week.”
“Then maybe it’s true, and maybe it’s also not the whole of the man anymore.
” She shrugged, unbothered, refilling both our cups.
“People can have decent hands and still lose themselves somewhere between a rodeo circuit and a sponsorship deal. Doesn’t cancel the first part out.
Doesn’t excuse the second part either. Both things get to be true, same time. ”
We sat on the porch a long while after that, not saying much, just two old friends drinking bad-turned-good coffee under a sky going dark, and something in my chest that had been tight for two straight weeks let go.
? ? ?
Consuela cooked for the whole crew that Friday, an idea she’d floated at breakfast and then executed without waiting for anyone’s approval, long tables set up in the equipment shed with sawhorses and plywood, every hand who’d crossed the fence line so far, Wyatt, Reyes, Sully, gathered around plates of her carne guisada and rice like they’d been eating together for years instead of weeks.
“Figured a crew that’s going to work together ought to eat together at least once before the season gets too busy for it,” she told me, setting down another platter, waving off Faye’s offer to help, her kitchen sovereign territory and no help wanted in it.
“Man works better for you when he knows you see him as more than a pair of hands. Learned that a long time ago, feeding your father’s crews. ”
Faye had stayed the extra day for it, charmed by the whole operation, an outsider taken with something that looks, from the right angle, like what a family is supposed to be.
She sat between Wyatt and Sully, asking questions about cattle work with the real curiosity of a large-animal vet who’d spent her whole career around horses and precious little around a working cattle crew, and by the meal’s end she’d extracted three separate promises to let her come along on a calving check sometime, just to see how the two disciplines differed.
“This is good,” she said to me quietly, midway through, watching Reyes and Wyatt argue good-naturedly about the best method for reading a storm front. “The whole thing. I wasn’t sure what I expected, coming out here. Something sadder, maybe. Angrier. This isn’t that.”
“Some days it’s that too.”
“Sure. But not tonight.” She nodded toward the table, toward Sully telling some long story about Buck Teague that had Reyes laughing hard enough to nearly choke on his rice, toward Consuela hovering with a fresh pitcher of tea, making sure nobody’s glass went empty long enough to notice.
“Whatever else this year costs you, Roz, you built this. This room, right here. That’s not nothing.
That’s actually the whole thing, if you ask me. ”
I looked around the shed, at faces that seven months back had belonged to somebody else’s operation, all of them here now because they’d chosen it, one truck at a time, up my own driveway.
Consuela refilled Sully’s tea without being asked.
Faye was right. Whatever this fence had cost me, in the middle of the worst year of my marriage it had built me a family I hadn’t known I was missing.
? ? ?
I called Nate the night the fence crew wrapped their third week of work, mostly to report progress, and found myself, partway through the call, telling him something I hadn’t admitted to anybody else yet.
“Eleven miles, near enough,” I told him. “Should be done inside the week.”
“That’s fast.”
“Ellis’s crew doesn’t waste daylight.” I sat on the porch step, phone against my ear, looking out at a stretch of wire visible even in the dark, catching what little moonlight there was in thin silver lines running off toward the horizon.
“Nate, can I tell you something I haven’t said out loud to Dad or Consuela or anybody? ”
“Always.”
“Some mornings, watching that fence go up, I don’t feel angry anymore.
I feel proud. Actually proud, the clean kind, not the kind mixed up with hurt.
” I turned that admission over even as I said it, testing its weight.
“Feels almost disloyal to my own anger, admitting that. Like I’m supposed to stay furious the whole time this is happening, and instead I keep catching myself standing at a fence post feeling like I built something good instead of something punishing. ”
“Why would that be disloyal? Building something good doesn’t cancel out what he did to deserve the fence in the first place.”
“I know that, logically. Doesn’t stop the feeling from showing up anyway, this little voice telling me I’m not allowed to be proud of a thing that started with him humiliating me in front of four hundred people.”
“That voice is wrong, Roz.” Nate’s tone had gone firm, a firmness he rarely used, saving it for the things he was certain about.
“You’re allowed every complicated feeling this year’s handing you, at the same time, without one canceling the other out.
Pride and hurt aren’t opposites. They can live in the same chest, same week, same sentence even.
Don’t let some old idea about how a wronged woman’s supposed to feel talk you out of feeling something good about something you actually built with your own hands. ”
I sat a long while after we hung up, looking out at eleven miles of wire catching the moonlight, thin silver lines running clean to the horizon.