Chapter 6
They set the last post on a Friday, twenty days after the first one, a day early, and I drove the whole line myself before I let Ellis’s crew load up their trucks and go.
Eleven miles of high-tensile wire, running the whole survey line Ellis had walked with me on the first morning, cutting the Teague operation clean down the middle after eleven years of it existing as one thing instead of two.
I drove it slow, window down, stopping every half mile or so to get out and check a splice or a brace post, more habit than worry, because Ellis’s crew didn’t leave sloppy work behind them and I already knew that.
I just wanted the excuse to walk it. To put the whole distance of it under my own boots at least once, before it turned into one more feature of the land I stopped noticing, a fence a person stops seeing once it’s stood long enough.
Boone watched from his own porch. He stood there when I drove the last stretch, a shape against the light holding a coffee cup he wasn’t drinking from.
He’d lost the argument some time back and settled for watching, and it showed in how he held himself, decided about it, done reaching for anything else he could do about it.
I didn’t wave and he didn’t either, and that felt about right for where we’d landed.
Neither of us reached for a gesture neither of us meant, and there was something almost merciful in that.
Ellis found me at the truck once the crew had the equipment loaded, the post-pounder chained down flat on the flatbed, spare wire spools stacked and roped in the truck bed like they’d never been anything but cargo.
“Good line,” he said. “Straightest fence I’ve run all year, and I’ve run a lot of them.”
“Wasn’t hard. The ground already knew where it went.”
“Ground never makes it that easy on its own. Takes somebody who can read it.” He looked at me a second, sizing up somebody he’d worked three weeks alongside and formed an opinion about without ever saying it out loud.
“Crew asked me last week whether you were doing this out of spite. Told them no. Spite doesn’t hold a line this straight.
Spite gets sloppy by the second mile, once the anger burns off and there’s nothing left but the work.
This held straight the whole way. That’s something else. ”
“What’s it, then, if it’s not spite?”
He shrugged, unwilling or unable to name it more precisely than he already had. “My wife heard about this,” he said instead. “Whole county’s heard about it, way these things go. She said to tell you good for you, if I saw you before we packed out.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“Will do.” He tipped his hat, the closest thing to a farewell Ellis had offered anybody in three weeks. “You ever need another eleven miles of fence, you know who to call.”
“Hoping I won’t. No offense.”
That got a real laugh out of him, short and rough.
“None taken. Best compliment a fence contractor can get, somebody hoping never to need him again.” He climbed into his truck and drove off with the rest of his crew, dust rising behind the line of trucks and settling slow back onto the county road, leaving me at a cattle guard with eleven miles of new wire between me and a marriage I hadn’t ended and hadn’t saved either, just measured out and cut clean down its own middle.
Consuela found me there an hour later, after the dust from Ellis’s trucks had settled back into the road, walking up on foot from the direction of the barn with two bottles of water, handing one over without a word.
“Done,” she said. Not a question.
“Done.”
“How’s it feel?”
I looked down the line, post after post after post, running straight to a horizon that didn’t care one way or the other whose name was on which half of it. I turned the water bottle in my hand, cold from the shed’s old refrigerator, condensation already beading on the label.
“Feels like a Tuesday,” I said, which wasn’t true, and Consuela knew it wasn’t true, and neither of us said anything else about it.
We stood there a while longer, looking at eleven miles of a decision I’d made in six minutes in a parking row at a harvest supper, now solid and permanent across the whole width of the operation.
My grandmother’s orchard fence came to mind, the one my father had mentioned and refused to explain.
How long did a fence need to stand before it stopped being a wound and started being a boundary?
Nobody had ever given me that number. I suspected nobody could.
“You want a ride back up to the house,” Consuela asked, “or are you planning to stand out here a while longer, staring at your own handiwork.”
“Little of both,” I admitted, and she laughed, and we walked back together, leaving the fence to do the only thing a fence knows how to do: stand there.
My father came out that evening, same as he’d said he would the morning he watched them set the first post, and walked the near stretch of it with me in the last of the daylight, running his hand along the wire, the same hand he’d run along a hundred fences before this one.
“Good tension,” he said. “Ferris’s crews always did know how to string a line.”
“You already knew that. You’ve used him twice yourself.”
“Wasn’t really talking about the wire.” He kept walking, hands in his pockets now, looking down the line toward the horizon same as I had that afternoon. “You did what you said you’d do, Rosalind. Not many people manage that, big as this was.”
“You offered me an easier road, that first morning. Lawyer’s number in your truck.”
“I did. Glad you didn’t take it.” He stopped at the cattle guard, looked back the way we’d come. “Doesn’t mean I know how the rest of this goes. Just means I was right to bet on you handling whichever way it does.”
He didn’t stay long after that. Some visits aren’t meant to.
? ? ?
I found my grandmother’s journal that night, in the bottom drawer of the desk where the plat map lived, a cloth-bound thing gone soft at the corners from six decades of handling, and I sat up past midnight reading it by the same kitchen table light I’d used to plan the fence three weeks before.
Most of it was ordinary. Weather, calving dates, a running tally of egg money from a flock of hens long since gone to whatever hens go to.
But there was a stretch, June through September of a year I did the arithmetic on: the summer my father would have been eleven, where the entries turned clipped and careful in a way the rest of the journal wasn’t.
June 14. Fenced the orchard off from the house side today. He asked why. I told him to go ask himself, since he already knew the answer better than I did.
June 30. He came to the fence line every evening this week. Doesn’t cross it. Just stands there a while and then goes back to the house. I let him stand there. Standing costs him something. That’s the point of it.
July 22. Told him tonight I’d take the fence down when I believed him and not one day sooner. He said that wasn’t fair. I told him fair wasn’t the thing I owed him. Honest was.
August 9. He brought Ruth’s letter to me himself today instead of letting me hear it from somebody else. That’s the first real thing he’s done all summer. Told him so.
September 3. Fence came down. Took it down myself, same as I put it up. He helped me coil the wire. Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.
I read that last entry three times, the handwriting gone shakier by September than in June, whether from age or something else the pages didn’t say.
Nothing in the journal explained who Ruth was or what her letter held.
Some things a woman didn’t write down even in her own private book, the specifics buried on purpose so that only the shape of the forgiveness survived, not the wound that had made it necessary.
My father’s version of the story came back to me, the one he’d refused to finish across the kitchen table three weeks back.
Every marriage worth keeping’s got at least one summer like that in it.
He’d known the whole of it, probably, growing up in that house, eleven years old and watching his own mother stand at a fence line every evening, deciding one evening at a time whether a man had earned his way back.
I closed the journal, careful with the soft old binding, and sat a while in the dark kitchen with my coffee gone cold, thinking about a fence that had come down after three months instead of the eleven miles I’d just put up, and wondering how long was long enough, and who got to decide that number when the time came.
? ? ?
I boxed up the last of Boone’s things the following weekend, a task I’d been putting off since the fence went up, not ready to make the house match the ground until the ground had finished changing shape underneath it.
It wasn’t much, in the end. A few shirts he’d left behind when he moved his main wardrobe to the other house, a pair of boots gone stiff from disuse, a shoebox of old rodeo ribbons from before either of us had a dollar figure attached to any of it, back when he rode broncs for the pure fool pleasure of it and not for any sponsor’s camera.
At the bottom of his side of the closet lay a photograph I hadn’t seen in years: him and me at a county fair, eight or nine years back, him laughing at something out of frame, me looking at him instead of the camera, an expression on my own face I didn’t recognize anymore, something unguarded and easy that had gone missing in the years since.
I sat on the closet floor a long while with the photograph, not crying, just looking at an old version of myself I hadn’t expected to find, a face I’d worn once and set down somewhere without noticing.
Consuela found me there an hour later, having come up to check why I hadn’t come down for supper, and she didn’t say anything at first, just sat down on the floor beside me, her own knees protesting the position with a creak she ignored.
“That’s a good photograph,” she said finally.