Chapter 6 #2
“I don’t remember being that happy. Not specifically. I remember the fair. I don’t remember feeling like that.”
“That’s what a photograph’s for, I suppose. Holding onto a feeling long after the person who felt it stops being able to find it on their own.” She took the photograph gently from my hands, studied it a moment, handed it back. “You going to keep that one, or is it going in the box with the rest?”
I turned it over once. “Keeping it,” I decided, and set it aside, apart from the boots and the shirts and the shoebox of ribbons, apart from everything else headed for the equipment shed’s back room, a whole marriage reduced to a few cardboard boxes and one photograph I wasn’t ready to let go of.
“Wise,” Consuela said, and helped me tape the boxes shut, and we carried them out to the shed in the last of the evening light, saying little, the quiet of two women who knew some tasks didn’t need narrating to matter.
? ? ?
Consuela invited me to Sunday dinner at Reyes’s place a few weeks into the fence work, a standing family tradition I hadn’t known existed until she mentioned it in passing, and I went mostly out of curiosity about a side of my own crew I’d never once thought to look for.
Reyes met me at the truck before I’d even cut the engine, hat already off, an unusual formality from a man who never stood on ceremony on the job.
“Boss lady,” he said, opening my door before I’d reached for the handle myself. “Graciela’s been cooking since noon. Fair warning, she’ll feed you till you can’t stand up.”
“I can handle a full plate, Reyes.”
“Everybody says that.” He grinned, a rare, easy thing I hadn’t seen much of out at the equipment shed, where he kept his own counsel same as Deacon did. “Nobody handles it. Come on in before she comes out here after the both of us.”
Reyes’s wife, Graciela, ran the household with a warmth that filled every corner of a modest house too small for the noise their three kids generated, and she greeted me at the door like I was already family rather than her husband’s employer, pulling me into the kitchen before I’d finished my introduction.
“Reyes talks about the work,” she said, stirring something on the stove that smelled better than anything I’d cooked in months.
“Doesn’t talk much about anything, my husband, but he talks about the work.
Says it’s the first job he’s had in years where the boss actually knows the cattle by name, not just by number. ”
“I know most of them by name. Some habits from twenty years don’t break easy.”
“He likes that. Respects it, even more than the money, though the money helps too, God knows.” She glanced toward the yard, where Reyes was teaching his oldest, a boy of maybe ten, how to coil a length of rope, patient in the same way he brought to a chute full of nervous yearlings.
“He was different, working for the other outfit. Tired different. Tired like his soul was tired, not just his body. This year, since he crossed over, he comes home tired the good way. Says something’s right about the work again, not just the paycheck. ”
“I’m glad to hear that, Graciela. Truly.”
“I know you are. I can see it in your face, the way you’re actually listening instead of just being polite.
” She handed me a spoon, put me to work stirring while she checked something in the oven, folding me into the household’s rhythm without asking whether I minded.
“This county’s been talking about you all year, you know.
Not always kind, at first. Kinder lately, now that people have watched what you built instead of just what happened at that supper. ”
“I’ve noticed the shift.”
“Good. You’ve earned it.” She smiled, warm and unguarded, and called the family in for dinner.
I sat at a crowded table with people I’d known only by name a few months back, fed generously, included easily, and watched Reyes’s youngest fall asleep against his father’s shoulder before dessert was served.
The fence had given me more than an operation split in half.
It had handed me, a little at a time, a whole community I hadn’t known was mine to claim.
? ? ?
I drove home from Reyes’s place with the windows cracked, the cool air carrying the last of autumn’s smell, cut hay and cooling earth, and halfway down the county road I pulled over at the old windmill for no reason I could name, an impulse to sit a while in the dark before finishing the drive.
The windmill had stood on this stretch of ground longer than anybody living could account for, older than my great-grandfather’s original fence, its blades turning slow in a breeze too gentle to work the pump beneath it anymore, more monument now than machine.
I sat on the truck’s tailgate a while, looking up at stars thick enough to make a person feel small, thinking about Graciela’s warmth, and Ellis’s hard-won read on the work, and the whole accumulating weight of a county deciding, a little at a time, to believe in me.
A strange grief sat with me on the tailgate, one I hadn’t expected and couldn’t easily name: grief for the version of this year I might have had, if Boone had stayed the man I’d married instead of drifting, slow and unnoticed, into somebody else’s idea of himself.
I wasn’t sorry for the fence, or the crew, or any of what I’d built.
But that one evening, alone under a wide dark sky, I let the sadness of it settle into my chest, a marriage that hadn’t needed to break this way, if somebody had caught the drift sooner, said something plainer, asked a harder question before a live microphone asked it for both of them.
I didn’t cry. Just sat with it, the grief moving through me like weather through a season, present and real without needing to make a show of its presence, and after a while it passed and left the sky clearer than before.
I drove home in the dark, windows down, cut hay and cooling earth blowing through the cab the whole way, the fence line running silver under the porch light.