The Boundary Line My Neighbor Erased
“That fence is staying exactly where the deed says it belongs,” I told him again, in front of everyone this time, because I was done saying it quietly.
Barry smiled the way he always did and dropped it, in words anyway. In practice, the small tests started. He mowed two extra feet onto my side of the line and called it cleaning up when I mentioned it. He started rolling my trash cans down to sit precisely on the boundary on collection days, an inch on my side just often enough that I could not prove it was deliberate. Kim, for her part, mostly smiled and looked somewhere else when Barry talked like this. I do not think she agreed with him. I do not think she disagreed with him out loud either.
Word travels fast around a feed store counter, and by early summer I had heard secondhand, from a woman at the church potluck who heard it from the man who sells Barry his fertilizer, that Barry had been telling people at the hardware store the fence was “probably not even legal” and that he intended to “get it sorted” before the boys started school in the fall. I did not think much of it at the time beyond a flash of irritation. I have thought about it a great deal since, because it told me something I should have taken more seriously. Barry was not planning to ask me again. He was building himself a story he could tell other people, one where he was the reasonable man clearing up somebody else’s mistake, and he was telling it before he had done a single thing to make it true.
Eight Days in Washington County
My brother Lance called me on a Tuesday morning in a voice I had heard from him exactly twice in our lives, both times when something had gone seriously wrong.
His tractor had rolled on the slope behind the family place in Washington County, pinning his leg for the better part of an hour before a neighbor heard him yelling. He was alive, stable, but looking at a long hospital stay and a longer recovery, and our mother was seventy eight and could not manage the drive up from Mobile alone, let alone the sitting and waiting that came after.
I packed a bag before I had even hung up the phone. I called Kim, not Barry, and told her I would be gone a week or more, that my mail could pile up, that I would appreciate someone keeping an eye on the place. She said of course, and for a moment I believed her the way you believe a person you have shared a cookout with.
I spent the next eight days in a hospital three hundred miles from home, sleeping in a recliner that folded down about halfway, watching my brother relearn how to stand on a leg full of pins and plates, holding my mother’s hand through two surgeries and a hallway conversation with a doctor that scared us both more than either surgery did.
I called home twice during those eight days, both times to a neighbor I trusted to water my tomatoes, not to check whether my property still had a boundary. It did not occur to me that there was anything left to check. A fence is the kind of thing you stop noticing exactly because it is supposed to just be there, holding the shape of your life together while you deal with everything else.