The Fence He Put Through My Field

I did not know then how much those two sentences would come to mean. I only knew I liked the old man, and I liked the stone, and I liked that the line between my land and the next was a living wall of trees his father had planted with his hands. I bought the place that week. Orval shook my hand and held it an extra beat and said, “You take care of it. It took care of us.” Then he got in his car and drove back to town, and I was alone with eleven acres and a blue tin.

I will tell you the truth. Those first weeks saved my life. I did not know a soul. I woke up when it got light, and I worked until I could not, and I slept hard, and that was better than anything I had managed in the city. I patched the porch. I painted the house a soft gray. I turned over a garden plot in the southeast corner where the morning sun hit first. I set two beehives at the edge of the cedars, the way Carol and I had always said we would, and I talked to the bees like a crazy old man, which I suppose I was becoming.

I planned the whole thing around that northwest corner, up by the dinner stone. The soil there was the best on the place, black and deep, where the old cattle pens had been. I was going to put the orchard there. Six apple trees, two cherries, a little stand of plums. I had already ordered the whips. I used to lie in bed and see it finished, Carol’s orchard, fifteen years down the road, me an old man under my own apples. It gave me something to point the days at.

Then I met Hollis Breck.

Everybody around Dunmore knew Hollis Breck, and I would learn that most of them were a little afraid of him. He farmed the quarter just west of me, and about four thousand acres besides, spread all over the township in pieces he had bought up or rented out from under people for twenty years. Breck Farms. His name was on the big steel sheds out on the highway and on the sign at the co-op where he sat on the board. He did custom work for half the small operators around, planting and combining their ground for a cut, which meant he had a hand in the pocket of nearly everyone who farmed near Dunmore. When Hollis Breck wanted something, people found reasons not to argue.

He came by in August in a dually pickup so clean it looked rented. He did not get out. He rolled the window down and looked at my fresh paint and my beehives and my garden with an expression like a man pricing a thing he intends to buy cheap.

“You’d be the fella bought Orval’s patch,” he said. Not a question.

“Dale Merrick.” I put my hand up to the window. He looked at it and did not take it.

“Hollis Breck. I farm this whole side.” He waved a thick hand at everything, including, I noticed, a good deal of what was mine. “City?”

“Lincoln, last. Grew up in Grand Island.”

“Figured.” He let that sit like it meant something. Then he looked up at my hedge row, the big Osage orange wall his neighbor’s father had planted, and something passed over his face, quick and cold, that I did not understand until much later. “That old hedge is a mess,” he said. “Eats ground. Thorns ruin my tires on the headland. Man ought to push that out, farm fence to fence.”