The Fence He Put Through My Field

“I like the trees,” I said.

He looked at me a long second. “Sure you do,” he said, and rolled up his window and drove off. I stood there feeling, for no reason I could name, like I had just been measured and found easy.

I did not think much of it. I had an orchard to plant and a grief to carry, and a strange man in a clean truck was the least of what was wrong in my life. In September my sister in Colorado took a fall and I drove out to help her get settled with a visiting nurse. I was gone nine days. I remember I almost did not go, and then I thought, what is there to watch here, it is only trees and dirt, and I went.

I came home on a Thursday evening with the sun already down behind the cedars. I pulled in the drive tired to the bone. Something looked wrong the way a room looks wrong when a picture has been taken off the wall, and it took my eyes a minute in the dusk to understand what I was seeing.

The hedge was gone.

Not all of it. The hedge ran the length of my west line, and a stretch of it, maybe three hundred feet up at the north end, had been torn out by the roots. The great old Osage orange trees Orval’s father had planted in 1951, one every ten steps, were lying on their sides in a mangled brown pile, bulldozed into a windrow and left. The ground where they had stood was scraped raw. And standing in the raw ground, straight and bright and new, was a fence. Shining galvanized pipe posts set in concrete, four strands of new woven wire stretched tight, running south from somewhere up past the corner.

It took me until the next morning, walking it in daylight with my coffee going cold in my hand, to understand what had been done to me. The new fence did not run where the hedge had run. It ran a good forty feet east of it. Into my field. Hollis Breck had bulldozed my trees, scraped my ground, and set a new fence forty feet onto my land, straight down the length of that north stretch, and he had taken with it the entire northwest corner. The deep black ground where the cattle pens had been. My orchard. And the dinner stone, the glacial boulder every kid in that township had sat on, was now on his side of the wire.

I stood at that new fence with my dead cold coffee and I shook. Not with fear, though that came later. With the pure animal disbelief of a thing so brazen you cannot at first make your mind hold it.

I called him. His number was on the co-op sign. He answered on the fourth ring and I heard a television behind him.

“Mr. Breck, this is Dale Merrick. You’ve put a fence forty feet into my field. You’ve torn out my hedge.”

There was a long pause, and in it I could hear him deciding how to talk to me. When he spoke his voice was patient, almost kind, the way you would talk to a child who has the facts wrong.