The Fence He Put Through My Field

“He pushed out my father’s hedge,” Orval said. Not loud. “He put a bulldozer on my father’s hedge.” He looked out the window a long time. “Dale, I’ll tell you something about Hollis Breck. His granddad Lyle was the same kind of man, and his dad after him. Three generations of Brecks who thought the line was wherever they could stand. Lyle tried to take that corner off my father in nineteen and sixty, tried to say the stone had been moved. And my dad walked half this township out to that rock on a Sunday after church and had them all put a hand on it and swear where it was. Lyle backed off. You know why? Because a Breck can face down one man. He cannot face the whole township looking at him at once. That’s the one thing they cannot stand. Being seen.”

He sat forward on his cane. The shaking had stopped. “You leave it with me,” he said. “There’s a thing coming up.”

The thing coming up was the Dunmore Fall Harvest Supper. It was held the first Saturday in October in the Legion hall, and near as I could tell it was the biggest night of the year in that town. The volunteer fire department put it on. Everybody came, three hundred or more, every farm family, all the old folks from town, the church ladies with their pies. There was a meal and then a benefit auction where people bid up jars of jam and quilts and sides of beef to buy the fire department a new rescue truck. And Hollis Breck, Orval told me with something like disgust, loved that night more than Christmas, because it was the one night he got to be the big man in the room out loud. He always bid the auction up sky-high on the showiest items, made sure everyone saw the number, made sure his name got said from the little stage. “He buys the town’s respect one Saturday a year,” Orval said, “and then spends the other fifty-one taking it back a fence at a time.”

I did not want to go. Orval told me I was going. He told me to come and sit and say nothing and let him work. “You’re the stranger,” he said. “Nobody’ll move for a stranger. But they’ll move for me. Let an old man do this.”

I went. I wore my good shirt. I sat at a long table with Orval beside me in his wheelchair and his grandson across from us, and I ate scalloped potatoes and ham I could not taste, and I watched Hollis Breck work the room in a pressed western shirt, slapping backs, laughing too loud, a big man among men who could not afford to tell him no. He saw me. He gave me a little nod across the hall and a smile with nothing behind it, and I understood the smile. It said, Look where you are. In my town. Eating my dinner. At my mercy. Painting your little house.

Then the auction started, and this is the part I will remember until I die.

The fire chief, Sonny Wills, ran it off the little stage with a microphone. Quilts, jam, a rifle, a hog. And when the bidding got to the showpiece of the night, a side of beef donated by a feedlot, Hollis Breck stood up in the middle of the hall where everyone could see him, the way he did every year, and started running the price up, two hundred, three, four, calling it out loud and proud, playing the crowd, and people were clapping, and he had his thumbs in his belt and his chin up, and he was swelling.