The Fence Line Between Two Brothers

“You knew she was sick.”

“I knew she was sick,” he said. “I did not know she was dying. You knew that. You knew that, Roy.”

“You knew at Christmas,” I said, and I heard it come out of my mouth in a voice I hadn’t known I had. “You heard it in her voice on the phone and you stayed in Topeka. You had a bridge in Concordia.”

He looked at me like I had struck him. And I had not even said the worst of it, because the worst of it was that I was right, and he knew I was right, and I knew he was right too, and neither of us could stand that.

He set his plate on the table. He went up the stairs and out the side door. He did not stay for the pie.

That was the last time we spoke.

I do not mean the last time we spoke warmly. I mean the last time. Eleven years. I sent a Christmas card the first year with only my name signed, and nothing came back, and after that I stopped. We saw each other at a distance sometimes, at the county fair or at a graduation, and neither of us moved toward the other.

And Dad drove.

I will carry this one until I am in the ground. For nine of those eleven years my father, who was already past eighty, did Thanksgiving twice. He would eat at my house at noon, at Marilyn’s table, pushing the turkey around his plate. At one-fifteen he would stand up and put on his coat and say, “Well, I’d better get on the road.” He drove seventy-five miles to Topeka to eat again at four with Curtis and Joan. He drove back after dark on Highway 36 with the deer jumping. He did the same thing at Christmas.

He never said, “Why don’t you two quit it.” Not once. I used to think that meant he didn’t have the heart. Now I think he knew it wasn’t something a man could be told.

The first Saturday

So that is who stood at the creek gate in March, holding out a hand for pliers.

Here is how a half mile of fence gets rebuilt, if you have never done it. You begin at one end and walk the line. You find where the wire is down, and you mark it with a strip of orange flagging tape. You find the posts that are rotted, and you mark those too. You pull the old staples and cut the old wire into lengths you can haul. You set the new posts, and then you string the new wire from one brace to the next, and you stretch it tight with a stretcher chain until it sings when you flick it. Then you staple it off.

You cannot do it well alone. You can do it, but not well, and that was the one thing about my father’s note I had to give him. He knew there was no good way to fix that fence with one man. He had built it in 1978 with the two of us, when I was sixteen and Curtis was thirteen, and the whole way through he had taught us the same trick of reading the wire. He would put a boy on each end of a long run, and one of us would pull, and the other would watch the wire and say when.

It turned out my brother and I still knew exactly how to do that.