The Pond Fence My Husband Built

The cows heard my truck before I topped the hill, and they were bawling at me before I ever saw why.

Thirty black Angus cows, all lined up along a fence that had not been there when I left for school that morning.

It was a Thursday in October, a week to the day after we buried my husband.

I had come straight from school in my good slacks, the way I had every evening since, to count cows and check water.

The new fence ran across the pasture in a straight shining line. Steel T-posts, some green-topped, most rusted brown from his barn lot, four strands of new barbed wire stretched tight enough to sing when the wind hit it.

On the far side of it sat the pond. The spring-fed pond Wade dug out with a rented dozer the summer Luke turned two.

The one pond on our place that had held water all through the dry summer.

My cows were on the near side. They had been pacing that wire since morning, I could tell. The grass along it was trampled flat and the dust was cut up with tracks.

I got out and stood there with my keys still in my hand. I did not understand it.

For a minute I thought somebody had made a mistake, the way a person thinks the phone is wrong when it rings at three in the morning.

Then I saw Dwayne’s truck coming down across his pasture, slow, the way he drives everything.

He parked on his side of the new wire and got out and put his hands on the top strand like a man leaning on a porch rail.

Dwayne Pruitt is my husband’s older brother. He was fifty-five that fall.

He has run cattle on the farm next door to ours his whole life, on the half of the home place their daddy gave him.

“Shannon,” he said.

“Dwayne. What is this?”

He looked down the wire, then back at me. “That’s the line now. Wade always meant for me to have this strip. Him and me talked about it plenty. He just never got around to it.”

I could hear my own heart. My cows were still bawling behind me, and one old cow with a white splash on her flank kept putting her nose through the wire toward the water.

“Wade never said one word to me about any strip,” I said.

“Well, he said it to me.” He did not quite look at me when he said it. “You can haul water to them. Or you can pay me two hundred a month and I’ll open a gate and let them water at the pond. That’s fair. That’s less than feed.”

I am not a yeller. I have been the secretary at the county elementary for nineteen years, and you do not last nineteen years in a school office by yelling. You last by going quiet and writing things down.

So I did not yell. I looked at him across the new wire for a long time, and then I said, “I’ll think on it,” and I got back in my truck.

I sat behind the wheel and shook. Not crying. Just shaking, all the way through, like I had been out in the cold too long.