The Pond Fence My Husband Built

The week before

Wade died on the last Saturday in September, cutting the last of the hay.

The September rain had finally come, and he wanted one more cutting off the bottom field before frost, because the summer had burned up everything else.

Caleb found him. Our younger boy had come home for the weekend from his apprenticeship with the electric co-op, and he took a jug of tea down to the field at four o’clock because his daddy always forgot to drink.

The tractor was idling at the end of a windrow. Wade was slumped over the wheel.

The doctor said it was his heart and that he was likely gone before the tractor rolled to a stop. He was fifty-two.

I do not want to write much about that week. There was the funeral home in town and the casseroles on every counter and the church so full they opened the fellowship hall and ran a speaker in there.

Dwayne was a pallbearer. He stood at the graveside in a brown suit I had never seen him wear, with his hat in his hands, and he did not cry.

Pruitt men do not cry in public. They go home and work.

Rhonda, his wife, held my hand through the whole service. She brought a ham, and a pan of scalloped potatoes, and she came back on Tuesday and washed every dish in my kitchen without asking where anything went.

That is part of why I sat in the truck and shook. Because it was Dwayne.

Because a week before he had carried my husband’s casket to the hearse, and now there was a fence across my pasture with my cows on the wrong side of it.

The water

I did the first thing first. The cows needed water, and it was eighty degrees that afternoon, warm for October after the dry summer.

Wade kept a three-hundred-gallon tank and a gas pump on a flatbed trailer behind the shop, for when the far pasture went dry. I had never hooked it up alone. I called Luke.

Luke is our oldest. He was twenty-seven that fall, a welder at the trailer plant in town, married to a sweet girl named Megan, with a little boy who was just learning to say Grandma.

He was there in twenty minutes in his camo jacket, short beard full of plant dust, still in his work boots with the steel toes scuffed silver.

He did not ask a lot of questions. He hooked up the trailer and filled it from the well and we hauled it out.

We made two trips that evening. Thirty cows in warm weather will drink five or six hundred gallons a day, more if they are nursing calves.

The calves were already weaned and sold, thank the Lord, or it would have been worse.

The cows crowded the trough while we filled it. I stood there in the dust in my good slacks and watched them drink, and I thought about Wade, who had never let a cow on this place go thirsty one day in his life.

“Mom,” Luke said, when the second load was in. “You want me to go over there and talk to him?”

“No.”

“I’ll be nice.”

“I know you will. No.” I put my hand on his arm. “Not tonight. I need to know something first.”

“What?”

“Where the line is,” I said. “Where it really is. Not where your uncle says it is.”