The Pond Fence My Husband Built

Why I did not call anybody

People have asked me since why I did not just call the sheriff. Or a lawyer. Or march into church on Sunday and tell the whole congregation what Dwayne Pruitt had done.

I will tell you plainly. Dwayne is my boys’ uncle. He taught Luke to drive a stick shift and Caleb to rope a calf. The sheriff sits two pews behind him every Sunday morning.

I did not want a deputy’s car in his drive a week after his brother’s funeral. I did not want my boys to have to pick a side in a courtroom.

I did not want a fight. I wanted the fence where Wade put it. That was all.

And I wanted to understand. Because the Dwayne I knew was proud and stubborn and tight with a dollar, but he was not a thief. Something had happened to him, and I did not know what.

The survey

Wade’s shop sits behind the house, a pole barn he put up himself the year Caleb was born.

It smells like welding rod and diesel and the peppermints he kept in a coffee can on the workbench.

I had not been in it since he died. I stood in the doorway that night with the light switch under my hand for a long time before I turned it on.

His coat was still on the nail by the door. His good pliers were on the bench where he had set them down that Saturday morning.

There was a half-eaten roll of peppermints next to them with the paper folded over.

I went through the gray file cabinet in the corner. Wade kept everything. Tractor manuals from 1985.

Every receipt from the feed store for twenty years, rubber-banded by year. Our marriage license, of all things, in a folder marked Truck Titles.

The survey was in the bottom drawer in a long cardboard tube. I knew what it was the minute I saw it, because I remembered the spring it was done.

In 1998, Wade and Dwayne’s daddy split the home place between his two boys.

Three hundred and twenty acres, half and half, with the old house going to Dwayne as the oldest and the bottom ground with the spring coming to Wade.

Their daddy hired a surveyor out of the county seat to do it right, because he said brothers stay brothers longer when the line is written down.

He was a wise old man. I wish he had lived longer.

I unrolled the survey on the kitchen table and weighed the corners down with the salt shaker and the sugar bowl and two coffee mugs. The line between the farms was drawn straight as a ruler.

At each end, and at the bend near the pond, there was a little circle and the words iron pin set.

And the distance from the line to the edge of the spring was written in the surveyor’s neat little hand.

The pond was on our side. It had always been on our side. There was nothing on that paper that gave anybody a strip of anything.