The Pond Fence My Husband Built

Walking the line

Friday after school, Luke came back out with a metal detector he had borrowed from a buddy at the plant, and we walked the line together in the last of the light.

I knew where to start, because I knew Wade. Every spring when he checked fence, he walked the whole line and dug out the iron pins with a spade and sprayed the tops orange so he could find them again.

He used to tease me about it. He said a man who knows where his corners are sleeps better at night.

I used to tease him back that he slept fine through a thunderstorm and three crying babies.

The old fence was still there. That was the strangest part. Dwayne had not torn out Wade’s cedar posts.

He had only cut the wire off them and rolled it up and set his new steel fence forty feet over.

So the old line stood there in the dry grass like the bones of something.

Cedar posts every sixteen feet, gray and split, set by Wade and his daddy when Wade was nineteen. Some of them still had wire staples hanging off them.

The detector chirped at the south end, right where the survey said it would, about a foot off the corner post.

Luke dug with the spade and there it was. A rusty iron pin with a cap of faded orange paint.

I got down on my knees in the dirt and put my hand on it. I do not know why.

It was just a pin. But Wade had been the last person to touch it, that spring, and I could not help myself.

We found the one at the bend by the pond, and the one at the north end, right where they belonged. Every one of them sat in a straight line with Wade’s cedar posts.

Luke ran a tape from the cedar line to Dwayne’s new wire at three places. Forty feet, forty feet, forty-one.

For a quarter mile. That is a little over an acre of our pasture, and the only water on it.

“He knew,” Luke said quietly. “Mom, he had to know. He watched Dad paint those pins every spring of his life.”

“I expect he did,” I said.

The phone call

I called Dwayne that night from the kitchen. I want people to know that. I did not sneak up on him. I gave him the chance.

Rhonda answered and said he was out at the barn, and she sounded so ordinary and kind that I knew right then she did not know anything about the fence. I asked her to have him call me.

He called back an hour later. I could hear the television in the background and the screen door slap.

“I found the survey from ’98,” I said. “The one your daddy had done. And Luke and I walked the line this evening and found the pins. Wade’s pins. The fence is on our ground, Dwayne.”

He was quiet a long time.

“Wade said,” he started.

“Wade didn’t say anything to me. And he wrote everything down. If he’d meant to give you that strip there would be a paper on it with his name on it, and there isn’t.”

More quiet.

“The boys and I are going to move it back tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll start at eight. You’re welcome to come get your posts and your wire. If you don’t, we’ll stack them neat at your gate.”

“Shannon, you can’t just.”

“It’s my land, Dwayne. I can move what’s on it.”

He hung up. Not hard. He just set the phone down, and the line went dead, and I stood in my kitchen holding the receiver and listening to nothing.