The Pond Fence My Husband Built

The road

Our pasture runs along the county road for most of that quarter mile. On a Saturday in October in our part of Missouri, the county road is the busiest place in the world.

The mail carrier came by at ten and slowed down to a crawl.

The Henderson boys came by on their way to the sale barn with a stock trailer full of calves, and they slowed down too.

Pastor Jim and his wife came by on their way to a funeral dinner in the next county. They did not stop. But his wife had her hand up against the window the whole way past.

By noon, half the road had seen the shining new fence coming down in the middle of a dead man’s pasture.

And every one of them knew whose it was, because every one of them had driven past it standing there for two days.

I did not wave. I did not put on a show. I just kept pulling posts. But I knew, and the boys knew, and I expect by two o’clock Dwayne knew too.

Megan brought out sandwiches and tea at one, and we ate sitting on the tailgate. The baby slept in his car seat in the shade.

Down at the pond the cows drank and lay in the shade of the bank, quiet for the first time in two days.

Dwayne

He came at about four.

The sun was getting low by then, coming in long and gold across the pasture, lighting up the oaks on the ridge behind the pond.

They had turned in the last week, orange and brown, the color they turn in a dry year.

He did not come in the truck. He walked across his own pasture from his barn, a quarter mile, in his old brown work coat and the cowboy hat he has worn so long the band is dark with sweat.

He stopped at Wade’s old line. He stood next to one of the gray cedar posts with his arms crossed over his chest, and he watched us.

He did not say a word. Neither did we. I hooked the puller on the next post and pumped it up and handed it to Luke.

Caleb kept rolling wire. Behind us the black cows stood drinking at the edge of the pond.

I could feel him there the whole time, the way you feel a storm coming before you hear it. But I did not look up. I did not hurry and I did not slow down.

Since ten, Caleb had been driving stays and stringing Wade’s wire behind us, a stretch at a time. When the last of his steel posts was out of the ground, Luke stacked it on the trailer, and we went back to finish Wade’s line.