The Pond Fence My Husband Built

Setting it back

Wade’s cedar posts were sound. Cedar will last fifty years in Ozark dirt if it is set right, and Wade and his daddy set them right.

All we needed was wire and a few new steel stays between them.

We drove T-posts in between the cedar, one at every eight feet, with a post driver.

The driver is a heavy steel pipe with handles, and you lift it and slam it down, and the sound rings off the hills.

Then we strung Wade’s wire, the four rolls he bought in the spring. Caleb tied off at the south corner.

I walked the roll down the line. Luke followed with the come-along and stretched each strand until it hummed.

Every so often I glanced at Dwayne. He had not moved. His arms were still crossed. His face under that hat was the same color as the cedar.

It was close to six when we got to the north end. The sun was almost down.

Luke hooked the last strand onto the corner brace and stretched it, and I put the last clip on the last stay, and it was done.

Wade’s fence. On Wade’s line. Exactly where he built it.

Caleb walked the three cows that had wandered over onto Dwayne’s side back through the old wire gate by the pond, and shut it.

All thirty of ours stood at the water’s edge on our side of the line, drinking like they would never stop.

What he said

Dwayne came over then. He walked down along the new wire on his own side, slow, and stopped across from me. I pulled my gloves off and put them in my coat pocket.

“You could’ve let me keep it a little while,” he said. His voice was rough. “Through the winter. I’d have paid you back in hay.”

“You didn’t ask me, Dwayne.”

“I know it.”

“You asked me for two hundred dollars a month to water my own cows at my husband’s pond.”

He took his hat off. He turned it around in his hands, the same way he had held it at the graveside.

“My pond went dry in July,” he said. “Bone dry. First time since Daddy dug it. I been hauling water with the tank every day since, morning and night. Rhonda thinks I sold some cows for the money to cover the note. I didn’t. I’m two payments behind on it.”

Luke and Caleb had stopped. Neither one of them said a word.

“I couldn’t ask Wade,” Dwayne said. “He was my little brother. I’m supposed to be the one who helps him. I kept meaning to. And then he was gone, and you were alone over here with that pond full, and I just.”

He stopped. He put his hat back on.

“I just did a stupid thing,” he said. “Rhonda don’t know. I didn’t tell her.”

I did not know what to say. I had been ready for him to fight me.

I had been ready for him to tell me I had shamed him in front of the whole road. I had not been ready for this.

And that was when Luke set down the come-along, very carefully, on the tailgate.

“Mom,” he said. “You need to see what Dad was building in the shop.”