The Pond Fence My Husband Built

The shop

I had not seen it. I had gone into the shop for the survey and for the wire and I had gone straight to the file cabinet and the shelf, and I had not once looked at the back corner. I could not. That was where Wade worked.

Luke had seen it that morning when he loaded the truck. He said he had seen his daddy working on it in August, too, the last time he was home for Sunday dinner, but Wade had only said it was a project and changed the subject.

We all went up in the truck. Dwayne rode in the back with Caleb. Nobody said anything the whole way.

In the back corner of the shop, under an old green tarp, there was a stack of welded steel. Luke pulled the tarp off.

It was a water gap. That is a steel panel that hangs down into a creek or a pond on a cable, so it can swing with the water level and keep cows from wading around the end of a fence.

Wade had built it out of two-inch pipe, and it was beautiful work.

There were three sections of it. Enough to run a pipe fence straight out from the bank and down into the pond, so cattle could drink from both sides of it and never mix.

Beside it there were six pipe panels, sixteen feet each. Enough to fence a narrow lane from the line down to the pond bank, so Dwayne’s cows could walk in from his side to drink.

And there was a tank. A round steel stock tank, made from the bottom of an old propane tank cut in half, the edges ground smooth so a cow would not cut her lip on them. A float valve and a length of pipe set beside it.

Taped to the top of the tank, with a strip of gray duct tape, was a piece of cardboard torn off a box of welding rod.

On it, in carpenter’s pencil, in Wade’s big square handwriting, it said:

For Dwayne’s cows. He won’t ask.