The Pond Fence My Husband Built

The tailgate

I do not know how long we all stood there.

Luke was the one who read it out loud, because I could not. His voice went at the end. Caleb put his hand over his mouth.

Dwayne did not say anything at all. He just turned around and walked out of the shop, and we heard him go across the yard, and when I went out after him he was sitting on the tailgate of Luke’s truck with his face in his hands.

He was crying. Dwayne Pruitt, who had not cried at his daddy’s funeral or his mama’s or his little brother’s.

He was sitting on a tailgate in my yard in the dark crying like a little boy, and his shoulders were shaking the same way mine had shaken in the truck on Thursday.

I sat down next to him. I did not touch him at first. Then I put my hand on his back, the way Rhonda had held my hand through the funeral.

“He knew your pond was dry,” I said. “He knew in July. He knew you wouldn’t ask. So he built it. That was Wade.”

“He never said,” Dwayne said, into his hands. “He never said one word to me.”

“He wouldn’t have,” I said. “He’d have just showed up one Saturday and put it in, and handed you a cup of coffee, and told you to quit standing around.”

Dwayne laughed. It came out wet and broken, but it was a laugh. Because that was exactly what Wade would have done, and both of us could see it.

Sunday

We put it in the next afternoon, after church.

Dwayne came at one o’clock with his tractor and his post-hole digger. Rhonda came with him. She had found out by then.

He had told her everything in the kitchen Saturday night, she said, all of it, the dry pond and the note and the fence.

She came up to me in the yard before anybody else had gotten out of the truck, and she put her arms around me and held on, and she said, “Shannon, I am so sorry. I didn’t know. I swear to you I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “I could hear it on the phone.”

“He’s going to make it right.”

“He already is,” I said, and I nodded at the tractor, where Dwayne was already backing up to the trailer full of Wade’s pipe.

The lane

We set the lane at the bend by the pond, from a new gate in the line down across our ground to the bank, about thirty feet.

Six panels, sixteen feet each, three to a side. Luke welded the hinges for a gate at the top end right there on the spot with the portable welder.

The water gap took all of us. We hung it on a cable stretched between two corner posts, one on each bank, so the pipe sections swung down into the water like a curtain.

When the pond rose, they would rise. When it dropped, they would drop.

Dwayne knew exactly what to do with every piece of it. He worked without being told, the way Pruitt men do.

Twice I saw him stop and run his hand along one of Wade’s welds, and then go back to work.

The tank went at the top of the lane, just over the line on Dwayne’s side, fed by a pipe from the overflow at the spring.

That way, if the pond ever got too low or too muddy for the gap, his cows would still have clean water from the spring itself.

Wade had thought of that. Of course he had.