The Fence She Finished in His Gloves

The Flint Hills Do Not Make It Easy

There is a reason they call them the Flint Hills. About six inches under that beautiful grass is limestone and chert, and a T-post will go down three inches and then stop like it hit a car.

We used a red manual post driver, the heavy steel tube with handles on the sides.

You slide it over the top of the post and lift it and slam it down, and lift it and slam it down. On good dirt it takes eight or ten hits. On rock it can take forty.

Brett had a hydraulic driver for the skid steer. It belonged to the company. It had gone with Rod. So we drove every line post on that mile and a half by hand.

Where the driver bounced, Wyatt came behind with a rock bar and chipped at the hole until the post would bite.

Tanner pulled the measuring wheel and set flags every sixteen and a half feet, one rod, the way Brett always spaced them.

A mile and a half is seven thousand nine hundred and twenty feet. At a rod apart, that is about four hundred and eighty line posts.

I wrote that number on the back of my hand the first morning, and I watched it get smaller every night.

The first day we set ninety-one posts. My shoulders were on fire by noon.

By three o’clock I could not feel the ends of my fingers, and I did not know if it was the cold or the paper towels or both.

When we got home that night, I stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, and then I drove to Wichita in the dark to sit with Brett until midnight.

Rod Calls

On the fourth day, about two in the afternoon, my phone rang in my coat pocket.

It was a number I did not know, from the Topeka area code. I almost let it go. Then I took the gloves off and answered.

“Casey.” It was Rod. His voice sounded far away and very tired. “I heard you’re out at Hensley’s.”

I stood very still. Behind me, Tanner and Wyatt had stopped working. The wind was the only sound, pushing through the grass in long waves.

“You took twenty-eight thousand dollars out of our account while Brett was in surgery,” I said.

“I know what I did.”

“Then tell me why.”

He breathed for a long time before he answered. I could hear traffic behind him. Wherever he was, it was not out here.

“Sherry’s taking the house,” he said. “The divorce. I had to take a second mortgage last spring just to keep the payments up, and now she gets half of it anyway. I was three months behind. They were going to start foreclosure.”

“So you took Brett’s half too.”

“Casey, I saw him on that gravel.” His voice cracked. “I saw his legs. The doctor said two broken vertebrae. He’s not going to walk again. You know that, right? Nobody’s going to say it to you, but somebody should. The company was done the second he hit the ground.”

I looked down the line. Ninety-one posts the first day. A hundred and four the second. Eighty-eight the third, because of the rock.

“He isn’t done,” I said. “And the company isn’t done. I’m standing in it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Rod, you can still fix this. Put it back. Or come out here tomorrow and help me finish, and we’ll talk about the rest when Brett’s awake. I’m not going to the paper. I’m not calling everybody in the county. I just want what’s ours.”

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s already gone. It went to the mortgage.”

“Then come help me finish.”

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Casey,” and he hung up.

I stood there with the phone in my bare hand. Then I put it back in my pocket and put the gloves back on, pushing my fingers down until they found the paper towels.

Tanner came over. He did not say anything. He just handed me the post driver.