The Fence She Finished in His Gloves

The Bad Day

There was one bad day. There is always one.

It was the second Thursday. The wind came up out of the north in the morning, a hard cold wind that made your eyes water. Tanner had the top wire on the stretcher, almost tight, when the clamp slipped.

The wire snapped back along the posts like a whip, singing and coiling. It went right past Wyatt’s face. He threw himself sideways into the grass and the barbs caught his sweatshirt sleeve and tore it open from wrist to elbow.

I ran to him. He was sitting up in the grass, white in the face, holding his arm. There was a long scratch along his forearm, bleeding a little, but the wire had missed his eyes by about a foot.

I knelt there beside him in the grass and I could not stop shaking. “Go home,” I said. “Both of you. I mean it. This isn’t worth anybody’s eye.”

Wyatt looked at his arm. Then he looked at me. “Mrs. Moreland, my uncle lost the end of his finger to a stretcher when I was ten. It’s a fence. It happens.” He stood up and brushed off his jeans. “We just reset the clamp tighter.”

We cleaned his arm with water from the cooler and wrapped it in a clean shop rag. Then Tanner reset the clamp tighter, and checked it twice, and we pulled that wire again.

That night in Wichita, Brett asked me what was wrong. I told him about the wire. He closed his eyes for a while.

“You can’t keep those boys safe from everything,” he said. “But you can make sure they never run the stretcher alone. That’s the rule. Never alone.”

“We never are,” I said.