The Fence She Finished in His Gloves

The Last Wire

We tied off the last wire on the twenty-sixth of October, a Monday, at about four o’clock in the afternoon.

It was the bottom strand on the far south end, the last quarter mile. Tanner pulled it tight and I plucked it and it sang the same note as the four above it.

Wyatt wrapped it around the brace post and twisted it back on itself five times, the way Brett did.

Then the three of us just stood there.

You could see the whole line from the south brace, three miles of new fence running up over the rises and down into the low spots, five bright wires catching the late sun.

The grass was gold on both sides of it. Somewhere up north a cow bawled.

Nobody said anything. Wyatt took his cap off. Tanner sat down on the flatbed and put his face in his hands for a second and then laughed at himself.

I pulled off Brett’s gloves. The paper towels in the fingertips had gone soft and gray and shaped to my fingers over two weeks. I left them in. I did not want to take them out.

Hap Hensley’s pickup came over the rise about half an hour later.

He drove slowly up to where our half began, parked, and walked the last mile and a half alone, plucking wires as he went. It took him most of an hour.

When he got to the south end where we were, he got out and walked over to the last brace and put his hand on the top wire. He plucked it. Then he plucked the bottom one.

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be by.”

That was all. He got back in his truck and drove home. I stood there with my mouth open, and Wyatt started to laugh, and after a minute I did too.

What He Said

Brett had come out of the ICU on day eleven and gone up to a regular floor.

By the end of October they had him sitting in a chair for an hour at a time. He had started physical therapy. He had feeling in both feet.

On Wednesday afternoon, two days after the last wire, I was sitting beside his bed when somebody knocked on the door frame.

It was Hap Hensley. He had on a clean pressed shirt and his good hat, the gray felt one he wore to funerals and the sale barn. He was holding an envelope in one hand.

He was seventy-four years old, and he had driven better than eighty miles each way to stand in that doorway.

“Brett,” he said. “Mrs. Moreland.”

“Mr. Hensley,” Brett said, and tried to sit up straighter. Hap waved him down.

Hap took his hat off and held it against his chest. He came over to the bed slowly, the way old cattlemen walk into a room where somebody is sick, like he did not want to stir up the air.

He took the envelope and put it into Brett’s hand and closed Brett’s fingers over it with his own.

“That’s forty-one thousand, one hundred eighty-four dollars,” he said. “It’s made out to you, son. Not the company. You.”

Brett looked at the envelope. Then he looked at Hap.

“Mr. Hensley, I didn’t build the back half.”

“I know who built it.” Hap turned and looked at me. His eyes were wet. He did not try to hide it.

“I’ve been running cows on that ground for fifty-one years,” he said. “My daddy built the fence your wife just tore out. I helped him when I was eleven. I have walked a lot of fence in my life, Brett, and I want you to know something.”

He put his hand on the bed rail.

“That is the straightest line I have ever seen on my place. I plucked every wire on that last mile and a half. Every one of them. She had those boys redo whole sections that I would have let go. My daddy would’ve hired her on the spot.”

I could not say anything. I just held on to Brett’s other hand.

“I got the north side to do next spring,” Hap went on. “About two miles. I want her to bid it. I’ll take whatever number she puts on it.”

Brett started to cry. I had never seen my husband cry in front of another man, not at his father’s funeral, not ever. He did not wipe his face. He just held that envelope against his chest and nodded.

“And one more thing,” Hap said. He put his hat back on. “I made some calls. Dale Ketchum, the Wagner brothers, Kenny Rowe over by Matfield Green. Six of ’em had you all on the book for this winter.”

“Six jobs,” I said. I knew the list. I had typed every bid.

“They’re still yours,” Hap said. “Yours. Not Moreland-Tillery. I told them what Rod did, and I told them what she did. I didn’t have to tell any of them twice.”

He shook Brett’s hand. Then he turned to me and shook mine, and he held on to it a second longer, looking at the healing blisters across my palm.

“Your daddy raised you right,” he said. And then he walked out, and we listened to his boots go all the way down the hall.