The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

“We both have the week off,” Caleb finally said.

“We do.”

“The fence on the forty is down on three sides.”

“It is.”

He looked at me with that half smile he gets right before he climbs a pole in the wind. “How do you feel about building a mile of fence for our honeymoon?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was the worst idea anybody ever had, and it was the first thing all morning that felt like ours.

“How much fence is a mile?” I asked.

He got a pencil off the dresser and figured it on the back of a wedding card envelope.

Forty acres, if it’s square, is a quarter mile on a side. Thirteen hundred and twenty feet. Four sides, fifty-two hundred and eighty feet. One mile exactly.

“A post every rod,” he said. “Sixteen and a half feet. That’s three hundred and twenty posts. Four strands of barbed wire, so about four miles of wire. Sixteen rolls.”

“Can two people do that in a week?”

“No,” he said. “But two people and your dad’s tractor might.”

I called my dad. My dad is a retired rural mail carrier who runs thirty head of cows on rented ground, and he owns a three-point hydraulic post driver he bought used at an auction in Windsor for eleven hundred dollars.

He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. Then he said, “I’ll have the tractor on the trailer by nine. Don’t let Caleb run that driver with his hand on the post.”

At the farm store in Clinton, we spent most of the wedding money in forty minutes. Sixteen rolls of barbed wire.

Three hundred and twenty treated posts. Two buckets of staples, a wire stretcher, a come-along, and brace wire for the corners.

The girl at the register knew me from the clinic, because I had held her beagle for his shots in August. “Y’all building a fence on your honeymoon?” she said, scanning the staples.

“We sure are,” I said.

“That’s either the most romantic thing I ever heard,” she said, “or the dumbest.”

Caleb paid with the twenties out of the doves. “It’s both,” he told her.

Monday we pulled old wire. If you have never pulled forty-year-old barbed wire out of fescue, it fights you every foot.

It is grown into the sod and wrapped around cedar sprouts and it springs back at your face when it lets go.

We rolled it onto an old cable spool in the bed of Caleb’s truck. By dark my leather gloves were split across both palms and Caleb had a long red scratch from his ear to his collar.

We ate bologna sandwiches on the tailgate and watched the sun go down over Roger’s bean stubble to the north. His combine was running in the next field over. He didn’t stop, and he didn’t wave.

“He knows we’re out here,” I said.

“He knows,” Caleb said.

Tuesday my dad’s tractor came, and we set posts. Caleb drove the tractor and ran the driver. I walked ahead with a tape measure and a can of orange marking paint and set every post where the tape said.