The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

It is a hard, rhythmic kind of work. The driver lifts, the post sits, the weight comes down with a sound like a door slamming in an empty church.

Three hits, four hits, and a post that was lying in the grass is standing in Missouri forever.

By noon we had the north line done, the side against Roger’s ground. By dark we had the east line done along the blacktop, too. My shoulders hurt in places I didn’t know had muscles.

Wednesday morning Caleb went off to the lumber yard in his truck and came back an hour later with two heavy treated timbers chained on a borrowed trailer.

He paid for them with the last of the card money and a little more on his own debit card.

“Gate frame,” he said. “Every farm needs a proper gate.”

We set them eight feet apart by the blacktop with the auger on my dad’s tractor, four feet deep, and tamped them in with a bar until my arms shook. Caleb bolted a crossbeam across the top.

Then he went to the truck and pulled a tarp off something in the back. I hadn’t noticed it all morning.

It was a sign. A long board, about four feet wide, cut from pale cedar he had planed that night. I knew that wood the second I saw it. It came out of our wedding arbor.

Caleb had built that arbor himself in August, out of cedar he cut and planed from a tree that blew down on my parents’ place. We said our vows under it on Saturday afternoon. Four days before.

“When did you do this?” I said.

“Last night, after you fell asleep,” he said. “Took the arbor apart in your dad’s shop. I hope that’s all right. I figured it ought to hold up something.”

He’d routed the letters into it by hand with my dad’s router, and painted them white. Honeymoon Acres. The O in Honeymoon was a little lopsided.

I stood there in the road ditch in my gray hoodie and my split gloves and cried for the second time in one week.

Not sad crying. The kind where something is so exactly right that your body doesn’t know what else to do with it.

I will tell the truth about something here. When I first read that sign, part of me wanted Roger to see it. Not just to see it. To feel it, every single time he drove past.

Caleb had the same thought, I think, because he said, “I thought about adding a line underneath. Something like, Not For Sale.”

“No,” I said. “Just the name. That’s what it is. It isn’t about him.”

That was mostly true. I am trying to tell this honestly, and the honest part is that it was mostly true, and the rest of it was a little bit about him.

That afternoon was sunny and warm for October, the kind of day where the fescue looks greener than it did in June. Caleb, in his tan work shirt, set the stepladder against the gate frame.