The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

I pulled my ball cap down, my braid hanging out the back, and stood by the ladder with one gloved hand on the gate post.

He set the board between the posts and held it against the wood. “Hold the post still,” he said. “There.”

He drove the screws in with his cordless drill. It took him a while, because he wanted it level, and Caleb Dahl will not hang a crooked thing, not on a pole or a gate or anywhere else.

When it was up, he came down off the ladder and stood beside me in the road ditch, and he read it out loud like he was reading it for the first time. “Honeymoon Acres.” Then he kissed the back of my glove.

The first truck honked before we’d folded the ladder.

It was a farm truck with a round bale on the back. The driver leaned on his horn twice, long and friendly, and lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, the way men wave out here.

Then a minivan honked. Then a cattle trailer. Then a school bus that I’m almost sure wasn’t supposed to honk.

“What in the world,” Caleb said.

But I knew what it was. It was a small town. Half of Henry County had been at that VFW hall Saturday night and heard about the Branson week.

By Monday afternoon the other half had heard it had been canceled. People talk at the elevator and at the clinic and at the Casey’s.

They didn’t know about the eighty thousand. They just knew that a young couple was supposed to be at Table Rock Lake, and instead they were out here in the road ditch with a fence stretcher and a sign.

Thursday we stretched wire. That is slow work. You tie off on a brace, run the roll out along the posts, hook the stretcher, crank it until the wire sings, then staple it to every post, four strands, all the way down the line.

Every few minutes, somebody honked.

Thursday afternoon a gray Silverado came down the blacktop and slowed almost to a stop by the gate. I knew the truck.

Everybody knows Uncle Lyle’s truck. He has had the same one since 2009 and he keeps it cleaner than his house.

Lyle Dahl is Roger’s older brother. Sixty-one, a widower like Roger, retired from the county road crew. He doesn’t farm the home place.

He sold his share of it to Roger when their father died, and they have been a little careful with each other ever since.

Lyle leaned out his window and laid on the horn, two long blasts. Then he hollered, “Nice fence, kids! Straightest line I’ve seen on this road in thirty years!”

“Thank you, Uncle Lyle!” Caleb hollered back.

Lyle grinned, pointed up at the sign, and drove on toward town. It was a small thing. But I watched Caleb’s face, and I saw what it meant to him that somebody in his own family had honked.