The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

Roger drove past every day. He had to. The blacktop is the only road from his home farm to the elevator and the parts store in town.

He drove past Wednesday evening, and Thursday morning, and Thursday at noon, and Friday twice. He never slowed down. He never once looked over at us or at the gate or at the sign. I watched every time.

“He’s going to have a crick in his neck,” Caleb said Friday, “from looking so hard at the other side of the road.”

I laughed, but I felt bad about it after. It isn’t nice to laugh at a man who is hurting. I didn’t know yet that he was hurting. I only knew he was stubborn.

Friday my dad needed his tractor back. He had round bales to move before the rain. We had the north, east and west lines finished, and most of the south line along the pond.

What was left was the southwest corner, where the draw runs wet. The ground there is soft as pudding in a wet fall.

We had already learned on Tuesday that the tractor would sink to its axles if we tried.

“We’ll do it by hand,” Caleb said. “T-posts through the draw, and we’ll dig the corner brace with the post hole digger.”

So Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, we did it by hand.

Caleb ran the hand post driver, the heavy steel pipe with handles on both sides that you lift and slam down over a T-post, again and again, until the post is in.

If you’ve never run one, it is about twenty pounds and it feels like a hundred by the fortieth post.

Caleb works with his hands every day of his life, and by Saturday noon his palms were blistered open under his gloves.

I took him to the tailgate and doctored his hands with what I keep in my truck for work.

Antiseptic, gauze, and a roll of the purple vet wrap we use on horse legs and dog paws. It sticks to itself. It’s the best thing there is for blisters.

“You’ve got me wrapped like a Labrador,” he said, flexing his purple fingers.

“A Labrador would complain less,” I said.

He was trying to smile, but he was tired. We were both tired the kind of tired that sits in your bones and doesn’t leave when you sleep.

We had one corner left and no tractor, and Caleb’s hands were raw.

That was Saturday, day six. It was about four o’clock, and the sun was getting low over the draw, and I was holding a T-post steady while Caleb lifted the driver with his wrapped hands when I heard a truck slow down on the blacktop.

I knew it before I looked. A man’s farm truck has a sound. Roger’s has a lifter tick that he has been meaning to fix since spring.

It pulled onto the shoulder by our gate and stopped. The engine shut off.

Caleb set the post driver down in the bed of our truck. Neither of us said a word.