The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

Roger got out. He was in his canvas chore coat and his seed cap, the one from the elevator.

He stood on the shoulder of the road and looked up at the sign over the gate for a long time. Longer than it takes to read two words.

Then he walked through the gate and down the new fence line toward us. He didn’t look at me, and he didn’t look at Caleb. He walked right past us, to the tailgate of our truck.

He reached into the bed and picked up the post driver.

“Where’s the next one go,” he said. Not a question, really. Just a sentence with no punctuation at the end.

Caleb pointed with one purple hand. “Flag, about sixteen feet down. Right by the cedar stump.”

Roger walked down to the orange flag, stood a T-post on it, set the driver over the top, and drove it in. Seven hits. Then he walked sixteen feet farther and did it again.

I looked at Caleb. Caleb looked at me. Then he picked up the post hole digger and went to the corner, and I picked up the tape measure and the next T-post, and the three of us went to work.

Nobody talked. That’s the thing I remember most. For almost two hours, there was no talking at all.

Just the clang of the driver, and the digger biting into the clay, and every now and then a truck honking out on the blacktop.

Roger drove the last nine T-posts through the draw by himself. Then he came to the corner and helped Caleb set the two big brace posts and the cross rail, and he showed Caleb a trick with the brace wire that Caleb said later he had never seen.

“Your grandpa did it that way,” Roger said. That was the first thing he had said in an hour.

When the brace was done, we hung the last four strands. Roger ran the stretcher. Caleb stapled.

I held the wire off the ground so it wouldn’t catch in the fescue, and when Roger cranked it, all four strands rang like a guitar string when you thumb it.

It was almost dark when we were done. The fence ran off in every direction, new posts against the gray sky, the whole forty closed in all the way around for the first time in twenty years.

Roger put the post driver back in our truck bed exactly where he’d found it. He pulled his gloves off and folded them into his back pocket. He looked at Caleb’s purple hands, and something moved in his face.

“You two eat yet?” he said.

We hadn’t. He said he’d follow us to town.

He sat at our little kitchen table on Franklin Street that night while I made grilled cheese and tomato soup out of a can, because that was what we had.

He took his cap off and set it on his knee. I had never seen him sit in our house before.

He ate one sandwich, and then another, and then he put his hands flat on the table.