The Field He Watches From His Sink

The Number That Would Not Move

I called his insurance that same afternoon, and then I called my own, and I sat at the kitchen table that night with the real figures in front of me.

Dale sat across from me with his reading glasses down his nose, and we did the plain math of it the way we have done every hard number of our marriage.

The fence was the worst dollar figure.

Four strands of barbed wire and new posts across the whole burned run came to a little over nine thousand dollars with the corner braces and the gate he had warped.

The trees were worse than the fence and also worth nothing on paper, which is the cruel joke of it. You cannot bill a man for forty years of growing.

Grandpa’s pine had no stumpage value I could prove in a courtroom. It was not a harvest stand ready to cut.

It was just the most beautiful thing on the whole place, and beauty does not have a price the adjuster will write down.

The adjuster was a polite young man from Springfield, and he as much as told me the fence was a he-said matter.

Len would swear wind to a judge the same as he swore it to me.

Dale wanted to call a lawyer.

He is not a hot man, my Dale, he drives a propane route five days a week and keeps his head, but he was rubbing his jaw the way he does when he is holding something down.

“We could make him pay the fence at least,” he said. “Small claims takes one afternoon down at the courthouse.”

And he was right that we could try. I lay awake on it that whole night, turning it over, listening to the house settle.

But by morning I had it clear.

An unattended burn pile in our county is a ticket from the fire marshal at the very most, and only if they can prove who lit it, and they could not, because Len would say wind.

Even if we won the fence, we would spend a year of Sundays not speaking to the man who taught me to drive, and I would still be looking at ten acres of black ground every morning of that year.

“I don’t want his money,” I told Dale over coffee. “I want the trees back. And he can’t give me that, and neither can any judge in this state.”

Dale looked at me a long minute over his cup. Then he said, “So what do you want to do, Frances.”

And I did not have an answer for him that morning.

But I had one by the end of the week, and it came out of the mouth of a thirteen-year-old girl at a 4-H meeting.