The Gate In The North Fence Line

The Cousin Across the Wire

Bart is my cousin. His mother, my Aunt Marcella, is my mother’s older sister. We grew up a mile apart and went to the same country school until it closed, and then rode the same bus to Broken Bow for ten years.

The north line between his place and mine was built by our grandpa in 1961. Both families had kept it up ever since. When a post rotted, whoever saw it first fixed it. That was the deal, and nobody had ever written it down.

Bart was forty-one that summer. He had a wife, Andrea, who worked nights at the hospital in Broken Bow, and a daughter, Thea, who was nine and could rope a calf better than most of the boys in her 4-H club.

He was a good cattleman. I want to say that plainly, because of what comes later. He knew grass and he knew cows, and in a normal year his cattle were the fattest on the road.

It was not a normal year. Nobody’s was.

I called him from the ditch. It rang until his voicemail picked up. I called again and got the same. Then I texted him three words. Your cows are out.

I did not write the rest of what I knew. I wanted to see what he would say.

While I waited I started the work, because sitting in the pickup was not going to fix anything. I had a new roll of barbed wire in the bed, a stretcher, my dad’s fence pliers, and a coffee can of clips. I pulled on my leather gloves and went to the cut nearest the road.

I could have called the sheriff that morning. I thought about it with the stretcher in my hand. But a deputy was not going to put hay back in my field, and he was not going to restring my wire, and Bart’s mother was my mother’s sister. Some calls you cannot take back once you have made them.

So I stretched wire.

I tied the new strand to the wooden post, hooked the stretcher, and cranked it tight until it sang when I thumped it. The sun came up in front of me and lit up my brown chore coat and the sandy ends of my ponytail. Across the wire, the black cows kept eating my hay like I was not there at all.

The Text and the Truck

Bart texted back at 7:40.

“Must have pushed through,” he wrote. “I’ll get them.”

I read it twice. Then I put the phone face down on the seat of the pickup and went back to the wire.

He came about half an hour later in his white Ford with Thea in the passenger seat. She had her hair in two braids and was still in her pajama top with a hooded sweatshirt over it. She waved at me through the window. I waved back.

Bart got out, said morning, and did not look at the cut wire. He walked out into my meadow with a sorting stick and started easing the cows toward the gap.

Clem Halvorsen, my neighbor to the east, had seen the pickups from his yard and came over on his four-wheeler. Clem is seventy-three and has been on that road since before either of us was born. He did not ask anything. He just went wide on the far side and turned the cows when they tried to slip down the fence.