The Gate In The North Fence Line

What He Said About Me

I knew what Clem meant. I spent the rest of that week knowing it.

When my dad died, Bart had come over after the funeral lunch in the church basement and stood with me out by the machine shed while the women washed dishes. He had his hands in his back pockets and kept looking at the ground.

He said he would buy the place if I wanted to sell. He said it was a lot of ground for one person. He said it kindly, I think, or he thought he did.

“I’m not selling,” I told him.

“You’ll want help,” he said. “Calving. Haying. It’s a lot for a woman by herself, Polly. No offense.”

I had taken offense. I had told him so, out there by the shed, in my good black dress with the wind pulling at it. I said some things about how I had been driving tractor since I was eleven and pulling calves since I was fourteen and I did not need my cousin to tell me what I could carry.

He had put his hands up and walked back to his pickup. We had been polite to each other since. Polite and not much else.

For two years I had made every payment, calved out every heifer, and put up every bale on that place by myself. I had done it partly because I had to and partly, if I am honest, to prove something to Bart.

And Bart, I understood that week, had been watching me do it. Every bale I put up in a dry year, he had been watching from across the wire.

A man who has told his cousin she cannot do it alone does not come to her door in August and ask her for hay. Not that man, anyway. Not my cousin.

A Quarter Mile by Hand

I did not patch the three cuts and call it good. That fence was sixty-five years old. If I was going to fix it, I was going to fix it right.

I went to the co-op in Broken Bow that Thursday and bought four new rolls of twelve-and-a-half-gauge barbed wire. A roll is eighty rods, which is exactly a quarter mile. One roll for each strand. They were ninety-four dollars apiece that summer, plus a box of clips and twenty new steel T-posts to replace the bent ones.

Dewey at the counter, who has known me since I was in diapers, rang it up and looked at the total and then at me.

“Big job,” he said.

“It’s a quarter mile,” I said.

“You want me to send somebody out?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

He nodded like he had expected that and helped me load the rolls into the bed of the pickup himself.

I started that evening after supper. I pulled the old wire first, a strand at a time, and rolled it on a spinner I made from an old wheel hub and a pipe. Old barbed wire fights you. It snags on the grass and the posts and your sleeves, and it does not want to go anywhere.

By dark I had two strands off. My forearms were scratched through my sleeves, and I had a blister under my glove on the ball of my right thumb.

The next evening I pulled the other two. Saturday I drove out at five in the morning and started stringing new wire.