The Gate In The North Fence Line

The Morning on the Line

That Saturday looked a lot like the Tuesday the cows got in, except the cows were on the right side now.

The sun was just coming up over the hills, big and orange, and it threw the shadows of every post long across the grass. I was at the corner post with the first new strand, stretcher hooked, gloves on, my ponytail pulled through the back of my cap.

Behind me, on my side now, the flattened grass was trying to stand back up where the cows had walked it down. On the other side of the wire, Bart’s black cows were grazing his short brown grass, close enough to hear them tearing it.

I cranked the stretcher until the wire was tight and hummed, and I tied it off on the post the way my dad showed me, two wraps and a hitch, and I stood back.

It was a good strand. Straight as a rifle shot to the far corner.

I did the second strand by nine and the third by noon. Clem came by around eleven on his four-wheeler with two bottles of water and a sack of his wife’s cinnamon rolls. He sat on the seat and watched me clip wire to T-posts for a while without saying anything.

“You’re doing it right,” he said finally.

“Dad taught me,” I said.

“I know he did,” Clem said. “I helped him teach you.”

That was true. I had forgotten it. When I was twelve, Clem and my dad had rebuilt the south line together and let me run the clips, and Clem had shown me how to hold the pliers so the wire did not bite back.

I sat down on a roll of wire and ate one of the cinnamon rolls, and it was the best thing I have ever eaten, and I did not cry, but it was close.

Why I Put a Gate In

The fourth strand went up Sunday evening. I stood at the corner and sighted down the line, and all four strands ran straight and tight and even, and the posts stood plumb.

It was the best fence on our road. I am not saying that to brag. It was just true.

Then I walked to the middle of the quarter mile, about where the second cut had been, and I stood there a long time.

When I was a girl there had been a wire gate in that spot. The kind you make with a loose panel of wire and a stick and a loop on the post, the kind every farm kid in Nebraska has wrestled shut with her shoulder. It was there so our grandpa could get from his place to his son’s place without driving around by the road.

At some point, after the families stopped going back and forth so much, somebody had strung it shut for good. I did not remember who. It did not matter.

I went back to the co-op Monday and bought a sixteen-foot steel tube gate and two eight-inch treated posts. Dewey did not ask this time. He just raised his eyebrows and helped me lift the gate onto the rack.

I set the posts with my dad’s three-point post-hole digger on the old Farmall, four feet deep, and tamped them by hand with a bar, a few inches of dirt at a time. I braced them so they would not lean. I hung the gate on the hinge pins and swung it open and shut, open and shut, until it swung clean.

Then I wrapped a chain around the latch post and put a padlock on it.

I drove home and found the spare key in my dad’s junk drawer, and I tied it to a piece of baling twine and hung it on the nail by my front door, the one where Dad used to hang his cap.

Then I texted Bart.

“There’s a gate in the north line now,” I wrote. “About halfway. It’s locked. The key hangs by my front door. If you ever need anything on my side, come knock.”