The Gate In The North Fence Line

The Gate in the Snow

The trucker came on the twenty-second in a cold wind, a little before noon. He had a flatbed semi loaded two high, and he pulled onto the section line by the north fence because my lane was too tight for him to turn.

I had told Bart to meet us there. He came in his tractor with the bale spear on the back, and Clem came in his, because Clem is Clem and had heard about it from his wife.

The trucker unstrapped the load and stood back stamping his feet.

I walked to the gate in the north line. The snow had drifted against it on my side, about a foot deep. I kicked it away from the latch and took the key out of my coat pocket, the one on the baling twine.

Bart was standing on his side of the gate. He watched me fit the key in the padlock.

“You could have just left it open,” he said.

“I could have,” I said. I turned the key and pulled the chain off and let it hang. “I wanted you to have to knock first.”

He nodded slowly. “Fair.”

I swung the gate open. It swung clean, even in the cold, just like I had hung it.

We unloaded the semi in two hours with three tractors. Seventeen bales went on my side and seventeen went through the gate onto Bart’s, and Clem counted them out loud as they went, like a man at an auction.

When the truck was gone, Bart shut the gate behind his last bale and stood with his hand on the top rail.

“Grandpa had a wire gate here,” he said. “When we were little.”

“I remember,” I said.

“I don’t know who strung it shut.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

He looked down the line, both directions. Four strands, tight and straight, all the way to both corners.

“This is a good fence,” he said.

“I know it is,” I said.

Thea’s Ribbon

I did not lock the gate again that winter. I hung the chain over the post and left the padlock open on it, and the key went back on the nail by my front door.

On Christmas Eve, I drove out to check the cows in the afternoon and saw something on the gate from a long way off. It was red and moving in the wind.

When I got close I saw it was a ribbon. A big red bow, the kind you buy at the dollar store for a wreath, tied on the top rail of the gate with baling twine.

There was a card tucked into the knot, in a plastic sandwich bag so the snow would not get it. The writing was in pencil, careful and a little crooked.

“Dear Polly,” it said. “Thank you for the gate and the hay. Dad says we are going to fix your corral this spring and I can help. I am going to show you how good I can rope. Merry Christmas. Love, Thea.”

Under it, in Bart’s handwriting, smaller: “She made me bring her out here in the snow to tie this. Polly, thank you.”

I stood by the gate with the card in my glove and the wind blowing the snow off the top rail, and I cried then. I had not cried at the fence, or at the co-op, or on the porch. I cried at the gate.