Forty Brushes for Mom’s White Fence

Monday I got off at one thirty and drove straight out. I do that most days anyway, to check the mare’s water and see whether Mom ate lunch.

I came up the road and I saw her before I turned in.

She was down at the corner post, by herself, in the hot sun, sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket with a paint scraper in her hand.

She was scraping the bottom board. There were curls of old paint all over the grass around her feet.

I did not even park right. I left the car half in the drive and walked down there fast. “Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing,” she said. She did not look up. Her hand was shaking on the scraper. Her face was wet, and I do not think it was all sweat.

Vergie had called her that morning. Vergie is eighty-four and has never kept a thing to herself in her life.

She had heard it from somebody who heard it from Rosetta, and she wanted Mom to know, she said, so Mom would not be blindsided.

“An eyesore,” Mom said. “That’s what they’re calling it.”

I sat down in the grass next to her. I took the scraper out of her hand. She let me, which told me more than anything she could have said.

“Your daddy set every one of these posts,” she said. “He dug every hole with a post hole digger and a bar. I held the level. I was thirty-four years old.”

She reached up and laid her hand flat on the top board, the way you would lay your hand on somebody’s arm. The board was rough and gray under her fingers.

“I know it’s gone down,” she said. “I know it. I just can’t get to it anymore, Robyn. I can’t get down there and I can’t get back up.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Somebody does,” she said. “Or it’ll be just like she says. It’ll fall down and everybody will drive by and say, there’s that old woman who let it all go.”

I want to tell you what I thought about, sitting in the grass that afternoon, because a lot of people have asked me since why I did not just call Sheree and have it out with her.

I could have. I had her number. I could have called Dean, too, and made him choose.

I could have stood up in church the next Sunday and said something about gossip, and every woman in that fellowship hall would have known exactly who I meant.

But it was Mom’s fence. It was Mom’s farm and Mom’s choice whether to sell it, not mine and not Sheree’s.

And Mom has gone to that church since 1979. I was not going to turn her church into a battlefield over her head.

I also knew Sheree. If I came at her, she would dig in.