Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

“You eat first,” she said.

“Grandma, I’ve got four hundred feet to dig.”

“Then you’ll dig it on a full stomach.”

So I ate. She sat across from me at her kitchen table with her own cup, in her red barn coat she wears from September to May, and she watched me eat like she used to when I was nine.

“Your grandpa would have done this,” she said.

“Grandpa would have done it with a shovel,” I said.

She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh in a while.

I started at my end, at the shop wall. I cut into my line inside and put in a tee and a shutoff, so the new line could be valved off from my house. I bored out through the foundation wall below grade. That took an hour by itself.

Then I unloaded the trencher, set the boom, and started across my yard.

If you have never run one, a walk-behind trencher is a lot of machine for one man. It wants to pull. You walk backwards ahead of it and keep it straight with your whole body, and the chain throws a ridge of dirt to one side that you will be smelling for a week.

Our ground is good ground. Black loam on top, then a clay layer, then gravel at about three feet that the chain does not love. I took it slow through the gravel. A broken tooth would cost me an hour and a broken chain would cost me the day.

I took down two fence panels at the property line and set them aside. By nine-thirty I had a hundred and ten feet open, four feet deep and about six inches wide, running straight as a string toward Grandma’s barn.

I looked up and Corbin was standing on his porch with a coffee cup, watching.

I lifted a hand. He did not lift one back. He stood there a minute, then went inside.

By ten I was in Grandma’s pasture. The horses came over to see what the noise was. Smoke stood at a careful distance, head up, ears forward. Bess did not care. Penny came right up to the machine like she meant to supervise, and Grandma had to come out with a halter and lead her off.

“She thinks it’s her trench,” Grandma said.

“She can have it,” I said. “She just can’t stand in it.”

Around eleven a truck pulled in at Grandma’s drive. I did not hear it over the trencher. I looked up and there was a man standing at the edge of the trench, watching me work. I shut the machine down.

It was Gus Ballantyne, from the next place south. Gus is seventy-two, a retired county road man who still runs forty cows and still wears overalls to church. He has known my family since before I was born.

“Lorene called me,” he said. “Said you were digging. Said not to come.” He looked down the trench, then back at the spoil pile, then at me. “So I came.”

“I appreciate it, Gus.”

“What are you running?”

“One-inch poly, four feet down. From my well to a tank at her gate.”