The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

Lamar

My wife’s brother is Lamar Coker. He runs a cow and yearling outfit north of town, about eleven sections, most of it rough breaks and grass, with forty miles of perimeter and cross fence that needs riding every week of the year.

Lamar is not a bad man, exactly. I want to be fair about that. He goes to church most Sundays. He has coached Little League. He helped me pull a calf in a sleet storm once when I could not find anybody else.

But Lamar has always been a man who figures his own troubles are bigger than everybody else’s. When his ledger is tight, he squeezes whatever is closest to him. Most of the time that has been family.

Last August his fence rider quit, and Jolene mentioned at Sunday dinner that Ward was looking. Lamar said he could use him two days a week. Ten dollars an hour, a horse from Lamar’s string, Ward’s own saddle.

Ten dollars an hour is low for that country, and everybody at that table knew it. But Ward wanted to be horseback so bad he would have done it for less. He shook Lamar’s hand over the pot roast.

The work

Riding fence is not glamorous work. You saddle up at daylight and ride the wire, mile after mile, looking for a staple pulled, a post rotted off, a wire snapped where a bull leaned on it or a deer went through.

You carry fence pliers, a roll of wire, a pouch of staples, a few clips for the T-posts. You fix what you can from the saddle and get down for what you cannot. With Ward’s knee, getting down and back up was the hard part.

He figured out his own way. He would back his pickup up to the corral fence, drop the tailgate, lead the horse alongside, and step off the tailgate into the saddle. Out in the pasture he would find a creek bank or a dirt tank dam to get back on from.

He rode Lamar’s fence two full days a week, eight or nine hours a day, from August on. Through the heat, through the first norther in October, through the first ice in December. Forty miles every week.

He found a water gap washed out on Sweetwater Creek after a fall rain and fixed it before a single cow got through. He found a set of tracks where somebody had cut the wire and driven in, and told Lamar, and Lamar called the sheriff and they caught a man stealing panels.

Lamar paid him every two weeks through the end of October. Then in November the checks stopped.