Cecil made a joke. He made it four times. And every time he made it, my mother lost a little more money and a little more sleep, and stood there and took it because he was family.
That is the part I could not get past. Whatever his reasons were, you do not laugh at a 71-year-old woman in her own barn lot while your bull stands in her heifers.
People have asked me since why I didn’t just go over there and make him fix his side.
I thought about it. I sat on Mom’s porch steps that morning and I thought about it hard.
I could have gone over there and said it to his face. I could have called the county and asked about the line fence. I could have made Twila choose between her husband and her mother in front of the whole family.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
And every Sunday dinner for the rest of our lives would have had that sitting at the table with us like an extra plate.
Mom’s Sunday dinners are the one place the whole family still lands. Fried chicken, green beans out of the jars from the cellar, a pie, all of us crowded around the table after church.
I was not going to be the one who broke that. But I was not going to let that bull back in her pasture either.
So I said the only thing I knew how to say.
“Mom, I’m going to fence it.”
She looked at me. “Fence what?”
“All of it. The whole pasture. High-tensile, five strands, hot. I’ll build it on your side of the line, a few feet in, so it’s yours and nobody else’s.”
“Abner, you have work.”
“I have two weeks of vacation I haven’t taken in three years,” I said. “I’ll close my book. You buy the wire and posts. I’ll build it.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “That’s a mile, son.”
She was right. Forty acres, laid out close to square, is a quarter mile on a side. A quarter mile, four times, is a mile, near enough.
“Then it’s a mile,” I said.
I build fence for a living. I have for 18 years, ever since I came home from two years working for a big outfit in the Shenandoah and went out on my own with a used skid steer and a borrowed post driver.
I know what a mile of high-tensile takes. I sat at Mom’s kitchen table that afternoon with the green ledger pushed to one side and a yellow legal pad in front of me, and I figured it.
Five strands of 12.5-gauge high-tensile wire, a mile long each, is 26,400 feet of wire. That is seven of the big 4,000-foot coils, with a little left over for braces and splices.