Four corners, each one an H-brace with two eight-inch treated posts and a brace rail between. Two more braces at the gate and one at the low spot by the creek, where the line had to pull in two directions.
Line posts every 60 feet on the flats, closer over the rises and through the dip. Fiberglass stays between them to keep the wire spaced. Insulators. Crimp sleeves. Five in-line strainers on every pull, one tension spring.
And a charger. A good low-impedance plug-in unit in the barn, three ground rods, and enough insulated lead-out wire to get from the barn to the fence.
It came to a little under five thousand dollars in materials. Mom wrote the check out of the heifer money without blinking.
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“That’s what the money’s for,” she said. “Keeping what’s mine mine.”
When I got home that night my wife asked me how it went, and I told her. She listened to all of it and then she said one thing.
“Take Wyatt.”
Wyatt is our son. He was 16 that August, all elbows and appetite, and he had not willingly been awake before nine o’clock since school let out.
“He’ll hate it,” I said.
“He’ll hate it for two days,” she said. “Take him.”
The first Monday of my vacation I knocked on Wyatt’s door at a quarter to six.
He came out in an orange T-shirt and jeans with his eyes half shut, ate three pieces of toast standing up, and climbed in the truck without a word. I counted that as a win.
We got to Mom’s place as the sun was coming up over the Blue Ridge, and the whole valley was gold and wet with dew. The heifers were bunched by the barn, black against the green.
Mom came out on the back step in her housecoat and handed Wyatt a sausage biscuit wrapped in a paper towel. He ate that too.
I had my skid steer and post driver on the trailer and the first load of posts stacked on the flatbed. We started at the northeast corner, the one closest to Cecil’s line, because that was where the trouble was.
We were maybe an hour into laying out the line with stakes and a string when I heard a tractor coming up the road.
It was an old gray Ford, and it was going about four miles an hour, and there was a three-point auger hanging off the back of it.
Homer Grubb was driving. Homer is 85 years old. He built fence in this county for 60 years, and there is hardly a farm between Staunton and the Rockingham line where you will not find some of his corners still standing.