He shut the tractor off at the gate and climbed down slow, one rung at a time, and came across the grass with a thermos in one hand and a digging bar over his shoulder.
“Heard down at the store you were stringing hot wire on Edna Mae’s,” he said. “Thought you might want somebody who knows rock.”
“Homer, I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t ask,” he said. He looked at Wyatt. “This your boy?”
“Yes, sir,” Wyatt said. I had never heard him say “sir” to anyone in his life.
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“Good,” Homer said. “He can run the bar. My shoulders aren’t what they were.”
Augusta County is limestone. Some places you can go four feet down in good red clay. Other places you hit rock at ten inches and there is no going any farther.
My skid steer and driver could push line posts through most of it. But the corner posts were eight inches across and had to go better than three and a half feet deep, and that is where Homer earned his coffee.
He would run the auger down and listen to it. When it started to chatter, he would lift it and shake his head and say, “Move it a foot west.” Nine times out of ten, a foot west, it went right down.
“How do you know?” Wyatt asked him the second time.
“I don’t,” Homer said. “I’ve just been wrong more times than you’ve been alive.”
When we hit a shelf we could not move off of, Homer would have Wyatt pour a bucket of water in the hole and let it sit, then go at it with the digging bar a little at a time. It was slow. It worked.
He showed Wyatt how to tamp a post. Not by throwing in all the dirt and beating on it, but three inches at a time, tamping each layer until the bar rang instead of thudded.
“You hear that?” he’d say. “That’s tight. That one’s going to be here when you’re my age.”
Wyatt tamped corner posts until his hands blistered through his gloves. He did not complain. He did keep looking at Homer like he could not figure out how a man that old could still outwork him.
At noon we sat in the shade of the barn and Mom brought out a jug of sweet tea and ham sandwiches. Dad hobbled out on his walker as far as the porch rail and talked fence with Homer across the yard for an hour.
It was the happiest I had seen him since July.
Cecil drove that road to work every morning and home every afternoon. Our fence line ran right along it on the north side.