Then we unrolled wire. High-tensile comes in coils, and you do not just pull it off the side like barbed wire. You set the coil on a spinning jenny, a turntable that lets it pay out without kinking, and walk it down the line.
Wyatt walked a lot of wire that week. A mile at a time, five times. He wore his orange shirt every single day because it was the only one Mom had washed, and she kept washing it.
We hung insulators on the line posts and ran the wire through them, bottom strand first, about ten inches off the ground, then up from there to the top wire at about fifty inches.
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.
At every splice Wyatt learned to slip on the crimp sleeves and squeeze them down with the big crimping tool, three crimps a sleeve, the way Homer told him.
“One crimp’s a hope,” Homer said. “Two’s a guess. Three’s a fence.”
The heat came in that second week. Valley August, with no wind and the air thick enough to drink. We started at six and quit at one, and in the afternoons we sat in the barn and Homer told stories.
He told Wyatt about building fence for the old Ballard place back when my grandfather ran it, and setting posts by hand with a clamshell digger, and how my grandfather paid him in hay and a half a beef.
He hummed while he worked. Old hymns, mostly. “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” when he tamped, “I’ll Fly Away” when he was walking wire. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.
On the last Thursday we started tightening.
High-tensile is not like barbed wire, where you stretch it with a come-along and staple it off. Each strand runs through an in-line strainer, a little ratchet with a handle, and you crank it up a click at a time.
You want about 250 pounds on each strand. Not more, or it will pull your corners. Not less, or the cattle will push right through it. The tension spring on the top wire tells you when you have it.
I stood at the big northeast corner post in my straw hat and leather gloves, cranking the tightener, while Wyatt stood beside me holding the coil of extra wire for the next splice.
Behind us, five new wires ran up over the green hill, catching the morning sun. Mom’s black heifers had already wandered up to graze along the inside, like they wanted to see what we were doing.
Out past the barn, the Blue Ridge sat blue and soft the way it does on a clear summer morning. I stopped cranking for a second and just looked.
“It’s straight,” Wyatt said. He sounded surprised.