The Mile of Wire Around Mom’s Pasture

“It’s straight because you set it straight,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything to that. But he stood a little taller with that coil of wire on his arm, and I saw him look back down the line at all the posts he had tamped.

Friday afternoon we tightened the last strand on the last pull.

I gave the strainer one more click and looked at the spring, and it read right. That was it. A mile of five-strand high-tensile, around all 40 acres, two weeks to the day from when we started.

I heard the back door. Mom came across the yard and out the gate and walked all the way up the hill to where we were, slow, in her barn boots.

She did not say anything at first. She just stood and looked down the line, the way she looks at her heifers when she is trying to decide which one is the best of the year.

Then she reached up and tapped the top wire with one finger.

It hummed. Tight high-tensile wire will do that. It sang a low note all the way down the line, and you could almost hear it go over the hill.

Mom’s eyes filled up.

“It hums like your daddy’s fiddle,” she said.

Dad played fiddle at every barn dance in this county for 30 years, until his hands got too stiff. He still keeps it in its case under their bed, and on good nights he takes it out and plays one song for her.

Mom tapped the wire again and listened to it. Then she patted Wyatt on the arm, turned around, and walked back down to the house without another word.

Wyatt looked at me.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

“She’s better than okay,” I said.

I wired the charger on Monday morning.

It sits on a shelf in Mom’s barn, a plug-in, low-impedance unit, rated for a lot more fence than a mile. I drove three six-foot galvanized ground rods ten feet apart outside the barn wall and tied them together with one heavy wire.

Homer had told me to make the second and fourth strands ground wires, tied back to the rods, so the cattle would get a full shock even in August when the dirt was dry as flour. He was right about that too.

We ran the insulated lead-out under the barn lot in a piece of pipe and up the corner post to the fence. I plugged it in, heard it start to tick, and walked out with the tester.

Seventy-eight hundred volts on every hot strand. All the way to the far corner.

Wyatt wanted to touch it. I told him he could, if he wanted to learn something about his own heartbeat. He decided not to.