Homer had driven up again that morning, even though there was nothing left to build. He sat on the tailgate of my truck with his thermos, and Mom sat beside him on an overturned bucket.
“He’ll come,” Homer said. “That bull’s got a schedule like a mail carrier. He’ll come check.”
About nine o’clock, he did.
He came up over the far side of Cecil’s hill, slow and sure of himself, swinging his big head. He walked straight for the old spot where the woven wire laid down, the place he had come through four times that summer.
He stepped through the old fence like it was not even there. Then he walked right up to the new one.
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Cecil’s truck came around the bend in the road at the same time, heading to work. He saw the bull. He slowed down and pulled off on the shoulder and sat there with the engine running.
Mom’s heifers were grazing about fifty yards inside the new wire. The bull could see them. He stood there and looked at them, and then he put his nose out toward the top strand to see what it was.
It got him square on the wet end of his nose.
I have seen a lot of cattle hit hot wire for the first time. I never saw one move like that bull did. He threw his head up and went backward about four feet in one hop, and let out a bawl you could have heard in Staunton.
Then he stood there and stared at that fence for a full minute. He shook his head. He looked at the heifers one more time.
And he turned around and walked back through the old fence and down the hill to Cecil’s place, and he never came back.
Homer laughed so hard he had to set his coffee down.
Cecil shut his engine off.
He got out of the truck and stood on the shoulder for a little while, looking at the fence. Then he walked across the road ditch and up to the wire, where I was standing on the other side of it.
I did not say anything. I had decided a long time before that I was not going to say anything, whatever happened. I had built a fence. That was all I needed to say.
He looked down the line one way and then the other. Up the hill, around the corner, all the way to the creek.
“You did all this in two weeks?” he said.
“We had help.”
He looked over at Homer on my tailgate, and at Mom on her bucket, and at Wyatt standing beside me in his orange shirt with his blistered hands in his pockets.