The Lane I Plowed First

What a fence does to two men

I should tell you about the fence, because everything comes out of it.

My father, Sten Hoyle, bought the eighty acres south of Hoyle Road in 1961, and Elwin’s father had the quarter section to the east.

In 1968 the two of them stretched a woven wire fence between the places, and Dad planted a row of white cedars along our side for a windbreak.

He planted them one Saturday with me holding the burlap. I was five. Those cedars are the oldest thing on our farm that I can still call his, and I should have known better than to love anything that much.

Elwin was eleven years older than I was, the big kid across the wire who let me ride the fender of the Farmall. By the time I was grown we were two farm men who went to the same church and showed up at the same barn raisings and burials.

When I married Marcene, Elwin stood up at the wedding with Lorraine on his arm, and Lorraine and Marcene became the kind of friends who end up with a standing Tuesday and a key to each other’s back door.

For thirty years the four of us did Christmas Eve supper at one house or the other.

Ten years ago this fall, Elwin decided to sell the back forty, and the buyer’s surveyor drove stakes along the line. He came to our door with a roll of plat sheets under his arm and a face that told me before he opened his mouth.

My father’s fence was eleven feet over. Over onto Elwin’s ground, the whole length of it, eleven feet at the road end tapering to nine at the back.

Sten Hoyle had stretched that wire in 1968 off a bad corner stone, and nobody ever checked, because nobody ever does. That meant the cedars I had helped plant stood on Tollefson land.

Elwin was not angry about it. I want to be fair to him, because I was not fair to him for a long time.

He came to our kitchen table that night with his cap on his knee and said, “Burd, I don’t want your cedars. I don’t want one foot of it. I just think we ought to set the wire right, and you ought to say out loud that it was off, and then we go on.”

That was all. He wanted me to say it out loud.

And I said, “Fifty years of use makes it mine, Elwin. Take me to court.”

I have heard that sentence every night for ten years. I knew it was a lie while it was still in my mouth. But a man’s father is a man’s father, and I could not stand at my own table and say that Sten Hoyle, who never missed a milking in his life, had set a corner stone wrong.

So I made Elwin the villain, because that was easier than making Dad a man who could be mistaken.

Elwin put his cap back on. He said, “I will wait on you, Burd.” He went home, and he did not take me to court. The buyer walked away from the back forty before Christmas, ninety thousand dollars Elwin had counted on for Lorraine’s care, and that was my doing too.

The next Sunday at Our Savior’s Lutheran he nodded at the pew in front of him instead of at me, and by Christmas two couples who had shared thirty Christmas Eves were four people looking at their shoes.

That winter I noticed that he had stopped waving.

You have to understand how people wave out here. It is not a greeting. It is four fingers lifted off the top of the steering wheel, or a hand raised off a porch rail, and it means I see you, I know whose truck that is, we are all right.

Elwin had waved at me from his porch every morning for thirty years. Now the porch was empty when I drove past, or he stood on it with his arms folded and his eyes on my windshield, and the hand did not come up.

That was the whole feud. A man who stopped lifting his hand.