I went in. He was on the couch with the dog, his jaw tight, and I could see he had already put it together. He is fourteen. They know more than you think they do.
“Is this because of me?” he said. “No,” I said. “This is because of Uncle Merle.”
“But I beat Tanner.”
“You wrestled a good match and you won. That’s all you did.”
“Tanner’s not even allowed to text me now,” my son said, and his voice cracked on the last word. I sat down next to him and put my arm around his shoulders. He let me. He is fourteen. He doesn’t always.
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“Is the hill closed forever?” he asked. “No,” I said, because I am his mother, and mothers say things before they know.
My dad called at nine, the same hour he has called every night since my mother had her knee replaced. “I heard,” he said. “I’m going out there tonight with the bolt cutters. I’m cutting every strand.”
“Dad, if you cut it, he wins,” I said. “He wants it to be you. Then it’s a feud between the two of you, and the kids are standing in the middle with their sleds.”
“The kids are standing in the middle already, Shelby. Then what do we do?”
“I don’t know yet. Give me a couple of days.”
“A couple of days,” my father said, like a man who had waited eleven years for something, and I understood he was not talking about the hill.
My father is sixty-six. He has a bad right hip that makes him walk like he’s carrying a sack of feed on one side, and he has worked that farm every day of his life.
He does not talk much. When he is angry he gets very still and very polite, and that was how he sounded.
Tuesday I signed tardy slips and found lost mittens in the box under the counter, and by three o’clock nine people had asked me about the hill.
Everyone in town had a feeling about that hill, and every one of them was waiting for somebody else to act. I know the feeling. I have been in churches where a light bulb stayed burned out for a year because everyone assumed the next person would change it.
Wednesday was a gray afternoon, and I left school early for a dentist appointment for Landon. On the way back I drove past the hill, and I should not have, but I did.
The Fenner twins were standing at the fence.
They are four years old. Their mother, Jolie, works the register at the grocery, and their father is a lineman for the power district, and the two of them take the twins out to that hill every winter afternoon they have off.
I could see Jolie’s car at the edge of the road. I could see the boys in their matching blue snowsuits, each one holding a plastic tube nearly as big as himself.
The wire ran right in front of them, at the height of a grown man’s chest.
One of the twins reached out a mitten toward the bottom strand, and then pulled it back and held it with the other. He didn’t know what barbed wire was. He just knew from his mother’s voice not to touch it.