Forty-Four Years of Four Thirty
I got to know Duane Stroud in the spring of 1979, a year after I came on with the county, and I was twenty-seven years old. He had bought his father’s farm and he wanted a line fence on his north side, between his pasture and the hay meadow I was buying, and I did not have a stretcher. He did. For three weekends in April the two of us strung five strands of barbed wire down a hundred and sixty rods of cedar posts, which is half a mile, and he talked the whole way, and I did not say twenty words. At the end of it, at the cedar post in the middle, we stood and looked back down our own straight work and he said, “That’ll hold a bull.”
It held every bull for forty-seven years.
The post in the middle became our place. I do not remember who started it. One afternoon in the summer of 1979 I came to check the water in my meadow and he came to check his cows, and we were both at the post at half past four, and we stood there. We talked about the hay, and the cost of corn, and the county commissioners, and the grader I was running, which I wanted to talk about for hours and which nobody else wanted to hear about for five minutes. The next day we were both at the post again. After a week it was simply what you did at half past four.
Forty-four years, Winifred says. That is right. Through the farm crisis of the eighties when he lost a third of his corn and I lost the notion of ever buying the north forty. Through Marcella’s pregnancy that did not take and the one that did. Through Winifred’s mother’s long dying, when he came out at four thirty and said nothing at all, and neither did I, and we stood at the post for an hour with our hands in our pockets. Through the grader going off the road in the ice storm of 1994 and the nine weeks I was laid up with my leg, when he walked the whole line fence every afternoon to the post with a folding chair on his shoulder and sat on my side of the wire so I could sit in mine.
And I will say this, because it is true: I never once wanted anything from Winifred Stroud but a good morning over the fence. She baked a decent pie. She kept those hens. She kept her husband’s books, which is to say she kept her husband, and I admired her for it the way you admire a good stretch of road you did not build. If there was something under that, it was never more than the breath you can see on a cold morning, and I never let it be more.