The Bell I Almost Took Down

The Gate

On Monday at about ten o’clock I looked out my kitchen window and saw a woman pushing a wheelbarrow across her north pasture with a gate in it.

I stood at the window for a good while. A steel walk-through gate, four feet wide, the sort of thing a man buys at the farm supply for a use he never finds. I recognized it. Duane had bought it in 1998 for a place on his south lane and never hung it. I had seen it on the wall of his machine shed a hundred times with a feed sack over it. I knew it the way you know a friend’s coat on another man.

I went out to the post. I got there about the time she did, on her third trip, with the clamshell post-hole digger over her shoulder. She was walking slow and set her mouth the way she does. I started across the grass, and she put up her hand.

“Stay on your side till it’s hung.”

I said, “Winnie, let me dig.” No man should call a woman by a short name uninvited, and I did not know it had come out of me until it did. Her mother had called her that. I knew it from Duane.

She said, “No.”

So I stood in my meadow for two days.

I will tell you what it is to stand with your hands in your pockets while a woman of seventy-one digs a hole in clay with her husband’s digger. I have operated heavy machinery for most of my life. I could have set both those posts in twenty minutes. She dug a foot, rested, dug a foot, rested. She stopped and looked at her hands. Once she stopped for a long time, with her forehead down against the handle of the digger, and I took one step forward before I made myself stand still. I have rarely wanted to do anything so much as I wanted to cross that wire, and I have rarely been prouder of a woman for telling me not to.

On Tuesday afternoon she cut the fence.

I had not understood until she lifted those red-handled pliers what she meant to do. She was going to cut the wire. She was going to cut her husband’s fence, the one that held a bull for forty-seven years, the one he strung in the April of 1979 with me on the other end of the stretcher, and she was going to do it in front of me.

She set her feet. She cut the top strand and it sang. It is a high thin note, barbed wire under tension, and it curled back off the post. She cut the second. I could hear her breathing from where I stood. By the fifth she was crying, plain and wet, and she stood there in her chore coat and wiped her face with the back of her glove and then did what she had to do. She set the posts. She tamped them. She rolled the old wire back in neat coils on either side and tied it off, every strand, as carefully as Duane would have.

I stood in my meadow with my hand over my mouth.