The Fence Line Between Two Brothers

His truck was already at the creek gate when I pulled in at six-thirty that second Saturday in March, and I sat there with my engine running for a full minute, deciding whether to back out onto the county road and go home.

Curtis lives in Topeka. That is seventy-five miles from our father’s place outside Hiawatha, Kansas, and the sky was still the color of dishwater. He had left his house in the dark to beat me to a fence.

I turned the key off. The engine ticked. A meadowlark started up somewhere in the brome along the ditch, the first one I had heard that year, and it seemed like a poor time for it.

His tailgate was down. In the bed I could see forty steel T-posts bundled with baling twine, a spool of four-point barbed wire, a bucket of staples, and Dad’s good fence stretcher, the one with the long chain that he bought at the Farmers Co-op in 1983 and never let either of us borrow without signing for it. I had not seen that stretcher since the day Dad stopped being able to lift it. I had assumed it was in the barn. Curtis had gone and found it.

He had read the same note I had. He had come ready.

I got out of my truck. He got out of his.

My brother is sixty-one. I am sixty-four. Somewhere in the last eleven years he had gone gray in the beard, and the hair under his cap was gone from the front. He still stood with his weight on his left foot, the way he did when he was nine and waiting on me to finish a chore so we could go down to the creek. All the rest of him was a stranger’s, but the way he stood was just exactly him.

I looked at him. He looked at the fence.

Then he lifted his chin toward the first leaning post, the one the wire had pulled right out of the ground, and held out his hand without turning his head.

“Pliers,” he said.

I handed him the pliers.

That was the entire conversation. I want to be honest about that from the start, because people hear a story like this and picture some movie where two old men fall on each other’s necks at a gate. It was not like that. It was cold, and the ground was soft on top and still frozen six inches down, and neither of us said anything of any weight for a very long time.