Chapter 26: The Fence
They set the first post on a Tuesday morning in late June, when the light came early and the ground had finally given up the last of its spring softness. Pete Sandoval arrived with his truck, his auger, and a thermos the size of a small fire extinguisher, and he stood in Ethan's yard looking at the pink survey flags the way a man looks at a sentence he intends to read carefully.
"True line," Pete said. "Not the old line. Not the almost line. The one the county says is the line."
"The one that's actually the line," Ethan said.
"That's the one." Pete spat into the grass out of habit, then remembered whose yard he was in and looked apologetic. "Sorry. Force of thirty years."
They had regraded the vault's footprint in May, once the township's engineers signed off and the last of the paperwork cleared. Clean fill, compacted in lifts, seeded with a mix that came up fast and green, like a lawn in an advertisement. Standing on it now, you would never know. That was the point, and it was also not the point, and Ethan had stopped trying to reconcile them. The grass was grass. What had been underneath was in the ground at St. Brigid's cemetery now, beside his grandparents, with a stone that said his uncle's name correctly. The rest β the knowing β had moved into the light, where it belonged.
The auger bit and turned. Cedar posts went into sleeves of gravel, one by one, plumb and true, each checked twice, because Pete did not believe in a post that leaned. Ethan worked the level and the string line, and the string, when he sighted down it, ran straight as a ruled page from the corner of his lot to the corner of Marge Hale's, dividing nothing that had not already been divided. It was only a line. It had only ever been a line. Men had made it into something else by deciding what to put under it.
Marge came out at ten with a tray. She had made sandwiches β ham and sharp cheddar on bread she baked herself, cut on the diagonal, as she had cut sandwiches for seventy-four years β and a pitcher of iced tea with lemon slices floating like small rescued suns.
"You don't have to do that," Ethan said, because it seemed required.
"I know I don't have to," Marge said. "That's rather the definition of doing it." She set the tray on the tailgate of Pete's truck and poured tea into plastic cups, and Pete took off his hat, which for Pete was a form of church.
They ate standing in the shade of Ethan's maple. Marge asked about Laura's boy and his broken wrist, healed now, and about the school play, and Pete described a fence he had built in 2009 that a bear had sat on. Nobody mentioned the vault. Nobody mentioned Walter, or Frank, or the fire, and the not-mentioning was not avoidance; it was rest. Some things, once said fully, could be quiet for a while.
After lunch the work went faster. Rails, then pickets, western red cedar, rough side in, the smell of it rising off every cut like the inside of a hope chest. Marge went back to her yard and came out an hour later with a watering can, tending the roses along her side of the new line, close enough to talk through the pickets and far enough to be in her own garden while she did it.
"You'll want to let it silver," she called. "People stain them and then spend forever fighting the stain. Cedar wants to go gray. Let it."
"I'll let it," Ethan said.
"Your grandfather said the same about hair."
It was the first time she had offered him a sentence like that β unweighted, ordinary, a piece of the old neighborhood handed across the fence line like a cup of sugar. Ethan took it the way you take something fragile: without making a ceremony of it.
At five o'clock they set the last post, at the far corner where the lots met the alley, and Pete leveled it and nodded once. Ethan stood, mallet in hand, and looked down the whole bright length of it, new wood glowing in the low sun, straight and plain and exactly where it was supposed to be.
He thought about what a fence was actually for. Not hiding β God knew this one would never hide anything again; half the township knew what honest ground it stood on. A fence was for marking. For saying, in wood and daylight: here is where my life runs, and here is where yours runs, and the line between is not a wall and not a secret. It is just a place where two people agree to meet, and to be neighbors across it.
"Straight," Pete said, satisfied.
"Straight," Ethan said, and drove the last screw home.