The Fence That Kept Home In: A Drifting Cowboy, Two Orphaned Sisters on Cottonwood Creek, and the Night He Slept Whole for the First Time in Ten Years

Chapter 19

The South Fence Finished

The last rail of the south fence went in on a morning so clear and cold that the cedar posts cast long blue shadows across the pasture. Elias set the rail, stepped back, and sighted down the line the way he had sighted down its broken beginnings weeks before — post after post standing true now, from the cabin pines to the far cottonwoods, the rails tight, the gate hung straight on hinges he had oiled until it swung at a finger's touch.

Willa came down the line carrying his coffee in the tin cup, picking her way over the frost-whitened grass. "It looks like it was always here," she said, handing the cup up. "Like it just grew in the shape of a fence."

"That's the test of a fence," Elias said. "When it stops looking built and starts looking meant."

Maren walked the whole line before she said anything at all. She put a hand on posts as she passed, testing them the way her father must have, giving one a shake and finding it gave nothing back. At the far end she stood a while looking at the pasture inside the wire of cedar — the creek running bright, the grass saved for winter because the fence had held the stock off it in time. When she came back her eyes were suspiciously bright and her voice was not.

"It would have taken us two winters," she said. "And we'd have lost the pasture doing it." She stopped in front of him. "Thank you. That word is too small and it's the one I have."

"You fed the fence builder," Elias said. "I reckon it squares."

That evening Maren declared a supper of thanks, and would not be argued out of it, and it was a supper: ham kept back for a better occasion than this had become, the last of the garden squash, beans with molasses, and a dried-apple pie that Willa produced with the ceremony of a person unveiling a painting. They ate at the table inside, the three of them, by lamplight, with the plates that had belonged to Sarah Ellery and were used, Willa said, for company — and then she stopped, and grinned, and said she supposed company was what they had accidentally become.

Afterward, in the last of the light, Willa carried a small wrapped bundle down to the new gate and would not let either of them help. She had taken a cutting from her mother's rose bush — the bush Sarah had planted the first spring of the homestead and tended like a fourth member of the family — and kept the slip alive in a jar on the windowsill until its roots showed white and eager. Now she knelt at the gate post, dug with a trowel, set the cutting in the dark earth, and firmed it down with both hands.

"So the gate has something growing at it," she said, to the ground as much as to them. "Mother said a place with a rose at the gate is a place people come home to on purpose." She stood and brushed the dirt off her skirt. "It'll bloom next spring. You'll see."

You'll see. The words went through Elias like a nail through soft pine. He stood with his hat in his hands and looked at the fence running away in both directions in the dusk, and at the small dark mound of earth by the gate, and the thing rose up in him whole and unbidden: that the north fence stood broken along the pass road, that it would take until near snow to mend it properly, that he could say so now — say I will stay for the north fence, say it plain, and watch Maren's face when he did.

The words got as far as his throat. He felt them there, solid as a swallowed stone. What stopped them was not fear of failing, the way it once would have been. It was the older habit, the ten years' habit, of a man who had trained himself to leave before staying could be taken from him — and who had never once practiced the speech for remaining.

"The corral gate still wants its latch mended," he said instead. "I'll finish that tomorrow. And then—" He put his hat on. "And then I'll be going, I reckon. Before the weather turns."

Willa's face fell open, without any art in it at all. Maren's did the opposite — it closed, carefully, like a door shut by someone determined not to slam it. "You've done more than anyone asked," she said, quietly. "No one here will think a debt of it."