They built the new stretch of east fence in the first week of June, working mornings before the heat, and it took four days because both of them were perfectionists and neither of them would admit to being slower than the other, so the work went at the pace of two people inspecting every post as if it were a treaty.
The new line ran true where the old one had wandered β Eli had re-sighted it in May with a surveyor's care β and where the gap had been, where the fifth post had stood for six years and a woman had been tied for one night of them, they set the new post together: a sound cedar, cut from the creek stand, barked and seasoned and straight as a plumb line. Eli dug the hole. Sela set the post and held it true while he tamped the earth and gravel around it in lifts, and they worked the whole task in the companionable near-silence of people who had long since run out of things they needed to prove while working.
When the post stood, Eli took the wire cutters from his belt, out of habit, to clip the tag-end of the top strand β and stopped, with the tool in his hand, looking at the clean cedar face at the height of a woman's shoulders, where nothing had ever been bound and nothing ever would be.
"Before the wire goes on," he said, "I want it said. Not written. Said, once, in the manner of this house, so the ground hears it from both of us."
Sela set her hand flat on the new post. After a moment, he set his beside hers β not over it. Beside it. The cedar was warm from the morning sun.
"No one will ever be tied to this fence," Eli said.
"No one will ever be tied to this fence," Sela repeated, in English, and then again in her mother's tongue, slowly, so that he could hear the shape of it if not yet the words. "Not to this post. Not to any post on this ground. Not by rope, not by paper, not by price, not by a story told smooth in a yard in Three Buttes." She took her hand down. "It is a fence. Its work is to keep the horses in and the cattle out and to mark where our care stops being only ours. That is all a fence is for. It took me twenty-seven years and one winter to learn the full size of that sentence. It is a good size. It fits the whole valley."
"It fits the whole valley," Eli agreed, and put the wire on, strand by strand, and stapled it home, and the fence took up its work along the creek β new wire singing in the wind off the water, doing its small honest job in the sun, no more and no less than a fence.
That night they walked the line once more in the last of the light, the way they walked it most evenings now β checking nothing, checking everything β with Runner careering ahead of them in the new grass in mad foal-circles, delighted with his legs, and Duchess following at her duchess's pace, and the creek running bright beside them under a sky going the color of the forge at rest. The town would tell the story many ways in the years after β the schoolteacher's newspaper version had already made Eli six feet taller and Sela a princess of her people and the morning in the yard into something with banners in it, and other versions would come with other weather β but the two people walking the fence knew the plain of it, and kept it the way they kept the box: neither of them had saved the other. He had cut a rope and stepped back; she had refused, at every price, to be anything but herself; they had simply declined, together, to let the worst thing that happened to either of them be the final definition of anything. It is not a story with banners in it. It is better. It has a fence in it, and a mare, and a box, and a door that bars from the inside, and those are the materials of a life, which outlasts banners by entire generations.
At the house, Eli held the door β not open like a servant and not wide like a claim, just held, in the manner of arriving at the same time β and they went in side by side, neither ahead nor behind, into the lamplit room where the box sat on the shelf with a running horse on its lid under an open sky. And the wind came down through the red cliffs the way it had every night of his six years and all of hers in that valley, through the stone, over the creek, along the new wire β and it did not sound lonely anymore, to either of them, ever again. It sounded like what it had been all along, waiting for two people stubborn enough to hear it properly.
It sounded like freedom.
The End