Fence Posts

Russ set the fencing hammer on the corner post and stood a minute, letting his shoulders get used to the bag. Staples and a spool of 12-gauge. Pliers with the handles worn to bare steel. The post was cedar, A.O. burned into the grain. Deer flies circled his hat.

He started walking.

The fence had two hundred twelve posts. Uncle Alton told him that once, the way other men tell you their batting average. Alton died in March. No wife, no kids. He left the house to Russ's brother Gary and the fifty-two acres of hay to Russ, and everybody said that was Alton being fair. Figured so, at the time.

The uncut hay was head-high, and it hid the house and the road. All that was left was wire and sky. The crickets pulsed out there. In, out. Like the field was breathing.

He counted as he walked. He'd done something like it his whole life.

The thoughts started when he was eight or nine. His mother at the top of the cellar stairs, and the two inches it would take. The paring knife on the drainboard, and his father's neck. They never came when he was angry. He'd hunt for the anger afterward and never find any. They came like weather.

He learned young that a flinch gives you away, so he quit flinching. He kept his hands full. In nineteen years of marriage he never told Denise. Never told the family doctor either, though he’d sat in that waiting room plenty. Twice he’d stood at the pamphlet rack reading the cover of the one with the word intrusive on it, and both times he left it where it was. Picking it up meant somebody might see him pick it up.

Kayleigh was two, standing on the dock at Tripp Pond, and the thought came whole: the water depth, how long. He walked to the truck and sat in it with the doors locked for forty minutes. The lock was for him.

"Rough night?" Denise said at supper. He'd let her think a lot of things.

A staple had backed out at post 31. Two taps put it home. The hammer felt good in his hand. He noted that, the way he noted everything.

At post 47, with the light going orange, the thought came, and for the first time it didn't flash. It just waited. Then it spoke in his own voice, the tone he used for explaining a mortgage to Kayleigh.

You've never told anybody. Thirty-five years. Why do you suppose that is?

The voice didn't shout. It reasoned. That was new, and it was worse. It had quit using pictures and started using arguments, and every argument was built from his own lumber. He recognized every board.

Somewhere past post 61 it said: Honest men don't keep a secret for thirty-five years. Men keep secrets about what they are.

He had an answer. Half of one, anyway. The cover had said a thought wasn’t a want. He’d never opened it to find out the rest.

The voice let him finish. Then, patient: A thought is not the same as a want, Russell. That’s the cover. You stood there twice, 2009 and 2014, and you didn’t pick it up.

That was the trouble with it. It never lied. It had just kept better records than he did.

Post 78 was where he stopped walking.

Alton had no animals. A bachelor with no animals doesn't walk a fence every week for thirty years, but Alton had. The cows went in '91. Since then the wire had kept nothing in and nothing out. The lawyer said Alton had been quite specific about who got what.

He stood in the last light and did the arithmetic slow.

Alton never once held Kayleigh. Not as a baby, not ever. Oh, he's just shy, everybody said, and Russ believed them, because believing was easier. Alton at cookouts, standing apart, hands jammed in his pockets like they'd been put there.

The pliers on his shoulder, handles polished bright by thirty years of Alton's hands.

Everybody had called it fair. Alton was passing it down.

He walked on faster.

Post 94 lay flat, rotted off at the ground line, soft as cork. He dug out the stub and set a new post. Then he tamped the earth in layers, and the sound went from hollow to dead. Dead meant done. Then he pulled the slack out of the wire until it twanged and held. Good enough. Ten minutes of work that wanted all of him.

The voice waited through all of it. Politely. That was worse than if it had talked.

When the last staple was home, it came back.

Look where you are. A mile from anyone. If you were dangerous, this is where you'd be dangerous. And you're fine. You've always been fine.

He shouldered the bag.

So why not go home and be fine there, too. Stand in the doorway. Just to know.

He knew that tone. He'd used it on Kayleigh at her swimming lessons, the summer she was six: walk toward it, sweetheart. It was the cruelest thing the voice had ever said, because it sounded like mercy.

The last orange drained out of the west past post 110, and after that the dark came up out of the hay like water filling a cellar.

He started counting out loud.

"One hundred thirteen. One hundred fourteen."

Never counted out loud before. The numbers carried more weight spoken. Weight he could stand on.

He found the posts by hand now, palm riding the top wire, burrs snagging his sleeve. Sweat had gone cold at his collar. A mosquito fed on the back of his neck and he let it finish. Slapping was flinching, and flinching gave you away.

Alton must have walked this line in the dark too, plenty of nights. You didn't need eyes for it. The fence read itself back to you, post by post, if you kept a hand on the wire.

Somewhere in the 120s the crickets lost the rise and fall. What was left didn't breathe.

Now they were a crowd that had gone quiet.

A post had gone lean in the 160s. He straightened it blind and swung the hammer at where the sound said wood was, and the staple bit. You could do this work with your ears if you had to. He'd learned that tonight.

He ran the old plays and watched every one come up short.

Keep your hands full. They are full, Russell, it said. They've been full since you were nine years old.

Count. It counted along with him, in step, never missing one.

He tried a prayer. Two words in, he stopped. He hadn't meant one since he was ten, and the voice knew that, same as it knew the rest.

Which left the one thing he'd never tried. Answering it.

"Because I was scared," he said to the dark. "That's why I never told anybody. Scared of what it meant."

The voice let that sit. It was good at letting things sit.

Scared of what, Russell?

He reached for an answer. Any answer. Every one he came up with, it had handed him first.

"Two hundred eleven. Two hundred twelve." His lips had gone numb around the numbers.

The hay broke open at the last corner. Downhill, the kitchen light was on. Denise stood at the sink, her shape moving slow in the yellow square. The window over Kayleigh’s room was dark, or dark enough from here, and it didn’t say whether she was home.

He'd been invited to stand in a doorway tonight. Just to know.

Here was a house full of doorways.

He stood at the corner post a long while. Long enough that the deer flies quit him and went off to bother something else.

The truck sat by the barn where he'd left it, and he thought of the lockbox bolted in the bed. Key on his ring with the others. Hammer in there, pliers in there.

See, the voice said, warm as a pocket. That's exactly what a man who's fine would do.

The bag strap dug at his shoulder. He tried to remember which of them had thought of the lockbox first. No use. Both of them thought in his voice.

He put the tools in the lockbox and turned the key. The hasp clicked. Then he went in.

The kitchen smelled of dish soap and pork chops under foil. He washed his hands at the sink, hot as he could stand, while Denise told him about her sister's knee. The specialist in Lewiston. October, unless somebody canceled.

"Uh-huh," Russ said, in the right places. Nineteen years of practice at uh-huh.

Kayleigh's door upstairs was shut. Music behind it, low. A boy with a guitar, singing about a girl who drove away.

***

He went up in his socks, boards quiet under his feet, and stopped in the hallway outside her door.

He'd stood outside doors all his life. This one was like the rest. A knob, and a thin line of dim light along the floor. His hand stayed at his side. That was the trick. He knew the trick, and knowing it, maybe, was the problem.

There, the voice said. Nothing to it. You can trust yourself.

Russ stayed where he was. He'd heard that exact tone before.

He was fifteen, out at Alton's shop, with a question half picked out. The words fell apart before they got out of him. He stood in the doorway a long time, and Alton never turned from the bench.

"You just keep your hands busy, Russell. You'll be fine."

Alton's hands never stopped moving.

Russ went to bed without touching the knob.

He lay on his back and slid both hands flat beneath him, under his own weight, the way he'd slept since he was nine. Denise stirred beside him.

"How'd the fence look?"

"Good. Two hundred twelve. I'll walk it again Thursday."

She was asleep before he finished saying it.

He lay in the dark a while longer.

He already knew which post would be down.