Vosburgh already had the excavator bucket through the third post before I got my boots on. I stood at the bedroom window in the gray light with one boot laced and the other still in my hand, watching a man I had known for nine years sit up in the cab of a rented Kubota like a farmer checking corn, easing the boom down onto my grandfather’s cedar fence posts one at a time and walking them out of the ground like pulling teeth.
It was 5:40 in the morning. The sun was not up yet over the tree line behind our place, just a gray bruise of light coming up over the hardwoods along Shoal Creek, and the diesel engine was the only sound in the whole valley besides a rooster two farms over that did not know what else to do with itself. I had heard that engine start in my sleep and thought it was Vosburgh’s stock trailer, thought maybe he had a cow down. It took me a full minute lying there in bed to understand what my ears were telling me. Then I heard the crack of a post letting go of eighteen inches of Ozark clay it had held onto since 1966, and I was up and moving before I finished the thought.
Lanell was already at the window behind me, pulling her robe closed with one hand and holding her phone in the other. “That’s our fence,” she said, like she needed to say it out loud to believe her own eyes. “Renwick, that’s Papaw’s fence.”
I did not answer her. I was already down the stairs in one boot, hopping the last three steps trying to get the other one on, out the mudroom door into grass so wet with dew it soaked through to my ankle before I cleared the porch. Our cattle were already up and moving along the far side of the pond, spooked by the engine noise, a low line of black backs shifting through the fog like something underwater. I could smell diesel and cut clay and, underneath it, the particular green smell of a fence row that has not been disturbed since before I was born, torn open all at once. My chest hurt the way it does when you run cold air into it too fast, and I did not slow down to figure out if that was the temperature or the anger.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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