I drew it up hand over hand and when it cleared the top of that post I set my bar down in the grass real slow, because what came up on the end of that cord was a sealed tube, heavy, and a tube in a fence post is a message somebody meant to last.
Twenty-five years setting fence and I know a post from a hiding place. You do not sink one post in a footing twice the size of the rest and cap the top of it unless the post is not a post, unless it is a length of pipe standing in a plain fence line where a mans eye passes over it a thousand times a year and never stops.
The couple who hired me had bought the property that spring off an old womans estate. They came across the yard when they saw me kneeling there. I told them what I had, and that I would not open a sealed thing off another persons land without them standing right there, so we cut the end of the tube together on their picnic table.
Inside, dry as the day it went in, was a stack of letters, a photograph of a baby, and a birth record. The letters were in a young womans hand, written to a child she called only my girl. She wrote that she had been made to give the baby up, that she never wanted to, and that she was leaving these words in the one place she owned that no one could take, so that someday somebody might carry them to the daughter she lost.
The old woman whose estate the couple bought from had been that young mother. She had set that pipe in her own fence line more than fifty years back and tended the fence herself all her life so no one would ever pull it. She died without ever finding the girl.
The couple did not let it end in a box. The wife took the birth record to the county and then to a woman who does family searches for a living. It took some months. But the daughter was found, seventy years old, living six hours away, a woman who had known her whole life she was adopted and had long ago given up on ever knowing why her mother let her go.
She drove out to see the fence. She stood at that one heavy post a long time with her hand flat on the cap. Then she read the letters sitting in the grass, all of them, and when she was done she was not crying the way you would think. She was smiling.
She said she had spent seventy years thinking she had not been wanted. And now she had it in her own mothers hand that she had been wanted more than anything, and she could finally set that weight down.
I set fence for a living. I did not expect to pull a womans mother up out of a post on the end of a rope. But that daughter comes back every spring now to check that the post still stands. I built it to last. Come to find out somebody already had.
