…so deep in the work that he did not hear me coming. He had a wire stretcher in one hand and a pair of dull pliers in the other, and he was reciting poetry under his breath, as he always does when he is tired. Dozens of fence posts marched away over the hill behind him. The sun was white and pitiless. His shirt was black with sweat, and blood ran in thin lines down both of his forearms where the barbs had caught him. “Daddy,” I called, and my voice came out as a croak. He turned slowly, squinting, and a smile spread over his cracked lips. “Kevin,” he said. “You are early.”
I ran back to the truck, grabbed the jug of water I keep behind the seat and the old straw hat from the dashboard, and sprinted back across the pasture. He drank half the jug in a single go, and the other half he poured over his head. “Daddy, how long have you been out here?” I asked. He frowned and looked at the sky. “Since seven, I believe,” he said. “Lynn said the county inspector comes Monday. She said if the fence is not finished, she loses her boarding license.” He looked down the long line of posts. “Half a mile, she said. I have done about a quarter. I am a little behind.”
I wrapped a clean shirt around his worst arm and walked him slowly to the shade of an oak. He is eighty three, and he taught ninth grade English in Marion County for thirty eight years. He has never in his life owned a pair of work gloves. I pulled a first aid kit from my truck and cleaned every cut, and he sat patiently like a boy in the office of the school nurse. “Daddy, you cannot do this,” I said. “You will pass out. Where is Lynn?” He sighed. “At the horse show, Kevin. She is entered in three classes. She needs the prize money.” His voice dropped. “She is having a very hard time.”
A rusty roll of barbed wire left at a fence post gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the porch in Ocala.
I called a fence contractor from Belleview who owed me a favor, and he promised a crew on Saturday morning, hand strung and bonded. I set out my terms to my father, in the shade of the oak, in a voice he could not argue with. He would not touch another strand of wire for anyone. I would take him home and clean him up. Lynn would pay him for the twelve weeks he had worked, at fifteen dollars an hour, which came to just over seven thousand dollars. And I would sit down with my sister, face to face, to find out what exactly was so hard.
I drove him home to Ocala that afternoon, with the windows down. He fell asleep in the passenger seat before we reached the highway, his hands open on his lap like a child, and the sight of the scratches made my chest hurt. I made him a bowl of soup and put him in the guest bed with the fan turned on. I stood in the doorway for a while, watching him breathe, and I thought about every summer he had spent reading on that porch with a pitcher of iced tea. He had earned those summers. And somebody had taken them from him.
Lynn came home from Tampa on Sunday afternoon with two blue ribbons and a trailer full of tired horses, and she walked into my kitchen with her hair in a braid. She stopped when she saw our father sitting at the table with his arms in white gauze. “Daddy, what happened to you?” she cried. “Lynn, he was stringing barbed wire in the sun,” I said. “For you.” She went white, and then she sat down hard on the nearest chair. “I did not ask him to,” she whispered. “I only said I was worried about the inspection. I never thought he would try to do it himself.” Daddy looked at her gently. “I know, honey.”
She told us everything at the table that afternoon. Her husband had left her two years earlier, and the farm was behind on the mortgage by four months. She had hidden it from us because she was ashamed. The boarding license was the only thing that was keeping her afloat, and the horse show prize money was meant to catch up the loan. “I did not know how to ask,” she said, and her voice broke. “I thought if I could just do it all myself, no one would have to know.” I took her hand. “Lynn, you did not do it yourself,” I said. “You let a man of eighty three do it.”
The money consequences were handled in the open. Lynn wrote a check to our father for seven thousand dollars out of her prize winnings, and she sold two of her older horses to cover the fence crew. I sat with her over a weekend and went through the books, and we worked out a plan with the bank, with my help, on a payment schedule she could keep. The inspector came on Monday and passed the fence. Daddy sat in a lawn chair at the edge of the pasture with a thermos of coffee and a new straw hat, and he watched the crew finish the last post.
In the name of my father, Harold, who taught ninth grade English in Marion County for thirty eight years, I started the Harold Pasture Fund. It pays for fencing crews, hired hands, work gloves and shade for small horse farms and cattle operations in central Florida whose owners are struggling and whose aging relatives feel obliged to pitch in. In the first year, we fenced eleven farms and hired nineteen part time workers. A rancher of eighty two, watching a young crew string wire on his north boundary, took off his hat and said, “Son, I did not think I would live to see someone do my fence for me.”
In October, my father and I drove to the farm for a quiet Sunday. The pasture was green, and the new fence ran straight and tight along the ridge. Lynn had cleared a spot under the oak, with a table and a pitcher of tea, and she was waiting there with a stack of books for him to read. He sat down and opened one, the old western he had finished a dozen times. After a while he looked up over the top of the page, at the horses grazing on the hill. “Kevin, this is the best fence I have ever seen,” he said. “Mostly because I did not build it.”
