Daddy died on a Tuesday, and the fence gave out by Thursday.
It wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a clean break where the cedar post had rotted through and the wire curled back like a wound left open too long.
I came back to the farm in boots too clean and a heart too sore. The gravel driveway was still half-washed out from last winter’s rains, and the gate hung cockeyed like it was waiting on him to come tighten the hinge one last time.
The house looked smaller than I remembered. The windows hadn’t been washed since Mama passed, and the porch sagged in the middle where Daddy used to sit and peel apples with his pocketknife. It was quiet, except for the cicadas screaming about something no one could fix.
I didn’t unlock the front door. I didn’t need to. What I came for was in the barn.
He kept his boots there — the ones with the cracked soles and dust caked deep into the seams. Brown leather, square-toed, laces broken and re-tied more times than I could count. He used to say a man’s boots tell his story better than his words. Daddy wasn’t a talker.
I slipped them into an old feed sack and slung them over my shoulder. They were heavier than I remembered. Maybe it was the years.
The back pasture hadn’t seen cattle in a decade. Just weeds now. Johnson grass, pigweed, a few stubborn mesquites trying to reclaim the earth. And the fence — well, it was tired.
Same as him in those last months. Leaning, rusted, giving more than it should’ve. The last post we ever worked on together still had his handwriting on it — a black Sharpie date: July 14, 2009. The day his breath got short, but he still said, “We’ll get back to it tomorrow, kiddo.”
We never did.
He never believed in funerals. Just a cremation and a tin can on the mantel, flanked by his John Deere cap and Mama’s Bible. “No one cried over ashes,” he said once, wiping his brow with the same handkerchief he used to check oil.
But I cried when I saw the fence had fallen.
Something about the way it gave up quietly — no warning, no fight. Just leaned into the dirt, like it knew its time was up.
I knelt beside the broken post and touched the wood. It splintered under my fingers. A wasp circled close, then left me alone. Even the bugs knew this was hallowed ground.
“You never did let me do it myself,” I whispered. “Always said I’d wrap the wire too loose. Or hammer the staples in crooked. But I learned, Daddy. I did.”
My voice cracked. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to prove it to anymore.
When I was twelve, Daddy taught me how to drive the truck across the pasture. Not on the road, not with a seatbelt — just feet barely reaching the pedals and his hand over mine on the shifter. “Trust the land,” he said. “She’ll tell you where she’s soft.”
We bounced along fence lines summer after summer, that old Chevy rattling like a bag of bones, me on lookout for breaks while he fixed what he could. Sometimes I held the wire tight while he stapled it down. Sometimes we just sat on the tailgate and watched storms roll in.
He wasn’t affectionate. Never said “I love you.” But he called me “kiddo” in that voice — the one with gravel and dust and something quiet behind it — and I knew.
When Mama died, he fixed fences alone. He got slower. Stiffer. Used more duct tape on things that needed welding.
I left for college with a promise to come back every summer, and I did — until the summer I didn’t.
Now I stood where the fence gave way, and I saw the past stretched out in weeds and barbed wire. A red pickup eased down the gravel road, slow and unfamiliar. It parked by the old gate.
A man stepped out. Young, late twenties maybe. Wore a reflective vest and boots too new for this kind of land.
“You the daughter?” he asked.
I nodded. “Used to be.”
He looked toward the house, then back at me. “They said you might come.”
I didn’t ask who “they” was. I could guess. Realtors. Developers. People who draw lines on maps but never stepped in manure or saw a birth calf come out breech.
“We start clearing Monday,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “We’ll leave the house for last, outta respect.”
I didn’t answer.
He glanced at the sack slung over my shoulder. “You taking anything else?”
“Just memories,” I said. “And they’re not light.”
He looked awkward, like maybe he wasn’t used to seeing women cry, or maybe he was just taught to look away when they did. “I’m real sorry, ma’am. I really am.”
He left without another word.
I turned back to the fence.
A wind picked up and tugged at my shirt like a child pulling for attention. The boots in the sack knocked together like bones in a box. I laid them down by the post, the one he dated all those years ago. The wire still clung in loops, rusted but faithful.
The sun dipped low. Shadows crawled out from under the mesquites and stretched long toward the fence line, like hands reaching for something they’d never quite touch again.
I sat there until the light bled gold, then copper, then nothing at all.
Tomorrow they’d bring machines. Bulldozers, excavators, names I couldn’t spell. They’d pull up the fence, rip down the barn, tear apart the last place where my father’s hands had left marks.
I could still see his fingerprint in the fence post, where he once pressed down hard to smooth a nail head. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that.
I rested my forehead against the wood.
“Some things ain’t meant to be fixed,” he used to say. “They just remind you of what held.”
I didn’t know it yet, but I would come back the next morning.
And what I’d do then — what I’d bury, what I’d leave behind — would be the only thing left of the farm we called ours.
The boots. The fence.
And the silence between them.
“They say land can’t cry — but I heard it weep when the bulldozers came.”
