Good fences make good neighbors, Robert Frost said. Fence lines sometimes cause murders in East Texas, because land is a sacred thing to us. The first person I ever knew who was murdered died over a disputed fence line.
The fence glinted in the staring sunlight, its barbs tipped with savage points of light. It was a tight fence, as taut-strung as the men who stood, one on either side, staring across it.
“Three feet,” said the tall man. “Three feet of my land. It’ll come out of your hide, Sam, before I have done.”
Sam shifted his weight uneasily, tucking a thumb in his worn leather belt. “Aw, Vince, come on! I split the difference, good as I could. What can you do when two surveyors say two different things? I just went halfway between ’em. If you’d been well enough to help build it, you’d have done the same thing, and no hard feelin’s.”
The taller man grunted, frowning in the shadow of his sweaty felt hat. “Bud Pearcy says different. He told me you moved the stakes yourself. Told me what you said too—so don’t try to talk so sweet and reasonable.”
“If you’ll listen to Bud Pearcy now, you must’ve been sicker than I knew or you let on,” interrupted Sam. “That greasy little snake’ll make trouble just for fun, and you know it. Never was any feudin’ around here, neighbor or family, that that squirt wasn’t nosin’ around in. Vince, we’ve been neighbors for twenty-two years right here, and never had any trouble at all until now. You’ve come to me when you needed somethin’, and I’ve come to you. Are you goin’ to let Bud put a spoke in both our wheels—over three feet of land that might be yours, but might just as well be mine?”
But Vince squinted his pale eyes and laid his hand on the top strand of wire. The sparks of light danced on the barbs as he shook it.
“Be damned to you. Be damned to your lies,” he said, and he turned and walked into the woods-path behind him.
Sam shook his head as he watched his old friend go. Slowly, he pulled on his warped leather-palmed gloves, wiped his forehead on his sleeve and climbed back onto the tractor.
He was a puzzled man. Because of a man he thought of as “po’ white trash,” here he was about to get good and mad at a man for whom he had great respect.
I was sure I was doin’ Vince a good turn, he thought. I bought all the wire and cut the posts off my own place and put up that fence to stay a while, without askin’ him for anything, just because he had so much trouble with his heart and I felt like he could use the help. Didn’t even ask him to buy staples. Why I let that sneakin’ Bud help build it, I don’t know.
He coughed in the dust raised by the hay rake.
Why the old-timey surveyors used trees for line markers, I don’t understand, he mused. Didn’t they know the trees would die, one day, and leave all sorts of stumps and root-holes that might be the one and might not? When Vince decided we needed a new line fence, I tried to get him to stick to the old line, but some college-kid county agent talked him into havin’ the whole thing surveyed again. Pure D waste. And then the idiot of a surveyor couldn’t take the old stump for a mark. Nossir, had to go and decide the old survey had used the wrong stump for a marker forty years ago.
I just couldn’t see takin’ six whole feet of land off Vince’s place, even if it was his own doin’. So I did the best I could. Would’ve been fine, too, if old Bud hadn’t come mooching around, crying for work.
The long line of dust swept behind him, round and round the field, as he combed the tangled hay into neat rows for the automatic baler. The sun basted the field with a sear of haze and shimmer, and the crickets zipped off in a brittle spray before the tractor. Sam jounced easily in the seat, his corded wrists and heavy shoulders running with sweat which, combined with the breeze of moving, kept him reasonably cool. But when Bud Pearcy stepped from the woods at the far edge of the field and waved for him to stop, he began to warm up in the region of his collar.
“What you want, Pearcy?” he demanded, cutting the throttle so he could hear the dirty little man when he spoke.
“Well, Sam, I reckoned I ought to come and tell you—warn you, like. Seems you really got Vince riled about that fence. He’s plumb unreasonable. I come by his house—Mrs. Vince promised my woman some dresses she’d done with—and Vince come in, all hot and bothered, swearin’ that for two cents he’d shoot you. I tried my best to smooth him out, and his wife, she done her best to calm him down, but the more I talked, the madder he got. So I reckoned I better run over here and let you know, so’s you can steer clear of him until he cools off some. You’re too smart to let name-callin’ and cussin’ and carryin’ on like that get you down.
“I told Vince, I said, ‘Sam Bullard’s not the man to make trouble. He’ll see things reasonable, if anybody will. You just go and talk things over with him, quiet like, and I’ll bet you’ll be friends again, right off’.”
“But he got to ravin’ about how you was always comin’ after him to help load cattle or get in the hay when it looked like rain, and how seldom he ever called on you, and that it seemed to him he’d been livin’ for twenty years right next to a bum and just now come to see it.”
“Course, Mrs. Vince, she reminded him of all the times you got up out of bed to drive him to the hospital, when he’d have those heart spells, but seemed like he didn’t remember at all. It’s real funny,” and the little man heaved a greasy sigh, “how bein’ sick will change a man and make him so ungrateful and forgetful.”
Sam had listened silently, but his neck grew redder and his face was mottled with dark patches of blood, under his fair skin.
“Bud,” he said in a mild tone, “You’d better get your tail off this place and don’t ever come back, even if all your brats take scarlet fever at once and your house is on fire to boot. I don’t like the looks of you or the smell of you, and I sure as hell don’t like the sound of you. Git!”
Pearcy looked up, startled and unbelieving. “But, Sam, don’t you understand? Vince is goin’ to be comin’ along any minute now with his shotgun, aimin’ to kill you dead. I’m doin’ you a big favor. You oughtent to be so ungrateful as to chase me off like a yellow dog!”
Sam spat into the dust by Pearcy’s foot. “I’ve got a gun too,” he said softly. “And I’m not too much agin shootin’ skunks. So git!”
And as the little man crept away into the woods, Sam unhooked the tractor from the rake and headed for the house in a cloud of dust and grasshoppers. Bud Pearcy watched him go and grinned his foxy grin as he slipped into a thicket, where he would have a ringside seat.
“Go right on, Mr. High-and-Mighty,” he whispered. “Git your gun. Load it up. One of you bastards is goin’ to be drawin’ flies before night. Always lookin’ down at me, feelin’ so kind and holy about givin’ me worn-out things for my folks to wear. Hatin’ to give me a little work, so’s I can buy groceries. Go right ahead and kill each other. I’ll be watchin’.”
When Sam returned, he hooked up to the hay rake again and went about his work, but laid across the gearbox of the tractor was a loaded shotgun. Time strung out, long and thin, as the afternoon wore away. The man in the thicket dozed off. The man on the tractor drove with one eye on the windrow and one on the woods path.
And when the shadows had begun to stretch out across the field from the west woods, Vince came walking from the east and stood at the fence.
Sam shut off the ignition and stepped down from the tractor in one motion. With the gun in the crook of his arm, he sauntered toward his neighbor. “’Lo, Vince,” he said. “Going hunting?”
The man whitened under his tan. “You know why I’ve got this gun, Sam,” he said. “Bud told me you threatened me, and I’m not one to stay at home and wait for somebody to come after me. If you want to kill me, well here I am. You don’t have to go lookin’ for me.”
Sam drew a long breath. “Bud was here too. Told me that you were gunnin’ for me. Can’t you see that he’s been playin’ with both of us? He’s too lazy and too mean to amount to a hill of burnt beans, but he’s dead jealous of anybody who gets out and digs and accumulates something. Go home and put away the gun, Vince.” Sam turned and headed for the tractor.
Some instinct made him stop in his tracks, turning slowly. The shotgun was aimed dead for his middle; Vince’s finger was on the trigger. Sam bowed his head and waited, as the finger tightened, bit by bit.
Then it fell away from the trigger, as a look of amazement crossed Vince’s face, mixed with sudden agony. He hunched as he went to his knees, his hands pressed to the center of his chest. His head went back, his pale eyes wide in his suddenly colorless face. He stared up at Sam.
Sam dropped his own gun and hurried forward, his hands outstretched. Before he could reach the fence, Vince gave a gasp. His right hand reached toward his old friend, but it found instead the barbed wire. He caught at it, in a last spasm.
The entire strand hummed tautly along the length of the fence. The grip loosed, and the hand fell limp from the wire. The light of the sun, setting red in the west, shone along the length of the fence, dyeing the metal the color of blood.