Scott Whitby, 2023
It was the first day of summer. I fell asleep comforted in the idea that I was free of school and early mornings and long division problems. Fishing, little league baseball, and my bicycle waited. I slept hard.
I didn't hear him until the second time he said it (a third time would not play well). "I told you to get up". I did.
Daddy had cooked me one scrambled egg. It had pepper, no salt, no toast, no meat, nothing to drink. It was the breakfast I'd eat for the next six years until the day I left for college. It was cold by the time I got to it. I never got to it when it was still warm, ever. That was on me though.
I ate those cold eggs not out of respect or fear or because I liked eggs, I ate them because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. His cooking that egg was the equivalent of another dad saying "Son, I love you and I'd do anything for you ". I never heard those words but I remember those eggs and it meant the same.
He told me we had a "little stretch of fence to put up". I'd long ago learned his minimizing a volume of work was meaningless. I interpreted the little stretch to be several hundred yards of six strands of barbed wire, through briars and poison ivy growing in mud.
"I've already set the posts".
That was an odd comment. It made me feel guilty that he did that without me so I didn't ask questions. Shortly, he said he borrowed a contraption from John Cole that hooked to the tractor and that drove the posts into the ground. I knew what was going on now. He was screwing with me.
We got to the little stretch. I was right about the distance, wrong about the rest. The tractor was sitting there with a thing on it that looked like it could drive a post in the ground. It was at the end of a row of a couple hundred shiny black oily creosote fence posts. I could even smell them. Creosote is the napalm of cattle farming.
Daddy was happy. That was unusual. I thought to myself things were finally looking better for us. We had a cotton picker. Last winter, we had started using big round bales of hay that only a tractor could lift. Now this. No more post holes dug with our arms. Now, if we could just embrace the chemicals that everyone else had, the ones that replaced hoeing cotton.
I was getting the barbed wire, the fence stretcher, the impossible to drive staples and his hammer ready while he walked to end of the fenceline and eyeballed it, making sure it is was good and straight. He backed away and squatted and looked again. I did not like the looks of this. He went to three or four posts and shook them. They were embedded as well as had they grown there.
He said "come here and look".
I did and suggested they were perfect, a perfect straight line. I casually acted like I didn't see some leaned a little left, some a little right. He knew better. I asked how that could matter? He said it'll never keep 'em in. He said a three year old would have done a better job.
We loosed each post from the solid-as -iron grip the ground held. They wouldn't release with just shaking them with our arms. Only a bear hug and full body rocking back and forth worked. I stunk of cattle farmer napalm for weeks. We dug the holes straighter and over the next several days set the posts such that they would keep cattle in...hold 'em.
Now we just had to string the wire. That was the hard part.
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