All We Know of Love

ONE My grandfather spent his life mending fences. So much of his life that it seemed like a religion. Thou shalt not let thy barbed wire sag. On our farm, Frank single-handedly built a straight line of barbed wire that stretched for acres. He attacked repetitive work like prayer; for him, it was a kind of Zen meditation, a fingering of rosary beads. Dig holes, drive posts, splice wire. Dig holes, drive posts, splice wire. Frank's sharp and shining metal fences were not about keeping anyone out or, for that matter, keeping anything in. They marked his territory, squarely for all to see. Frank knew every inch of ground on his propertyhe'd walked and worked and fenced it all, from the time he was a boy shooting groundhogs with his .22 right up to the day he became housebound with bone cancer. He might've said it was his destiny, that farmland, those dry pine woods that came to him through his grandfather. The straighter the fence, the clearer the connection to the past, the better the possibility for the future. That is one of the things I always understood about my grandfather, his curious attachment to fences, and I guess I have always had it too. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here in the high desert of eastern Washington, dressed in heavy jeans and steel-toed boots on a ninety-degree day, working on the line. I wouldn't be on the farm at all, much less out in the front pasture. Frank died six years ago, so there is no one here to make me do it. There is no one back at the house to ask me how it went. The ground underneath my feet bakes in the yellow gold sun. I wear a baseball hat to keep the light out of my eyes, leather gloves to keep the barbed wire from catching my skin. Sweat trickles down my back, collects in the brim of my hat. Dust, from the field and the gravel on the county road, sticks to the damp hairs on my forearms. The fence line, standing straight and proud, shimmers in waves of heat that steal the horizon. It hurts my eyes to look. The earth pulses with the lazy singsong saw of crickets. In this part of the country, where the hills roll golden gray into one another for miles at a time, the sky is unbelievably big. There are no buildings to blot it out, to get in the way of the clouds that gather and part on the whim of a powerful wind. From this spot, I can see the curve of the world. I approach my task methodically. Where the fence has slackened under seasons of hard frost and heavy snows, quick thaws and rain, I tighten new stretches of wire around the metal posts. I use a special tool, made just for fencing, a hammer and pliers and wire cutters all in one. It is solid, unambiguous, and fits in the palm of my leather-bound hand. There is a pleasure in that, uncomplicated and real. My name is Joanna, after John the Evangelist. I am finally home and it has been a long time since I've worked like this, wrestling with spools of wire. I admit that it is no coincidence that I chose to tackle this job first. It could've easily been the roof on the house, which has sprung a leak into the living room, or the linoleum that's pulling free in the bathroom. But I chose the fence line because I want to bake. I want to sweat. Effort will purify me. In the early part of this century, the Virgin Mary appeared to three children in Fatima, Portugal. The pasture where they saw her is now a plaza in which tourists congregate and nuns pass back and forth on their knees in supplication. A small chapel stands over the actual site of the apparition, the bush that Mary touched with the tips of her toes. Iron candle racks stand on one side of that plaza. People bring tapers the size of their prayers, some large, some small, some the actual shape of their affliction. Shopkeepers sell candles in the village, pieces of wax shaped like arms and legs, or the heads of babies, along with postcards and rosaries and T-shirts, shot glasses and sunglasses adorned with the imageSchneider, Katie is the author of 'All We Know of Love' with ISBN 9780767904094 and ISBN 0767904095.