Fence Cutter

Stopped going to town when town got bad. Ma stopped working the library desk and Uncle Mack’s work driving gravel stopped. He went to the grocery a couple times before everyone died, brought back cans of a sort of bean we’d never had, a case of water chestnuts in cans, armfuls of distilled water, and seven rolls of paper towel instead of toilet tissue. What all they’d had left. Though it was the end of the summer, school got canceled. Pushed back a couple weeks out of abundant caution, the letter said. Then no more mail. No calls from the office. No emails. No word.

Never went to town unless it was school, anyways. No point to. Anyone who’d be a friend believed the lie that Uncle Mack chased off my dad to sleep with MA, and figured he’d just stayed in his stead, eating off his table, riding his horses, selling his calves out from under him. No one believed that they didn’t share a bed, Ma and Mack, or that they got along most days, as simple friends, or that he was here as a kindness on both his part and my mother’s. They cared for each other in small ways all day. I was the one who’d know. I lived with them. I saw it, right in front of me, the small ways, all the time. Ma did the shopping after work, brought home whatever we needed. We never ate out. Wasn’t a budget for it and Uncle Mack’s heartburn. And Uncle Mack made a point to remember Mother’s Day for her, cut her oxeyes and made me sign the little card he’d pick up at the gas station. I’m saying I was up here alone, already, anyway, school or no. And I had the chores, anyway. Feeding the horses, mucking the lean-to, moving the cows, cleaning up, mowing, weed-eating, splitting wood towards an eighth cord for winter, dumping the troughs, digging out the teasle, Ma’s garden, her herb bed—that all takes a day. So, I had plenty to do up here, anyways, always. Kept me away from the mess, at least. Let me think my thoughts. And in those days, when everything turned bad, it kept me not sick. 

He got sick first, Mack. Holed himself up in his bedroom—the spare room—to spare us. When the TV in there kept running for two days straight, we knew he’d died. I clicked it off with the toe of my boot, and we covered our faces with an ace-bandage we cut in half and put on gloves and dragged his body to the tractor bucket. Buried him right here, under the plum Ma planted two Falls ago, down by where the creek oxbows. It was a bad week for us, Ma crying so hard, scared, and nothing certain, nothing clear. Then she got a fever, holed up too in the same room he died in. There was no TV by then, nothing on the airwaves I mean, and nothing on the radio, computer couldn’t connect. Might be off to say, but I preferred it like that, less noise, less panic.

After she didn’t answer my knocking after a day, I knew. I buried her under the little berm before her garden, a ways up from Mack. I put her head up into the berm a bit so she could see the valley spread out, the pink evening sun running through the mountains like tears of cotton candy, and made a wooden cross for her, carved her name on it, said up to God that she’d been the perfect mother because she had. Always knew what to say to me, when to say nothing. She was the kind of person you could hold you without having to hold you, a quiet honest love pouring out of her. Covered her with dirt of this place, covered the dirt with an envelope of poppy seeds she’s saved form the spring. Laid on the floor for a few days after, couldn’t read, didn’t feed the horses. 

When the Meekers’ porchlight burned out, I knew they were gone too. They were our neighbors. Good people, I guess. Always a little cold to us. I took coldness over curiosity, though, and shoveled their drive in winter once in a while, offered to patch up their fence come spring. They seemed to have a little money, didn’t work off the land they hand. Just kept a tidy house there, set up several sets of chairs and tables all around their property. They’d switch between the porch chairs one night, the chairs on the hillside the next, the set above the old granite quarry the next. Sitting there drinking one cocktail each. Think it was cocktails. Mrs. Meeker wore glasses. She was from around here, maybe town, but had spent a lifetime elsewhere. Spokane, I would guess. The highway split their land from ours, and because they were up on the rise, their view of the valley included our spread—all our paddocks and scrap piles, all our mud and our cars. Sometimes when they sat up above the quarry and I happened to notice them there with their drinks, sitting in their chairs placed just-so, I wondered if they thought about deleting our dirty little world for theirs, hoping that, in its place, was just the prairie we interrupted. Did they want for a view that traded us for the sagebrush and scrub oak and a few pronghorns now and then? Resentment, I guessed. For our rust and ruts and half-sick cows. They weren’t working their land at all, though they could’ve been, sure. Didn’t need the trappings of it. Just lived up at their outpost there up on the rise. 

And after their lights died, it seemed all lights died. Even when I climbed to the top of the old quarry one night, through the smell of the Meekers’ rotting food and moldering bodies, to look down valley, I saw nothing in town. No movement, no glinting light, no sirens, no fire.

So, maybe a week ago now, daylight, I dug out the binoculars—with the lens busted out on the left front side, Mack had called them his one-noculars, said it like wonnocular, which I always thought was kid-like—and hiked back up behind the Meeker place. Looking a little closer at town in broad daylight there was still nothing. No one walking around, no long lines outside the clinic like before, no milling at the grocery. A fine, white dust sort of over everything. Like bathwater having receded, like scum. Ash, maybe. Maybe just no movement, no scurrying around. Maybe just time. The just-visible layer of dust that time just puts out in its honest passing. But now, no one at all to dust it. It had been twelve days since Ma, maybe fifteen since Mack. I went back to ours, didn’t look in on the Meeker’s, started the chores.

Horses—we had ten of them—had just about eaten down the south paddock before it all started but moving them would be hard work alone. I would toss over two bails in the morning, a couple flakes each, and one at night. They were hooving the place all to mud. Put the mud out of mind. The cows, in the big spread north of the house got their usual. Forty head, including calves, calves already tagged, thank God. Couldn’t’ve done it without Mack or Joe Old Person, the hand Mack sometimes brought up. Fed chickens a can of scratch, gave them whatever kitchen scraps I made, but I made very little, eating mostly beans and peanut butter, stale saltines, the chickens’ own eggs. They’d eat their own shells, sure. But scratch was almost out, couldn’t make up my mind about how or where to get more. And I pruned the plum trees. And I kept the lawn down best I could. Started rationing gas some.

That night, maybe an hour ahead of sundown, a little car flew up the highway. This was the first car I’d seen moving since Ma. Their headlights, in that falling dusk, the first electric light I’d seen in weeks. Seemed like they were fleeing. Fleeing what, in all this stillness, all this quite, I didn’t feel sure, but I guess deep down I knew. No one came after them, no pursuers, no other parties. There were two folks inside, a man and woman. I caught barely a glimpse of them. He looked usual, almost bored. She—don’t think I’d ever seen a woman look more tired, a ghost, an almost-ghost. I do not believe they saw me. They might have as I was outside, hauling in a little wood. But they did not slow at all. My heart started racing, raced all night that night, not sure why. Stayed up reading all night, by candles or the light of the woodstove, don’t remember. Read until dawn, sort of waiting for the little car to inch back down the road, listened for them—nothing really to see up there save more prairie, more hills, the old mining cabin, then the pass. The highway winds back to Salmon. If everyone was dead in Dillon, why you’d try Salmon, I wasn’t sure. City-type car, they had. Pretty low clearance, two-wheel drive I would bet, dirty, loaded down. Didn’t clock the plates.

Morning came and I slept. Had started sleeping in the living room, right on the couch, right by the stove. My room felt cold, couldn’t get it warm no matter how much larch I burned. Wouldn’t go into Ma’s or Mack’s. Sort of sealed them up mentally. Nothing of use in there, anyways. Despair, and maybe a lingering sick. My world got smaller each day, seemed. Kitchen backed the living room and living room became the bedroom. Slept well there. I had my books, could keep the fire stoked some. The world outside started feeling bigger and bigger, though. The strange sensation of endlessness, of total vacancy, would unspool out from me some days doing chores. It became easy to imagine a complete, quite world rushing out from me. Not that I was at the center of things, exactly, but at the top of things, that all experience ran down off of me like a creek carving its rut down a mountainside, going elsewhere, going into elsewhere. I would tip over the horse trough to refill with fresh water, and the old, brown water rushing out would carry everything there was in the world with it, little flecks of everything there was. I would split rounds and each thwack would skitter out forever. Sometimes believed I could actually hear it skitter out forever. It became difficult to understand sound’s ending, nothing out there, no one out there to dampen it. When I awoke, maybe noon, maybe early evening, I did my chores. I convinced myself that the car had carried those folks far away now, that they tried Salmon, found nothing, then went down to Challis or tried Stanely.

In order to get to my perch above the Meeker’s to look down into town, I had to hop their back fence. A little three-strand, each strand barbed. First couple of times I went up there, thought nothing of it. Ducked through fences every day, felt natural. That evening though, I brought the tinsnips. I don’t remember thinking to grab them from off the workbench in the shop. Just grabbed them. Uncle Mack would sometimes talk about how he knew he was addicted to smokes because every once in a while he would sort of just find himself at the Town Pump buying them. Said, he didn’t make the choice to get there, to go in, to ask for a couple packs of longs. Just arrived, sort of woke up at the counter and paid for what he’d apparently asked for. Like it was the nicotine turning the wheel, he’d say. I suppose it was like that, me grabbing the snips. Didn’t exactly register what I was planning to put them to but slid them in my back pocket and walked across the highway and up the Meeker’s drive and to my new little trail behind their house. When I got to their back fence—the back fence, I guess—I cut each strand, still not really thinking of it. Just pop, pop, pop, turning my eyes away in case the wires, still tensioned pretty well, leapt out at me. The wonnoculars revealed nothing more than they had a couple days before. A still, dusty town, a little dustier. The glaze of white dust—or ash, or soot—a little thicker. Bits of trash blowing in and out of the gutters.  The dead quiet of another evening coming. 

From the Meeker’s then, I decided to hike up to the old mining cabin. It was a thousand feet higher maybe and I wondered if I could catch the sense of a glow from Deer Lodge or Butte or, hell, Bozeman. Never thought I’d find myself glassing the valley for light pollution rather than scorning it, swearing over it. That’s what I thought. Remember laughing at myself. Anyways, I took the highway as far as it made sense to. Walked right down the double yellow lines of it. Thought doing so would make a strange feeling in me, to plant your feet right where they’re never meant to touch. Thought I might still, in my heart, anticipate a car, a speeding flatbed. But it felt natural, like the obvious path. I used to get lost in the woods way up the mountain here with our old dog Roper. We wander way off whatever trail we’d taken up and turn around around nightfall and try to just shoot straight home. Dogs always find the path of least resistance, my dad once told me. Follow the dog when you can, if you’re turned around. And back then I did. I did follow Roper and he would lead me down the mountain clear and easy. No thick brush, no soggy seeps, no rocky gullies. Just the easy, obvious path home, but a path I couldn’t’ve seen. That day, on the highway working up to the cabin, I reckon Roper would’ve followed the yellow lines too.

Wound up a couple miles to where the BLM road cut out from the highway and took it. A mile and change in, just where our neighbor Leeland use to keep his cattle, a side road jogged off to the cabin. Horse Prairie, they called the cabin. Though I was unaware of any Horse Prairie around here. This was just the prairie. Above it the foothills. Then the mountains and then the pass into Idaho. The back fence of Leeland’s spread—it was BLM but had the rights—was cut, I noticed. Spliced in two or three places, wires coiled and dusty in the dirt. A month ago, I had been up here and seen his cows. That night, saw none. Couldn’t figure why someone would do something like that and I hadn’t clocked truck and trailer rigs up that way since I’d seen the fence intact. Could’ve missed someone, someone desperate enough. Some rustler cutting loose with thousands of pounds of beef to ride out end of the world.  

The cabin emerged through the clearing and was dark. Then again, everything was dark. I smelled smoke, though. Got thicker the nearer I drew to the cabin. I ducked around into the cabins little side yard, what I thought had been the old corral for the mules. There was a woman there, the same from the car. She was alive, upright, wrapped in a sleeping bag, poking down at some coals in a burn barrel. She heard me round the corner and jumped out. She whirled around and held the stick out at me, it’s little red end drawing threads of smoke through cool, blue air. Without taking her eyes off me, she tilted up her head and hollered out a man’s name. I can’t remember it now. She belted it out a couple of times then squared her face back to me and said I needed to stay away from her, that there was nothing there for me, that she’d burn my little eyes out. She was sooty and sweaty, I remember. And as tired as I remember here being. More so.

The man came around behind her, swore, and swatted down her stick. He said I had better leave, too, that he was sorry, but they couldn’t help me and didn’t know if I was sick or not. I asked them if they cut the holes in the Leeland fence. Said they had no idea what I meant. I asked if they could see lights from Deer Lodge or Butte. I could see myself by then there weren’t any. No glow at all. Just blue-black mountains and trees against coal-black night. A huge, slender splinter of moon. And stars like nail holes. I lingered a second, can’t say why. Took in the stars from up there, maybe. But she grabbed back her stick and swung it toward me, some tears rolling down her tired face. I said good luck. Said I was sorry to scare her. Said I would leave. I went back around the corner, heard him say to her once I was gone that I was just a kid. Heard her say that we were all just kids now. She said there was no mother left, no safety, no father, no protector. Her voice shook, sort of split down the middle, cut in half, and dry, dead creek. In the dark, I wound back down the road to ours—to mine.  

A couple days followed that encounter with the couple. They did not come back down the mountain, and I did not return to the cabin—their cabin, as I came to think of it. Wondered what they were eating. How much water they had. What they would do when they ran out. I don’t remember seeing their car up there. I think the hid in the woods abutting the cabin, or covering it with slash. I did my chores. Fed the chickens the last of their scratch. Horses had torn their paddock completely to mud. Or, the mud had completely welled up in their paddock. I had maybe ten bales left them, that was four days if it stretched it. Cows and calves had plenty to work on out where they were and I could rip open a round of hay for the horses when the time came. Though there wasn’t much left. There wasn’t much of anything left. My stores were about tapped. I had a couple sleeves of spaghetti yet and all the water chestnuts. There was a pound of flour left, and a half-box of cornmeal, but no milk, no sugar, no butter. There was a bottle of brown liquor behind the little cabinet doors above the stove hood. Didn’t think much of that. Didn’t think it would serve me well to drink. Never served Mack well, or Ma. The days became long trials of silence. No sound but the warm, late summer wind and the complaints of the horses, the rattle of the mice in the kitchen. I never spoke aloud. Not even to the horses or chickens or cows. Didn’t mutter to them or coo. Every noise I made, with my voice or with my movements reminded me that I was alone, that there would be no response. I began to reread some old books of mine. Found new meanings in each of them. I suppose they made noise, the books. Their soundless words rolling through my head as I read nights. If they talked, they talked at me or through me, not with me.

I thought less and less about the woman and the man up at the cabin. Maybe I assumed they’d moved on or died, succumbed to hunger and thirst or tiredness. I thought more and more about the holes cut in Leeland’s fence. Thought about why whoever had done it had cut out so much. If you were stealing cattle, you’d just cut out one section between posts. Would act as a makeshift funnel and you could drive the cows out through the small gap and into your trailer. But to cut so many sections—maybe four or five, I seem to remember—seemed more like the work of a vandal. I decided I would walk the lower section of Leeland’s pasture the next day. Maybe his cows were still in it. Maybe I’d find more holes.

It was a shorter walk, didn’t have to bother with the folks at the cabin at all, dead or still there eking it out. Knew where to cut off the highway to work my way down toward the lower, long stretch of his fence, the east-facing stretch. I started out early and by the time I was off the highway the sun had just spilled its full light into the prairie. Cutting through beargrass and nettles, I could see our place, the Meeker’s place above it. I could see down into town, gray and still as it was, a smudge now. A rough wound on this big valley, scabbing slowly over. I’d stopped looking for sign of life.

The mountains rose up both behind me and before me. They were colorless and undefined in the low morning light. They looked like a painting of mountains, cut-outs. The fog on the valley floor and over the prairie burned up a little more each moment. Or it went to join the apple-skin-pink air that poured out from the sun. Smelled like dew on straw all around me. Smelled like animals, like wet but not moldering clothes. And I soon came upon Leeland’s southeast corner. Fences were intact there. I ducked under them—easier to walk in the cow-mown grass, though it was pushing back up, dewy then too. Oxeyes had sprung up there in that field, though I’d never seen them this late. A blush of wild mint ran under the fence aways. I pushed on for a couple of acres and felt something change—the air, the sprit of the prairie there. It was like things got quiet, even more quiet, the way birds’ll stop singing or calling when there’s a bear in the woods. But there were no birds in the prairie just then. Just the grasses, the weeds, the silver lines of fence.

I walked into the smell of carrion. A smell I had stopped being disgusted by a long time ago. It was a fact now, that smell, a normal presence in this quiet, yellow world. I pressed on through it and came upon another four or five sections of cut fence. Each wire popped cleanly off the post just on the right-hand side. In the sixth section, though, just the top line was cut and below it dangled a body I knew to be Leeland’s. He—his corpse, better to say—was draped over the last two uncut lines. They held him up at his belly, his face in the dirt on the north side. Couldn’t say how long he’d been dead. He was always a slight man, but his clothes were drooping over his small skeleton now. I could see them pucker and draw down into the holes of his ribs. His left foot, I recall seeing, was without a boot and the mice had eaten away two small toes. I did not approach his body. Took a handful of steps backward, in fact. If it was the sickness that killed him, didn’t know how long it lingered. Never got privy to all that. Not sure anyone really did. I pulled my t-shirt over my mouth and thought of the cut ace bandage we’d wrapped around our faces to drag out Mack. Seemed to work for me, maybe not for Ma. In the dirt just ahead of Leeland, I could see now, was an old pair of bolt cutters. Their metal jaws glowed pink in the morning sun, glinted, seemed to stir as my eye fell over them.

Worked my way back at a quick clip, a little scared. I remember thinking that the holes made all the sense in the world now. Leeland’s holes. He’d cut down his fence on both sides. Knew he was dying, knew his cows would die, too, starve in that pen after so long with no forage. Most of them would die in the fall, all would die come winter. So, he gave them a chance, cut them loose, let them range the prairie, maybe start to move south or else go raid someone other dead rancher’s stores. There were thousands, maybe millions, of hay rounds from here to Utah. They could, maybe Leeland thought, rummage their way to another summer.

Slept uneasy that night. Didn’t sleep really. Stayed up reading The Wringer, a book they’d had me read for school a couple years back. Read it the whole way through. The boy in it has to kill the birds, one by one, has to wring their necks. Finds he can’t do it, can’t be the one who actually kills the birds, whether it’s a mercy or not. Doesn’t like it but would rather let them suffer to death than be their final undoer. When I slept for an hour at dawn, I dreamed of eating the plums from Ma’s trees, dreamed they tasted like metal. Dreamed Leeland came down to find me, set his bare foot on my splitting stump and snipped off each of his toes with those bolt cutters. He did not wince in pain or call out or cry. He acted like it was a lesson, like he was showing me an old rancher’s trick. I awoke and began gathering supplies without thinking about what I was doing. Stuffed warm clothes and a wool blanket into big old backpack of Mack’s. Put matches and a light saucepan in there too. Found some iodine tablets in the medicine cabinets and zipped them into the little pocket on the back the bag. Stuffed the ace bandage halves in there too. Filled two quart-sized canning jars with cold water from our well and put one in either side pocket. I shook the rest of the old saltines in on top of the blanket and threw in a salt shaker after. I slide a couple books into the bag, whatever was near at hand. I found a stocking cap and put it on. Put on my boots. Slung the wonnoculars over my neck. Heaved on the pack. Walked outside.

In between the house and chicken coup, right there where I would split and stack the wood, I remember pausing, sort of coming to myself. All was quiet but did not feel quiet, did not feel still. Felt like everything had gone a little electric, like the buzz of 9-volt one your tongue, like that small buzz was in everything now. The long grass where I stood lapped up at me. The cords I’d split seemed to lean in toward me. In the distance, Ma’s garden which I had kept pretty well weeded towered up from the ground, shook, shimmered. Behind it, the plum tree where we buried Mack seemed to turn itself straight toward the sun, bent its arms up somehow, craned its neck. The creek down behind it seemed to throw sprays of itself into the air, made mist, glowed. The prairie bind it seemed burst open. I hollered out the kind of yell I’d heard Mack use to steer horses with his voice. It rang out around me and carried itself to the mountains and bounced around them and off them like light off a sheet of steel.

Went to the shop where I’d left the tinsnips. Pulled off my pack and slid them in against one of my water jars. Then I found the bolt cutters and walked to the horse pen first. Opened the chicken coup on my way there, propped the door open with a cinderblock. Didn’t watch to see if the hens would wander out. Horses saw me coming and came running toward me, hoping for another flake of alfalfa. They kicked at the mud and at each other when they saw I wasn’t hauling any. I said something to them, but I can’t remember it. I just remember the sound of my voice rippling out again around the house and shop and outbuildings and into the huge mouth of the prairie. Cut their fence just like I’d cut the Meeker’s. Stood aside to let them spill out of the mud and onto the grass before them. Walked through the hole I’d made and cut a hard left, up north to where the cows were milling. Just like Leeland, I cut five bays open for them. Then I walked all the way across their pasture to where it ran against the highway and cut four or five more bays open. Left the wires coiled in the ditch and scrambled up to the highway.

I stood again on the pale-yellow lines running north-south. They weren’t a trail anymore, I remember thinking. They were veins. I looked south back down to town. Seemed invisible to me then. Couldn’t make out the shapes of buildings or phone poles. It was a spot in the valley were my vision got vague, that’s all. I looked north, up to where the road climbed up into the mountains. How many fences could I cut in Idaho. How many horses and cows might spill out from my holes. Saw the dry, caked lips of yearling lambs in the eye of my mind, heard them whimper and wheeze. Went north. Went due north.