Over those three weeks, I kept thinking about something. Not the fence. The mornings.
The spring before Dad died, he’d gone out walking every morning at six with his cane and a five-gallon bucket, along the north fence line, in his cap and canvas coat. I watched him from the kitchen window: a stooped figure against a pale sky, moving very slowly, stopping every hundred feet or so to bend down with a grunt and set something in the dirt.
Orange flags. The little wire kind with plastic streamers.
At breakfast one morning, I asked him what he was doing out there.
“Walking.”
“With flags?”
“Keeps me honest.”
He went out every morning for eleven days. Then an older man with white hair came in a pickup with a tripod, and the two of them walked the fence together for most of a week with a long steel tape and a measuring rod. I was at work at the co-op. When I came home, the flags were gone, and Dad was in his chair with a cup of coffee and an expression I’d have called satisfied in anybody else.
I assumed he was putting his affairs in order. I thought, a man who knows he’s dying wants to know where his fences are.
I never once thought: he’s building something.
Four days after the land company started surveying the back eighty for the sale, a white Ford pickup pulled into my driveway. The magnetic sign on the door read OKAFOR LAND SURVEYING — KEARNEY, NEB.
I was on the porch shelling peas into a bowl. A young man climbed out. He was about thirty, tall, thin, and freckled, with sandy hair flattened by a hat. He wore khaki work pants and a safety-orange vest, and he held the hat in both hands as he came up the walk. He looked like a boy about to confess to breaking a window.
“Ma’am? Are you Annie Dekker?”
“I am.”
“I’m Gil Okafor. My father was Gilbert Okafor. He passed last fall. I run the practice now.” He turned the hat in his hands. “I’ve been surveying your brother’s ground for the sale. And I found some pins. From last spring. Your father’s pins, ma’am. My dad set them.”
“I have the survey.”
His relief was visible. “Then you’ve seen it.”
“I’ve seen it. I don’t understand it.”
He glanced back at his truck, where a rolled-up map stuck out of a tube on the dashboard.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I think you’d better come see where he set them.”
We drove out with the windows down. It was seven in the evening, in the long gold light of an April dusk. The river bottoms lay flat and dark to the south, freshly disked, with the river marked by a line of cottonwoods beyond. A meadowlark sang on a fence post.
He parked where the north fence meets the township road.
I’d driven past that fence ten thousand times. Four strands of barbed wire on cedar posts, running east and west along the edge of the farm between our field and the gravel road. Dad and I had restrung it together in 2011.
Gil walked me south into the corn stubble, ten paces, twenty, forty. I followed in my sensible shoes. The ground was soft and cold.
At about sixty feet, he stopped.
At his feet, flush with the dirt, was a short iron rod with an orange plastic cap stamped LS 211.
“That’s a pin,” he said. “The first of thirty-one. My dad set it last April, with your father standing right here leaning on his cane.”
“It’s not on the fence.”
“No, ma’am.” He pulled a steel tape off his belt and walked it back to the wire. The tape rang softly as it ran out.
“Sixty-six feet,” Gil said. “One full chain.”
I stood there. The wind came across the stubble smelling of dirt and cold river water. A killdeer ran across the field, crying.
“The deed your father recorded,” Gil said carefully, “describes the north fence line as a strip sixty-six feet wide, measured south from the north boundary of the farm, running the entire length of the property, east to west.”
“That’s three-quarters of a mile.”
“Just under four thousand feet. I did the math on the way over. About six acres. Six point one.”
I almost laughed. A dry, small, startled sound.
“Dale got over four hundred seventy acres. Why would six acres matter?”
Gil looked at me for a long moment, like a man who’d found something in a house and felt sorry for the people living in it.
“Ma’am,” he said, “walk with me to the west end.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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