Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [70]
At the far end of the valley I begin the looping climb back, topping out in a patch of popple. And now I’m crying. I wish he had let me know. I wish I could have seen him one more time. The usual selfishness of grief. I am not angry, I am yearning. Overhead the tree trunks fork their dusty white bark into sunlit greenery, the newborn leaves limp and luminescent somewhere just short of chartreuse. A shifting scatter of light plays across my head and shoulders, and I am grateful for the cathedral feel of this place. Grateful that I might grieve in natural sanctuary.
I have a good sweet weep. Then I walk back to the house. I want to hold Jane. Feel life in my arms.
A few days later I am on my way out the door to hook up the electric fencer. Anneliese is on the couch with Amy. They are reading Beetle McGrady Eats Bugs! “Stink bugs taste like apples!” says Amy. “I’ll take your word for it,” I say.
I’ve mounted the fencer on a post inside the pole barn, to keep it out of the rain. The power unit is an unremarkable plastic cube the size of a half-pint ice cream box. When I plug it in, a pinpoint green light glows on and off, indicating that the fence circuit is complete. The fencers of my childhood were more the size of a twelve-pack, and were commonly housed in stylized tin shrouds. One resembled the front fender of a Ford Fairlane. Another of my favorites was dusty blue with a silver-riveted logo plate and a fat orange indicator light that eased languorously from lit to unlit. I used to stand in the barn at dusk staring up at the deliberate amber blink and imagine the unit was an advance robot broadcasting homing pulses to the distant mother ship. Dad’s first fencer was called a Weedburner, an apt name considering that shortly after he plugged it in, flames swept the pasture and there were fire trucks in the back forty. In a nod to my father’s frugality, years later I would be out fencing and find myself threading the wire through partially melted insulators remnant of the fire.
Unlike many a curious farm boy, I swear I have never peed on an electric fence. I am told this blows a very specific fuse. Perhaps the act prevents prostate cancer—a longitudinal study is in order, challenge number one being the location of subjects willing to ’fess up. I do remember walking down the barnyard lane with a steel can of Off! and trying to see how close I could run it past the fence without making contact, a diversion that lost its appeal when I got knocked to my knees. To test the steadiness of his hand, my brother Jed once formed a circle around the wire with his fingers and took off walking only to zap himself flat, establishing that neither his intellect nor his fine motor skills would qualify him as a brain surgeon. One of the Carlson boys used to check to see if the fence was energized by slapping at it with his open palms. He swore that if you touched it quickly enough the shock was minimal. We assigned him special powers until the day he mistimed his swat and his hands clenched around the wire in an electrified spasm. The current would break just long enough for him to begin unwrapping his fingers, then the “on” cycle would hit and his hands would seize into fists again. Hearing the howls, his father ran to detach him.
On one of my prior Farm & Fleet runs, I purchased an electric fence tester consisting of a slim grounding wand connected by a coated wire to a plastic paddle tipped with a copper terminal. You stick the wand in the dirt and touch the terminal to the wire. There are