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The Fence by Jon Erickson December 27, 2006 He didn't know why he had come. Curiosity, he supposed. The shabby town was sixty miles off the interstate, not even on his way to the conference. His family had only lived there not quite two years, and that was forty five — no forty six years ago. His father had been with a retail grocery company and they had assigned him to trouble-shoot the store on the dying business section of Main Street. The family had rented a small house, moved in unwelcomed, and had generally been ignored for the next eighteen months. He had walked into the school, seventh grade, the most difficult year for transitions, and was immediately tagged with the nickname "Fuzzy." The long curly hair, too long uncut in the relocation to a new town, might have been accepted a few years later with the hippies and Afros in style, but not then. Then it was a term of derision, the kind of cruelty that seventh graders often inflict on one another, particularly the new kids. Without hope of friends among the more accepted students of the school, he began to associate with three or four other outsiders, hanging out in an abandoned garage, smoking the occasional stolen cigarette and once tasting from a pint bottle of bourbon one of the boys had stolen out of a car. It tasted terrible but he had followed the lead of the other boys, trying to act cool. There were the usual visits to the principal's office, the lectures at home, the frustration and tears of his mother, the rants and rages of his father and once, a split lip when his father lost his tempter and control. Yet he was not a bad boy, not the kind that needed the police to arrest him, not the kind that ended up at some juvenile center. He was just out there, alone; even when he was with his friends, even when he was in the halls at school, surrounded by kids, even when he was being lectured by one of the teachers, he was alone. You could see it in his face, his posture, the way that he sat in one of the back seats of a classroom. The most indifferent teachers often said, "He'll grow out of it." And the most astute said, "I wouldn't be surprised if he killed himself some day." So why had he come back? There were no good memories. There were no old friends. There was nothing here for him. Yet he drove up and down the streets of the town, looking at store fronts long boarded up, houses in need of paint under the prairie sun, vacant lots full of scrub and wrecked and rusting cars. The town hadn't changed that much. It was just more washed out of color, like the sand and stone that that lay in the gutters, more beaten down like the weeds that had grown over the sidewalks and spread out like spider webs on concrete, more crumbling like the asphalt in the playground of the old school he had attended, now deserted. The store his father had tried in vein to raise from the economic ashes of the dying farm community had breathed its last; the signs for flower and tobacco, now barely legible as the walls returned to weathered brick. Abandoned, the house they had lived in, never old enough to be elegant, had years ago been painted a dark and unhealthy green. The garage now tilted to one side and the yard was devoid of the trees and flowerbeds that had once indicated it was a property of some respect. His basement room was always slightly dank, with a moldy dust that smelled like damp magazines. It had made him cough in the mornings. With posters, he had tried to make it a good place, but the dampness in the walls refused to let the movie stars and teen singers stick. As the tape pulled away, the paint often came with it. That wasn't the worst part. The voices of his parents had filtered down through the floor vent; angry, frustrated, not only at him, but at the company for sending them there, and at the town that was too wrapped up in its own insecurity to allow the family any part in their lives. Even the church, only a block away, had offered them nothing but a place to sit on Sunday. It now sat like a tombstone with a coat of paint, chipped on the edges. The church yard showed the signs of care a community might give to any institution they were trying to preserve but not working too hard keep alive. He turned left; down — what was it? Harrison Street. Slowly, like water spilled on a table and soaking up through a new paper towel, the memory came back to him. Harrison Street. Two blocks down, right on the edge of town, bordered by fields at the back, sat the old house. He was surprised. It had not changed that much; wood shingles, sagging screen porch, rusted screens, overgrown flowerbeds, bottles in the yard and some broken windows. The fence, made of twelve inch boards across the back, separated it from the fields. No one had lived there for many years. He remembered the fence. It was brand new back then, contrasting the old house. Whoever had built it had done a good job, setting the tall posts deep in the sandy soil, nailing the cross pieces with ring shank nails, nailing the boards to the cross pieces. It was a fence that would last for a long time. And it had. The seasons had taken its toll of the boards; gray in the sun, weathered and warped by winter's wet snows. A few knotholes had popped out in cold and heat, a few boards had pulled loose in the wind, like missing teeth in a wide smile, but most of the fence was intact. Remnants of paint in the cracks and along the cross pieces showed where the boards had been protected from the weather. He remembered how he and two of his friends — Ronny and — Jay — yes, Jay French, had climbed over that fence and into the apple tree in that back yard. They had heard that Mrs. Murphy, the old lady who lived there, was mean and yelled at the kids, waved her cane and threatened to call the cops, but on a mid-summer night, with the fire flies in the woods and the smell of corn growing in the fields, the temptation of a tart apple, sweetened by the adventure of stealing it, was too much. This time the old lady had called the police. The local officer, too old, too overweight and basically too lazy, had driven up along the track beside the high fence and had waited quietly for the boys to climb back over into his custody. In a town so small, it was no use running. He could identify all the boys. Mrs. Murphy spoke to the officer and the boy had tried to hear, but the frail voice was carried off in the breeze. Rushing through his head were scenes of arrest, his parents coming down to the little office and taking him home, all of this followed by more shouting, more hurt, more nights of regret and remorse in that damp basement. But the officer got back in the patrol car. It backed down the dirt lane, turned on to Harrison Street, and drove away. The old woman had turned to face the boys. "Officer Holtzman has left you in my custody. He said you have to do what I tell you to do." Her voice had a strong old world accent. She looked each boy in the eyes. ?You took my apples so you have to pay for them. You have to pay for them by working for me. Saturday, you boys will come here and paint my fence. You will come here and paint my fence and then we will hear no more about this stealing. Then we will be even. You be here at eight o?clock. Now go home.? They had met that Saturday morning in the old garage. "You going?" Jay asked. "I ain't going," Ronny said, 'that crazy old woman probably forgot all about it by now.' 'Yea, probably.' he answered, but he felt the hollowness in the words. And they never heard anything else. His mind had soaked up all the memory it could hold. His family had moved that fall, just after the start of school, to another town, another poor house, but he had found better friends, fit in better at school, made his own way. He had lived by his own code. Made his own rules; paid his debts, never owed another person, never asked for anything that wasn't his. The conference wasn't for another day. It was only an hour to the interstate. The summer dusk was still hours off. He drove to the hardware store, the last store still offering the goods to hold up a tottering town. He picked what he needed carefully: hammer and nails, brushes and gallons of stock white paint, and a box of industrial towels. Picking an apple off the ancient tree, now gnarled and spreading its branches our over the back yard, he bit into it as he painted the fence. It tasted a lot sweeter than he remembered, forty five ? forty six years ago. About the author: I started writing when I was 6 and am currently working on several short stories and several novels. I became a fan of PHC in 1978 when I was in Northern Minnesota as a Lutheran pastor. I was among the people Garrison talked about, and coming from a Swedish/German mix family, could identify. As a kid, I remember visits to my mom's best friend, Erma Heinemeyer, who at parting, would run to the bathroom and wave out the window. My dad would always respond with two toots of the horn as we drove out the alley. Years later, my mom and dad (Goodwin and Frieda) became great fans, finding the humor in their own actions and background. I remember their disappointment when they sharred their excitement with Erma and Chuck and were told that "he's making fun of us," and they refused to listen after the first show. Garrison's stories helped me write sermons and often, his stories were better sermons than mine. I recorded four years of those early stories, often changing people's wedding plans so that I could be at my radio on Saturday afternoons. My favorite stories are "God is Good." and "Homecoming and the Septic Tank." Lately, it has not been as easy to listen as there are religous stations overriding the signal from Greeley. | | | |
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