Fence Repair

What’s the matter with you today

sed John you and Jan fighting?

On no I said it’s not that

it’s a letter I got that’s bothering me.

Must be from the govament

or the insurance, I can understand that.

No, John, it’s not them this time

it’s from a friend.

Did he die or summin?

You aint sed a decent word all morning

I might as well be working by myself

and let you set on the nailkeg

unrolling barbwore

Oh dammit, John,

it’s just a letter that pissed me off,

I said. It’s from a writer who saw something I wrote

about coyotes killing sheep

and he wrote saying that never happens.

He sez what? sez John.

He said there’s no documented evidence

that a coyote ever killed a sheep

unless it was rabid, I said.

And he said my story was a lie

and should never have been written.

He’s a writer? sez John.

What does he write about?

Oh, he writes novels, I said.

Books about cowboys and Indians

and the California mountains.

He sez that sed John

did he? You know

most chickens I known of

is layers and most folks

I known is liars

and most of them don’t know the different

but that don’t get in the way

of their opinions.

It was a preacher

got his first call

to come to our town back home

his first sermon that everbody

showed up to hear

was how all people is good

it aint no such of a thing

as a bad person

he wasn’t in town half a year

before Travis Newberry

knocked up his daughter in the eighth grade

and he was twenty-four by then.

He’d started preaching late

after giving up on farming

and owning a grocery store

must of been too late

he run out of words after bout a year

we had to elect him to office

to give him something to do.

First thing he voted no taxes

and no pay raises to schoolteachers

so they all known he’d be a good one

mebbe governor some day

had to move him out

of the parsonage and into a house

where he had to pay rent

like real people

so they found him a place

out on the end of town

where they could be alone

with that pregnant girl

they took out of school.

It was skunks out there

a mama and four babies

and his wife and that girl

sez oh they’re purdy

let them alone we like them

so he did

by the time she had her baby

they’d killed all their chickens

the Easter ducks and the cats

it was mice and skunks

running all over that place

they couldn’t live there no more

so he run for state office

they sent that girl

off to Christian school

we never heard of her again

and tried to raise the baby boy

but couldn’t do that neither.

He got elected

to the campaign of no taxes

and close down the schools

cause he blamed it all

on Travis Newberry hanging around

the jr-high parking lot

and moved to the state capital

to live and before

they could rent that house again

they had to set out traps

for two months and rat poison

sed they got twenty-four skunks

but nobody counted the mice

it was awful

took a year for the smells

to go off and it wasn’t no hippies

back then to rent it to

they had to wait it out

so he run for Warshington office

six years later

and put the boy in the orphanage

up for adoption

he might of been a scandal

but he didn’t get elected

they made him a judge instead

after that and he’s rich

still there and being so famous

he don’t pay no rent

the state gave him a house

and a car and a maid

but that still don’t mean he known one damn thing

about people or skunks or mice

or preaching or farming or

running a grocery store.

I seen it with my own eyes

a coyote running through

a herd of sheep and killed nine lambs

just to do it

and we set up five nights

in our pickups waiting for him

until he come back

and he killed four more

before we shot him

and that’s nothing to what

Allen Dalley out to Summit lost

that one year when they say

coyotes got half his lamb crop

that’s just a bunch of bullshit

because he done one thing

don’t mean he knows nothing

about anothern

and if he doesn’t know

what he’s talking about

you tell him to just keep his mouth closed

or run for office

that’s what it’s there for

so why don’t you forget about it

and you can forget him too for now

let’s get to work

cause all this is real

not something in a book

and has to be got done for sure

not just by thinking about it

and if you don’t get that frown put in a drawer

this is gone be a long day of work

Source: A Legacy of Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)