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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