The Boundary Fence

The old man shifted in the saddle and coughed; he propelled the hard-earned phlegmmy remnants of decades of smoking downwards and onto the ground where it landed with an audible splat. 

Bill was not what he seemed; when Hannah watched him gallop after the fox, remove his stirrup leather and swing it around like a whip and knocking the fox flying, she knew the old man had conviction. And when she saw him reach down and gather up the day-old lamb, shove it down his shirt and then drop it back to the stunned mother-ewe, she knew he had a heart too. 

Maybe he’d know what to do about the painful ache in her own.

“Bill, can I ask you something?”

He didn’t speak, but eye contact and a sudden jerk of his face upwards told her she could.

“It’s Luke. He’s saying he needs to move in ‘officially’ with me. I thought it was temporary, because he needed somewhere to stay until he found more work.” 

Hannah waited but old Bill didn’t say anything. He adjusted the collar of his coat in a bid to keep out the cold. She knew he’d heard her. Maybe he needed to hear more? Hannah let what was in her head spill out into the brisk August air. 

“I don’t want him to move in permanently, because I’m not ready to settle down. And I’ll need him to start paying rent and maybe help with the groceries and the electricity. He uses the air conditioning a lot. But I’m worried I’ll hurt his feelings if I tell him. And what if he ends it with me? I really like him.”

Hannah waited. Bill was twisting the baling twine cracker on the end of his whip between his fingers. 

Eventually, he looked up at her again, this time with what she thought was kindness in his blue eyes. 

“C’mon, we’d better see where these bloody cattle’ve been gettin’ in.” 

Disappointed, Hannah nudged her horse onwards. Was Bill ignoring her? 

They rode further along the fence line. Hannah tried to focus on the job at hand, because obviously that’s what Bill wanted to do. There was to be no talking about ‘feelings’ with this old bastard. So she took a mental note of the state of the fence. The top barbed wire was loose and sagging - in desperate need of a strain because the cattle could’ve been jumping over it almost anywhere along the length of it. 

“Look at this,” Bill’s gruff voice broke the silence as he pointed to a patch of bare ground, “pig shit.” Hannah pulled up beside him, looking down at the ground. She wanted to say “so what?” but thought better of it. 

A few strides later, Bill came to another halt. 

“Didya see that?” Bill asked her, beckoning to a hole in the netting at the bottom of the fence. The ground beneath it was rubbed bare by the hooves of pigs and the paws of kangaroos pushing through. There was grey fur stuck to the top of the hole, where the netting had bunched up. 

“Yeah, I see it,” said Hannah.

Bill turned to look at her.

“Well, the way I see it Hannah, it's like this… you haven’t got much of a boundary fence. The cows just step over it like it’s not there. The pigs just push their way through. They’re all in here having a great old time at your expense. Eating your grass, drinking from your trough, shitting on your land. That’s no way to run a farm, and it’s sure as hell no way to live your life.”

Hannah sat, stunned. A magpie warbled overhead in a big yellow box tree, signalling the coming of spring. 

“You need to strain the wires, and you need to make ‘em tight.”