Janet Gillespie was the first person to crash through my fence. It was summer of ’59, and she came down Thompson’s Hill without ever tapping the brakes. Back then there was nothing but sugar beet fields all around, and it was easy to lose track of your speed with all that empty horizon stretched across your windshield. The short runout at the bottom of the hill caught her by surprise, and she was standing on the brake pedal when she came sliding past the stop sign, straight through my cedar split-rail and into the rows of tomatoes my wife grew out back of the house. 

She was alright, Janet was—a little embarrassed, promising to pay for the damage, sorry about the tomatoes, and so on. The grill on her big Buick took some dings, but nothing worth mending. Her husband Gino came over next day and fixed up the fence. He was handy that way, and even though I said it wasn’t necessary, he spent another hour adjusting the twine knotters on a baler that was giving me fits. When he was finished, he wiped the grease off his fingers, shook my hand, and said sorry again for the trouble. I told him that I’d come out ahead in the deal, and asked could he send Janet out for a drive the next week. He laughed and said see you at church.

That was fifty-odd years ago, and in the time since there’s been near to a dozen more folks come to the same predicament. Just bad road planning if you ask me, although no one on the county survey crew ever did.

There used to be a natural pond at the bottom of Thompson’s Hill. It was no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, fed by a deep thermal spring and ringed all around by smooth, sandstone boulders about the size of Janet Gillespie’s Buick. The pond was deep, and clear as a window pane. You had to skip a rock across it to convince yourself it wasn’t an empty hole.

The pond marked the northern edge of my old man’s spread. Beyond that was a narrow corridor of rocky, untillable county land that pretty quick tilted upward into pine-covered forest. When I got married in ’49, dad staked me and Charlene twenty head of dairy cattle, and forty acres up near the pond. I built a little clapboard rambler with my own hands, and tacked on a wide porch that looked out onto the water. Charlene planted a garden just off the porch, which I fenced in to keep the cows from tromping about.

There wasn’t another house in sight. At night, me and Charlene would run bare-assed from the porch to the pond, laughing like you do when you got the world on a string. We’d float on our backs, the world silent, the stars so close we felt like we were drifting through space. At one end of the pond was a wide, flat-topped slab of sandstone the color of a worn penny. It was our sundeck and diving platform. The bulk of it was sunk deep in the earth, like it had been dropped from the sky, and the thermal spring kept it as warm as a car hood after a Sunday drive. We’d lie naked on that rock and point out the constellations we knew, and make up names for the ones we didn’t.

One of those nights, Charlene laid her head on my chest and told me about the kids we were going to have. The first, she said, would be a whip-smart redheaded boy who would grow up to be a big city lawyer. “He’ll remember everything you teach him,” Charlene said. “And he’ll be a big help with the chores.” I couldn’t help smiling at the thought of a dirt-streaked kid up on the New Holland, letting out the clutch too quick and tipping hay bales off the back of the wagon.

“Then we’ll have a girl,” Charlene said. “A toe-headed hell-raiser of a girl who will turn us gray before our time.”

“I like hell-raising girls,” I said, giving Charlene a squeeze.

“Good, ‘cause we’ll lose a few nights sleep over her,” Charlene said. “But she’ll stay close to home and our grandkids will come over for a swim on Saturdays.” Charlene was silent for a while, staring off into the stars, her hand resting on my chest. Then she added, “Someday, she’ll have my mother’s heirloom tomatoes growing in her own garden. She might even ask me for advice on how to tend them.”

The babies never came. That’s the blunt end of it. Nobody tells you how goddam hard it is to bring a kid into this world. That’s something you got to find out on your own. Along the way you learn what happens to a woman when she’s got a baby growing inside her and then suddenly she doesn’t. Makes no difference that she never laid eyes on it; that baby was hers all the same.

It happened four times. The last one came in the fall of ’58. It was an Indian summer if there ever was one and I was sweating rivers in the milk shed, even though the sun hadn’t yet come up. I looked out through the open shed door and saw Charlene tip-toeing down the porch steps. Despite the heat, she had a heavy wool blanket draped over her shoulders, and she was wandering toward the pond like she was lost. I walked over to ask what she was doing, but before I could speak she said, “Leave me be, Henry.” I couldn’t remember the last time she’d called me by my proper name, and the sound of it left me silent. She continued on out to the flat rock by the pond.

And there she sat, for the better part of two days.

I knew better than to come near, and I tried best I could to look like I wasn’t watching over her, but I spent those forty-eight hours working up any chore I could think of that was in sight of the pond. At night I paced the creaking porch, watching, waiting. Charlene hardly moved. She just sat there cross-legged with the blanket wrapped tight around her, looking out over the moonlit water like she was expecting something to rise up out of it. I couldn’t get over the thought that she was going to fall asleep and slump forward off the edge of the rock. I pictured her all tangled up in that blanket, unable to shake loose while the heavy-soaked wool pulled her to the bottom. And I couldn’t quite let go of the idea that she might not try to shake loose.

As Charlene’s vigil stretched into the afternoon of day two, I pulled the New Holland up near the tool shed where I’d have a good view of the pond and set about changing the spark plugs. I could have done the job with my eyes closed, and maybe it was sheer boredom, or lack of sleep, or the damned heat, but pretty soon I was lulled into a trance. My hands moved around the engine block and I watched as if they belonged to someone else. Maybe I even dozed off. Can’t say for sure. I only know that I was someplace else in mind, until my hand slipped off the wrench and I raked my knuckles across the serrated edge of the fly wheel. That’s when I looked up. Charlene was gone.

I ran like man on fire. Across the hard-packed yard toward the fenced garden and the pond behind it. My eyes were fixed on the water as I rounded the corner post of the garden. But I cut it too close, clipped the post with my boot and hit the ground like a dropped grain sack. I didn’t even have time to put my arms out to catch myself. It was like the ground rose up to strike me. I hit face first. For a moment I lay there shell-shocked, clawing dirt from my eyes, spitting it out of my mouth. Blood streamed from my nose. I felt around on my face, taking inventory.

Then I remembered Charlene, and my senses came back in a rush. I was up and running again, over the little rise to the pond’s edge, up onto the flat-topped boulder, and head-first into the warm water.

The impact cleared out my eyes pretty good and I kept them open as I kicked my way down. I could see the smooth rocks on the bottom, and the rising bubbles where the thermal spring gurgled up from beneath the stones. But I couldn’t see Charlene. Around and around I whirled, but there was nothing. I swam back up to the surface and climbed out onto the flat rock. With all the dirt I’d brought into the pond with me, the water was now mirky, and I could no longer see to the bottom. Charlie, I shouted. Charlie! No answer came. I was about to jump back in and feel my way around when I caught a glimpse of smoke rising from the stove pipe over at the house.

Again I ran, water sloshing inside my boots, inside my ears. I charged down the slope, clambered up the porch steps and banged open the screen door. Charlene was standing at the stove, her checkered apron tied around her waist. She looked at me for only a brief moment, without expression, and said in a soft voice, “Sit down for supper, Hank.”

In that moment, I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I did just what she said. I sat at the kitchen table in my soaking overalls. Water dripped from my elbows and landed softly on the wood floor. Little streaks of mud ran down from my matted hair. Charlene set the food on the table and took her seat. Neither of us said a word. Neither of us ate a bite. We just sat.

At some point, Charlene reached out and took my hand, my knuckles still raw and bloodied from the flywheel. She drew in a breath, like she was about to say something. But she just held tight. And I held tight. And the food went cold. And the sun went down.

***

The next spring, I woke one morning to find a county survey crew pounding stakes in the ground near the pond. “Road coming through,” explained the foreman. “Gonna shave off an hour or so for the logging trucks coming off the mountain.”

“Didn’t know the county was in the logging business,” I said.

“I guess the lumber mills have friends in high places,” he said. He shrugged, looked  through the big scope mounted on a tripod and said, “I just build roads, partner.”

“Not there you don’t,” I said, motioning to the orange ribbons fluttering in the breeze. “You got your stakes on the wrong side of that pond. That water’s been on family land since my great granddad homesteaded the place.”

The foreman didn’t even bother to look up from his scope. He fished a business card out of his shirt pocket and held it out to me. “The lines are good,” he said. “Here’s the number for county records if you’ve got a dispute.”

Next day I drove to the county courthouse, about an hour down the highway. I suppose it’s no surprise that the deed they had on file came down in their favor. I showed the clerk a photo of me, my old man and my granddad swimming at the pond when I was kid, granddad decked out in those long-legged bathing outfits they used to wear.  The clerk took a quick glance at the photo and said, “I got a picture of me on the Golden Gate Bridge, shall I bring it out?”

A week later the road crew pumped the pond dry and capped the spring with a long pipe shoved down vertical and topped with an avalanche of concrete. Then they backfilled it with gravel and had a giant dozer come in and push the sandstone boulders out of the way like they were a child’s building blocks. They laid twenty miles of blacktop, starting up north where the logging roads dropped out of the mountains. The road came strait over Thompson’s Hill and down to the spot where the pond had been. There they put in a stop sign and turned the road ninety degrees to run west along my property line and over to the state highway. In the end, there wasn’t a trace of me and Charlene’s little oasis.

Funny thing about water, though. When it spends a few centuries bubbling up from the earth and collecting in a low spot, it doesn’t like to give up that spot. No more than a month went by before water started seeping right up through the pavement, turning the blacktop shiny wet and just slick enough to send Janet Gillespie’s Buick into my yard.

Can’t say exactly how many times my fence got busted after that—the dates and names are either lost to me, or all mashed together such that I can’t separate one from another. But after Janet there were two more I couldn’t forget if I tried.

Late spring of ‘68 it was Swede Jensen’s kid, Eric, a shy, lanky fella who was a hell of a ballplayer over at the high school. It was two in the morning and those screeching tires split the stillness like a siren, the snapping of wood posts like gunshots. I came out in my night shirt with a flashlight and there he was standing in the garden with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his letterman’s jacket. I asked was he okay, even though I knew those dried out fence timbers weren’t gonna hurt a kid in a one-ton pickup.

It was graduation night and I could smell the beer on his breath. He didn’t say it, but we both knew what was in store for him if his old man found out. I drove the kid home in his own pickup—the Jensen place was a few miles south of mine, homesteaded back in granddad’s day. I cut the engine and the lights a bit shy of the house. Then me and young Eric pushed the truck into the farmyard, and I watched as he slithered into the house through a basement window. Then I walked back through the beet fields to my own place, the pre-dawn light just starting to put a glow on the outer edges of night.

Two hours later I was milking cows in the shed when Swede Jensen suddenly appeared in the open doorway. He was holding Eric by the elbow. The boy was staring straight down at his boot tops, but I could see the deep purple shades of a fresh welt high on his cheek, and a trickle of dried blood pooled in the corner of his mouth.

“Boy’s come to milk cows,” Swede said. “By way of payment for the fence.” Swede pushed Eric forward. Eric winced. “I suppose he owes some for the taxi service as well,” Swede said. He gave me a hard look, then turned and walked away.

I didn’t say a word. I just stood and motioned for Eric to take my place on the stool. Swede got back in his pickup and drove off. I went about my other chores, checking in on the boy from time to time. Mid-morning I found him asleep on the milking stool, his head slumped forward on the warm hide of a moaning Guernsey. His hat had fallen to the ground, revealing a wild shock of rust-colored hair. I stood and looked at him for a while, I couldn’t say how long. Then I put my hand, gentle-like, on his shoulder and nudged him awake. You done your bit, kid, I said. You done your bit.

Not long after that, the county came in and fixed the water drainage under the road. God knows where they diverted that little spring, but I sometimes dreamed of walking out onto my porch and seeing a geyser blasting from the ground, shooting into the sky, washing out the road and flooding the whole goddam valley. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought.

The valley got flooded all the same. With people. In ’85, Wal-Mart came in and built a giant distribution center down by the interstate. Cheap land and big tax breaks made it a no-brainer. The governor and both senators came out to cut ribbons and pat themselves on the back. Other manufacturers followed. Within five years the governor was crowing about the largest industrial park in the intermountain west. There wasn’t enough labor in the county, so the companies brought in folks by the bushel. Pretty quick the beet fields started to get turned under for tight-packed subdivisions that promised country living.

In ’96, a big developer made some sort of land swap for the untillable county land that bordered my property. One day a crane came in and stacked those sandstone boulders into a pyramid at the bottom of Thompson’s Hill where the pond had been. They took the big flat rock—me and Charlene’s sundeck—and stood it upright at the top of the pyramid. A stone cutter carved “Welcome to Spring Meadows” into the face of it.

Turns out that rocky soil was just right for growing houses. Hulking, timber-beamed mansions grew up all around me. My clapboard rambler could have fit inside their three-car garages. Hardly a week went by without someone knocking on my door and asking if I’d sell my land. Most of the old families cashed out. Even my two brothers sold the parcels my old man had left them. By the time the new century rolled around, me and Charlene were on an island.

After that, folks still crashed through my fence every now and again—just in a hurry, no slick road to blame. But they didn’t come by to mend it or milk cows. They left their business cards in the mailbox, with a note saying their insurance agents would call to make arrangements.

Most of ‘em I never met, unless I happened to be nearby on the tractor when they came barreling through. One fella said I ought to pay for damages to his vehicle—something about my fence being in violation of the zoning. And while I was helping to push his car out of the freshly tilled garden, he asked couldn’t I do something about the smell of those goddam cows.

Each time it took months to get the fence mended. Folks had to gather three bids from contractors, then wait for the insurance check to come through. It was too much hassle for an old man, and truth told I would have let those boards rot on the ground if not for Charlene. She’d had a stroke in ’99, and spent her days parked in a wheelchair that I pushed back and forth between the bed, the toilet, and the tv. Her mind slipped away pretty quick. It let go of nearly all it had known of our fifty years together. The only hint of the old Charlene that I could find was on the odd occasion when she’d ask me to go out back and pick a fresh tomato.

We had a breakthrough, at least for a moment, in the summer of 2002. I was wheeling Charlene off to bed one night, after she’d fallen asleep watching the evening news. As we passed by the screen door that opened to the back porch, Charlene said, “Take me outside.”

I stopped, not quite sure I’d heard her right. Normally, I had no trouble understanding her, even with the left side of her face gone slack and words falling out of her mouth in clumps. But this time caught me by surprise. I couldn’t recall the last time she’d wanted to go outside, and I stood a long while rolling the idea around in my head.

“Outside,” Charlene repeated, clear as daylight. “I’d like to go for a swim.”

I wheeled her out onto the porch. Lights twinkled all around us: tall street lamps that ran alongside the paved road, all the way up Thompson’s Hill and into the distance; rows of neatly spaced pathway lights that lined the stained concrete walkways of the big houses in Spring Meadows; porch lights and post lanterns and landscaping spotlights and the occasional blinding motion-sensor floods that seemed to kick on for no reason. And there were the glowing edges of hundreds of windows, the blinds closed and the inside lights on.

“The stars are lovely,” Charlene said. I started to laugh, until I looked down and saw the far off look her eyes, the emptiness.

“Yes,” I said. “The Big Dipper and Gelding Major are particularly brilliant.” I searched her face again for some glint of recognition. There wasn’t one. I looked over to the spot where our pond had been. The stone pyramid, topped with the the big flat rock that welcomed one and all to Spring Meadows, was lit up like the Washington Monument.

“Not a good night for a swim,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Charlene had already forgotten why we’d come outside. Her head started to droop, so I turned to push her back into the house. But she raised her hand, motioning toward the garden. “Those are my mother’s heirlooms,” she said. “I have to pass them on to my daughter.”

I looked out at the garden. Busted fence rails lay at the edge of it—souvenirs from a wayward car months earlier—and a deep set of tire tracks were still visible in the soft ground. Charlene looked up at me, her face suddenly distraught, pleading. In her eyes I looked for the young woman I’d known, running naked and barefoot over the dirt, splashing into the warm embrace of the pond. But I saw only a lost soul, begging me to do something. And the only thing I knew to do was to keep those cars from barreling through her garden.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I marched down the porch steps and across the yard to the New Holland.

The tractor fired on the first try. I pulled it up next to the tool shed and fished out a 100-foot log chain. One end I hooked to the tractor hitch, then drove across the road, the chain dragging behind. I parked the tractor tight up against the base of the boulder pyramid, then jumped down and hauled the rest of the chain up to the top, where me and Charlene’s diving platform stood basking in the spotlights. “Hey, old pal,” I said, almost expecting that old rock to talk back to me. I put my hand on the smooth, flat face of it. It was cold as steel.

I started circling with the chain, wrapping that stone like a mummy. Round and round, until I ran out of chain. I secured the slip hook to a link, tugging hard to make sure it would hold. Satisfied, I climbed back down and into the New Holland’s contoured seat pan.

For a moment I paused. The old tractor idled beneath me, it’s low rumble mostly drowned out by the high-pitched hum of air conditioners spinning against the summer heat. Across the road I could see the television flickering through an open window of my house. The place was otherwise dark. I pushed the gear shifter forward and she slipped in with barely a groan. Throttle down hard, clutch out easy, and pretty quick that chain was stretched tight.

The tractor bucked like a goddam rodeo bronc. The front wheels lifted off the ground. Black smoke spewed from the pipes. The engine bellowed and the chain protested with a creaking groan that I could hear over the straining motor. I looked back over my shoulder and the rock hadn’t budged. Crazy goddam old man, I cursed at myself. Crazy goddam old man. I backed up to put a little slack in the chain, then gave her hell. Still nothing. I backed and revved, backed and revved, grinding gears and pumping that old New Holland for all she was worth. By god something was gonna give, and I was none to sure if it would be the rock, the tractor, or the chain.

I had the throttle pegged and the chain stretched when all of sudden the tractor jumped forward like a quarter-horse springing from the starter’s gate. I was sure the chain had split, but when I looked back I saw the Spring Meadows welcome sign leaning slightly toward me. Son of a bitch, I thought. Here we go. One more time I punched the throttle and let out the clutch. That big rock held for just a moment, then slowly leaned past its tipping point and dropped like a felled redwood. It tumbled end over end down the pyramid and smashed face down in the dirt the way God himself had put it in the first place.

I was damn near giddy. I would have loved the chance to cackle at some stunned soccer mom running toward the commotion. But not a single door in Spring Meadows opened. Not a single plantation blind flipped up.

The chain was still wrapped tight around the rock. I dragged the big stone across the blacktop to my property, and swung it around to the edge of Charlene’s garden where the broken fence rails sat in the dirt. I lined it up good and straight, and stood on the tractor to survey the job I’d done. Charlene’s garden now had a wall, solid as Sunday.

I parked the tractor and climbed the porch steps to where Charlene sat in her wheelchair, already asleep. I wheeled her inside to our room, lifted her into the bed and lay down beside her. I held her hand tight.

***

Britney Givens was the last person to slide through the stop at the bottom of Thompson’s Hill. It was five days after I’d walled off the garden with the big sandstone slab. Nobody’d said a word to me in that time—too scared to confront an old coot, I figured, although I found out later that a most folks didn’t even notice. That big rock was so obvious, so permanent, that people just couldn’t imagine it gone. So they imagined it still there. It was like having a co-worker show up one day with his leg amputated. The change is too much to comprehend, so you end up asking, “Did you get a haircut?”

The few residents of Spring Meadows who did notice that their sign was gone just assumed that someone else was taking care of it.

On that fifth night, Britney Givens came down the hill in a rush, running late to pick up her two-year old daughter from daycare. She was on her cell phone with the daycare, apologizing for being late, promising to be there in five minutes, when the stop sign came up on her too quick.

I was inside having my tv dinner with Charlene. I heard the screeching tires through the screen door. It was a sound I’d become familiar with. But the god-awful calamity when she hit that boulder was like nothing I’d want to hear again if I lived another eighty years.

I staggered outside, fast as I could, but there were already folks bustling around a crumpled minivan by the time I made it down the back porch steps to the garden. Two fellas were trying to pry open the driver’s side door, but is was bent something awful. I looked into the car window. The airbag was puffed out and Britney’s head was resting on it like a pillow. Streaks of long blond hair lay across her face. Her eyes were closed. For a second I thought of Eric Jensen, more than three decades earlier, sleeping upside that old milk cow.

Only this gal didn’t rustle up, even with all those folks poking about and saying, Can you hear me? Can you hear me? She didn’t move when the paramedics came either. And we all learned soon enough that she was dead from a broken neck.

***

I was on the wrong side of at least a dozen statutes. The attorneys for the Givens family pointed that out straight away. I just sat there and listened. I watched the jury with their downcast eyes. I didn’t recognize a one, even though my lawyer said they were all local.

I sold the cows, the equipment, and most of the land to pay the settlement. The whole ordeal took four years to sort out. Charlene passed away in the middle of it all. We’d promised, on one of those starlit nights at the pond, that we’d be buried side by side on our land. My lawyer was quick to point out that the new zoning wouldn’t allow it.

When all the paperwork was done, the county took an easement through my back yard. They had long since trucked away the big boulder with the rusted log chain wrapped around it. Now they took out the stop sign and ran the road straight through, thirty feet back of the house. I shouldn’t say so, but I was glad Charlene wasn’t around to see those big road graders come through and scrape that garden hard and bare.

It’s a straight shot down Thompson’s Hill now. When I lie in bed I can hear those cars whizzing by all night long, fast as they please.