The Nails in the Fence Post

Peter: They'd know me as Peter. William Peter Hawthorne, if you want it whole, but a farm doesn't much care for a whole name — it wants your hands, morning to dark, and it'll take the rest of you too if you let it. I'm gone now, these many years — passed in the nineteen-thirties, back when a man was still buried out of the front room and the neighbors dug the hole themselves. But there's a thing I left behind that I'd like to tell you about, because it's small, and because the small things are the ones that last. Peter: I had a great-grandson. William Edward was the name they gave him, but nobody ever called him that but the preacher and the schoolteacher. From the time that boy could walk, he walked after me. Out to the field before the dew burned off, down the fence line, into the barn — wherever my boots went, his little bare feet went right behind, two steps back, like a shadow that had learned to grin. The uncles took to calling him Pete. Pete, because he was mine, near enough — Peter's boy, Peter's shadow — and that name stuck to him the whole of his life. Sixty years a man carries a name he got at four years old, all because he wouldn't let his old great-grandpa out of his sight. Peter: Now folks have told my granddaughter — she's the one keeping all this, bless her — that Pete and I favored one another something eerie. There's photographs, she says, and you look from the one face to the other and you can't hardly tell where the one man ends and the boy begins. The set of the jaw. The way the eyes sit. I never saw it myself — a man doesn't study his own face, and I surely never studied a camera — but I believe it. Blood will out. It comes down a family the way water comes down a row: it finds the low places and it fills them, whether you dug them there on purpose or not. Peter: And the voice. Lord, the voice. We were quiet men, the Hawthornes — not shy, mind you, just quiet, the kind of quiet that comes from listening more than you talk. And soft. Our words came out low and a little breathless, like we'd been walking uphill, so a body hard of hearing would lean in close and say "how's that?" and you'd have to say the whole of it over again. Pete talked just like me. And his own children after him. You could close your eyes at a Hawthorne supper table and not rightly know which one of us was speaking. That's a strange kind of forever, when you think on it — that a man's own way of saying a thing outlives the man, and goes on being said in mouths he never lived to meet. Peter: But I promised you the fence post, and here it is. Peter: There was a morning — Pete couldn't have been more than four — and I was mending a stretch of fence along the near pasture. Setting posts, stringing wire, the ordinary work. And that boy is right there at my knee with his hands out, wanting. Wanting to help. Now a wiser man, or a busier one, would've shooed him off to the house. But I never could tell that child no, not with those eyes. So I gave him a handful of nails and I said, here, drive these. And I pointed him at a post that didn't need a thing in the world done to it. Peter: And he went to work. Oh, he went to work. Tongue out the corner of his mouth, hammer near as big as his arm, and he drove those nails into that post every which way — crooked, doubled over, half of them bent flat — nails that held nothing, fastened nothing, served no purpose under heaven but to let a four-year-old boy stand beside his great-grandpa and be, for one morning, a man doing a man's work. Peter: I never pulled them out. Peter: I meant to, maybe. There's always a reason to tidy a thing up. But every time I passed that post I'd see those crooked little nails catching the light, and I'd leave them right where they were. And here's the part I most want you to have — the record is silent on the exact of it, but the family swears it's so, and I'll swear it with them: those nails stayed in that post for years. Long after Pete's hands were big enough to do real work. Long after mine were folded and still. They were in that post when they finally gave up the row-crop and turned the whole place into a chicken farm — and even then, when they'd have had every reason to pull that old post and burn it, the nails were still in it. Rusted now. Holding nothing. Meaning everything. Peter: Because that's what we leave, you see. Not the big things — the big things get sold or split or plowed under. It's the small marks. A boy's crooked nails in a post that outlived its fence. A soft way of saying a word. A face that turns up again, generations on, in somebody who never knew you. You go into the ground and you think that's the end of your usefulness, and then the whole time, without your ever knowing it, you've been driving nails into the people who came after — nails that don't hold anything and won't come out, and that somebody, someday, will stand in front of and finally understand. Peter: I was a quiet man. I couldn't have told you any of this out loud; I'd have run out of breath by the second sentence. But my granddaughter kept it, and now it's said. And that's the whole trick of a family, isn't it — you leave the nails, and you trust that somebody down the row will know what they were for. Peter: They called the boy Pete. They called me Peter. And the post, last anyone knew, was still standing.