Every Fence a Sermon

I went back once.

This was 1914, the year the war started in Europe, though we didn’t know yet what that would mean for wheat prices or for the boys who’d grown up on homesteads and would cross the ocean to die in mud not so different from what their fathers had plowed. I was thirty-eight years old and living in Lincoln, married to a hardware salesman named Elvin Dahl who was kind to me in ways that required no courage, which is the best kind of kindness, though I didn’t know that until I’d experienced the other sort.

I took the Burlington line to Broken Bow and hired a man with a wagon to drive me the rest of the way, because there was no road to speak of, just ruts where the old freight route had been, packed hard in dry weather and swallowed in wet. It was October. The grass had gone the color of a dog’s ear — tawny, bristled, with a sheen when the wind hit it that made the whole prairie look like something breathing. Bluestem and switchgrass and the little tufts of early hair-grass that my father used to pull up and throw at us children, saying it wasn’t good for anything else.

The house was gone. I knew it would be. A sod house will stand maybe eighteen years if you’re lucky with the roof, and ours had not been lucky with anything. What remained was a depression in the ground, roughly sixteen by twenty-two feet, which was the footprint of our home from 1873 to 1889. Compass plants grew at the eastern edge. Prairie clover had colonized what had been the dooryard. The well — that cursed well — was a shallow dimple filled with rainwater and cattail shoots, and I stood over it and felt nothing I could name, which disappointed me, because I’d come a long way to feel something.

My name is Sigrid Nygaard. I was the third child and second daughter of Gust and Ragna Nygaard, who filed a homestead claim on a quarter section of Custer County, Nebraska, in the spring of 1873, the year the grasshoppers came and the year the Panic collapsed every bank between New York and Omaha and the year my father decided God had chosen him to turn one hundred and sixty acres of buffalo grass into wheat.

He was not a stupid man. I need you to understand that before anything else. People who hear these stories — the failed homesteads, the broken families, the graves with no one left to tend them — they assume stupidity or stubbornness, which is the same thing dressed for church. My father was neither. He could calculate board feet in his head. He could read weather from the texture of clouds the way a preacher reads Scripture, and he was almost never wrong about rain, which makes what happened either ironic or inevitable, depending on how much pity you have left.

He was wrong about something else. Something larger. He believed that the land owed him a living because he was willing to suffer for it. Not that the land would yield — that’s a farmer’s hope, ordinary and forgivable. He believed the land should yield. That his suffering was a kind of currency accepted by the soil, by God, by the natural order of things. Every broken axle, every dry well, every child’s fever — these were not warnings. They were receipts. Proof that he had paid enough to deserve what was coming.

What was coming was always next year.

We arrived in April. I was three years old and remember nothing of the journey except a sensation of confinement followed by a sensation of openness so total it felt like falling. My brother Halvor, who was seven, remembered the wagon and the sound the wheels made on the old military road — a grinding that changed pitch with the soil, sandy to clay to hardpan — and our mother sitting on a trunk with her back straight and her face aimed at the horizon like a woman watching for something she hoped would not arrive.

Our father had come ahead in February to cut sod. He’d built a temporary shelter — a half-dugout, walls of sod blocks stacked four feet high with a canvas roof — and when we arrived he stood in front of it with his arms at his sides and a look on his face that I have seen since on the faces of men presenting diamond rings and new automobiles and houses they cannot afford, the look that says: I have done this for you. See what I have done.

The sod bricks weighed sixty pounds each. I know this because he told us, many times, the way a minister returns to a particular verse. Sixty pounds. He had cut and stacked over four hundred of them. Twenty-four thousand pounds of Nebraska moved by hand, by his hand, in six weeks. The walls were two feet thick. He said this kept the house cool in summer and warm in winter, and the first part was true.

Our mother looked at the half-dugout and said, “Where is the floor?”

“Dirt,” our father said. “For now.”

“For now” was a phrase that structured our childhood. The dirt floor was for now. The canvas roof was for now. The single window, which was not glass but oiled paper that turned the light the color of old lard, was for now. For now lasted, in most cases, until we left.

The first year he broke thirty acres with a borrowed plow and a team of oxen he’d bought on credit from a man in Broken Bow named Esterhaus, who charged him twelve percent interest and told him the soil was good for wheat. The soil was not good for wheat. The soil was good for grass, which had spent ten thousand years becoming what it was, and which did not appreciate being opened up to the wind and the sun and the mineral hunger of winter wheat, a plant it had never met and did not want to know.

The wheat came up thin and pale, like hair on a sick child. My father stood at the edge of the field with his hands on his hips and said it would thicken. It did not thicken. What thickened was the wind, which took the topsoil from the broken ground and deposited it against the south wall of the half-dugout in a drift that reached the eave by August.

He harvested eleven bushels that year. A good year on that ground, with rain, might have given him fifteen. A good year on good ground — river-bottom land in eastern Nebraska, the kind he couldn’t afford — would have given him forty.

But my father did not measure in bushels. He measured in commitment. Eleven bushels was not a poor yield. It was a first installment. Proof that the contract between himself and the land was in effect, that both parties were performing. Never mind that the land’s performance was closer to a refusal. The land had accepted the seed, hadn’t it? The land had grown something, hadn’t it? That was consent.

Our mother kept a ledger. She kept it in a tin box she’d brought from Kristiansand, and in it she recorded everything that entered and left the household: pounds of flour, gallons of kerosene, ounces of salt, the number of eggs laid by the three hens we kept in a crate behind the house. She recorded the dates when the children were sick and the dates when we were well and the dates when the well water turned alkali and we had to haul from the creek two miles south, which meant an entire day lost for Halvor or our father, which meant the fencing didn’t get done, which meant the cattle from the Rocking H pushed through and ate the kitchen garden, which meant our mother had to replant the beans in July, which meant the beans came up late and were killed by the first frost in September.

She recorded all of this in a hand so small you needed good light to read it. I found the ledger after she died, in 1907, and spent a week deciphering it, and what I found was not a record of a household but a record of a physics problem — inputs and outputs and losses that could not be balanced, month after month, year after year, the deficit carried forward like an unpaid debt accruing interest that no harvest would ever cover.

She knew. She knew from the first year, from the thin wheat and the alkaline well and the canvas roof that leaked in any rain harder than a drizzle. She knew the way a bookkeeper knows, which is the most certain kind of knowing: not from intuition, not from experience, but from numbers that do not add up and will never add up regardless of how many columns you rearrange them in.

She stayed anyway. She stayed for nineteen years, from 1873 to 1892, and when she finally left it was not because the numbers had changed but because Halvor was dead and the last child — my youngest sister Brit — had married a railroad man from Kearney and moved east, and our mother looked at our father across the table one evening and said, “I’m going to live with Brit.”

Not: I’m leaving. Not: this is over. She announced a destination, not a departure. Our father nodded and cut his bread and said, “The fence on the north line needs mending before the snow.”

She left the next morning. He mended the fence.

The winters I do remember. Winters on that quarter section were a kind of education in the geometry of confinement. Five people in a sod house sixteen by twenty-two feet, November through March, with a cast-iron stove that burned twisted hay when we ran out of buffalo chips and burned buffalo chips when we could find them and burned cottonwood when my father could spare the time to fell it, which was seldom, because there was always fencing to repair or harness to mend or some improvement to the house that would take three times longer than he estimated and use twice the materials.

My mother cooked on that stove the same seven meals in rotation: cornbread and salt pork, beans with onion, potato soup, johnnycake, boiled wheat with molasses, dried-apple pie when there were apples, and a porridge she made from cracked wheat that she’d pound in a canvas bag with a flat stone because we didn’t own a grain mill. On Sundays she added lard to the cornbread. This was the extent of celebration.

She stored the flour in a barrel she’d lined with oilcloth and she checked it every Monday morning. She would plunge her hand into the barrel to the wrist and feel the level, and I could read the year’s trajectory in her face as clearly as my father claimed to read it in the clouds. When her hand went in past the wrist, we were fine. When it stopped at the palm, we were careful. When she withdrew just her fingers, white with flour dust, she would stand very still for a moment and then wipe her hand on her apron and begin to plan how to stretch what remained until the store in Broken Bow could extend us more credit, which it sometimes would and sometimes wouldn’t, depending on whether my father had paid the last account, which he sometimes had and sometimes hadn’t.

Halvor and I shared a pallet in the corner by the west wall. The sod sweated in winter — moisture from the ground and from our breathing condensed on the inside surface and ran down in thin streams that froze in January and thawed in February and left the bedding damp through March. My mother hung a flour sack over the wall beside our pallet, which she washed every week and which was always stained with the rust color of sod-wall seepage. I can still smell it. Wool and damp earth and the mineral taste of water that has passed through thirty inches of compacted prairie grass and come out the other side changed into something that isn’t quite water anymore.

My father slept well. This is a detail that seems small but was not. He slept deeply and without apparent disturbance, eight hours when he could get them, and woke ready. My mother did not sleep well. I would hear her in the dark, turning on the bed, or standing at the stove to warm water for her hands, which cracked and bled in winter from the alkali and the cold and the constant washing. She would stand at the stove with her hands wrapped around a tin cup, looking at nothing, and the firelight through the stove grate would throw a pattern of bars across her face and across the floor and across the far wall where the flour sack hung, and everything in the room would look like it was behind something.

What I want to tell you about is the year 1881, which was the year everything happened, which is how I remember it though of course things happened every year and most of them were the same things — planting, weeding, harvesting what little came, surviving winter — and the sameness was its own kind of violence, a slow-motion bruising that didn’t show on the skin but showed in the way my mother moved by the time I was eleven, careful and deliberate, as if she had learned to economize not just flour and kerosene but motion itself.

In 1881 my father decided to dig a new well. The old well had gone alkali the previous summer — the water tasted of salt and metal and left a white residue on the pot that my mother scrubbed off with sand — and my father believed that if he dug deeper he would find clean water. This was possible. It was also possible that he would find more alkali, or nothing at all, or that the walls would collapse in the loose sandy soil before he ever reached the aquifer. But possibility was my father’s currency. He traded in it the way other men traded in wheat futures.

He dug for three weeks. By hand, with a short-handled spade and a bucket and a rope and Halvor hauling the bucket up on a windlass he’d built from cottonwood poles. Halvor was fifteen that year and already taller than our father, with our mother’s narrow face and our father’s hands — big, square, cracked across the knuckles from the alkali water and the wind and the cold and the constant friction of tools against soil.

At twenty-two feet they hit clay. My father sent Halvor home and kept digging alone, because the clay was harder and the bucket came up heavier and because — I understand this now in a way I could not have understood it then — the struggle was the point. If the water came easy it proved nothing. If the water came hard it proved everything. Every foot of clay was testimony. Every blister was a prayer answered before it was asked.

At thirty-one feet the wall gave way. The sandy soil above the clay layer slumped inward, not enough to bury him, but enough to fill the bottom three feet and crack two of the shoring timbers. My father climbed out with mud in his hair and his left hand bleeding where a timber end had caught him across the palm, and he stood at the lip of the ruined well and looked down into it and said, “I’ll start again tomorrow.”

My mother was standing in the dooryard — we had a proper house by then, still sod but with a wood-frame roof and real glass in two of the three windows — and she said nothing. She went inside and came out with a basin of water and a rag and cleaned his hand and wrapped it in a strip of flour sacking and went back inside and stood at the stove with her back to the door, and I could see her shoulders moving in a way that might have been crying or might have been the effort of not crying, and either way it was something she did not want witnessed.

He started again the next morning. Same spot. Dug out the slumped soil, reshored the walls with thicker timbers cut from a cottonwood he felled a quarter mile away and dragged back with the oxen. Halvor on the windlass again, hauling buckets of clay and sand and the occasional stone, the rope burning through his gloves, new gloves their mother had sewn from a flour sack because the leather ones had worn through.

At thirty-four feet they found water. Clean water. Sweet, cold, without the alkali taste. My father climbed out of that well and dropped to his knees and bowed his head and wept, and we all stood there — Halvor and I and Brit, who was four, and our mother — and watched him weep, and no one went to him, and no one spoke.

I have thought about that moment for thirty-three years. And what I have come to believe is this: we did not go to him because his weeping was not grief and it was not relief. It was vindication. He was right. The land had tested him and he had passed. The broken well was not a warning — it was a trial. The clean water was not luck — it was a verdict. And we could not comfort a man who was celebrating, even if what he was celebrating was the thing that was destroying us.

Halvor died in the spring of 1885. He was nineteen. He was pulling a stump — our father had decided to clear the cottonwood stand along the creek to plant more wheat, because thirty acres was not enough, because nothing was ever enough, because the logic of his conviction required expansion the way a fire requires fuel — and the chain snapped and the whipping end caught him across the throat. He lived for six hours. My mother held him the entire time, in the dooryard, because he couldn’t be moved, and my father stood at the edge of the cottonwood stand with the broken chain in his hands and looked at it as if it had betrayed him, as if the chain’s failure was another test, another receipt, another proof of the magnitude of what was being asked of him.

We buried Halvor on the high ground east of the house where the bluestem hadn’t been plowed. My father built a fence around the grave — four posts, cedar, with wire between them — and I watched him set those posts and I understood for the first time that every fence he built was a sermon. The fence around the field said: this land is mine. The fence around the garden said: this food is ours. The fence around the grave said: this death is meaningful.

It was not meaningful. It was a chain that snapped because it was old and because the stump was bigger than my father estimated and because he would not hire help and because he would not wait and because his wrongness was a wheel and Halvor was beneath it. But you cannot tell a man who has buried his son that his son’s death was the consequence of a flawed conviction. You cannot tell him because he will not hear it and because the telling is a cruelty that serves only the teller. So we said nothing. And our father mended the fence around the grave every spring, and the wire stayed bright while everything else rusted, and the grass inside the fence grew tall because no cattle could reach it, and from a distance it looked like a small green room on the prairie, the only enclosed space that thrived.

My sister Brit left in 1888, at sixteen, to marry Ovar Lindgren, who worked for the railroad out of Kearney. The night before she went, our mother sat with her at the table and wrote out the recipes — all seven of them, in that miniature hand, on a single sheet of paper that she folded twice and gave to Brit with the instruction: “Don’t let the cornbread recipe go. The others you can forget.”

Brit said, “I won’t forget any of them.”

Our mother said, “You will. You’ll learn new ones. That’s the point.”

Our father did not come to the table that night. He was outside mending the hinge on the root cellar door, a job that took him the better part of three hours and could have waited a week. He said goodnight to Brit through the doorway without coming inside, his hands black with grease, and Brit said goodnight back, and that was their farewell. There was no cruelty in it. There was no warmth either. There was the flatness of a man who has decided that departures are routine and who has cultivated that decision so thoroughly he can no longer tell the difference between composure and indifference.

I left the following spring, in 1889, at thirteen, to live with a family in Broken Bow named Esterhaus — the same Esterhaus who had sold our father the oxen on credit sixteen years earlier, and who by then owned a dry-goods store and needed a girl to mind his younger children while his wife was ill. I told my father I was going and he said, “There’s fencing to do on the east line.”

I said, “I know.”

He said, “The wheat will be better this year. The signs are good.”

The signs were not good. The signs were the same as every year — dry spring, late rain, hot wind in July that cooked the grain on the stalk — but the signs had never been good and he had never stopped reading them as favorable, the way a man in love reads indifference as mystery.

“I know,” I said again, and he looked at me then, truly looked at me, for what I believe was the first time since Halvor died, and something crossed his face — not understanding, not remorse, but a bewildered arithmetic, as if he were adding up the family and the sum kept coming out smaller than it should.

“You’ll come back,” he said. It was not a question.

I said nothing. My mother handed me my coat and a packet of johnnycake wrapped in a flour sack and walked me to the road where the Esterhaus wagon was waiting. She did not cry. She held my face between her cracked hands for a moment and said, “Write to me. Your father won’t read the letters but write them anyway.”

The last thing I saw as the wagon took me toward Broken Bow was my father walking the fence line with a coil of wire over his shoulder, and my mother standing in the dooryard with a basin in her hands, and neither of them looking in my direction, and the grass going on forever in every direction and the sky pressing down on all of it like a hand on a Bible.

So I went back in 1914. My father had died in 1903, of pneumonia, though I believe the pneumonia was merely the last in a sequence of concessions his body made to the land — the alkali kidneys, the broken fingers that healed crooked, the cough that started in 1880 and never fully left. He died in the sod house, alone, because my mother was with Brit in Kearney and I was in Lincoln and there was no one else. A neighbor found him three days later. The stove was cold. The wheat in the field — he was still planting wheat, twelve acres by then because he’d worn out the rest, twelve acres on a quarter section — the wheat was standing unharvested. The neighbor cut it for him. Brought it in. Sold it. Sent the money to my mother, who put it in the tin box with the ledger.

Eleven bushels. The same as the first year. Thirty years and the yield was identical, and my father would have seen this as proof of the land’s constancy, its faithfulness, its willingness to meet him where he stood. I see it as proof that the land was never listening.

I stood at the edge of what had been the dooryard and looked at the depression where the house had been and the filled-in well and the high ground where Halvor was buried, and the fence was gone — the cedar posts had rotted, the wire had been taken by someone or something — and the grass was growing over the grave the same as it grew over everything else, bluestem and switchgrass and the little hair-grass tufts that bent in the wind, all of it undifferentiated, all of it the same grass, and there was no marker and no fence and no sign that a boy had lived and died here except a slight unevenness in the ground that might have been a grave or might have been a gopher mound or might have been nothing.

The wheat field was gone. Not fallow — gone. The grass had come back, as grass does when you stop fighting it. Ten years without plowing and the roots had reclaimed every furrow, and the topsoil had stabilized, and the ground that my father had broken and broken and broken was whole again, and it looked the way it had looked when we arrived in 1873, which was the way it had looked for ten thousand years before that.

I picked up a handful of soil. It was dark and dense and full of roots — nothing like the pale, sandy, wind-stripped dirt I remembered from the fields. The grass had restored what the wheat had taken.

I don’t know what I expected to feel. Grief, maybe, or anger, or the vindication that comes when you’ve spent decades knowing something and the evidence finally confirms it. But what I felt, standing in that October wind with the dirt crumbling between my fingers and the grass moving around me, was something I still can’t properly name. Smaller than grief. Closer to embarrassment. I had come back expecting the land to testify — to confirm that my father had been wrong, that we had suffered for nothing, that I was right to leave. And the land did no such thing. The land was growing grass.

My father’s wrongness was large enough to fill a life and bury a son and drive away a wife and two daughters. My own wrongness was smaller but the same species: thinking that coming back here would mean something. Thinking the land owed me an answer the way he thought it owed him a harvest.

The man with the wagon was waiting on the road. I walked back. The wind picked up as I crossed the open ground, and by the time I reached the wagon it was blowing hard from the northwest, carrying dust and grass seeds and cold.

“Find what you were looking for?” the man asked.

I said I had. He didn’t need the truth and I didn’t have it.

We drove back toward Broken Bow through grass that grew on both sides of the road and over the road itself in places where the ruts had softened. The first snow came before we reached town — early, just a few flakes turning in the wind, melting when they hit the ground. By the time I boarded the train it was falling steady, and I watched it through the window as we pulled east, covering the prairie the way it covered everything, without preference, without judgment, accumulating.