Courtney June's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

The fence went down again before Courtney June finished her coffee. She saw it from the porch: three cedar posts leaning into the mud, wire coiled like a snake in the grass. Her twelve heifers stood ten feet from the gap, chewing, patient, waiting for her to be stupid about it. Past the break lay the neighbor's pasture — the neighbor being the only reason she'd bought this land in the first place, and the only man in the county who had never once tipped his hat to her. She pulled on her boots over her pink overalls and grabbed the post driver. If those heifers crossed the line and chewed up his winter rye, he'd never speak to her. Not to complain. Not to yell. Just a closed door forever, which was worse. The ground was soup from the storm. Every post she set wobbled loose again. She drove one down to her knee and it still leaned. She stood in the mud and swore at the sky. That was when the capybara waddled out of the willow scrub on his side of the property line. It was round and brown and calm as a loaf of bread. It sat down in the gap in the fence, blinked at her, and did not move. Courtney stared. Capybaras did not belong in this county. Capybaras did not belong in any county she knew. Behind it, a man came jogging through the wet grass, rope in hand, hat pushed back. Him. The neighbor. He stopped on his side of the wire and looked at the mess — the leaning posts, the mud, the pink overalls, the heifers, the rodent sitting between them all. "That's Beau," he said. "He gets out." "I was fixing the fence," Courtney said. "I can see that." She waited for him to turn around. He didn't. He stepped over the downed wire, took the post driver out of her hands, and sank the next post in three clean strikes. She held the wire. He drove. Beau chewed a willow shoot and watched. They worked the whole line before noon. He didn't say much. She learned his hands were scarred across the knuckles and that he took his coffee from a dented thermos and that he called the capybara "buddy" under his breath when he thought she couldn't hear. When the last staple went in, he wiped his hands on his jeans and finally looked at her straight. "Fence'll hold now," he said. "Keep your girls off my rye." "I will." He whistled. Beau stood up and followed him back toward the willow. Halfway across the pasture he stopped and turned. "Supper's at six," he said. "If you eat beef." He kept walking before she could answer. Courtney stood in the mud with a coil of wire in her hand and six hours to figure out what to wear.