Country Ways ...Part 1 ...Good Fences Make Good Neighbours
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dealing with that, and wrestling with how people view them.
—LeCrae
I moved to the country for the peace and quiet and so I could work on my writing.
Yeah, I’m part of that dying breed of mystery writers and right now my books are on the New York Times best-sellers list, so I guess a lot of people like my pies…
But not everyone—especially Stella McKinley my neighbour whose constantly criticizing my city ways.
Here’s what I think. Life is an interruption of death; death is an interruption of life—and between those two intervals, we live and move and have our being.
As you can see, I’ve been thinking a lot about interruptions lately.
I’ve concluded my whole life is punctuated by Fate’s long and short pauses—kind of like a Morse code. If I can only figure it out.
But then, there are a helluva lot of other things I need to sort out first, beginning with the tangle of my emotions.
Who’s got me tangled in knots, you may ask? —Why just about everybody—my neighbours, Jim Crow and the most bedevilling conundrum of all, Stella McKinley.
“You shouldn’t put windmills up here, Jed—you should respect your neighbours.”
I hammer another staple into the fence post, before giving Jim hell eyes. Jim Crow’s a full-blooded Cherokee and some kind of local guru—but to me, he’s just a guy I hire to do a job.
“Government allows me to do it, Jim and pays me a good return—besides, I thought First Nation people were all about taking care of the environment. Let’s face it, wind power is green energy.”
“You can call me an Indian,” he says, ignoring my point.
“Okay—well then, aren’t Indians all about protecting the
environment?”
“We are, but we also try not to piss off our neighbours.”
You see, I can’t talk to Jim—he’s not like most people—hell, he’s got a crow following him around. I’m not talking about a pet crow—but a wild crow.
He thinks it’s either a spirit guide or one of his ancestors—anyway he explained it once, but I don’t want to get him going on that crap again.
“Wind Walker’s circling up high—gonna snow tonight.”
I look at him with his long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail looking like a fugitive from a Lakota commercial.
“How the hell would a flying bird tell you anything about the weather?”
“He knows the wind—it’s not just a bearer of profits,” he stares at me pointedly, “—it’s the breath of the Great Spirit.”
“I suppose that bird channels wisdom to you.”
“He does. He tells me not to build a bonfire on a shit house.”
In his not so subtle way, Jim’s ribbing me again about choosing the wrong location to burn some fallen branches.
I’m not a farmer and didn’t realize there could be methane fumes from buried septic tanks. Besides, the explosion wasn’t that major.
“You gonna electrify this fence?” he asks.
“Yeah—I’m tired of hunters and kids with dirt bikes trespassing in my woods—and I don’t want them near my windmills.”
“You better put up red tape and signs that say it’s electrified.”
“Why the hell would I want to do that? I want to zap them bastards—teach them a lesson.”
Jim just shakes his head and gets back on the tractor and pulls the wire fence taut so I can staple the next pole.
I’m about to sit down to dinner when I get interrupted, as I do daily, by my nosey neighbour, Stella McKinley. I grab a chicken leg and nibble on it while I pick up the phone.
“I want to take a look at that fence you and Jim put up today,” she says.
“How’d you hear about that?”
“We live in the country—everybody knows everybody’s business.”
I figure Jim Crow went back to the reservation and sent up smoke signals.
I sigh resignedly. “When do you want to look at it?”
“Like right now—Duh! It’s almost five and it gets dark fast in December, especially when it’s snowing.”
“It’s snowing?” I ask, just about choke on my chicken.
“Yeah. Didn’t Jim warn you?”
I din't want to bring Jim's crow totem back into the mix.
“I’ll be over in my truck to pick you up.”
“I hope you’ve got snow tires.”
I roll my eyes. I’ve got a Ford F-150 with all season tires—they have a snowflake on the sidewall.
I’m not going to explain that to a woman.
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