--Chris LeDoux
                                                                                          “County Fair”

            Songs about ranch hands and horses blared from the dash of my pickup when I drove to Texas twenty years ago. The Amarillo Diocese needed priests and I needed land to raise cows and break colts.
            God answered my prayers.
             Twenty years later, I’ve sold my cows and hung up my training saddle.  But I still have horse stalls to clean and a truck to drive. Investing in rural life benefited my priesthood as well as my diocese—practically as well as spiritually. This morning, for instance, I’m heading to a convent to help build fence for some Franciscan Sisters who want to graze cattle.
             Several farmers are already pounding posts by the time I arrive. I’m handed a bucket full of metal fasteners and sent to the south side of the forty-acre lot.
             It is mid-December and the air is clear and cool. Clipping wire to posts is solitary work. My mind starts to review significant events from recent days: a great-nephew unharmed in a grain truck accident; dancers with feathered headdresses twirling like whirlwinds on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe; a deep conversation with a brother priest; the improved attitude of my younger horse; the fiery blaze of today’s sunrise. Each blessing counted and clamped with the satisfying gripe of pliers on twisted wire.
            A tractor pulls up. The cab door swings open. The farmer inside wants help laying wire on the opposite end of the pasture. I climb in. On the way to the far corner, he asks me to say a prayer. He pauses. His boy. Meth-head. Now in rehab. Third time. He shakes his head and I nod mine.
           We bounce our way across fescue grass, the sound of the motor loud and hard inside the cab. When we reach a row of lonesome posts, we stop, make the Sign of the Cross and send up a plea.
            Later, back on my side of the pasture, I try humming Chris LeDoux’s song about stretching wire. But other lyrics, just as country but a lot more troubled, intrude:   
              The words grab my gut like the sight of a rib-thin horse. The rest of the day, I feel no sun on my face, only the prick of barbed wire on open skin…and the press of a glove to slow the bleed.