Everyone called the old man a fool for fencing off more and more fertile land without ever keeping livestock, but they had no idea why he kept doing it
Part I – The Man Who Built Empty Circles
I am E., thirty-four, American, and I came back to C. because my mother, L., called me and said, “M. is doing it again.”
C. is not a town so much as a fold in the hills of Vermont where the road gives up and decides to be a dirt track. I left when I was eighteen and swore I would never be one of those women who comes back to tend a childhood house that should have been sold. Then L. got sick, and then she didn’t get better, and I came back anyway.
M. was my grandfather. He was eighty-seven that spring. My grandmother, A., had been gone for twelve years. He lived alone in the farmhouse with a dog named B. who was deaf and a tractor that only started if you sweet-talked it.
And he built fences.
Not the kind of fences you build in Vermont, straight lines to keep your neighbor’s cows out of your corn. M. built circles.
The first circle I remember was when I was seven. It was small, maybe twenty feet across, made of split chestnut posts and wire, in the middle of the lower field where nothing grew except foxtail and Queen Anne’s lace. There was nothing inside. No cow. No horse. No garden.
My father, R., said, “Dad, what are you fencing? Air?”
M. just said, “I’m marking something.”
Next year, he built another circle around the first one, bigger, ten feet out. Then another the year after that. Year after year the old man expanded the fence by one more circle, yet never kept any livestock. Each spring, when the frost came out of the ground, he would set new posts in a wider ring, perfect, as if measured with a compass only he could see.
People talked. In C., people have a lot of time to talk.
“He’s gone soft after A. died,” said Mrs. D. at the general store.
“He’s wasting good land,” said Mr. T., who wanted to buy the lower field for hay. “Three acres now, fenced for nothing. You could run twenty head in there.”
I asked him once when I was sixteen, home for Christmas, angry about everything. “M., why do you build empty fences?”
He looked at me over his glasses, his hands gnarled from arthritis, and said, “Not empty, E. Just not full yet.”
I thought it was poetry. I now know it was patience.
When L. died last winter, I moved into the farmhouse to take care of M. and the dog. He was frail but stubborn. Every morning at five, he went out to his circles with a thermos of tea and stared at them. I watched him from the kitchen window. There were seven concentric circles now, the outermost almost a hundred yards across, a strange wooden ripple in the field. Inside, the grass grew tall and uncut, full of fireflies in June, full of milkweed in July. It was beautiful and completely useless.
Then J. came back too.
Part II – The Summer Gate
J. was the boy who lived in the house over the ridge. J. is thirty-five now, American, a carpenter who left for Burlington and came back because his father, P., had a stroke. When we were kids, we were feral together. He taught me how to catch crayfish. I taught him how to read the clouds.
He had not changed much, except his shoulders were wider and he had a quiet way about him that made you want to be quiet too.
He came to help me fix the gutter on the farmhouse in late May. He looked out at the circles.
“Your grandfather still at it?” he asked.
“Seven circles,” I said. “Seven years of wasted land, according to everyone.”
J. squinted. “That’s not wasted.”
“Tell that to Mr. T.,” I said.
J. didn’t answer. He just kept looking.
June in Vermont is a brief, violent green. The grass inside the circles grew waist-high. The fireflies came early that year. The village children — there are only nine of them now, C. is shrinking — started to gather at the edge of the outermost fence, the way children gather at the edge of anything mysterious.
They asked M., “Mr. M., what’s in there?”
M. said, “You’ll see in summer.”
People said he was wasting good land. My cousin, K., who came to appraise the property for taxes, said, “E., you have to talk sense into him. That lower field is worth forty thousand an acre if it’s clear. As it is, with all those fences, it’s unsellable.”
I tried. One evening, I brought M. his tea out to the field. I said, “M., why don’t you let Mr. T. cut it for hay?”
He patted my hand. “Hay is for cows, E. This is for something else.”
“For what?”
“Wait till summer,” he said.
Summer arrived on a Tuesday, hot and blue, after a thunderstorm that made the mountains look newly washed. It was the first week of July, the week the town does its little parade and the kids get out of school for good.
I woke up to find M. already outside, in his good shirt, despite the heat. He had a pair of pliers in his hand. B., the deaf dog, was beside him, awake for once.
He walked to the outermost circle, to the gate he had built but never used. In seven years, I had never seen that gate open. He had always climbed over.
He opened it.
The gate creaked — seven years of rust and disuse — and swung wide.
Then he did something that made me drop my coffee mug on the porch steps.
He turned to the cluster of village children who had been watching from the stone wall, as they did every day, and waved them in.
“Go on,” he said. His voice was thin but clear. “It’s yours now.”
The children stared. Then the bravest one, little S., daughter of Mrs. D., ran in. Then the rest. Nine children in mismatched shorts ran into the tall grass inside seven empty fences and disappeared, laughing, the grass closing over them like water.
J. had come over with lumber for the porch. He stood next to me, his mouth open.
Mrs. D. came running from her house. “M.! What are you doing? My S. —”
M. just smiled, a smile so wide his old face folded into a hundred lines.
When summer arrived, he opened the gate and let the village children play freely inside — it turned out he had built the fence only to give them a little private sky of their own. Year after year the old man expanded the fence by one more circle, yet never kept any livestock. People said he was wasting good land. The truth was the opposite. Inside seven circles, the town’s noise, the road, Mr. T.’s tractor, the whole world fell away. All you could see was tall grass and, above, a perfect, unbroken circle of sky that belonged only to whoever was lying in it. He had built them a sky. A private sky.
Part III – The Sky He Meant
I ran into the circles after the children. J. followed.
Inside, the world changed. The outer fences cut out the houses, the telephone poles, the road. All you saw was grass and light and, above, sky. A perfect round window. The children were lying on their backs, arms out, staring up.
“It’s so quiet!” S. whispered.
It was. The wind didn’t reach in here the same way. The circles broke it.
M. sat down heavily on an old stump he had placed in the center years ago — I had never understood why there was a stump in an empty field. Now I did. It was a chair.
J. lay down next to me in the grass. He was so close I could smell sawdust on him.
“Did you know about this?” I whispered to him.
“No,” he whispered back. “But I remember A.”
My grandmother, A., died when I was twenty-two. She was small and fierce and she loved the stars. She had been a schoolteacher before she had L. She taught astronomy at the little elementary school that closed in 1998. She told me once that children in towns can never see the stars properly because there is too much light and too much fence that isn’t theirs.
“A. used to bring her class out here,” J. said quietly, so only I could hear. “Before your family owned this field. This was old Mr. K.’s field then. She brought us here at night. She would make us all lie down and she would say, ‘This is your sky. No one else’s.’ We thought she meant God.”
I felt tears come, sudden and hot.
That was the second twist, and it wasn’t about fences at all.
M. hadn’t been building for livestock. He hadn’t been building for children in general. He had been building for one woman.
A. had been afraid of dying indoors. In her last year, when the cancer made her blind, she told M. she missed the sky. She could no longer see the stars, but she could feel the sky if she was under a big enough piece of it.
So after she died, M. started building circles. Not to keep something in, but to keep everything else out. Each year, a wider sky. Each year, a little more privacy for a woman who was no longer there to enjoy it, until he realized — and this was what he told me that night, after the children went home, after J. had carried the sleeping S. back to Mrs. D., after we sat with him on his stump in the middle of his seven skies — until he realized he could give it to someone else.
“I built it for A.,” he said, his voice cracking. “But A. said to give it away. So I waited till there were enough kids to need it.”
I took his hand. It was cold.
“M.,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“Because if I told them it was for staring at the sky, they’d say I was wasting good land,” he said, and cackled, and then coughed, and then cried, just a little.
J. and I walked back to the house in the dark. The fireflies were inside the circles, thousands of them, blinking on and off like a private constellation. From the outside, you couldn’t see them. You had to be inside.
J. stopped at the outermost gate and closed it gently behind us, so the fireflies would stay.
“My dad used to say your grandfather was the most useless farmer in Vermont,” J. said.
“My mother said the same thing,” I said.
“They were wrong,” J. said.
Then he kissed me. In the middle of that useless field, next to seven empty fences, with fireflies blinking around our ankles, J., the boy who taught me to catch crayfish, kissed me like he had been waiting twenty years to do it. And perhaps he had.
Part IV – The Letter Under the Post
M. died in August. In his sleep, after a day spent watching the children play inside his sky. B., the deaf dog, died two days later, as if on schedule. We buried them both under the oak at the edge of the lower field.
After the funeral, I found an envelope taped to the underside of the central stump. It was addressed to me, in M.’s terrible handwriting. E.
Inside was a deed and a letter.
E.,
If you are reading this, I am with A. again. Good.
The field is yours. Not L.’s house. The field. I bought it from Mr. K. in 1971 with money A. saved from teaching. It was never part of the farm. It was ours.
I built the fences in circles because A. said a square sky is not a sky. A circle is how the earth looks if you love it enough.
I know you think C. is small and you need to leave again. But maybe you could stay and build the next circle. Or maybe you and that J. boy could build it together. He has always looked at you like you are a sky he wants to keep private, too.
Don’t sell it to Mr. T. Let the kids play. Let them have something that is not useful. Useful things don’t last.
Love, M.
P.S. There is $47,000 in the coffee can in the kitchen. It’s for a new gate. The old one squeaks.
I laughed and cried and showed it to J.
J. read it twice. Then he said, “I have $12,000 saved.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For a ring,” he said, “but I can buy a gate instead.”
That was the third twist. I had come back to C. to close up a house. I had inherited a field of empty circles that turned out to be full.
Mr. T. came the next week with an offer. I told him the field wasn’t for sale. He said, “E., be reasonable. What are you going to do with seven fences and no cows?”
J. put his arm around me. He had sawdust in his hair again.
“We’re going to build an eighth,” J. said.
Mr. T. thought we were crazy. Perhaps we were.
That night, we lay inside the seventh circle with the children gone home, with S. and the other kids’ laughter still caught in the tall grass like burrs, and we stared at our private sky. In August in Vermont, you can see the Milky Way if you are away from town lights, and we were. We were directly under it.
“My dad always said this field was wasted,” I said.
“Your grandfather wasted it perfectly,” J. said.
He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. He is thirty-five, but in that light he looked seventeen again.
“E.,” he said. “If I built you a circle, would you stay inside it with me?”
I said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
Part V – The Eighth Circle
We built the eighth circle in September. Not because we needed more sky, but because M. was right — a circle is how the earth looks if you love it enough, and we had a lot of love left that needed somewhere to go.
We didn’t do it alone. All of C. came. Mrs. D. brought lemonade. S. and the other eight children carried posts that were too heavy for them, solemn as pallbearers. We made it bigger than the others, so big that when you stood in the center, you couldn’t see the outer world at all, just grass and sky and the faces of people who had decided that some land is more valuable when it is useless.
In the center, we put two stumps now. M.’s old one, and a new one J. cut for us.
We got married there in October. No church. Just seven circles of fence and one new one, and a private sky that turned pink at sunset. W., the town clerk, married us. S. was flower girl and ring bearer and kept shouting, “Now you have your own sky!”
We didn’t keep livestock. People still say we are wasting good land.
Last week, I found out I am pregnant. J. cried when I told him, big silent tears that made his shoulders shake. We haven’t told anyone yet, except the sky. We lay inside the eighth circle yesterday, my head on his chest, his hand on my still-flat belly, and we stared up.
Year after year the old man expanded the fence by one more circle, yet never kept any livestock. People said he was wasting good land. When summer arrived, he opened the gate and let the village children play freely inside — it turned out he had built the fence only to give them a little private sky of their own.
And now, we are going to need to build a ninth circle.
Not for cows. Never for cows.
For a child who will need somewhere to lie down and learn that some of the most useful things in the world are the ones that are built for nothing at all, except love.
