But even with the materials, we couldn’t do the labor. Not the two of us. A sixty-by-eighty barn with a gambrel roof takes a crew. Pete said it would take Dwayne alone two summers, working every evening and weekend. And that was if he didn’t fall off the roof and break his neck.
“We’ll figure it out,” Dwayne said.
But I could see in his face he didn’t think we would.
There’s one more thing I should tell you about those weeks.
In the pile of salvaged lumber by the machine shed, there was one beam I wouldn’t let Dwayne cut up or burn. An old oak post. Eight by eight, hand-hewn, with adze marks still on it. Twelve feet long.
It was one of the original posts from the 1912 barn. Dwayne’s great-grandfather cut it out of a tree on the creek bottom and squared it with an axe. When they re-roofed the barn in the fifties, they’d kept the old posts.
It came out of that pile almost perfect. Not even cracked.
And about four feet up from the bottom, carved into the wood with a pocketknife, there were initials.
V.H.B. 1959.
Vernon Henry Bauer. Nine years old.
Dwayne found it while we were digging. He stopped and ran his thumb over the letters.
“Dad carved that,” he said. “He told me about it once. He got whipped for it. Grandpa said a barn post wasn’t a school desk.”
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he went and got his cordless drill and a pry bar, and he carried that post out of the pile himself, and laid it on two sawhorses in the machine shed.
“That one goes back in,” he said.
Chapter Six: The Feed Aisle
In the second week of June, I went to the co-op in Cedar Bluff for mineral.
Fifty-pound bags. The cows go through it fast in summer. I had my cart in the feed aisle at the back of the store and I was trying to lift a bag off the bottom shelf, and it was heavier than I remembered, and I was in a bad mood about everything.
“Here,” somebody said behind me. “Let me get that before you throw your back out.”
Old Marv Ochs.
Marv is eighty-two. He’s farmed the quarter east of us since 1965. He’s six foot four and built like a corn crib, even now, with hands like shovels and a voice like a cement mixer. He was one of the first ones at our place the day of the twister. He was the one who wrapped Dwayne’s hands.
He picked up that fifty-pound bag of mineral like it was a loaf of bread and set it in my cart.
“Thank you, Marv.”
“How’s Dwayne?”
“Fine,” I said. I always say fine.
He looked at me for a long time with his faded blue eyes.
“When’s Dwayne putting that barn back up?” he said.
I didn’t answer right away. I looked down at my cart.
“I don’t know, Marv,” I said finally. “We bought the materials. Pete figured them up. But it’s just Dwayne and me. Pete says it’ll take two summers.”
Marv grunted. He leaned against the shelf of dog food.
“Two summers,” he said. “That’s a long time for calves to be under a tarp.”
“I know.”
He didn’t ask about the insurance. He didn’t ask about Vernon’s new shop. He didn’t have to. Everybody in Cedar Bluff knew. You can’t pour a forty-by-sixty slab four miles from town without everybody knowing.
But Marv didn’t say a word about it. He just stood there by the dog food, scratching his chin.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. I got a free Saturday coming up and nothing to do but aggravate my wife. If Dwayne wants a hand, you tell him to call me.”
Then he winked and walked off toward the checkout with a bag of chicken scratch under his arm.
I stood there in the feed aisle with my cart.
And the whole thing turned over in my head. All at once. Like a coin flipping.
I couldn’t fight Vernon. Dwayne wouldn’t let me, and the law wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t have the heart for it anyway. I couldn’t make him give back the money. I couldn’t make him tear down his shop.
But I had something Vernon didn’t have.
I had a road full of people who knew what a barn was.
Chapter Seven: Seventy
I started calling that night.
I sat at the kitchen table after supper with the church directory and the 4-H phone list and a legal pad. Dwayne was out checking cows. Caleb was watching TV.
I called Marv first. To tell him I’d taken him up on it.
“Good,” he said. “When?”
“I don’t know yet. A Saturday. Soon as we get the trusses delivered.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. “Who else you got?”
“Nobody yet. You’re the first.”
“Well,” Marv said. “Get busy, girl.”
So I got busy.
I called Pete Hanson next. I asked him if he’d be willing to run a crew. I told him I could pay him something.
“Lorrie,” he said. “I’ve built barns in this county for thirty-eight years. You know how many old-style barn raisings I’ve been to? Where the whole road comes out and puts it up in a day?”
“How many?”
“Two,” he said. “One in 1979 and one in 1986. And I was a kid at both of them.” He paused. “I’ll run your crew. For free. And I’ll bring my boys.”
I called the Hanson brothers, Pete’s nephews, who farm south of us. I called Gary and Ruthie Stahl. I called the Lindqvists, the Ostranders, the Meyers, the Kaczmareks. I called the Lutheran pastor. I called the Catholic priest, because the Kaczmareks were Catholic and I figured he might want to know.
I called the fire department, because three of them were farmers and they had a bucket truck. I called the shop teacher at the high school, who had a whole class of boys who needed a summer project. I called the 4-H leader.
I never said one word against my father-in-law.
I want that understood. I never said Vernon. I never said insurance. I never said shop.
I just said we were putting the barn up ourselves. Old style. In a day. And we could use some hands.
By the end of the first night, I had twenty-three names on my legal pad.
Dwayne came in from checking cows around ten. He saw me at the table with the phone and the legal pad and the church directory.
“Who are you calling?”
“Everybody.”
He looked over my shoulder at the list. His face changed.
“Lorrie,” he said slowly. “What are you doing?”
“We’re putting the barn up,” I said. “On a Saturday. In July. Old style.”
He stared at me.
“You didn’t tell them about Dad,” he said. “Did you?”
“Not one word.”
He stood there for a long time. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down next to me. He picked up the church directory and opened it to the W’s.
“You forgot the Weidners,” he said.
By Thursday I had lost count past fifty.
People called people. That’s how it works out here. Gary Stahl called his brother-in-law in Fullerton. Ruthie called her quilting group. The shop teacher brought eleven boys. The Lutheran ladies said they’d bring salads. The Catholic men’s club said they’d bring a pig.
A man I’d never even met called me on Wednesday night. He said he was from Belgrade, thirty miles away.
“I heard about your barn,” he said. “My granddad’s barn went down in the ‘75 tornado and the whole county put it back up. I was six. I carried nails.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to come carry some more, if that’s all right.”
The trusses came on a flatbed on the Tuesday before. Thirty of them. Big triangles of yellow pine, engineered in Grand Island, stacked like giant ribs on the grass by the old footings.
The steel came on Wednesday. Red, to match the old barn. Dwayne wanted red.
The lumber came on Thursday. Posts, girts, purlins, rafters. Pete stood in the barnyard with his clipboard and checked off every piece.
“We’re ready,” he said Thursday night. “If the weather holds, she goes up Saturday.”
Chapter Eight: Friday
So I baked all Friday.
Eleven pans of bars. That’s the number. I counted. Because you don’t ask seventy people to lift your barn and feed them crackers.
Scotcheroos. Lemon bars. Seven-layer bars. Special K bars. Monster cookie bars. Two pans of Rice Krispie treats for the kids. A pan of rhubarb dream bars from my mother-in-law June’s recipe, which she taught me the first summer I was married, when I couldn’t even make Jell-O.
I started at five in the morning. I didn’t stop until eleven at night. Every surface in my kitchen was covered with nine-by-thirteen pans. The counters. The table. The top of the deep freeze in the back porch.
Ruthie Stahl came over at noon to help. Then Darlene Ostrander. Then Pete Hanson’s wife, Joyce, with three dozen eggs and a crock pot of sloppy joe meat.
We worked in my kitchen all afternoon with the windows open and the radio on. Nobody talked much about why we were doing it. Nobody had to.
Around four o’clock, Darlene was cutting lemon bars at the counter, and she said, without looking up, “You know Vernon’s shop has in-floor heat?”
The kitchen went quiet.
“I know,” I said.
“Cost him eleven thousand just for the boiler. Rick told my husband.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept stirring the Scotcheroo topping.
Darlene looked at me. Then she nodded, once, and went back to cutting.
“Well,” she said. “Our barn’s going to have something better.”
“What’s that?” Ruthie asked.
“Us,” Darlene said.
That night I sat on the back porch steps with Dwayne. It was hot and still. The fireflies were coming up out of the grass in the pasture. Caleb was asleep upstairs.
Across the barnyard, I could see the trusses in the moonlight. Stacked and waiting.
“Lorrie,” Dwayne said. “What if nobody comes?”
“They’ll come.”
“What if it rains?”
“Then they’ll come Sunday.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“What if Dad hears about it?” he said.
I looked at him in the dark.
“He’s already heard,” I said. “Rick works at the co-op. Everybody in Cedar Bluff knows.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” I said. “He hasn’t called. He hasn’t come by.”
Dwayne looked north. Toward the half mile of dark fields between us and his father’s house. Toward the new shop, which you could see from our porch at night, because Vernon had put a yard light on a pole beside it.
The light was on. A little white star on the horizon.
“I don’t want this to be about him,” Dwayne said quietly. “I don’t want it to be a fight. I just want a barn.”
“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s a barn.”
Chapter Nine: The Raising
They started coming at 6:45 in the gray light.
I was standing at the kitchen window with my first cup of coffee. It was barely light. Mist lying in the low spots in the pasture. A meadowlark singing on the fence post.
Then I saw headlights. Down the gravel from the east. One truck.
Then another one behind it. Then another.
Then a line of them. All the way back to the corner. Pickups and SUVs and a church van and a flatbed with a skid loader on it and old Marv’s Chevy. Headlights coming down the gravel road in the fog like a parade.
I set my coffee down. My hands were shaking.
By seven o’clock, the barnyard was full.
People everywhere. Men in work boots and seed caps and tool belts. Teenage boys from the shop class, yawning. Women in jeans carrying casserole dishes and lawn chairs. Kids running around the machine shed. Three dogs.
Pete Hanson stood on the back of a flatbed trailer with a bullhorn.
“All right, people,” he said. “We’re going to raise a barn today. Old style. I want the young bucks on ropes. I want anybody with experience on the frame. I want the ladies to keep us fed and keep us from falling off. And nobody, I mean nobody, goes up on a truss without a harness. Understood?”
Seventy people said “Yes, sir,” all at once.
The posts went in first.
Twenty-eight of them, set in the old concrete footings, bolted down with steel brackets. Pete had a crew of six men walking them up one at a time with ropes and braces.
The last post was the old oak one. Dwayne’s great-grandfather’s post, with the adze marks and the carving.
Dwayne carried it himself. Him and Marv and two of the Hanson boys. They set it at the northeast corner, by the big door. Where it had stood for a hundred and twelve years.
Dwayne put his hand on it for a second. Then he stepped back.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s build a barn.”
The first truss went up at 7:40.
I told you about that already. I told you how I stood in the wet grass with my roaster of eggs and couldn’t move. How the whole barnyard clapped.
Then the second one went up. Then the third. Pete calling out from the middle, “Walk her up. Easy. Hold her there.” The young guys on the ropes. The old guys on the ladders, nailing. The shop class boys handing up boards.
By nine o’clock, the whole frame stood against the sky.
You’ve never seen anything like it if you’ve never seen a barn raising. The bones of a building, standing up out of nothing. All the posts and the girts and the trusses, yellow wood against a blue sky, and people crawling all over it like ants on a sugar cube.
And the sound. Hammers going everywhere, all at once, a hundred different rhythms. Saws whining. Somebody’s radio playing country music. Pete’s bullhorn. Kids shrieking.
I ran food the whole morning. Eggs and sausage and coffee. Then bars. Then more coffee. Then lemonade, because the sun came out and it got hot.
And my husband laughed up on that frame.
I heard it from the food table. I looked up and he was straddling a truss, twenty feet up, in his harness, with a hammer in his hand. Marv was on the truss across from him. Marv had said something, I don’t know what. And Dwayne threw his head back and laughed.
A big, loud, honest laugh. I could hear it over all the hammers.
I hadn’t seen Dwayne laugh since April.
I had to set down the coffee pot and turn around for a minute. Ruthie Stahl put her hand on my back and didn’t say anything.
The steel went on the roof by eleven. Red. Sheet after sheet, handed up and screwed down. You could see the color coming across the roof like a sunrise.
Then, a little before noon, I heard the white Ford.
Chapter Ten: Three Passes
Vernon’s truck. I know the sound of it.
A 2016 F-250 with a diesel engine and a loose heat shield that rattles at low speeds. I’d heard it come down our road a thousand times in twenty-two years.
I was standing at the food table cutting more lemon bars. I looked up.
The white Ford was coming from the north. From his place. Down the gravel at a walk. Maybe five miles an hour. The driver’s window was down.
He drove past our driveway. Slow. His head turned toward the barnyard. Looking.
