“Well, now,” Vernon said.
He said it slow. The way he says things when he’s about to say no but wants you to think he’s still deciding.
“Well, now,” he said again. “The policy’s got my name on it, son.”
Dwayne stopped.
“I know it does.”
“So the money’s mine,” Vernon said. He folded the envelope and put it in the chest pocket of his chore coat. He buttoned the pocket. “Legally. My name. My premiums. My barn.”
“Dad, we paid half those premiums. For twenty years.”
“You paid me rent,” Vernon said. “What I did with it was my business.”
Then he got back in his white Ford and drove home.
Chapter Four: The Slab
Three weeks later, a cement truck went past our place.
I was out hanging laundry. It was the middle of May, warm and windy, the kind of day you can dry a whole load of sheets in an hour. I heard the truck coming down the gravel from the east. A big red and white Ready Mix truck from Cedar Bluff, with the drum turning.
I watched it go by. I thought maybe somebody up the road was pouring a sidewalk.
It turned in at Vernon’s home place, a half mile north.
I stood there with a clothespin in my mouth and a wet pillowcase in my hand.
Then another cement truck went by. And another. Four of them, that morning.
By noon, I could see it from our back porch, if I stood on the top step. A long flat gray rectangle behind Vernon’s brick house. Where his garden used to be. Where June grew tomatoes for forty years.
A slab. Forty by sixty.
The steel came the week after. A flatbed semi from a building company in Grand Island. I watched them unload it with a crane. Red steel beams and white sheets of metal siding and big rolls of insulation.
By the first week of June, it was standing. A brand-new pole shop, forty by sixty, with a fourteen-foot overhead door and a walk-in door and windows down both sides. Red trim. White siding. A cupola on top with a weathervane shaped like a tractor.
Dwayne’s cousin Rick told us the rest. Rick works at the co-op and hears everything.
Concrete floor with in-floor heat. Two hundred amp electric service. A bathroom with a shower. A wood stove. A woodworking bench and a welder and a brand-new lift for working on trucks.
“Must have cost him eighty, ninety thousand,” Rick said. “Easy.”
He built himself a new shop.
With the money that was meant to put our barn back up.
That night, I lay in bed next to Dwayne in the dark. The bedroom window was still covered in plywood from the twister, because we hadn’t been able to afford all the glass yet. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand.
“Dwayne,” I said. “You have to talk to him.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Dwayne. That was our barn. That was our money too. We paid those premiums. I have the checks.”
“I know.”
“Then go talk to him. Or call a lawyer. Or something.”
He was quiet so long I thought he’d fallen asleep.
“He’s my dad,” he said, in the dark.
“I know he is.”
“I’m not going to court against my own dad over a barn, Lorrie.”
I didn’t argue. I wanted to. I lay there with my fists clenched under the sheet and my heart pounding.
But I knew he was right about one thing. The money was legally Vernon’s. His name. His land. His premiums, on paper.
I’d even called a lawyer, the week before. Without telling Dwayne. A woman named Carol Ritter in Columbus who does farm law. I sat in my car in the co-op parking lot and told her everything.
She was kind about it. But she didn’t sugarcoat it.
“If he’s the named insured and the owner of the building, the proceeds are his,” she said. “Your rent agreement doesn’t give you a claim to them unless it says so in writing. Does it?”
“There’s no written agreement,” I said. “It’s family. It’s a handshake.”
She was quiet for a second.
“Then I’m sorry, Mrs. Bauer,” she said. “No lawyer’s pulling that money out of a poured slab. And even if there was a way,” she paused, “you’d be suing your husband’s father. On a family farm. I’ve seen what that does. You can’t sue your father and still have a father.”
Chapter Five: Hollow
So I stood in our empty barnyard and felt hollowed out.
That’s the only word I have for it. Like somebody had reached in and scooped out everything inside me and left the shell standing.
Every morning I’d go out to do chores and there’d be nothing there. Just a big square of bare dirt where the barn used to be, and the concrete footings sticking up out of it, and a pile of salvaged lumber we’d stacked by the machine shed.
The calves were living in a temporary shelter Dwayne threw together out of cattle panels and a tarp. It flapped all night in the wind. You could hear it from the house.
We’d lost more than a building.
The haymow had three hundred bales of last year’s alfalfa in it when it went down. All of it soaked and ruined. We had to buy hay to get the cows through to pasture. Two hundred and ten dollars a ton, from a man in Kearney.
Dwayne’s grandfather’s tools. A whole pegboard of them, some of them from the 1920s. We dug out maybe half. The rest were bent or broken or gone.
The Farmall Super C. Three winters of Dwayne’s evenings. Crushed under a beam.
And three calves.
We figured it up one night at the kitchen table. What it would cost to rebuild ourselves, without the insurance.
Pete Hanson came over and helped us. Pete’s a carpenter in Cedar Bluff, about sixty, who’s built half the barns and pole sheds in this county. He sat at our table with a yellow legal pad and a calculator.
“If you hire it all out,” he said, “you’re looking at a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty. Easy. Labor’s half of it.”
“We don’t have that,” Dwayne said.
“I know you don’t.” Pete tapped the pad. “But if you just bought the materials? Lumber, trusses, steel roof, siding, hardware? And did the work yourselves?” He wrote some numbers. “Forty-one thousand. Give or take.”
Forty-one thousand dollars.
We didn’t have that either. But we could borrow it. I went to Farm Credit in Columbus the next week and sat across from a loan officer named Dennis with thick glasses and a pocket protector. I brought my shoebox of records. Twenty-two years of them.
Dennis looked through it all for a long time.
“You keep very good books, Mrs. Bauer,” he said.
“I was a bookkeeper,” I said. “In Omaha. Before I married a farmer.”
He approved a forty-one-thousand-dollar operating loan, secured against our cattle and our machinery. Seven-point-two percent. Ten years.
Seven-point-two percent on money we shouldn’t have had to borrow.
