The Shed That Earned Its Keep

“Just till I pour a pad at home,” he said.

He did not pour a pad at home.

In 2019 he bought a hay wagon at a farm auction near Blunt, a flat rack on a four wheel running gear, because the church youth group wanted to do a hayride at the fall festival. They did the hayride. One time. Then he pulled the wagon in the big south door, could not get it turned, unhooked it crossways about ten feet inside, and said, “Just for now.”

The second boat came in 2021. It was an old sixteen foot aluminum fishing boat he bought off a widower in town for four hundred dollars, meaning to fix it up for the grandkids. He parked it beside the wagon.

And that was the south door. A wagon crossways and a boat beside it, and behind them, sixty feet of clean concrete that nothing with four wheels and a license plate could get to.

I know what a sensible person is thinking, because my daughter, Kim, has said it to me at least twice a year. Mom, there’s a north door.

There is. But the north door opens on the shelterbelt and the hay ground, and there is no lane to it and never was. To reach it in a car I would have to go out my own driveway, down the section line, through a wire gate and across a quarter mile of two track on gumbo. Anybody who has lived around Pierre knows what gumbo is when it’s wet. And that door had not been rolled since the week of the funeral. The bottom track was packed with nine years of dirt and a volunteer elm had come up in front of it as thick as my wrist.

A freed door would not have changed that. The door was an hour’s work. The gumbo was the trouble, and no car I could afford was going to cross a quarter mile of it twice a day from March to November.

The south door was the only one a car could get to, and my brother’s wagon and his boat were parked across it. That is the whole of it.

So my car sat in the yard.

It had not always. Len built a lean-to down the east side of the shed, twenty feet by sixty, open to the morning, and for years that was where our pickup and my car lived. But he roofed it with tin off his dad’s old barn, to save money in a year we did not have any, and by the time he died it was more nail holes than tin. I parked under it anyway until a wind in 2020 took two sheets off. After that I parked by the house.

I paid the taxes on that place every April and every October. I paid the insurance on the shed and what was in it. I paid the light bill from the electric cooperative, which runs about forty dollars a month on the shed meter whether I flip a switch out there or not.

Nine years. Alone. And I never said a word about any of it to Vince, because every time I got the words lined up, I saw him at my table at four in the morning with his coat still on.

You do not hand a man like that a bill. That is what I believed.