The For Sale Sign In My Yard
By nine fifty five there were six trucks parked along my gravel lane and in front of my house, and not one soul was there to buy anything, and nobody had asked anybody to lie about why they’d come, and nobody needed to, because on our road a man does not need a reason to stop by a neighbor’s place on a Saturday morning. That is simply what a road like ours is for.
Rick Satterfield pulled in at nine fifty eight in a clean white SUV with his name on the door, and behind him came a second car, a young couple I did not recognize, nicely dressed for a farm visit in the way that told me they did not spend a lot of their lives around farms.
Rick got out first and I watched him take in the trucks lining my lane, watched something shift behind his eyes as he did the math.
“Mrs. Harmon,” he said, careful, professional. “I wasn’t told you’d be having company.”
“Folks were already stopping by,” I said, which was true in every particular and misleading in exactly none.
The young couple introduced themselves as Todd and Abby, from Indianapolis, looking for some acreage, they said, maybe horses someday, maybe just the quiet. They were polite. They shook my hand. I want to say clearly that I did not for one second blame them for any of it. They were not villains in my story. They were simply two people who wanted land and did not know yet whose land it actually was.
LeRoy Krantz did not wait for an introduction. He walked straight past Rick, past me, out to the pole barn, and put one flat hand against the gray weathered wood of its side wall the way you’d put a hand on the shoulder of an old friend.
“Come see this,” he said to Todd, not unkindly, just certain that Todd would want to.
Todd went. Abby went. I went too, and so did half the road.
“Her daddy built this in three days,” LeRoy said, nodding at me without quite looking away from the barn. “April of 1965. Palm Sunday tornadoes took the old one clean off its stones, took half the Osters’ hog house too, same storm. I was twenty nine years old and I handed Virgil Harmon nails for three straight days while he framed this thing up by lantern light the last night, because the man would not stop working once he got the notion he could beat the rain coming back. I was at his funeral eleven years ago. I expect to be at mine before I’m done talking about this barn, but I wanted somebody young to hear it before I go.”
Abby had her hand over her mouth. Todd looked at the sixty year old wood like he was seeing it differently than he had five minutes before.