The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

Grandpa’s House

My grandfather was Roy Talley, and he farmed a quarter section seven miles northeast of town for fifty-one years. Wheat, a few cows, and a garden big enough to feed half the Methodist church. He died two winters before, in his own bed, at ninety-one.

The house went to my dad, Gene, who was his only son. Dad had his own place four miles farther out, and he had spent two years walking through Grandpa’s house once a month, checking the pipes, and coming back out without deciding anything.

“You want to live in it,” Dad said on the phone. It was not a question.

“For ten months. Maybe longer.”

There was a long pause. I could hear his radio in the background, the farm report out of Tulsa, cattle prices.

“I’ll meet you out there at four,” he said.

I picked the kids up from school and day care and drove out. The road turns to gravel two miles past the county line, and then it is pasture and bois d’arc hedgerows and the old Talley mailbox with the dent where somebody’s hay wagon caught it in 1988.

The house sat on a little rise with the barn behind it. Two stories, white once, now more of a gray with the white showing through in patches. A wraparound porch that sagged on the north end. A red barn with the paint gone pink and the old letters on the side so faded you had to know they were there.

Dad’s pickup was already in the drive. He was standing on the porch with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the front door like it might say something.

“It’s dusty,” he warned me.

It was more than dusty. The air inside smelled like old mice and closed windows and Grandma’s cedar chest. The furniture was under sheets. There was a calendar on the kitchen wall still on the January Grandpa died, from the feed store, with a picture of a red tractor.

Addie walked through the front room without saying anything. June sat down on the floor and started drawing in the dust with her finger.

“Power’s off,” Dad said. “I had the co-op pull the meter after the funeral. Propane tank’s got maybe a third in it. Well pump went out last summer, I think. I never got around to it.”

“Can it be fixed?”

He looked at me sideways. “Kayla, everything can be fixed. Question is how much and how fast.”

“How fast can it be?”

He walked through the house slowly, opening cabinet doors, turning faucets that gave nothing. In the back bedroom he stood for a while in front of the window that looked out on the barn.

“Your grandpa painted this house every seven years whether it needed it or not,” he said. “Inside and out. Said a house that’s painted is a house that’s loved.” He cleared his throat. “He’s about two years overdue.”

“So we paint it.”

“So we paint it,” Dad said. “What’s your deadline?”

“Ed’s new rent starts April first. I want to be out before then. I want the kids sleeping out here by the end of the month.”

Dad looked at the feed store calendar on the wall, which was a thing he did when he was counting. It was the fifth of March. He had heifers calving for the next two weeks, the co-op needed time to set a meter, and the propane man only came out on Tuesdays.

“If we start in earnest on the twenty-first,” he said, “that’s nine days of real work before the end of the month. Maybe ten.”

“Nine,” I said.

“Nine,” he agreed, and went out to his truck.