The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

The Initials

There is one more thing about the barn, and I need to tell it right.

When my grandfather built the barn in 1961, he painted his initials and the year on the big south wall in white letters four feet high. R.T. 1961. Every seven years when he painted the house, he painted those letters again. The last time he did it, he was eighty-four and my dad held the ladder and yelled at him the whole time.

By the time I moved out there, you could barely see them. The barn was more pink than red. The letters were just a ghost.

On Sunday afternoon, the ninth day, after the house was done and everybody had gone home, Addie came and found me in the kitchen.

“Mama,” she said. “Can I paint Great-Grandpa’s letters?”

I looked at her. She had a half-pint can of white and one of the little brushes in her hand, and she had clearly been planning this for a while.

“Those letters are way up high, Addie.”

“Grandpa Gene can hold the ladder.”

My dad was sitting on the back step finishing a cup of coffee. He had heard every word. He put the cup down on the step without saying anything, and he went to the barn and got the short ladder, the eight-footer, and he leaned it against the south wall.

It was not tall enough to reach the top of the letters. So he picked her up.

My father is sixty-three years old and has a bad shoulder from a calf that kicked him in 2014. He picked up my eight-year-old daughter and held her on his hip at the top of that ladder, one hand on the barn, one arm around her, and she traced every one of her great-grandpa’s letters in white paint with a brush no bigger than her finger.

The R took her a long time. The T was easier. Then the dot, then the one, the nine, the six, the one.

When she was done, my dad set her down on the ladder rung and she climbed down by herself. He stayed up there. I could see his back. He did not turn around for a while.

“Grandpa,” Addie said from the ground. “Did I do it right?”

“You did it right,” my dad said, still facing the barn. His voice did a thing I had heard it do exactly once before, at the funeral. “He’d have said you did it better than him.”

I took a picture of that too. Josh has it on the wall of his shop now. He says it’s the only picture he’s ever seen that makes him cry on purpose.

That night the kids slept in Roy Talley’s house for the first time. Addie in her honeydew room, Wyatt in his blue one, June in the crib Dad had carried up the stairs on his good shoulder. Before I went up, I went out on the porch and switched on the light.

I sent Josh a picture of it. He was still at Fort Bliss, an hour behind us, and he answered in under a minute.

“There it is,” he wrote.