The Barn the Adjuster Called Rotten
He was right. I drove home with the radio off, and somewhere along the county line I understood that I had run out of ordinary ways to be right.
That night I went out and stood where the barn had been. The yard light threw a long yellow square over the splinters. I picked up the end of a broken post and put my nose to it. Cut oak, clean and sweet and raw.
I thought: he says it fell because it was rotten. Rotten wood does not smell like that.
And for the first time in a month, I thought properly about the hill.
I did not call anybody yet. First I wanted to know what I was asking them to swear to. Saturday I drove from Marvin’s tailgate spot to my yard light with the odometer running: five-tenths of a mile and two-tenths more. I stood on the hill at a quarter to eight in the evening, the hour it happened, and the whole Hanke bottom lay in plain light, the sun still well up over the west timber. A man standing there could not have missed the barn if he had tried.
Monday I called the weather service office in Wichita and asked for the damage survey on my place. They sent it to Joan’s niece, who printed it at the library. EF2. Estimated winds of 125 miles an hour. Path three hundred yards wide. Touchdown at the north fence line of the Hanke property at 7:46 in the evening.
Then I went to see Maxine Oberg.
Maxine has the agency on Main Street in Lindahl, between the hardware and the old Rexall that is a tax office now. Her husband Ted started it in 1979, and when he died she kept the doors open and the coffeepot on. She is sixty-three, wears a blazer every day of the week, and knows more about who owns what in this county than the recorder does.
She slid a sheet across the desk, from the company’s regional claims office. It asked the producing agent to confirm, for the file, that the barn “was observed to be in poor or deteriorated condition at the time of her most recent inspection.” There was a line at the bottom for her signature.
“They sent you this,” I said.
“They did.” She took off her glasses. “I’m their agent, Lloyd. They pay me a commission on every policy, and if I get crosswise with a claims office I hear about it at renewal. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to sign. Nobody would have blamed me.”
“What did you do?”
“I wrote back one word. In the space where my signature goes.” She almost smiled. “I wrote it large.”
“What was the word?”
“No.”
She opened a folder. “Every March for forty-one years, Ted and then I have driven out to every farm we insure and walked it. We write notes. Here is what I wrote about your place, with photographs.”
There was the barn, whole, with its tin roof bright. There was the north sill, close up, with a ruler held against it and a dark, spongy patch two feet wide. Under it, in Maxine’s neat hand: North sill soft, two ft, from downspout. Advise repair. Posts and beams sound. Tapped all bents with hammer. Ring true.
“I told you to fix that sill,” she said. “Twice.”
“You did.”
“I’m not saying it to be hard. I’m saying it because they will put it in front of you, and you’d better say so first.”