The Barn the Adjuster Called Rotten
“I’m going to say so first,” I said. “I’ve been to the hill. There were eight of them at Marvin’s that night. I’m going to ask each of them to write down what they saw.”
She put her glasses back on and looked at me over them for a while.
“Then do it so it can’t be argued with,” she said. “The company’s answer will be that friends coached friends. The only reply to that is eight people who never heard each other. Same evening. Separate rooms. Each one writes the time, where he stood, what he saw and what he heard, signs it, dates it. Nobody reads anybody else’s. And Lloyd, don’t tell them what you want it to say.”
“I won’t.”
“Good. And watch Marvin. He tells everything a little better than it happened.”
I did not tell her the honest reason I had not asked them for a month. I had told myself they were busy with haying and wheat. The truth was that I am a man who helps other people, and a man like that gets proud of it.
Maxine seemed to know it anyway. “Lloyd Hanke,” she said at the door. “You have carried this neighborhood for forty years. Do you think a single one of them will feel burdened?”
I called Marvin Tucker that afternoon and stammered through what I needed. He is seventy-one and a man of few words, most of them about weather. “Wednesday at seven,” he said. “Lucille will make bars.” Then he hung up, and I stood in the yard with my face hot.
Marvin’s kitchen has a long oak table that Lucille’s grandfather made, and on that Wednesday it held eight chairs, two pans of lemon bars, a pot of coffee, and a stack of lined paper Lucille had set out without being asked.
I told them everything, the probe, the word rotted, the letter, the release, the January note. I told them the sill was soft and I had put it off, and if they had to say so to somebody they should.
“I’m not asking you to say a thing you don’t know,” I said. “Tell it exactly the way you saw it. Don’t help me. Don’t make it bigger. It has to be so plain nobody can say you were being kind.”
Nobody spoke. Then Lucille pushed the pan an inch toward me.
“Have a bar, Lloyd.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry.”
I took one. I could not have told you what it tasted like.
Arvid Davenport went first, because nobody would have dared go ahead of him. He is tall and bent, with hands like fence posts, and he had driven himself six miles in his old Mercury over his daughter’s objections.
“Seven forty-eight,” he said. “I looked at my watch. I’m a man who writes things down.”
“Your roof came off in one piece. Not collapsed. It came up off the walls whole, like a hat off a man’s head, and turned over the pivot and came down in Terry’s beans.”
“Half a mile,” said Terry Yates. “I paced it Monday morning because I didn’t believe it. Eleven hundred and some steps, and I’m not a short man.”
“And the walls?” I asked.
“Stood about three seconds after the roof went. Then the north side folded out and the south side went in. I heard the posts.” Marvin looked at his coffee. “It sounded like rifle shots, Lloyd. A line of them. I’ve heard rotten wood break, and it doesn’t sound like that.”