The Barn the Adjuster Called Rotten
One by one they told it. Nina Easley had counted forty seconds from the roof lifting to the last wall falling. Pete Hanrahan thought thirty. “Say what you counted,” I told him, and he said thirty. Joel Kuntz said the cloud was brown and full of tin.
Then I asked them to write it down, and I did what Maxine said. Lucille sent Marvin to the front room, Jerry to the porch, Nina to the dining room, and Pete out to his truck with a clipboard. Terry took the back step. Joel went to the cellar. Arvid dictated his to Joan, because his hand shook, with Lucille standing in the doorway to see that Joan wrote only what he said. Nobody read anybody else’s. Everybody signed, dated, and put down the time.
“They’ll say we’re neighbors,” Nina said. “They’ll say we love you.”
“We do,” said Lucille, flat as a weather report.
Then Pete Hanrahan cleared his throat. He is a stocky bachelor with a face like a closed gate, and I had heard him speak a full paragraph twice in my life.
“I’ve got pieces of your barn stacked at four field corners,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Not just me. Terry’s got some. Jerry. Joel. Whatever we turned up working the ground, we pulled to the end of the rows.” He looked at the table. “I figured you’d want them for something.”
I had been so busy hating a piece of paper that I had not noticed that for seven weeks the men I lived beside had been quietly picking my barn out of their fields and stacking it where I could find it.
It took two days and six trailers.
We went out the second Saturday in July, nine of us counting Joan, who drove the pickup. Brantley came on the strict understanding that he would carry nothing heavier than a chalk pencil, and he was put in charge of numbering. By Sunday evening we had brought in twenty-six timbers: posts, beams, a purlin, and two pieces of loft floor.
Arvid offered his machine shed, a big clean building with a concrete floor and good light. He swept it himself. We laid blue tarps in two long rows, and Brantley chalked a number on every piece while I stood over him with a tape and Joan’s phone, photographing each broken end with the tape laid across it.
What I saw was that every break was bright.
You have to have worked with timber to understand. Rotted wood doesn’t break, it crumbles. It goes soft and brown and punky and comes apart like old bread. Sound oak, when a hundred and twenty-five mile an hour wind snaps it, goes in long, pale, stringy splinters, bright as the day it was milled. The ends of those posts looked like the heads of brooms.
Marvin got down on one knee at the end of post six and took out his pocketknife. He pushed the blade into the broken end, at the heart. It would not go in the width of a fingernail.
“White oak,” he said. “That’ll outlive us all.”
“It didn’t.”
“It did until Sunday.”
We went down the rows with the knife and found two places on the whole frame that were soft. The north sill, which I knew about, and the bottom foot of the northeast corner post, which sat beside it and had caught the same water. Everything else was hard, dry, and bright. Twenty-six timbers. Two soft ends.