The Barn the Adjuster Called Rotten
I did not hide those two. I put them first in the row, where a man walking in would see them before he saw anything else. If somebody was going to argue the sill, it was going to be me.
Further down, Marvin crouched at a joint where a beam had pulled loose from its post. A peg was still in the hole, sheared off flush on both faces, white inside as a split apple.
“Dad drove that one,” he said. “With a cigarette in his mouth, so you know it’s a good peg. A peg in punky wood works loose like a bad tooth. You can pull it with your fingers. That one had to be cut.”
Arvid came along the row slowly, one hand on each timber as he passed, as if he were counting cattle. At the first post he stopped. “I held the plumb line when this went up,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-four. I was twenty-nine.”
Brantley held the end of the tape for me and read the numbers back in his schoolroom voice. When we got to the soft ones he chalked a small star on each, because he is eight, and I let him.
I called the adjuster on Monday. It was not strategy. It was my mother’s old rule: give a man the chance to do the right thing before you show him he didn’t.
“Mr. Dalrymple, it’s Lloyd Hanke.”
He sounded surprised. “Mr. Hanke. I’m sorry, I don’t have anything new.”
“I do. I’d like you to come back and look at the posts. Not the sill. I’ve got twenty-six pieces of that frame laid out in a shed, and I’d like you to put your probe in every one.”
“The report is filed, Mr. Hanke. Anything further would have to go through the formal appeal.”
“Then I’ll be at the Davenport place on Elm Creek Road Thursday at ten, if you change your mind.” I hung up before he could answer.
Maxine called Tuesday. She had put the eight statements in one envelope and her March photographs in another and phoned the regional claims office in Salina, asking for the manager by name, Stuart Whitcomb. She read him the first statement, then the second. Then she stopped and said, “Mr. Whitcomb, there are six more.”
There was a long pause. “Mrs. Oberg, are you telling me eight people watched this roof come off?”
“I am,” Maxine said. “And I walked that barn every March for forty-one years.”
“I’ll drive out Thursday at ten,” Whitcomb said. “Quietly. I’d prefer there not be a crowd.”
“There won’t be a crowd. And bring the adjuster. He should see it too.”
I had told Terry and Jerry and Joel to stay home. They were not happy about it. I wanted the adjuster able to say what he had to say in a room where nobody was watching to see if he would.
On Thursday I woke at four and could not go back to sleep.
At 9:40, a white car came slow up Elm Creek Road. We were waiting at the door of the shed, six of us: Joan beside me, Maxine in her blazer, Marvin, Pete with his arms folded, and Arvid in his Sunday coat, because he had said that was what he wore to be a witness.