The Kitchen Built From Grandpa’s Barn

Winter

I built boxes all winter. It is not exciting work.

You rip sheets of plywood on the table saw, cut dados for the bottoms and backs, glue and screw them square, and stack them along the wall of the shop like a row of empty crates.

I worked from about seven to ten most nights after school, once I had graded what needed grading.

Saturdays I could get in six or seven hours. Sundays I stayed out of the shop, because Megan asked me to, and because I was tired.

Owen started coming out in February. At first he just sat on a stool and did his homework at the end of my bench, with his headphones on.

Then one night he took them out and asked what a dado was. I showed him.

After that he came out most nights. He is a quiet kid, more like his mother than me.

He did not talk much, but he watched everything, and he had steady hands. By March he was sanding parts and labeling them with a carpenter’s pencil.

One night he asked me, without looking up from what he was doing, “Are you building this because of what Grandma said?”

I thought about how to answer that. “I’m building it because I promised your mom a long time ago,” I said. “Grandma just reminded me.”

He nodded and went back to work. A few minutes later he said, “She shouldn’t have said it in front of everybody, though.”

“No,” I said. “But she’s your grandma, and she loves your mom. People say things they wish they hadn’t.”

Diane did not come out to the house much that winter. It was not a fight, exactly. Nobody had raised their voice.

She just called Megan a little less, and when she came for Sunday dinner in February she talked to the kids and to Megan and said about six words to me.

Megan noticed. “She knows she was out of line,” Megan said. “She’ll never say so. That’s how she’s always been. She’d rather go quiet for a year than say she’s sorry for a minute.”

The storm

On the nineteenth of May, a line of storms came across eastern Iowa a little after supper.

We spent forty minutes in the basement with the weather radio going and the dog shaking under the stairs. The wind sounded like a freight train going over the house.

We came up to branches all over the yard and the power out, and nothing worse. We were lucky. Two miles north, they were not.

Megan’s grandfather, Merle Hollis, had farmed a quarter section north of us for almost fifty years. He was Diane’s father.

He sold the place in 1998, when his knees gave out, to a family named Pruitt, and he died in 2009. Megan had been his favorite, and everybody knew it.

The Pruitts had kept the old barn standing because their kids showed sheep in it.

It was a big gable barn with a haymow, red once, mostly gray now, built in 1948 by Merle and his two brothers, the summer he married Megan’s grandmother.

The storm laid it flat. The whole east wall came down first, Tom Pruitt told me later, and then the roof folded in on top of it like somebody had stepped on a cardboard box.

Megan heard about it the next morning from her cousin. She stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and cried. I had not seen her cry like that since her grandpa’s funeral.

“I used to play in that haymow,” she said. “Grandpa had a rope swing up there. Mom had it before me. She told me she used to sit on the milk stool and watch him milk when she was little, and talk his ear off the whole time.”

I drove up there that afternoon. Tom Pruitt was standing in his yard looking at the pile with his hands in his back pockets. He had a skid steer parked next to it, ready to go.

“I hate it,” he said, when I walked up. “I know what it meant to your wife’s family. But I can’t leave it sitting there for the kids to climb on, and there’s no insurance on a barn that old. I was going to push it into a pile and burn it once it dries out.”

I looked at the boards. Siding, mostly, one by ten and one by twelve, the old red paint worn down to almost nothing and the wood under it gone silver gray.

Some of it was broken. A lot of it was not.

“Would you mind if I took some of it first?” I said.

Tom looked at me like I had asked him if I could have his garbage. “Take all you want,” he said. “Take all of it. You’d be doing me a favor.”