The Red Paint on My Barn

Then I went around to the east end and shined the light up at the haymow door, and I found the thing that made me sit down in the wet grass.

Arlo’s father had painted the barn himself in the summer of 1958. When he finished, he climbed up and painted his initials in white above the haymow door, with the year under them.

E.J. 1958. Two letters and four numbers, about a foot tall, a little crooked because he did them from a ladder with a sash brush.

Arlo used to lift Brad up on his shoulders in the yard to see them. “That’s your grandpa,” he’d say. “He was up there when he was older than I am now.”

Brad would wave at the letters. He was three, maybe four. He thought his grandpa lived up there.

The letters were gone. There was nothing above the haymow door but smooth, flat gray.

I sat in that grass a while. I am not ashamed to say I cried, and it was not about the color of a barn.

It was about the photographer coming Monday. It was about my son deciding, in the eleven days I sat beside his father, that his father was not coming home.

And it was about how close he might be to right. I did not know yet if Arlo would walk. I did not know if he would ever say my name again.

When I got up, my slacks were soaked through, and I had decided something.

I was not going to call the crew in Worthington and yell. I was not going to call Brad back and say the hard things I had ready.

I was going to paint it back.

I went inside and found the old tape measure in Arlo’s desk drawer, and I went back out at eleven o’clock at night and measured that barn by flashlight.

Seventy-two feet long. Thirty-six feet wide. Sixteen feet up the walls to where the roof starts, and the big gambrel ends going up another twenty feet to the peak.

I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and a piece of the envelope from the electric bill. I am not a painter, but I kept the books on this farm for thirty-six years, and I can do arithmetic.

It came to somewhere around forty-five hundred square feet of siding, not counting the doors.

Then I took a shower and slept four hours in my own bed, and it was the best sleep I’d had since August.

At seven Friday morning I was in the parking lot of the farm store in Marshall when they unlocked the doors.

The paint counter was run by an older man named Gene, who has been mixing paint there since before they built the new store. He has sold Arlo fence paint and stock tank paint for twenty years.

“Carol,” he said. “How’s Arlo?”

“Working hard,” I said. “Gene, I need barn paint. Red. The real red.”

He looked at my numbers on the envelope and pushed his glasses up. “That’s the old Jensen barn. The one on the county road.”

“It was red until Tuesday.”

He knew. Of course he knew. Everybody on that county road had driven by it, and half of them had probably called him to ask what in the world.

“Rough-sawn boards drink paint,” he said, and tapped my envelope. “Figure a hundred fifty to two hundred square feet a gallon, one coat. Going red over fresh gray, one good coat will cover if you back-brush it.”