The Red Paint on My Barn
“So thirty gallons?”
“Thirty if nobody spills. Get forty. You’ll have kids, I’m guessing?”
I hadn’t told him that. I hadn’t told anybody that yet.
“You’ll have kids,” he said again, and started pulling five-gallon pails off the pallet.
Eight pails of barn red at a hundred seventy-seven dollars each. Two gallons of white for the trim. Rollers with the thick one-inch nap for rough wood, extension poles, brushes, trays, a box of rags, and a case of drop cloths.
It came to a little over seventeen hundred dollars. I paid it out of the household account, the one Arlo and I have kept at the same bank in Tracy since 1989.
The boy who loaded the pails into the back of Arlo’s pickup was maybe seventeen. He asked if I was painting a barn.
“Back,” I said.
He didn’t ask what I meant, and I didn’t explain.
I sat in the pickup in the parking lot and called Nate.
Nate is the youth pastor at our Methodist church in town. He is twenty-nine, with a beard he is still growing into, and he drives a minivan with a dent in the sliding door that the kids are not allowed to mention.
He had come to the hospital twice to pray with Arlo. The second time Arlo held his hand with his good left hand and would not let go.
“Nate,” I said, “how many kids could you get on a Saturday, all day, if I fed them?”
He did not ask what for. He had driven past the barn on Wednesday. Everybody had.
“Let me make some calls,” he said. “I’ll ring you back.”
He called back in an hour. “Twenty-two,” he said. “And four dads with extension ladders. And I need to tell you how we’re going to do this so nobody’s mom calls me Sunday.”
I liked him a great deal right then.
Nate had rules, and he read them to me over the phone like a man who had thought about this before.
Every kid would have the church’s activity form signed by a parent. Nobody under sixteen would go up a ladder at all. They would roll the bottom eight feet from the ground with poles, and there was plenty of bottom eight feet to go around.
The older kids could work ladders, but only to the height of the first floor, and only with Nate running the ladders and watching every one the whole time it had a kid on it. No kid would ever be on a ladder alone.
“And the peaks?” I asked. “Those gambrel ends go up thirty-six feet.”
“Nobody’s going up there on a ladder,” Nate said. “Not a kid, not me. You need a lift.”
So I called Merle.
Merle and his wife, Pam, have farmed the place across the county road from us for as long as we have farmed ours. Merle and Arlo have traded work every fall for thirty years.
Merle has been to the hospital three times. He drove his own combine over and started on our soybeans the day after the stroke, without asking anybody, and he will not let me pay him.
“I’ll rent a lift from the rental place in Marshall,” Merle said. “The towable one, forty-five foot. I’ll run it myself. Me and Nate and Mike Olson. Nobody else goes up in the basket.”