The Red Paint on My Barn

Gene had been right about back-brushing. The kids would roll a section, and then somebody would come behind with a wide brush and work the paint down into the rough grain of the boards.

The gray disappeared under it. You could watch it go, board by board, like a shadow sliding off a field when the sun comes out.

By ten o’clock the bottom of the whole south wall was red, and it was the right red. Not fire engine. Not brick. Barn red, the deep old color that looks almost brown in the evening.

Some of the kids I knew. The Peterson twins. Hannah from the Dairy Queen. A tall quiet boy named Tyler whose grandfather used to haul our cattle to Worthington.

Most of them I did not know at all. They were somebody’s grandchildren from church. They had never set foot on our place, and they had given up a Saturday in September to paint a barn for a woman they had never met.

At noon the women from the church kitchen came out with a roaster of sloppy joes, two pans of bars, and a cooler of lemonade. They set it up on a sheet of plywood across two sawhorses.

Twenty-two teenagers sat in the grass with paint on their arms and in their hair and on their sneakers, and they ate like harvest hands. One of the Peterson twins ate five sloppy joes. I counted.

By the time they went back to work, the whole south side was red, top to bottom. Merle had finished the east peak from the lift.

Somebody had brought a speaker, and they sang along with it, something I did not know, loud and off key, all of them together.

A little after one, a girl found me by the pickup, where I was pouring the last of the fourth pail into a tray.

She was maybe fifteen, small, with a red bandana over her hair and red paint up to both elbows. Her name was Emma. Her grandmother sings alto in our choir.

“Mrs. Jensen,” she said, “can I ask you something? Pastor Nate said there used to be writing up over the little door. On the end. What was it?”

I set the bucket down.

I told her about Arlo’s father, Earl, painting the barn in the summer of 1958. About him climbing up when he was done and putting his initials and the year above the haymow door with a sash brush.

I told her about Arlo lifting Brad onto his shoulders in the yard to see them, and Brad waving, and thinking his grandpa lived up there.

I didn’t mean to tell her so much. She just stood there with her paint-red arms and listened, the way young people almost never do anymore, and it all came out.

When I finished she didn’t say anything at all.

She looked up at the east end, where Merle had just painted over the place with fresh red. Then she walked over to Nate and asked him something, and he went to talk to Merle.

I went back to stirring paint. I did not think about it again for a while. There was too much to do.

By three o’clock the west end was done, and the north side was half done, and the kids were slowing down. They were sunburned and tired and still singing, but quieter.