The Barn Dance That Built a House

I met Nate Dettmer when he was nine years old, sitting in the chair beside my desk with a split lip and blood on his shirt. He had hit another boy in the lunchroom. He wouldn’t say why, not to the principal, not to his mother, not to me when I brought him an ice pack and a paper cup of water. He took the three-day suspension without a word.

Three weeks later a girl in his class told her teacher what happened. The other boy had been needling her about her father, who was in the county jail that winter, and Nate had told him to quit.

When he came back I asked him about it. He looked at his shoes. “She didn’t ask me to,” he said. “I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

That is Nate, and he has been that way ever since. He will haul your cattle out of a ditch at two in the morning and refuse the twenty you hold out for gas. Giving is easy for him. Taking is a thing he never learned.

His father, Vern, died in the machine shed four years ago, and Nate took over the home place, a hundred and sixty acres of corn and beans and thirty head of cows. Bree had left her billing job at the vet clinic when Josie was born in June. They were making it. They were not making it with anything left over.

The casseroles started Tuesday. By Wednesday there were so many in Bree’s parents’ freezer in Denver that Pat Lindahl called to ask whether the church had a spare one. Gift cards came. Coats came, and bags of children’s clothes.

On Thursday the Lions Club sent an envelope with five hundred dollars in it. They meant it kindly. Nate wrote them a thank-you note on the back of a church bulletin and mailed the check back.

Lorraine told me the rest. He came into the hardware store on Friday for a box of staples, and she asked, as gently as anyone has ever asked a man anything, whether the family was all right for money.

“We’ll manage,” he told her. He paid for the staples. He said thank you for asking. He left.

I went to see Gary Sieck at Farm Bureau the Monday after. Gary has insured half of Bremer County since before I knew how to type. He pulled out a yellow legal pad and drew me a picture.

The farmhouse had been insured for a hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars, which was fair when Vern bought the policy in 2011. To build the same house today, with the new septic and the wiring brought up to code, would cost two hundred and seventeen thousand six hundred, according to Clem Oltrogge, a builder out of Tripoli who had walked the site with a tape. Then there was the deductible. The contents of a house are paid at what the old things are worth, not what new ones cost, and a six-year-old’s winter boots are worth almost nothing to an adjuster and about forty dollars to a mother.

He wrote the number at the bottom of the page and circled it. Sixty-one thousand, four hundred dollars. That was the distance between a burned-out lot and a house with a roof on it.

“They can borrow it,” I said.

“They’re already carrying the operating loan for spring seed. The bank won’t write another note on a farm that burned.” He tapped the circle with his pen. “It’s usually the kids who pay, Colleen.”

I drove home with the radio off.