The Day the Road Raised Our Barn

What The Storm Took

I want to tell it the way it happened. Then you will understand why seventy people came, and why one man did not.

We farm a quarter section in the southern part of Minnesota, corn and beans, same as everybody out our way. Dwayne grew up on it. His daddy, Vernon, grew up on it.

The barn that went down was raised by Dwayne’s grandfather in 1948. There was a date carved in the sill beam.

I used to run my thumb over it when I was carrying a bucket of feed and feeling sorry for myself about something small.

The tornado was a bad one, the worst our township had seen in forty years. The county siren went off at 4:15 on a Thursday afternoon.

Dwayne and I took the three kids down into the cellar under the house. We sat on the old church pew we keep down there and listened to it come.

It sounded like a freight train, the way everybody tells you it will. I had always thought that was a worn-out thing people said, until I heard it myself.

When we came up, the house still stood.

The windows on the west side were blown in, and the big silver maple my mother-in-law planted when Dwayne was a baby lay across the driveway with its roots in the air.

But the barn was just gone. Flat. Not scattered across the county the way you see on the news.

Folded down into itself, the roof laid over the walls like a hand closing.

The dairy had been out of that barn for fifteen years.

But we kept the calves in there in the cold months, and the shop was in the lean-to on the south end.

The haymow still held last year’s small squares. And all of Dwayne’s grandfather’s hand tools hung on the wall where they had hung since before I was born.

I stood in the yard that evening with my phone, taking pictures for the insurance the way you are supposed to. I could not make myself feel the size of it.

A barn is not a building. A barn is the middle of a farm. Everything on a place like ours turns around the barn the way a wheel turns around the hub.

And ours was lying in the mud with the rafters snapped like somebody had stepped on a basket. That night Dwayne called his father.

Vernon lives three miles up the road, on the home place, in the house he was born in. I heard my husband say, “Dad, it’s the whole barn.”

I heard the long quiet on the other end. Then Vernon said he would be over in the morning to look.

He came. He walked the wreck with his hands in his pockets.

He said it was a shame, and he said we were lucky the house held, and he said a few true things that a man says.

Then he got in his truck and drove back up the road. I thought at the time that he was shaken, the way we all were.