The Day the Road Raised Our Barn

The Phone Calls

I started calling that night, at the kitchen table, with the same phone book half our county still keeps in a drawer.

I did not call to complain about Vernon. I want that understood. I never once, on any of those calls, said a word against my father-in-law.

I just said we were putting the barn up ourselves, old style, in a day. I asked did they want to come, and could they bring what they had.

A barn raising is not a thing people do anymore. That is exactly why people wanted to do it.

Marv said yes before I finished the sentence.

Pete Hanson, who had quoted us the job, said he would come run the crew for free and bring his skid lift and his two boys.

He would not take a dime for any of it. “I’ll sell you the lumber at my cost,” Pete said, “and the rest is just a Saturday.”

The Hovde brothers said yes. The Ruuds said yes, and Dottie said she was doing the food whether I liked it or not.

Our pastor, Pastor Ken, said yes. He said he would say a word before they started if we wanted one, and we did.

The Klossner boys, who are not boys anymore but will be the Klossner boys until they die, said yes.

The man who runs the elevator said yes. Two fellows from Dwayne’s volunteer fire department said yes.

A woman I barely knew, who had bought eggs from me twice at the farmers market, heard about it somehow and called me and said yes.

By Thursday I had lost count somewhere past fifty. And I understood I had a different problem than I started with. I had to feed them.

You do not ask seventy people to lift your barn and then hand them a sleeve of crackers. My mother raised me better than that, and so did this whole county.

Feeding the crew is the one thing the family does at a barn raising. The neighbors bring the muscle. You bring the dinner. That is the deal, old as the ground.

So I baked. I baked Thursday night and all day Friday. I did eleven pans of bars and four coffee cakes and I browned twenty pounds of hamburger for the hotdish.

I boiled five dozen eggs for the morning. Dottie brought three more hotdishes and a dishpan of her potato salad. The Ruud girls brought buns.

Faith Lutheran sent two thirty-cup coffee makers and the long tables and a box of the heavy church forks that do not snap when you put them in a plate of ham.

Friday night I sat down at my own table at eleven o’clock with flour to my elbows, and I cried for the first time since the storm. Not sad crying.

I could not have told you then what kind it was.

I just sat there with the whole road about to show up in the morning, and it came out of me, and I let it.