The Day the Road Raised Our Barn

Saturday Morning

They started coming at 6:45, headlights down the gravel in the gray light, one truck and then two and then a line of them.

Pete Hanson got there first with the skid lift already on the trailer and a thermos the size of a milk can.

By seven there were twenty men standing in my yard in the dew with gloves on and coffee in them.

They looked at the slab and the lumber and talked it over the way men talk a job over before they touch it. Slow, with their hands in their back pockets.

Pastor Ken stood up on the loader bucket so they could all see him, and he said a short prayer. He did not make it long.

He thanked God for the hands that were there, and he asked that no one get hurt.

He said that a barn is a kind of prayer too, a thing you build because you believe there will be a next year to put a crop in it.

Then he said amen and got down. The amen was still in the air when the first boards started moving.

I had never seen anything like it, and I have not since. By 7:40 the first truss was up. By nine o’clock the frame stood, all of it.

The whole skeleton of a forty by sixty pole barn against the sky, and men were walking the top plate like it was a sidewalk.

By eleven they were putting steel on the roof.

A chain of them handed sheets up, and the sound of the screw guns was like a field full of locusts. I ran food the whole time.

Dottie had the table and I ran the yard, carrying out thermoses and bars and jugs of water. A working man drinks more than you think, and it was warming up.

The kids ran too. My oldest, Dwayne Junior, was eleven that summer.

He carried screws and water and anything a man handed him, and he was so proud to be useful that he glowed.

And all morning, up on that frame, my husband worked like a man set free. I watched him laughing with Pete Hanson about something I could not hear.

I had not seen Dwayne laugh since April. The barn going up was pulling something back into him that the storm and his father had pulled out.

I stood by the food table with a dishtowel in my hands, and I thanked God for every truck in that line.