The Day the Road Raised Our Barn

A Plate In His Hands

I do not know what made me do what I did next. I have thought about it a great deal.

I could have let him stand there. I could have let the shame have him. Part of me, the Tuesday-in-the-feed-aisle part, wanted to.

He had taken the roof off our farm to put one over his own tools. He had driven past twice.

He deserved to stand alone at that post with seventy witnesses and feel every ounce of it.

But I looked at him. That stiff old back, that gray head bent down against a post his money should have bought.

And I thought about my three kids who call him Grandpa.

I thought about Ruth.

I thought about what Pastor Ken had said off the loader bucket, that a barn is a prayer you build because you believe there will be a next year.

And I thought: you do not get a next year by poisoning this one.

So I made up a plate. I did it without deciding to. My hands just did it, the way they had made up a hundred plates that day.

A scoop of Dottie’s hotdish, a spoon of potato salad, two of the ham buns, a lemon bar on the side.

I carried it across the yard, past all of them, and I came up next to Vernon at the post.

He turned his head when he felt me there. His eyes were wet and red and he looked eighty years old, though he was not quite seventy.

He opened his mouth. I think he was going to say something, explain something, build one more wall out of one more true thing.

I did not let him. I did not want his words, and I did not have any of my own that would not break the day.

I just held the plate up to him, between us, and I did not say a word.

He looked at the plate. He looked at me. And something went out of him, all at once, the way the air goes out of a thing.

He took it. His hands were shaking and the fork rattled on the plate.

And then Vernon Lindqvist stood there in the middle of his son’s barnyard, in front of seventy neighbors, and he ate.

Standing up. He did not sit down at a table. I do not think he felt he had the right to sit, and nobody offered, and that was correct.

He stood by the post with the plate in his hand and he ate every bite of it, slow, with the tears running down into his gray whiskers and him not wiping them.

Nobody watched him do it.

Our people had the decency to look at their own plates and let a broken man eat in peace.

When the plate was empty he set it down on the end of the food table, careful, the way you set down something that is not yours.

And then he did not get back in his truck.

He walked over to where Pete Hanson was pulling his gloves back on, and he said something to Pete that I could not hear.

Pete handed him a pair of gloves out of the lift, and Vernon put them on his shaking hands.

When the break was over and the crew went back up, my father-in-law was down on the ground with the cutoffs and the leftover steel, stacking, carrying.

He did the old-man jobs a man his age can still do, and he worked the rest of the afternoon, and he did not say ten words. Dwayne saw him there.

The two of them ended up on the same end of a sheet of steel late in the day, father and son, one up the ladder and one holding it.