The Dance I Threw in the Shed

The Barn He Left Me

The barn was built in 1931 by a man named Alvin Dietrich. My grandfather bought it with the eighty acres under it in 1958 and never once stopped telling the story of the day he signed.

It is a hip-roof barn, what some people call a gambrel. The roof breaks halfway down so the loft is big enough to swing a rope in.

There are not many of them left standing in our part of central Illinois. People let them go.

A barn like that costs money to keep up and will not hold a combine. So one by one they sag, and then one spring they are a pile of gray boards and a foundation full of raspberry canes.

My grandfather would not let his go. He put a steel roof on it in 1994.

He painted the rest himself every few years, up a ladder into his eighties, until my father made him stop.

The harvest dance started with him. The first one I remember, I was maybe six, up in the loft on a hay bale with a paper cup of cider, watching the grown people turn in the lantern light below me.

There was no admission. There was a coffee can by the door.

You put in what you could. If you could not, you put in nothing, and nobody looked.

That can bought the oats for the next year’s hayride and the propane for the heater. It bought a ham for whoever on our road had a hard winter.

My grandfather kept a little book of who got the ham. I found it after he died. It went back forty years.

It was a spiral notebook, the kind you buy at the drugstore for a quarter. Each line had a year, a name, and sometimes a short note.

1974, the Ostrander boy, father in the hospital. 1988, the Vances, hail took the beans. The handwriting got shakier as the pages went on, but the lines never stopped.

He never showed that book to anybody. He never told a soul he kept it. The whole point of the thing was that nobody knew.

That is the difference I did not have words for yet, standing in my truck watching Barry make change. My grandfather spent his life making sure a man could take without being seen to take. Barry had set up a table so a man could not get in without being seen to pay.

He left me the barn and the eighty acres around it. Not my father, who had passed by then. Not my uncle. Not Barry. Me.

His will said the home place goes to Neil because Neil is the one who still comes out to it.

I did come out to it. Every Sunday for the last six years of his life I drove out, and we sat in the barn on two buckets, and he told me the same stories.

I let him. A man’s stories are the inventory of his life, and he was running low.

So when I say the barn is mine, I do not mean it the way you own a truck. I mean I am the one holding it for the next person.

That is a different kind of owning. Barry never once understood it.