The Barn Our Gravel Road Built

“He said it’s his building on his ground and his policy. He said his shed’s torn up too and he’s waited thirty years for a real shop. He said he’d get to ours next year.”

“Next year,” I said. Not angry. I was just trying to see it. Next year meant no barn this winter.

It meant forty bales of hay bought somewhere and stored out under a tarp, and three horses with a windbreak made of pallets.

Jory said, “Iris, I know.” Then, before I could ask it, he said the thing I already knew he would say.

“Legally it’s his money. And I’m not going to take my own dad to court. I farm with him every day. He’s all the family I’ve got left on that side.”

I reached over and took the cap out of his hands and set it on the table.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to be the kind of man who would. That’s not who I married.”

He let out a breath like he had been holding it since the co-op.

Then he said, quieter, “He’s not right since Mom. You know that. He sits in that house. I think the shop is the only thing he’s looked forward to in three years.”

I did know that. I had watched Rollie at Wilma’s funeral, standing at the graveside in the March wind with his hat in his hands and no idea where to put them.

I had watched him eat cold supper alone at church potlucks since.

That did not make a barn. But it made it hard to be anything but sad about him, and I decided right there at my kitchen table that sad was all I would let myself be.

Winter was coming either way. Thirty cows need hay under a roof.

So we got out the savings book. We had twelve thousand dollars put aside, money we had been saving four years for a newer truck.

Jory looked at it and said, “Well, the old truck runs,” and that was the end of the truck.

The next morning I called the lumberyard in McPherson. A 40 by 60 pole barn kit, posts and trusses and girts and steel, came to $24,800 delivered.

The concrete for the post footings and a slab down the center alley came to about $6,200 more.

Thirty one thousand dollars. We had twelve. On Monday we sat across the desk from Mr. Lund at the bank in town, who has known Jory since Little League, and he loaned us the other nineteen at a rate he apologized for.

Jory signed the note with the same pen he used for his cattle checks.

Out in the parking lot he said, “I can put up a kit. I’ve helped with three. But not with just you and me, Iris. It’d be August before we had trusses on.”

That was the night I took out the church directory and the county plat map and a yellow legal pad, and sat at the kitchen table after the kids were in bed, and started calling every house on our gravel road.

I want to say I was brave about it. I was not. I hate asking anybody for anything. My mother raised me to bring a casserole, not to need one.

My hand was shaking when I dialed the first number, which was Hollace and Marva’s place on the corner.