The Barn Our Gravel Road Built

Hollace answered. He is seventy and still runs cattle and he has a telehandler he bought at a sale barn auction that he loves more than his pickup.

I told him what we were doing, not why, just what. A pole barn kit, a Saturday in June, help if he could spare it.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Saturday the thirteenth? That’s before wheat. I’ll bring the telehandler. You’ll want it for the trusses.”

I said thank you and he said, “Iris, don’t thank me yet. You haven’t seen me run it.”

The second call was Roscoe, who lives two miles east and does dirt work.

He said he would come Thursday evening with his skid steer and the auger and dig the post holes, and he would not take a dime for the diesel. I tried. He hung up on me, laughing.

The third call was Ione, who taught Sunday school to half the county including my husband.

I barely got the words out before she said, “Honey, you feed them and we’ll build it. How many are we feeding?”

I said I did not know yet. Maybe twenty. Ione made a sound in her throat like a woman who had been organizing church dinners for fifty years. “Plan on more,” she said. “Plan on a lot more.”

I kept calling. The Hendricks boys up the road. The Olsons. The family that bought the old Peterson place and that I barely knew.

The parents of the kids on my bus route, who I see every morning at the end of their lanes.

Jory called the night crew at the mill. A couple of the men said they would come off shift Friday night and sleep in their trucks if they had to.

One of them said his wife made a cherry pie that would make a grown man cry, and he would bring it.

Not one person asked me why the insurance was not building it. I think most of them knew, the way news travels on a gravel road.

Nobody said Rollie’s name to me on the phone. I did not say it either. That is the thing I am proudest of in this whole story.

Pastor Neil called me back on Wednesday after somebody told him. He asked if he could come pray before the first post went in.

I said we would be glad, and he said, “Short, I promise. I know men want to get to work.”

Thursday evening Roscoe came down the road with the skid steer on a trailer, just like he said.

He laid out the corners with Jory with string and stakes and a tape, checked the diagonals twice, and started augering holes as the sun went down.

Etta and Owen sat on the porch step and watched him for two hours. Every time the auger came up full of dirt Owen cheered like it was a touchdown.

When Roscoe finished, twenty holes, he climbed down and let Owen sit in the seat and work the stick with the engine off.

Friday the flatbed came from McPherson with the kit. The driver unloaded the treated posts and the long stack of trusses with his own forklift, and Jory and I checked every piece against the list on the hood of the pickup until dark.

I cooked all Friday night. Ione and Marva came over at four in the afternoon with their own roasters and stayed until eleven.