The Barn Our Gravel Road Built

We made two hundred breakfast burritos and wrapped them in foil, and then we started on the ham sandwiches for lunch.

At some point after ten, Marva sat down at my table with a dish towel over her shoulder and said, “You know your mother in law would be right in the middle of this.”

I said I know. She said, “She’d be making the coffee too strong.” I laughed until I cried a little.

I did not sleep much. At four thirty I got up and put on the coffee and stood at the kitchen window in the dark, looking at the twenty holes and the stack of trusses and the slab where the old barn had been. I prayed for no rain and nobody hurt.

Saturday came up clear. A real Kansas June morning, the sky so big and blue it almost hurt, no wind yet, the snapped cottonwoods along the drive standing there with their broken tops, and the storm pile still heaped at the edge of the yard.

The first truck pulled in at five thirty. It was Hollace, hauling the telehandler, with Marva in the passenger seat holding a pan of cinnamon rolls on her lap.

Behind him came Roscoe. Behind Roscoe came a line of pickups I could see all the way back to the corner.

They kept coming. Men in caps and T-shirts with nail aprons and cordless drills and their own ladders tied in the beds.

Women with coolers and folding tables and slow cookers. Teenagers who had been told by their fathers that they were coming, and came.

The mill crew pulled in at six, gray from the night shift, and ate four burritos apiece standing up.

One of the bus kids, a twelve year old named Cody, ran up to me and said, “Mrs. Wendt, my dad says I get to hold the level.”

Ione stood by the food table with a clipboard and a pen, counting plates, because that is what Ione does.

At seven o’clock she looked up and said, “Iris, I have seventy.” I did not believe her. I looked around the yard and believed her.

Pastor Neil stood by the first corner post at a quarter past six with his cap in his hand, and everybody took their caps off, and it went quiet enough to hear the meadowlarks out in the pasture. He kept his promise. It was short.

He thanked God for the morning and for the hands. He asked that nobody get hurt and that the thing stand straight for another forty six years.

Then he said amen, and Hollace said, “Let’s go,” and seventy people went to work at once.

I have never seen anything like it. Jory ran the job, which surprised everybody but me. He is a quiet man, but he knows how a building goes together and men listen to him.

He had a set of plans in a plastic sleeve and a voice I had not heard him use before.

They set the corner posts first, four men to a post, sliding each one into its hole while somebody sighted it with a level and somebody else braced it off with a two by four and a stake. Then the long sides, every ten feet, down the line.

Cody held the level at the second post with his tongue between his teeth.

His dad stood behind him not saying anything, just with one hand on the back of the boy’s shirt, which is how a lot of fathers in this county show their love.