The Barn Our Gravel Road Built

By ten the east and west walls had their girts on and Hollace had the telehandler rigged with a chain for the trusses.

The men stood around looking at the first truss on the ground, forty feet long, while Jory talked them through how it would go.

Then the post at the southwest corner gave them trouble. The ground there was softer from the storm.

The concrete had set but the post had drifted off plumb, just a hair, and a hair matters when a forty foot truss has to land on top of it.

Two of the mill men were wrestling it with a come along and a level, and it would not hold. Jory came down off his ladder to look at it.

I was crossing the yard with a big foil tray of ham sandwiches toward the folding table, Etta beside me with the jug.

That was when we heard the gravel the third time.

The silver pickup came down from the north, and it did not slow down and keep going.

It pulled off onto the shoulder of the gravel road right beside our yard, right by Etta’s paper cup, and the engine shut off.

The whole yard went quiet. Not all at once, but the way a church does when the organ stops, one row at a time.

A drill stopped. Then a hammer. The Hendricks boys stopped with a girt between them.

Rollie got out. He stood there by the truck in his seed cap and his tan work shirt, the same shirt he wears every Saturday of his life, and he looked at the frame of that barn, at seventy people, at his son.

Then he reached up and took off his cap.

He did not say anything. He held his cap against his leg for a second and then he folded it and put it in his back pocket, and he walked across the yard, past the food table, past me, past Etta, straight to the southwest corner post.

The two mill men stepped back without being asked. Rollie put both hands on that post, set his boots, and leaned into it.

He looked up at the top of it, then at Jory, then down at the level in Cody’s hands.

“Little more,” Jory said. Rollie moved it a little more. Jory watched the bubble. “There,” he said. Rollie held it.

One of the mill men drove the brace stake, and Roscoe came over with the drill and set the screws, and the post stood plumb.

Rollie did not let go. He stood there with his hands on that post like he was afraid it would leave if he did.

I set the foil tray down on the folding table because my hands were not steady enough to hold it anymore.

That was the moment I keep in my mind. The clear June morning, the frame going up, the broken cottonwoods behind us, the storm pile still sitting at the edge of the yard, and my father in law holding a post upright with his silver pickup parked on the road behind him.

Etta did not wait for anybody to tell her. She took a new cup, filled it to the top from the orange jug, and walked it across the yard with both hands, slow so it would not spill, and held it up to her grandpa before she gave a single cup to anybody else.