The Barn Our Gravel Road Built

I walked Rollie to his truck. The paper cup Etta had set on the fence post was still there, full and warm.

Rollie picked it up and looked at it. I told him Etta had put it out for him that morning, in case he came back.

He stood there with that cup of warm tea in his hand and he did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said, so quietly I almost missed it, “Wilma would have skinned me alive, Iris.”

I said, “She’d have fed you first, Rollie. Then she’d have skinned you.” He laughed, one short laugh, the first one I had heard out of him in three years.

Then he got in the silver pickup and drove the half mile home, and I watched his lights all the way.

I did not ask him for the money. I never have. Jory never has.

I do not know if Rollie lay awake that night thinking about eighty six thousand dollars, or thinking about a post, or thinking about his granddaughter and a paper cup. I suppose that is between him and the Lord.

What I know is that the next Saturday, at a quarter after five in the morning, before I had the coffee on, I heard a tractor on the road.

I went to the window in my robe. It was Rollie, coming south on the gravel in his big John Deere with the loader on the front.

He pulled into our yard and shut it off and sat there in the cab in the gray light, waiting for us to wake up.

Jory went out in his socks. I watched the two of them stand in the yard and look up at the trusses together.

About twenty people came back that second Saturday. Hollace and Roscoe. The Hendricks boys. Most of the mill crew. Ione with her clipboard.

Rollie ran the loader all day, lifting the bundles of steel up to the men on the roof, one after another, steady as a clock.

He did not get off that tractor except to eat. Etta brought him his drink first again, every single time, and he took it from her every time like it was communion. Nobody remarked on it. Nobody had to.

By supper the roof was on, and three of the four walls, and the big sliding door was hung on its track.

The last wall went on Monday evening, just Jory and Rollie and me holding screws. Rollie never said a word about the shop. Jory never brought it up.

Rollie still has his shop. It is a fine shop, fifty by eighty, heated floor, a good place to work on a planter in February.

He spends a lot of time in it. I hope he is happy in it. I mean that.

But it was a long summer for him in some ways. I do not think a single person on our road ever said one hard word to him about the barn.

They did not have to. Every one of them had stood in my yard and built the building his check was written for, in plain sight of his new shop.

That is a thing a man has to drive past every day. Rollie drives past it every morning on his way to the field.

I have seen him slow down. I have seen him look at the southwest corner post.