The Barn My Son Cut By Harvest

Paul on the phone

My husband, Paul, drives long haul. He was in Wyoming that week, somewhere on Interstate 80 with a load of boxed beef, and he called me at his ten-hour break like he does every evening.

I told him the whole thing, standing out on the porch so Logan would not hear. When I finished, the line was so quiet I thought it had dropped.

“I’ll call him right now,” Paul said. “That’s my brother, and that’s my boy, and he doesn’t get to do that.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Danielle.”

“It’s his business, Paul. It’s his mill. If you call him, he’ll either dig in or he’ll hire Logan because you made him, and Logan will know it either way. I’m not going to beg your brother for anything.”

Paul breathed out slow. I could hear the trucks going past him at the rest area, that long whine they make on the interstate.

“Then what are you going to do?” he asked.

I looked across the yard at the machine shed. The big door was open to let the heat out, and back in the corner, under a blue tarp gone gray with dust, sat his daddy’s old portable band mill.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. That was the truth that night. But I kept looking at that tarp.

The storm

Two weeks later, on a hot Saturday afternoon, the sky to the west went green and then black, and a straight-line wind came across the ridge like a freight train.

We were in the cellar for eleven minutes. When we came up, our yard was full of oak limbs and the machine shed had lost half a sheet of tin. That was all. We had been lucky.

Wendell Rauch, next door, had not.

Wendell is seventy-six. He has farmed the place below our ridge since before I was born.

His wife, Stella, passed three winters ago, and he runs a few cows now and puts up his own hay and goes to the Methodist church in town every Sunday in the same brown suit.

His barn was a hundred years old, a big gray thing with a hay mow and a rusted tin roof. The wind took it off its stone footings and laid it down in the lot like a stepped-on matchbox.

I walked over that afternoon, once the sky had cleared and the sun was back out. Wendell was standing at the edge of the lot with his hands in his overall pockets, just looking.

“Well,” he said when he saw me. “That’s that.”

Behind the barn lot, his whole north woods was a tangle. Big white oaks and red oaks, some of them three feet through, were down with their root wads standing up taller than a man.

“Anybody hurt?” I asked.

“Just the barn,” he said. “And me, a little. Stella and I were married in that barn. Her folks had the reception in the mow.”

I stood there with him a while. Neither one of us said anything. A whippoorwill started up down in the hollow, and he said, “Well, he doesn’t care,” and almost smiled.