“Let it go, Ma. Let it cave in, and the insurance pays forty thousand dollars. That’s the only good thing that’s going to happen to this farm all year.”
My brother Stellan said it at Mom’s kitchen table on a Monday morning in March, with the sun just coming up over four feet of fresh snow.
He said it with his coffee in his hand. He did not raise his voice. He said it the way a man reads the price of hay off a sale bill.
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Mom did not answer him. She looked out the window over the sink, toward the pole barn, where forty bred cows were standing in the straw a week before the first calf was due.
I was standing by the stove in my sock feet. I had driven over at six because the co-op had called off meter routes for the day, and I wanted to check on her.
My nephew Bjorn was sitting at the end of the table, seventeen years old and six foot two, with his elbows on the oilcloth and his eyes on his father.
His mother had moved to Marquette when he was nine, and he had lived with Stellan ever since. School was closed for the snow, so the two of them had come over together for breakfast.
Nobody said anything for a long minute. The furnace kicked on in the basement. Somewhere out in the barn, a cow bawled, low and long, the way they do when they want hay.
Then the barn answered her. It was a crack, sharp as a rifle shot, loud enough to rattle the glass in the storm door.
Mom put her hand flat on the counter. I watched her knuckles go white.
“That was a truss,” she said quietly. “That was one of your father’s trusses.”