The Barn Roof We Shoveled Before Dark

The weeks after

The rest of it did not happen in one afternoon. Real life never does.

That Saturday, Stellan came to Mom’s kitchen with his bank statements, and the three of us sat at the oilcloth table and looked at every page. Bjorn sat at the end and listened.

Stellan sold his snowmobile and his deer rifle and his good chainsaw, the one he had been saving to give Bjorn. He put the skidder up for sale at the machinery auction in April, and it brought sixty-four thousand, well short of what he owed.

That left a hole, but a smaller one. Mom sold five open heifers she would have kept. I put in what I had in savings, which was not much. The bank took the rest in payments Stellan could make.

Halvard and the dairy boys came back the next week with a jack and a length of two-by-ten, and spliced the cracked truss with Stellan holding the light.

The first calf came that next Thursday, a black bull calf out of old Bossy. Mom named him Halvard. The real Halvard pretended to be annoyed and came over twice that week to look at him.

All forty cows calved that spring. We lost one calf, a twin, born early. We lost no cows.

The next storm

The next big snow came the second week of April, a late one, eighteen inches wet and heavy, the kind that makes everybody on the road go out and look at their roofs.

I drove over to Mom’s at seven in the morning with my yellow jacket and my navy cap on the seat beside me and two grain shovels in the back of my truck.

When I pulled into the yard, the sun was just up, and somebody was already there.

Stellan’s truck was parked by the granary. He was standing at the foot of the barn wall in his work coat, with his own shovel in one hand and a coil of rope over his shoulder.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything about March.

Then Bjorn came out of the shop, carrying the extension ladder on his shoulder the way his grandpa used to carry it, and set it up against the eave, and footed it in the snow.

He held the bottom rail steady and looked at his father.

Stellan climbed. Bjorn handed him the ladder, and then the rope, and then he came up behind him.

I stood in the yard for a minute and watched them, the two of them up there on the green steel in the morning sun, cutting the first block loose at the ridge together.

Mom came out on the porch with her coffee and stood beside me.

“Your father would have liked that,” she said.

“I know, Mom.”

Then I took my shovel out of the truck and went up after them.

Some Sundays now, after church, Mom still hums the old hymn she hummed at the gate that day, under her breath, while she does the dishes. She says she does not remember humming it. I remember. I was on the roof, and I heard every note.