The Barn Roof We Shoveled Before Dark

The barn my father built

My father built that pole barn in the summer of 1979, three years before Stellan was born. He set the poles himself with a borrowed auger and his brother-in-law, and he put the trusses up with a hay elevator and a lot of rope.

It was sixty feet wide and a hundred and fifty feet long. Nine thousand square feet of green steel roof, the biggest thing on our road, and he was prouder of it than of anything except us.

I was not born yet when he built it. I came along late, the surprise baby, twelve years after Stellan. By the time I was big enough to remember the barn, it was already old and leaning a little on the west end.

Dad died six winters ago, in February, of a heart attack in the feed room. Mom found him. She kept the cows anyway. Everybody on the road said she would sell out by spring, and she did not.

She was seventy now. She ran forty bred cows, black baldies and straight Angus, on the home quarter and the rented eighty across the road. She calved them in that barn every March and April.

This is Houghton County, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We get more snow than almost anywhere in the country that isn’t on a mountain. Two hundred inches is a normal winter. We know about snow.

But March snow is a different animal. It comes in wet and heavy off Lake Superior, and it sits on a roof like poured concrete. That storm had dropped close to three feet on the flat in two days.

On the north slope of the barn roof, where the wind had drifted it, it was four feet deep. I could see it from the kitchen window, a white hump bigger than the barn itself.

What my brother wanted

Stellan was forty-four. He logged for a living, mostly pulpwood and some hardwood saw logs, and he had worked hard his whole life. I want to say that plainly, because of what comes after.

Two years before, he had bought a used skidder for one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. The bank would not carry him alone, so Mom co-signed the loan, with her cattle and her machinery as part of the security.

Then the pulp mill in the next county cut back, and the price went down, and a wet fall kept him out of the woods for two months. He fell behind. Then he fell further behind.

I did not know any of that until later that week. That morning, all I knew was that my brother wanted our mother to let her barn fall in.

“Snow collapse is covered,” he said. “Ma, I read your policy. It’s an act of God. They pay replacement up to forty thousand on that building.”

“And the cows?” I said.

“Turn them out. Put them behind the windbreak by the silage pile. They’re cattle, Aubree. They’ve been outside in snow before.”

“They’re a week from calving,” I said. “In four feet of snow, in March, with no shelter. You know what that does to a heavy cow.”

He knew. He had grown up in that barn the same as I had. He knew a heavy cow standing in deep snow in a north wind can go down and not get up, and that calves born in a snowbank die of cold before they stand.

“So we lose a few,” he said. “The insurance on the barn covers more than a few calves are worth. Ma, I’m trying to help you.”

That was the worst part. I think he believed it.