The Barn Roof We Shoveled Before Dark

Stellan in the yard

About an hour in, I looked down and saw Stellan standing in the yard with his hands in his coat pockets.

He did not yell. He just stood there, in the trodden snow by the water hydrant, and watched his son on the roof.

“Bjorn,” he called finally. “Come down.”

Bjorn did not stop shoveling. “When it’s done, Dad.”

“It’s never going to be done. It’s nine thousand square feet. You two can’t move that by dark. Nobody could.”

Bjorn cut another block. It broke loose and slid, and a ton of snow came off the eave in front of his father and buried his boots to the shins.

Stellan stepped back out of it. He did not say anything else. He went and stood by his truck.

I did not say anything to him either. I had decided at the stove that I was not going to say one word to my brother that day that I would have to take back. I needed my breath for shoveling.

The road sees

Our road is a county road, gravel under the snow, with seven farms on it in six miles. In the winter, when the plow comes through, everybody knows about it in ten minutes.

That Monday, the plow had come through at five. By ten in the morning, people were out on the road, checking mailboxes and pulling out of driveways and driving to town for groceries before the next band of weather.

Anybody who drove past Mom’s place could see two figures on the barn roof. One of them was wearing the brightest yellow jacket in Houghton County.

The first one to stop was Halvard Moe.

Halvard was seventy-five years old. He had farmed the place a mile east of us his whole life, and he and my dad had traded work every haying season for thirty years.

He pulled into the yard in his old pickup, got out, looked up at the roof for a long time, and then looked at Stellan by the truck.

He did not say a word to Stellan. He went around to the back of his pickup and pulled out two roof rakes, the long aluminum kind with handles that screw together to twenty feet or more.

Then he pulled out his own extension ladder.

“Halvard, you shouldn’t be on a ladder,” I called down.

“I’ve been on a ladder since before your mother was born,” he said. “I’ll stay on the eave and pull from the edge. You two keep cutting from the top.”

So that is what we did.