The Barn Roof We Shoveled Before Dark

The farm families

Halvard had his phone in his shirt pocket. I did not see him make the call, but I know he made it, because twenty minutes later two more trucks pulled in.

One was the dairy family from two miles north, a father named Erling and his two grown sons, with their own ladders and three grain shovels and a bale of baler twine for tie-off rope.

The other was a young couple who had bought the old schoolhouse farm the year before. I had met them once at the feed store. The wife, Solveig, came straight to the kitchen to sit with Mom, and her husband climbed.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody asked what had happened, or why a seventy-year-old widow’s son was standing by his truck while her daughter and grandson shoveled her roof.

They looked at Stellan, and then they looked at the roof, and then they got to work.

That was the whole consequence for my brother that day. Nobody shamed him out loud. Nobody had to. Every person on our road saw where he was standing and where his son was standing.

Noon

By noon we had the south slope bare and the north slope about a third cleared from the west end. The sun was full on the steel by then, and the cleared part was steaming.

I remember that steam. It rose off the green metal in a thin white sheet, like the roof was breathing out after holding its breath for two days.

One of the dairy boys had run their skid steer over from home, and he cleared out the feedlot on the south side of the barn, pushing the snow up into a long bank along the fence.

Mom came out in her chore coat and her barn boots and stood by the gate.

“I want them out,” she said. “If those trusses go, I don’t want anybody underneath.”

So Halvard came down off his ladder and went in with her, and they opened the big sliding door on the south end, and the cows came out into the sun.