The Barn Roof We Shoveled Before Dark

Mom counting

I was on the roof when it happened, kneeling at the ridge to rest my back, and I could see the whole thing from up there.

The cows came out slowly, the way heavy cows do, blinking in the light. They were black against all that white snow, their bellies wide and low, their breath smoking.

Mom stood at the gate with one hand on the top rail. While the first ones found their feet, she was humming “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” under her breath, the way she does at the sink. Then she counted them out loud.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”

She did not hurry. She said each number like she was saying a name.

“Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.”

I could hear her voice from the roof, thin and steady in the cold air. Bjorn stopped shoveling and stood beside me, and we both listened.

“Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.”

There was a pause. The last cow was an old cow with a white face, the oldest one in the herd, standing just inside the door like she was not sure about the sunshine.

“Come on, Bossy,” Mom said softly. “Come on, girl. Come out here with me.”

The old cow came out.

“Forty,” Mom said.

Then she put her face down on her arm on the gate rail, and her shoulders shook, and the young wife from the schoolhouse farm went over and put an arm around her and just held on.

I did not cry on the roof. I would not let myself. I had a rope around my waist and four feet of snow to move. But Bjorn did, a little, and he wiped his face on the sleeve of his gray hoodie and picked his shovel back up.

The afternoon

The rest of the north slope took four more hours. There were eight of us by then, three on the roof at a time and the rest on ladders at the eave with roof rakes and shovels.

We rotated. When your back gave out, you came down, drank some coffee in Mom’s kitchen, and went back up. Our new neighbor from the schoolhouse farm kept the coffee pot going all day, and somebody brought a pan of bars from the church basement freezer.

The men on the roof did not talk much. You do not, on a job like that. You say “slide coming,” and “watch your feet,” and “rope,” and that is about all.

Every slab that came off made the barn groan and settle. By two o’clock, I could see from the ridge that the bad truss on the north side, the one that had cracked, had come back up almost level.

It was cracked through the bottom chord, and it would need a splice. But it had held. My father’s barn had held.

At about three, the dairy father stopped beside me on the ridge and looked down at the yard.

“Your brother’s still down there,” he said.

“I know.”

“Been there all day.”

“I know.”

He did not say anything else. He went back to shoveling.