The Barn the County Raised in a Day

The ground where our barn used to stand still smelled like a campfire somebody had put out with a garden hose, and I was standing in the middle of it at ten minutes past six in the morning with a coffee cup going cold in my hand.

It was thirty-four degrees. Frost lay on the pasture like spilled flour, and the sun had not come over Sand Mountain yet. Everything was gray except the black square at my feet.

I heard the diesel before I saw the lights. It came up the county road slow and heavy, the way a loaded flatbed sounds when the driver is trying not to wake anybody.

Then a second engine came behind it. Then a third. By the time I turned around, the headlights were strung out down Cold Springs Road as far as the Pettus place, one truck, then ten, then more than I could count.

I want to tell you how we got to that morning. I have to start five weeks back, with the lightning, because nothing about that Saturday makes sense without the Tuesday night that came before it.

My name is Rhonda Tidwell. I am fifty-seven years old. My husband Wendell and I have farmed fifty-two head of beef cows outside Gilliam Gap, Alabama, for thirty-six years, on land that has been in his family since before the war.

The storm line came through on the second Tuesday in October, and the weather radio had been squawking since supper. We had both gone to bed anyway. You do not lose a night’s sleep over thunder in Alabama or you would never sleep.

At eleven-forty the whole bedroom turned white. There was no gap between the flash and the sound. It was one crack, like the sky had split a board over its knee, and the window glass hummed in the frame.

Wendell was already on his feet. I do not know how a man of sixty-one who had a stent put in his heart in April can go from a dead sleep to the back door in four seconds, but he did.

I looked out the kitchen window and saw the barn roof lit orange from the inside.

I called the Gilliam Gap volunteer fire department with my hands shaking so hard I had to dial twice. Then I ran out in my nightgown and Wendell’s barn coat and found him already at the lot gate.

He had his boots on the wrong feet and no laces in either one. I have never told him I noticed that.

“The mares,” he said, and he went in.

I screamed his name. I stood in the yard and screamed at the back of a man going into a burning building, and he did not turn around.

He came out with Pearl on one side of him and Dolly on the other, a halter rope in each fist, both mares wild-eyed and dancing. He walked them straight through the smoke and put them in the far lot and shut the gate.

Then he went back for Judge.

Judge is our mule. He is twenty-six years old and as stubborn as a deacon’s wife, and he would not leave his stall. Wendell told me later he had to slap that mule across the hindquarters with the flat of his hand, hard, and tell him he was sorry.

He got him out. That was the last thing he got out.