The Barn the County Raised in a Day

I stood on the porch with my hand over my mouth. Behind her came Sue and Little Sue. Then Duchess, who would not walk through the gate until Wendell reached out and held it open for her like a gentleman.

All fourteen of them. Home.

“I paid what they were worth, Wendell,” Ferris Kitchens said, standing quietly by his trailer with his cap in his hands. “That money’s yours. You earned it. The cows are yours too. Nobody here is going to take one cent of it back, and don’t you dare offer.”

Wendell said, “Ferris, I can’t….”

“Yes,” Ferris said. “You can.”

My husband turned around and looked at that man a long time. Then he did something I have only seen him do twice in thirty-six years.

He took his cap off, and he said, “Thank you.”

That is the whole story of how we got our barn.

Wendell still has his daddy’s ledger. He took it out of the glove box that Monday night, and for the first time I ever saw, he opened it. He sat at the kitchen table a long while with the page open.

I stood at the sink and did not watch him.

Finally he picked up the carpenter’s pencil, the same one Alvis had put in his hand. He turned to the very last page his father had written on, the one that said Paid in full in a cramped hand, dated nineteen ninety.

He wrote underneath it: Barn, Gilliam Gap, November. Owed to everybody. Never to be paid back. Only passed on.

Then he closed the book and set it on the shelf over the stove, where we keep the Bible and the seed catalogs, and he has never put it back in the truck.

Alvis Crowe died in February, in his own bed. His son told us that Alvis had asked to be buried with a carpenter’s pencil in his shirt pocket, and a framing hammer, if somebody would kindly get the hammer back to Wendell afterward.

Wendell carried that hammer to the funeral himself. He stood by the grave in his good suit, in a cold wind, and he put the pencil in the old man’s pocket with his own hand.

We kept the hammer. It hangs on a nail in the tack room, next to Judge’s halter.

That spring, in April, a wind came through on a Sunday night and took the roof off Dub Cantrell’s chicken house. I woke at four-thirty to find Wendell’s side of the bed empty and his truck gone.

He was already there when the sun came up. He had been there for an hour, nailing down tin with his cap on backward, and when I drove up with the coffee thermos, he did not say a word about it.

He just looked up, and he asked me if I had brought the nails.

There is a board along the ridge of our barn, up under the tin, where nobody can see it unless they climb, and it has two hundred and eleven names on it in carpenter’s pencil. Some of those people have since moved away. Some have died. Alvis was the first.

I climb up and look at it sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, when the cows are in the lot and the light comes through the cracks in the roof in long gold bars.

At the very bottom, in small letters, it says I am sorry I lied and I would do it again.

I would.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.