The Barn the County Raised in a Day

Wendell found that ledger in his daddy’s desk when Ennis died. He has kept it in the glove box of his truck ever since, and I have never once seen him open it.

So when our barn burned, I knew what was happening inside that man before he said a word. He was not grieving a building. He was looking at a second ledger and doing the sums.

The first thing Wendell did was drive to Pettus Feed and Seed in Gilliam Gap and buy six round bales of hay, because the cows still had to eat. Lyle Pettus told me later that he counted the money out on the counter in ones and fives.

The second thing he did was call the sale barn in Albertville. He sat in the truck in the yard to do it, because he did not want me to hear.

I heard anyway. The kitchen window was open a crack.

He told them he had fourteen bred cows to sell.

They were his best, the cows he had raised from heifers, and he had a name for every one. There was Mabel, a big speckled cow with one white ear. There was Sue and Little Sue. There was Number Fourteen, whom he called Duchess because she would not walk through a gate unless you held it for her like a lady.

The sale was on a Wednesday. He loaded them himself, one at a time, with his hand on each one’s back. I watched him from the porch.

Here is the thing that hurt him most, and I did not understand it then.

For five weeks, nobody in our church said one word to him about the fire.

Gilliam Gap Baptist has a hundred and ten members on a good Sunday. Every one of them had seen the smoke. Every one of them knew. And Wendell would stand in the fellowship hall after services with a cup of coffee, and men he had known since first grade would talk to him about the weather, and the Alabama game, and the price of diesel.

Not one of them mentioned the barn.

He came home from church that fifth Sunday after the fire and sat down at the kitchen table, and I could see it in his face like a bruise. “They don’t care,” he said, quiet, not to me exactly. “Not a one of them.”

“Wendell,” I said.

I wanted to tell him everything right then. But three days earlier I had given my word to Reba Hargett.

Reba and her husband Ferrell run Hargett Lumber in Boaz. Reba is sixty, with iron-gray hair and a voice that carries across a Piggly Wiggly like a dinner bell. She has sung alto at Gilliam Gap Baptist for forty years and been in charge of everything for thirty-five.

She caught me in the cereal aisle on a Thursday, nine days before the raising. She put one hand on the handle of my cart and held on to it, like she thought I might run.

“Rhonda Tidwell,” she said, “I need you to listen and not talk.”

I listened.

“It’s going to be a barn raising. The Saturday after next. We have the lumber, we have the poles, and we have the trusses built, and Ferrell and the men have been working on them every night in the fellowship hall lot since the week after the fire.”

“You will not tell Wendell,” Reba said.