The Barn the County Raised in a Day

“Reba, he’ll…”

“He will say no. I know he will say no. Rhonda, I have known that man fifty years, and I cannot stand in front of him and hear him say no, because I will not be able to do it anyway, and then we will both feel terrible.” She squeezed the cart. “So he does not get asked. He gets told when the trucks are in the driveway.”

“Everybody has been quiet to him,” I said. “Is that you?”

She did not look away. “I told them to let him be until we were ready. If they’d said a word, he’d have found a way to talk them out of it. He’s good at that. He is also hurting, and I know it. I wasn’t sure I was right. I still am not.”

“Be home Saturday at six,” she said. “Have coffee on.”

I stood in the cereal aisle and said, “I’ll have coffee on.”

For nine days I lied to him. It was the first lie I have ever told Wendell Tidwell in thirty-six years of marriage, and I told it badly.

I told him that my cousins from Fort Payne were driving over Saturday to help burn the brush pile. He said, “What brush pile?” and I said, “The one by the fence,” and he looked at me for a long time. I do not think he believed it. I think he decided not to pick at it, because he was tired.

On the Monday before, Dub Cantrell showed up with his dozer. Dub is a quiet, bowlegged man with a farm over by the creek. He said that Chief Daws wanted the burn spread out and flattened before the fire marshal made his report.

That was true, as far as it went. The fire marshal did want the site cleared. But Dub also staked out a rectangle in the dirt with orange flags, and Wendell, standing right there, did not ask what the flags were for.

He said, “Dub, I’ll pay you back in baling, come June.”

Dub said, “You do that.”

Now we come to the Saturday. I stood in the ash-gray dawn, cold to the bone, with my coffee gone cold, and I counted headlights.

Wendell came out onto the porch behind me. He had on his barn coat and his old cap, and he was holding his own cup in both hands, steam rolling up off it into the dark.

He saw the lights. I watched him see them.

“Who died?” he said.

“Nobody died,” I said.

The first truck turned into our drive and its headlights swept across us both. It was Ferrell Hargett’s flatbed, stacked high and strapped down, and it ground to a stop in the middle of the yard with its air brakes hissing.

On the bed were twelve treated poles, thick as a man’s waist and sixteen feet long. Beside them were the roof trusses, eleven of them, built in a stack, that the men of Gilliam Gap Baptist had put together in the church parking lot after supper every night for three weeks.

Behind Ferrell came Dub Cantrell with two tractors on a trailer, each with a post-hole auger on the back.

Behind Dub came the women.

I do not know how else to describe it. They came in station wagons and minivans and pickup trucks with the back seats full, and every one of them had a crockpot in her lap or a pan under foil. Imogene Sparks, the preacher’s wife, had four hundred sausage biscuits in aluminum trays. Dot Gentry had two coolers of coffee.