The Barn the County Raised in a Day

Behind the women, the men. Behind the men, the boys. And at the very end, a little blond boy in a camouflage coat that came down to his knees, in the passenger seat of his granddaddy’s truck, holding a coffee can of nails in both arms like it was made of glass.

That was Tucker Pettus, Lyle’s grandson. He was six years old. Lyle told me later that Tucker had been up since four, and that he had refused to let anyone else carry the can.

Wendell turned and looked at me.

“How long have you known?” he said.

“Nine days.”

He did not say a word. He set his coffee cup down on the porch rail, very carefully, the way you set something down when you are afraid you might throw it.

Then he walked off the porch and out into the yard, into the headlights, and I was left standing there alone, and I thought, Rhonda, you have done it now.

But a pickup had stopped at the edge of the yard with its door hanging open, and an old man was climbing out of it, very slowly, one foot and then the other, and then reaching back for a walker.

Alvis Crowe is eighty-eight years old. He is the last man living who put up the 1971 barn. He lives alone in a little white house across from the Gilliam Gap post office, and he had not been out before noon in the cold in two winters.

He got that walker planted on our frozen grass and stood there in a wool coat down to his shins, breathing hard, with his hat pulled low.

Wendell stopped walking.

“Alvis,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

“Framing,” said Alvis.

“You can’t. Alvis, I can’t pay for this.”

“Did I ask you to?” Alvis said.

Alvis Crowe lifted his chin and looked at my husband. He has pale blue eyes that have not changed since he was a young man, and they were wet.

“I put up the first one, Wendell. Your daddy and I and seventeen other fools. I’m not dying till I see the second one up. So you can stand there and be proud, or you can tell these people where you want your barn.”

I saw something move across my husband’s face. I have never been able to describe it. It was like watching ice go out of a creek.

He did not speak. He walked over and took Alvis by the elbow, the way you would help your own father down a church step, and he turned him toward the orange flags in the dirt.

“There,” Wendell said. His voice cracked on it. “The corners. Right there.”

By eight o’clock the auger rigs were turning. They drilled twelve holes in less than an hour, and the men dropped the poles in and tamped them tight. Alvis sat in a folding chair at the edge of the pit with a feed sack across his knees. He had drawn the whole barn on it at his kitchen table, post by post.

By ten o’clock there were forty-one trucks parked in our pasture. Tucker Pettus counted them, out loud, over and over, and kept losing his place and starting again. By eleven he said there were sixty-three, and nobody corrected him.

The women set up in my own yard on sawhorses and plywood, and I was not allowed to lift a finger. Imogene Sparks took a spatula out of my hand and pointed me to a lawn chair and said, “Mrs. Tidwell, if you set one dish down on that table I will tell Brother Odell.”