The Barn the County Raised in a Day

The kids were everywhere, hauling nails and screws in coffee cans and buckets. Tucker Pettus went from man to man with his Folgers can. He would stand at the foot of each ladder with his chin up, holding that can with both hands, and say in his high, serious voice, “Do you need nails?”

My daughter Kayla drove in from Huntsville with her little boy Jace, and my son Brandon came from Pensacola in a truck he had driven all night. Reba had called them both. Brandon did not say a word. He walked straight to his father, took the end of a two-by-eight off the ground, and went to work.

Alvis Crowe could not climb a ladder anymore, but he did not need to. He sat in his chair with that feed sack and called it out, and Wendell, who had never stopped looking back at the old man, relayed it.

“Trusses on the east end first.”

“Plumb that corner.”

“Brace that, don’t wait.”

Ferrell Hargett’s boom truck lifted the first truss at eleven-fifteen. Four men rode it, one at each end, and the whole crowd went still, and I held my breath without knowing I was doing it.

It went up. It settled onto the top plate. Someone whooped, and then everyone did, and the sound went out across the pasture and set the cows to lowing.

Every one of them. All thirty-eight cows lined up along the fence like deacons, and bawled.

By noon seven trusses were up. By half past twelve, eleven.

At noon we ate, a hundred and forty people on tailgates and hay bales. There was chicken and dressing, green beans cooked with fatback, twenty-two pies, and a banana pudding in a roasting pan that fed forty by itself.

Brother Odell Sparks said the blessing standing on a bucket. It was short. He thanked the Lord for the hands and for the food, and he said, “And for a man who has been too proud to ask and a town that was too stubborn to wait for him to.” That got a laugh. Wendell did not laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved.

He had not said one word to me in six hours.

I knew that look. He was working the way he worked after his mother died, hard and wordless.

At a quarter past one, with Wendell up a ladder on the third truss, Alvis Crowe took a flat carpenter’s pencil out from behind his ear.

There was a board lying across two sawhorses at the edge of the work, beside the lumber. It was a long pine board, a one-by-eight, sixteen feet, planed smooth. I had seen it earlier that morning and not thought anything about it. The kind of board you would use for a ridge cap.

“Wendell,” he said. “Come over here. I’ve got something I need to show you.”

He came down the ladder slowly, one rung at a time.

I watched my husband cross that yard in his dusty barn coat with sawdust in his gray hair. I watched him stop at the end of the sawhorses and look down at the pine board.

I watched him bend over it, and read the first line.

I could not see his face. I saw his shoulders. I saw his big, scarred hands come up slowly and go flat over his mouth.