The Barn the County Raised in a Day

The ridge board went up at ten minutes past five.

Four men carried it on their shoulders up the ladder, and Ferrell’s boom truck lifted the last man to the peak. They fitted it into the notch where the two sides of the roof met, and they held it in place, and then there was only the last nail.

Alvis Crowe wanted to drive it. He had driven the last nail in the 1971 barn, and everyone knew he would.

They helped him up on one of the six hay bales left from lunch, and held his elbows. Someone put a framing hammer in his hand. He lifted it. And his arm shook.

I saw it from the ground. His whole old body trembled with the effort, and the hammer went up an inch and sagged.

“I can’t,” Alvis said, so low that I almost did not hear. “Wendell. I can’t lift it.”

Wendell was already there.

He stepped up behind the old man on the bale, and he put his right hand over Alvis’s hand on the hammer. He put his left under the old man’s elbow.

And standing at the foot of the bale, holding up a Folgers can with both arms, in a camouflage coat that came down to his knees, was Tucker Pettus.

“Do you need nails?” he said.

Alvis laughed. It cracked in the middle of it, and the laugh turned into something else.

“Yes, son,” he said. “I believe we do.”

Tucker took a nail out of the can with his small fingers and held it up, and Wendell set it against the board.

They drove it together. The old man’s hand, my husband’s hand, and the hammer between them. It took three strokes. On the third, the nail went home, and the sound rang out across Cold Springs Road clear as a church bell.

Nobody said anything for a moment. And then two hundred people sang.

I do not know who started it. I think it was Reba, the alto. It was “Amazing Grace,” and it came out ragged and wonderful, in four or five keys, with the tin still shaking from the screw guns and the kids in the dirt with their cans.

I sang until I could not.

The siding went on in the last light and then under work lamps, and at seven-forty the last sheet of tin was screwed down. Somebody checked a watch and shouted it out. Thirteen and a half hours, first truck to last screw.

Wendell climbed up on the bed of Ferrell’s flatbed. He is not a speaking man. He has not stood up before a crowd since his daddy’s funeral, and that was only because the preacher had a cold.

He held his cap in both hands. For a long time he did not say anything, and nobody pushed him.

“When I was seven years old,” he said, “I carried nails for a barn right here on this ground. I wasn’t any more than waist high. And I watched my daddy stand in this yard that night, after everybody left, and I saw him cry. I didn’t know why. I thought it was because the barn was burned.”

He stopped. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “It wasn’t the barn,” he said. “It was the owing. He spent twenty years working it off.”