The Shed We Raised Ourselves

Garth pulled into our yard on a Saturday in late September, towing a white boat, and he was grinning like a man who had won it at the county fair.

I was standing in the garden with a dish towel in my hands, because I had come out to the porch to shake it and then forgotten why. The sun was low and clear over the bean field. Somewhere behind the barn a combine was running, and the whole place smelled like dry corn leaves and diesel.

The boat was long and bright, with a bass seat on the front deck and a motor on the back that looked bigger than my kitchen stove. It sat on a tandem trailer with the price of the whole afternoon written on it.

“Eighteen feet,” Garth said, climbing down and slapping the hull like it was a good horse. “Hundred and fifteen horse on the back. Russ, look at this thing.”

My husband sat on the porch in the recliner we had dragged outside so he could have the air.

Russ was four weeks past a back surgery in Norfolk, a fusion of two vertebrae the surgeon called routine and Russ called the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He could stand ten minutes at a time.

He could not lift a gallon of milk.

He looked at the boat. He looked at his younger brother. His face did something I had not seen it do in thirty years of marriage, which was nothing at all.

“Nice,” Russ said.

“Nice? It’s a steal.” Garth came up the porch steps with his hands out like he was presenting a calf. “Guy in Norfolk had to sell. I couldn’t pass it up.”

I folded the dish towel in half and then in half again. I want to tell you I was calm because I am a calm woman. The truth is I was holding very still, the way you do when a wasp lands on your arm.

“Garth,” I said. “When does your crew start on the shed?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. Garth is forty-six, six years younger than Russ, a big sunburned man with a contractor’s belly and a voice that fills a room.

He runs Ostby Construction out of a pole barn on the edge of town, and for twenty years he has built decks, garages and grain bin pads for half the county.

“Well, here’s the thing, Glenda. Ground’s gonna freeze. Can’t pour in the cold.” “It’s a pole shed. Nothing gets poured.” “Footings,” he said. “You still want footings.”

“We want poles in the ground, and you know it, because your father set those same poles in 1979 with a hand auger and a bottle of whiskey.”

He laughed, a short one. “Spring,” he said. “First thing in spring. I’ll have it up before you’ve planted.” I looked at Russ. Russ was looking at the floor of the porch.

Here is how we came to that porch.

The shed burned the first week of August. A thunderstorm rolled over Madison County a little after two in the morning, and a bolt came down on the southwest corner of the machine shed and went through that old building like it was dry paper.