The Shed We Raised Ourselves

A man at the cooperative loaded the poles on, and I drove it home at twenty-five miles an hour with both hands on the wheel, listening to every pole creak.

When I pulled in, there were cars in the yard.

I had not asked anybody. But Delbert had told his grandson, who told his wife, who told the church prayer chain, and by eight o’clock there were four pickup trucks and a skid steer and two men from our congregation, Stuart Hasselbring and a retired mechanic named Eddie Ruhl, standing around the ashes with their hands in their pockets.

“Heard you need some poles stood,” Stuart said. “I do.” “Well, we’re here.”

By noon, the last of the poles stood in a row against the sky, plumb as a ruler, and the old black ground had a bones-and-ribs look to it like the skeleton of something coming back to life.

That evening Russ asked me to push his chair to the edge of the yard so he could look at the poles. We sat there, the two of us, and the sun went down behind the cornfield. He took my hand.

“Glenda.” “Yes.” “I should have gone to the bank myself. I should have driven out there in a wheelchair.” “You had a hole in your back.”

“I should have known my own brother.” “You did know him,” I said. “That is the whole trouble. You loved him. That is not a fault, Russ.”

He did not say anything for a while. A killdeer was crying somewhere in the stubble. “My dad would’ve been ashamed of him,” he said.

“Your dad would have been standing right there with a level.” He laughed, a short wet laugh, and put his other hand over his eyes.

I did not look. I let him have it. The third Saturday, the girts and purlins. That was the hard one. The horizontal framing goes on at head height and above, and that is where a person finds out what she is made of.

I spent six hours on a stepladder with a nail gun, and then, when the nail gun jammed, with a hammer, and by three in the afternoon my palms had blistered through the leather gloves and the blisters had broken.

I taped my hands with white athletic tape from the boys’ football bag and kept going. “Mom, let me,” Tanner said, not for the first time.

“You’re on the other end of the board.” “I can do both ends.” “I know you can,” I said. “But I’m going to do this end.”

At four, Eddie Ruhl came up the ladder on the other side and held the end of a two-by-eight for me. “Glenda,” he said.

“Hm?” “My boy ran off with the money from my Co-op account in 2003. Twelve thousand. He’s in Arizona now. We don’t talk.”

“Eddie, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not telling you for sorry.” He drove a nail with three hits. “I’m telling you so you know somebody’s seen it before. You’re doing it right. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s too much to have done.”

I handed him another nail. Fourth Saturday, October thirty-first, was the tin. I had found it two weeks before at a farm outside Albion, an old dairy barn the owners were taking down to make room for a hog confinement.