The Barn Deposits and the Engstrom Barn

But I have done weddings in rented halls my whole working life, and I have watched brides cry over folding chairs and fluorescent lights and a hall that smelled like last Saturday’s fish fry.

And Drew had a barn. A real one. Forty by a hundred, hand hewn beams, a loft with a rail around it, two sets of double doors that opened onto a hill that rolled down to the creek.

So we asked Norbert. We asked him straight, at his own kitchen table, over his late wife’s old percolator. Drew’s mother had been gone five years by then, and the farm was quieter for it.

Norbert said, “Do what you want with it. I’m not using it.”

Three summers. Summer one was the roof and the sill beams, because two of the sills had gone soft as a wet loaf of bread.

Summer two was the electrical, which Drew did himself on his days off, and the bathrooms, which a plumber from Westby did for a price I am still a little proud of. Summer three was the floor.

Drew laid that maple floor board by board over two weeks in August, on his knees, with a nail gun and a cheap pair of kneepads I bought him at the farm store.

He would come in at ten at night with sawdust in his eyebrows and say, “Come look.” And I would walk out across the barn with a flashlight and stand on it and feel like I was standing on something that had been waiting for us.

Sixty-two thousand dollars. I kept the number in the binder, on the first page, with the receipts clipped behind it. It was twelve years of our savings and every hour of overtime Drew could get, and when it was spent we had about fifteen thousand dollars left in the world.

Drew told me the total in the truck, afraid I would be mad. I was not mad. I held his hand on the gearshift.

Norbert did one thing in all that time. He insisted the venue run under the farm’s name.

“Farm’s got the liability policy,” he said. “Farm’s got the ag permit. You want to host people on a working farm, it goes under Kowalski Farms. That’s how it’s done.”

It sounded sensible. I am not a lawyer. Drew is a lineman. The man who held the policy and the permit was his own father, who had farmed that ground for forty years and who knew the county board by their first names.

So the contracts said Kowalski Farms. The checks said Kowalski Farms. And Norbert, who kept the farm books at the kitchen table on a green ledger pad the way his father had, said he would “handle the deposits” so we would not have to fool with them.

I should have asked then to see the account. I know that. I have said it to myself in the shower more mornings than I want to admit.

The first booking came in January. By the end of March we had eleven weddings on the calendar, the third Saturday in September through the last Saturday in October, and a waiting list of six more for the year after.

I cried in the car when Ashlyn Sorlie’s mother handed me the first check and said, “My mother was married in a barn in 1956. I never thought I’d see it again.”

I told Norbert about every one of them. Every Sunday at supper I gave him the count. And every Sunday he nodded and passed the potatoes.