The Barn Deposits and the Engstrom Barn

I cut asters from the ditch by the county road. I cut goldenrod, which people hate and I love, and the last of the sunflowers from a field of Mr. Larson’s that he said I could have. I filled a dozen old cream cans that Vera had saved in her basement for forty years.

Phyllis Rostad, who is eighty, called my shop on Friday for four women at once. They wanted to know what to bring.

“We’re doing a hotdish and a salad apiece, and Vera says no one is paying for a caterer, so we’ll just make it ourselves.”

“I know how many people it is,” she said. “I fed six hundred when my husband passed.”

Word moved the way it always moves out here. By Wednesday it was at the Cenex, and by Thursday it was at the feed store, and every version had the money right.

Norbert called on Thursday night.

He did not call me. He called Drew, at nine o’clock, while we were eating leftover chili at the counter. I knew the ring because the phone on the wall is the only one in the house with a bell.

Drew listened for a long time. I could hear the shape of Norbert’s voice through the receiver, not the words, only the rise and fall of it, the way you can hear a radio in another room.

“No, Dad,” Drew said. “Those eleven weddings are at the Engstroms’.”

A pause.

“You can’t stop them. They’re not yours. They never were.”

Another pause, longer.

“I know what the note is, Dad. I know.” His voice did something then that I had not heard it do since his mother’s last week. It thinned. “I would have helped you. If you had said it, if you had come to us and just said it, I would have sold the truck.”

He listened for another half minute and hung up the phone. He stood there with his hand still on the receiver.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said I made him look like a thief in front of the whole township.”

I thought about that for a while.

“Did you tell him he did that himself?” I said.

Drew almost smiled. It did not get all the way there.

“No,” he said. “I let him keep it.”

Ashlyn’s wedding morning came up clear and bright, with a low mist in the creek bottom that burned off by nine. By noon it was seventy degrees and the cornfields along the county road had gone that dry gold they get in the third week of September.

It was the kind of day Wisconsin hands you maybe twice a fall, and I took it as the only apology anyone was going to offer.

I stopped just inside. I had not seen it finished. Everyone had told me it was done, but a person cannot see her own project when she is in the middle of it.

Gustav’s tables ran down the center in two long rows, the oak gone dark and smooth under forty years of other people’s elbows. The church’s folding tables made the wings. Straw bales lined the walls.

Somebody had strung white lights across the rafters in long loose swags, and the morning sun came through the loft doors and lay across the new maple floor in a yellow square as clean as a bedsheet.