The Barn Deposits and the Engstrom Barn

“Oh,” said Kristi.

“Yes,” I said.

Drew picked up his grandmother at nine. Irene Kowalski is ninety-one years old and weighs perhaps ninety pounds in her church shoes.

She walks with a cane that has a rubber foot worn flat on one side, and she wears a pale blue cardigan buttoned wrong more days than not. She lives in an apartment in Viroqua now, and she had not been out to the farm in a year.

I had not known whether she would come. I had not asked. She was Norbert’s mother. I thought the question belonged to her alone.

She stood in the doorway of the Engstroms’ barn with her hand through Drew’s elbow and looked at the floor for a long time.

“That’s the maple,” she said.

“It’s new, Grandma,” Drew said. “I built it Tuesday. It’s the leftover from the other floor.”

“I know what it is.” She let go of his arm. She walked, by herself, to the edge of the boards, and she bent, slowly, as if she were going to pray, and put her palm flat on the wood.

“Gustav and I were married in a barn,” she said. “Nineteen fifty-two. We danced on a floor Gustav’s brother put down in a weekend. Plank, not tongue and groove. It had a splinter in it the size of my thumb.”

She looked up at Drew.

“I’ll dance on this one,” she said.

I turned away, because that was the tender part, and I did not trust myself.

By ten the cars were turning in the lane, one after another, kicking up a thin yellow dust. Hotdish in roasters wrapped in towels. Pies riding upright on the dashboards. A man with a smoker bolted to a trailer, who turned out to be Phyllis Rostad’s nephew and said he had been up since four with pork shoulders.

A hundred and forty people came. I knew perhaps thirty of them. They were Jared’s relatives from Richland Center and Ashlyn’s from Genoa, and the whole Lutheran choir, and Wilbur’s two sons, and the electrician, who had stayed on to see if his wiring would hold.

Ashlyn’s grandfather, Arvid Sorlie, stood at the end of the lane in his good brown suit with one hand on his cane and the other flat on his chest, looking at the barn as though he were afraid it might disappear.

“Where’s the aisle, young lady?” he asked me.

He is a small man, with a face like a walnut. He farmed forty acres outside Genoa for fifty years. His son, Ashlyn’s father, died of a heart attack in a hay field at forty-one, and Arvid had stood in the same kitchen with his granddaughter every Sunday since, the two of them eating the same oatmeal.

I took his arm and pointed at the open doors and the floor shining inside them.

“Straight down the middle, Mr. Sorlie,” I said. “That’s all of it. All you have to do is walk.”

“I have been practicing with a broom,” he said, and he gave me a look that I will remember until I die, a mixture of embarrassment and fierce, hungry pride.

“I heard.”

“I would not have wanted to let her down.”

“You aren’t going to,” I said.

I heard the truck then. Not at first. At first it was only the sound of an engine on the county road, changing gear for the hill, the way a hundred engines had that morning. But it did not go past. It slowed, and it slowed, and the sound dropped to an idle.