The Red Paint on My Barn

I saw it in my headlights on a Thursday night in September, coming up our lane at a quarter to ten with a bag of dirty laundry on the seat beside me.

The yard light was on, the way it always is. It throws a white circle across the gravel and climbs halfway up the south wall of the barn.

The wall it climbed was gray.

This was new paint, flat and even, laid over the old boards.

I stopped the car right there in the lane with the engine running. I sat with both hands on the wheel and looked at it for a long time.

That barn was built in 1925 by Arlo’s grandfather, Walter Jensen, with lumber hauled from the depot in Tracy on a hay wagon. It had been red every single day since.

It was red when Arlo’s father, Earl, ran forty Holsteins in it. It was red when Arlo and I got married and had our pictures taken in front of the big door.

It was red in every Christmas card we ever sent. It was red in the picture that hangs in the hallway of the Lyon County fair office, the year Arlo’s steer took reserve champion.

And now it was gray, and I had been gone for eleven days.

I need to tell you where I had been, because people always ask why I didn’t just stop it.

On the last Saturday of August, my husband Arlo stood up from the supper table to get more coffee and his right hand would not close on the pot.

He looked at his hand like it belonged to someone else. Then he tried to say my name, and what came out was not my name.

I am a farm wife. I have called the ambulance for a man under a tractor and a neighbor kicked by a cow. I knew what I was looking at, and I called 911 before he hit the floor.

They flew him from the hospital in Marshall to Sioux Falls. I drove the seventy miles behind the helicopter in the dark with the radio off.

It was a stroke on the left side of his brain. That is the side, the doctor told me, that runs the right hand and most of the words.

Four days in intensive care. Then they moved him to the rehabilitation floor, where they teach people to walk again and button a shirt and say the word cup.

I slept in a vinyl chair that folded out about as far as a lawn chair. I ate from the vending machine and from the cafeteria when I remembered.

I watched my husband, who could back a gooseneck trailer into a slot with two inches to spare, work for twenty minutes to pick up a plastic spoon.

I would not have left that room for anything. And I didn’t, until the nurses made me.

“Go home one night,” the charge nurse said on the eleventh day. “Sleep in a bed. Bring him his own pajamas. He’ll be here when you get back.”

So I drove home on Thursday night, and the barn was gray.

I got out of the car and stood in the gravel. I could smell it then, that sharp, clean smell of fresh paint still curing in the night air.

The trim was gray too, a shade darker. The big sliding door, the haymow door, the little window on the north end where the barn cats sleep. All of it.