The Barn Dance That Built a House

The call came at ten past midnight on a Monday in January, and nobody phones a sixty-four-year-old woman at that hour with good news.

It was Lorraine Pfeiffer, who runs the register at her husband’s hardware store and keeps a fire scanner on her kitchen counter beside the church directory. “Colleen, it’s the Dettmer place,” she said. “Out on V-14. Waverly’s already rolling and they’ve called Denver for tankers.”

I was out of bed before she finished. Dennis was sitting up, feeling for his glasses. He didn’t ask who. In our part of Bremer County you never ask who. You ask how bad.

“Are they out?” I said.

“Hank says they’re out. Everybody’s out. That’s all I know.”

Dennis drove. It was nine below, with a wind that pushed the snow across the blacktop in long white ropes, and we could see the glow from three miles off, a dull orange smear where there should have been a yard light and a dark farmhouse.

By the time we turned in at the Dettmer lane there was nothing left to save. The roof had gone in. The firemen had stopped fighting the house and were wetting down the machine shed and the propane tank so the whole farmstead wouldn’t follow it.

The family stood together at the edge of the light. Nate Dettmer was in his jeans and a pair of rubber boots somebody had pulled off a truck. Bree sat in the cab of the first pumper with the heater going and baby Josie zipped inside her coat. Ada, who is six, wore a fire department coat that came down past her ankles. Colt was asleep on a fireman’s shoulder with his mouth open.

That was everything. Five people, a borrowed coat, and a pair of borrowed boots.

Hank Dreyer, our fire chief, told me the rest while the pumper idled. The smoke detector in the upstairs hall had gone off at about ten to midnight, one of the ones the department handed out at the school safety night two Octobers ago. Nate had grabbed Ada and Colt by the arms and Bree had grabbed the baby. They went down the back stairs and out through the kitchen in their bare feet.

“Chimney fire,” Hank said. “That old woodstove in the kitchen. The flue liner was cracked and nobody knew it.”

“Did they have insurance?”

“They did.” He looked at the ground. “It’s an old farmhouse, Colleen.”

I knew what he meant, though I did not yet know how much he meant it.

Nate saw us then. He walked across the snow and stopped a polite distance away, the way a man does when he doesn’t want to be handed anything.

“Mrs. Hovland,” he said. “You didn’t have to come out.”

He is thirty-one, and he has called me Mrs. Hovland since the fourth grade.

“Well, I’m here,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded at the house. “My grandpa put that roof on in 1954.”

That was all he said about it. We stood there until the rafters came down, and then he turned his back on the fire and went to see about his children.

My name is Colleen Hovland. I was the secretary at the elementary school in Waverly for thirty-one years,. I retired two springs ago. My husband Dennis managed the grain elevator until his knees quit.