The Day the Road Raised Our Barn

The Frame Going Up

The first truss went up at 7:40 in the morning. I stood in the wet grass with a roaster of scrambled eggs in my arms and watched it climb.

Four men I had known my whole life walked that truss up a ladder like it weighed nothing. Our old barn had been down for eleven weeks by then.

The tornado took it on a Thursday in April.

It folded the barn flat like a card table and left the silo standing alone on the rise like a thumb pointing at a sky that had already moved on.

Now it was the first Saturday in June. There were pickups parked all down our gravel road, nose to tailgate, more than I could count without walking the line.

I did not try to count them. I had eggs to set out and sixty-some people coming who needed to eat before the real work started.

Dwayne was up on the skid lift with Pete Hanson, both of them in leather gloves.

They were guiding a laminated post into the bracket we had bolted to the slab the week before.

My husband is not a loud man. He had not said twenty words all morning.

But I saw his jaw working, and I knew him, and I knew he was close to crying.

He would rather have fallen off that lift than let a single man on our road see it. So I kept my eyes on the eggs.

I set the roaster on the long folding table, the one Faith Lutheran lends you if you sign the clipboard in the fellowship hall.

I peeled back the foil and the steam went straight up into the cool air.

“Carla,” Dottie Ruud said behind me, “you sit down one time today and I will tie you to that chair myself.” She had two gallons of orange juice, one in each hand.

She had a look that said she was running the food table and I could argue about it later. I did not argue. I let her have the table.

I needed my hands free anyway.

Thirty feet away the whole frame of a new pole barn was climbing into the sky off our cracked concrete, and I did not have the first idea how to thank any of them.