The Barn

by Avi

  Starting from the stake and using the rope to keep things straight, I marked out thirty feet on the four-foot side, twenty feet on the three-foot side. At the end of each I put down new stakes.

  Using those new stakes as starting points, plus the lines I had just drawn, I laid out two other triangles.

  That gave us three corners.

  For the fourth I extended lines from the second and third and got a decent-size rectangle.

  “Ben,” Harrison said, “someday you’ll be governor of Oregon Territory.”

  By this time he was all for wanting the barn big, though Nettie — it was no surprise — argued for small. I fetched up with the idea that the rectangle we had already measured might be good enough, and we agreed to that. It was not to be the biggest barn in the territory. But a barn it would be.

  Excited that we had agreed, I said, “We must tell Father.”

  “Not me,” Nettie said.

  “You be the one to tell him,” I said to Harrison.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Harrison and I went into the house and approached the bed. I saw Father’s eyes shift.

  “We marked out the barn,” Harrison announced.

  We stood there, waiting for a response. None came.

  Harrison turned to me. “I think he only listens to you,” he said, and turned to walk away. I held him back.

  Leaning over Father, I shouted, “We’ll promise you the barn if you promise you’ll get better.”

  His eyes moved a little.

  “Do you have an answer?” I cried.

  Father’s hand stirred.

  “There,” I said to Harrison, “we’ve made an agreement.”

  Though there were hills to the east, our land ran mostly to flat. It also dipped off some toward the southwest corner. There was a creek down there — Corbs Creek — which ran good, sweet water. We would have lived closer, but the last two times Father tried building near to a creek, we were flooded out. After that, he swore he would only walk to water, not swim through it.

  But Corbs Creek was the reason all the trees — pine, oak, fir, ash — grew well. They were not so old, either, because the Indians used to burn the area to keep it clear for hunting.

  Again we talked of the best wood to use. I repeated that pine was what most people chose, because it would last.

  “Ben,” Nettie said, “with all your talk of forever, you’ll have to become a preacher.”

  In the end Harrison agreed with me, saying we should do it right.

  And so we began the barn.

  We decided that each day Harrison and Nettie would come back from fieldwork earlier than usual. Then I’d go out with one of them down along the creek bottom. I would bring the ax. Whoever came with me would lead the oxen.

  Once there, we’d scout around for a pine tree we could use. We needed straightness but a trunk not so big we couldn’t manage to move it. As soon as we picked a tree, I’d start to chop it down. Or try to. During that time, I broke three ax handles. Harrison had to shape new ones.

  When I tired, the other would chop. Working regular that way, we could cut down one, sometimes two trees of a late afternoon. We used the oxen to haul them up near the house.

  Then, during the day, when I was at home tending to Father, it was my job to fashion the trees into logs we could use.

  First I measured each one for a particular side of the barn. The building was to be just twenty feet across at the front and back, with the sides running only thirty. That meant cutting the trees to those lengths. I used the ax but could not swing it strong enough to cut the trunks into logs the right size. Instead I pounded the ax in with our maul, a kind of wooden club. (I never did tell Harrison or Nettie I needed that maul lest they think me less than them again.)

  Next I had to strip off the bark. The trick was to peel it in sheets as big as possible, which we could nail onto the barn roof for shakes. I used Father’s peeling chisel, the one with the widest blade. Smaller pieces I used to patch the roof on our house.

  Most times I did fine with the peeling, though now and again I nicked myself. Then I would creep inside and bind up with a rag. Only then was I grateful that Father could not notice what I was doing.

  Once I had the bark peeled and stacked to dry, I needed to split the length of each tree into halves. I’d start off with a metal wedge, driving it in as close as possible to the centerline of the tree. For that I used the maul again. With the wedge firm and a crack started in the wood, I’d slip in a glut, a sharp pointed stake made of hard oak.

  With the maul, I would pound that glut down into the crack, opening it up some more. Then I could yank out the wedge and set it in a bit farther down along the length of the tree. After I drove the wedge in again, I’d set in yet another glut and repeat the whole process all over.

  Generally speaking, by the time I drove in five or six gluts, that tree would split right into two fairly even half logs.

  Of course by then I was fairly well split with exhaustion myself. That was no problem when I was working alone. But if Nettie or Harrison was about, I had to look to find some sly way to rest. I’d say, “I better go check on Father” or “I think I’ll tell Father how we’re doing.”

  No one seemed to mind.

  Sometimes Tod Buckman came around to see Nettie. One afternoon he watched me work for a while and then said, “Ben, you’re getting to be almost as strong as Harrison.”

  That pleased me.

  “All the same,” he added, “I could give you some help. So could others. But Nettie said you say no.”

  “That’s right,” I told him. “It has to be just us.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  At first I could not think of an answer. I just looked across the fields.

  “Is there that much pride in a barn?” he pressed.

  By then I had found my answer. “It isn’t just a barn,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

  Besides wood for the barn, we needed rocks for the foundation. Finding them along the creek run was not hard. But it was another matter to haul them out and bring them up to the site. If we hadn’t had the oxen, the chore could hardly have been done.

  Once all three of us were fetching stone. It was an unusual hot day. Nettie was lifting a rock, but it slipped and splashed me up fine. Before I thought of what I was doing, I splashed her back. She gave a hoot and splashed me again. Then Harrison joined in. Next thing, we were all splashing away, till we were soaked and laughing to a fit. And who should appear but Tod? Harrison tore out of the creek, grabbed him, and dunked him as well. A rare lark. Nettie, to defend Tod, took after Harrison, whom she and I dunked. And then as a reward, Tod kissed Nettie. I’d never seen him do that. She blushed up pretty when Harrison and I howled. We were all just being children.

  During these weeks, we kept at our regular tasks. There were the fields to tend, which meant harvesting the wheat crop. Nettie and Harrison took it to town and traded for what we needed. Wheat prices were high that year, and we did prime.

  About that time I told Nettie she should write to Mr. Dortmeister and ask him to return the school fees he had kept.

  She said, “I don’t write well enough for that. Besides, you are going back.”

  “Not till Father is well,” I retorted.

  She sighed and looked at Harrison. He said, “There was the promise to Mother.”

  I only repeated, “Not till Father is well.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “When the barn is up,” I said.

  No one said anything for a time. Then Harrison turned to Nettie. “We have enough money to wait till then.”

  She shook her head. “I never heard of a month named Then.”

  Even so, no more was said about my schooling.

  All in all we needed eight weeks to take down the trees, haul them out, then cut, trim, and split them, as well as gather foundation stones.

  And Father? There was no change other than his gradual wasting away. But si
nce I was getting stronger, it was easier for me to move him about.

  After a while, before I worked splitting logs, I would pick him up and ease him into the barrow, then tie him upright so he could see what I was doing. And I talked to him, too. A constant stream. Of course aside from his strange sounds and now and again the blinking of his eyes, he said nothing. But I often acted as if he had talked back to me — had given some advice, shared a story, or even, as he had so often done with me, told a joke.

  While Nettie and I were still cutting and hauling logs and I was trimming them, Harrison began the notch work. That is, in order to stack the logs up for walls, he had to notch them at both ends.

  He decided to do it as simply as possible, which was just a square notch, like cutting a step out from both log ends. He used a mortise ax with the maul. And he did it right, too.

  “Where’d you ever learn to do all that?” I questioned.

  Harrison nodded over to Father, who was in the barrow, looking on. “I once asked him how come our family moved so much from state to state and then to Oregon Territory. He said the only thing he ever got right was building new houses. That’s why we had to keep moving: to keep up his hand. It was his way, he said, of telling the whole country what he could do.”

  We looked at Father, and he blinked at us, as if to say, “Harrison has it right.”

  It was Nettie’s sixteenth birthday. She had forgotten, but Harrison and I had not. He’d carved her a little box, with a lid that was hinged. In the top of it he cut a heart. I baked a sweet cake for her. We gave her these things at supper with Father. Nettie cried and said she would never get married after all. I jumped up and ran for the door.

  “What is it?” she asked, alarmed.

  “I’m going to tell Tod,” I said. We all laughed. I wondered what Father thought of us.

  In early June, Harrison announced that we had foundation stone and logs enough — stacked, notched, and drying — to start building the barn.

  Usually, people putting up a barn got everything ready, then brought in neighbors and worked as a team until it was standing up and roofed. A frolic. We might have done that if we chose. But I wanted the barn to be ours. And Father’s.

  “We don’t know how he’ll take to sudden people,” I explained one night at dinner. “Other than the three of us and Tod, he’s not seen a soul since Dr. Flannagan looked at him four months ago. It might embarrass him.”

  Nettie disagreed. “I don’t remember Father ever being embarrassed.”

  “But this is different,” I said. “And anyway, we should begin on Sunday when we’re not in the fields.”

  “Thought we weren’t to work on Sundays,” Harrison said. That was a family rule, according to the church Mother and Father had been part of in Vermont.

  I said, “I don’t think it’s work we’ll be doing.”

  “Feels like it,” Nettie offered.

  I shook my head. “It’s not as if we had to build a barn. This is a gift for Father. To make him well.”

  Before they could argue, I left the table to go outside and stand by the logs and the heap of rocks. In my mind’s eye, I could see the barn complete. It looked so fine. Better yet was the thought of Father standing right there with me and admiring it, telling me how grand it was.

  I lifted one end of a log. Not far, but hoisting it at all was something I could not have done when I first came back from school. I felt so proud that if it had been just me, I’d have started building right that moment. The sun was still up, the sky all lavender. Sunday was four days off.

  Two days before we were to begin, Father turned worse. He was tied into his chair, and I had fed him. We were finishing up our own food when he gave this sudden gasp. It was as if the wind had been taken from him. Then his head lolled back, rolled, fell forward.

  Taken by surprise, we just looked at him for a moment. Then Nettie sprang up.

  “What is it?” Harrison asked.

  Nettie drew up Father’s head and held it against her chest. His eyes were closed, his mouth slack. For a moment I thought he had died. My heart sank.

  “Better get him to bed,” Nettie said, and untied Father. He was as limp as a new blanket one minute, then rigid the next.

  Harrison carried him. Father lay still, eyes closed. You could see his chest move, but he was having trouble breathing. When I took up one of his hands, it was cold as snow. I chaffed it some, and Nettie did the same with his other hand. Harrison eased off his boots and rubbed his feet.

  Then I brought in some wood and heaped the fire till it was roaring. Harrison picked Father up, while Nettie spread a blanket near the hearth. We laid him on it so he could take in some heat.

  Finally Nettie sighed. “It’s what Dr. Flannagan said might happen: another fit.”

  We stared at Father and at one another. Then we commenced rubbing him again, and after a while his body seemed to grow less tight. Some warmth came, too, as if he were thawing out.

  But there was nothing calm or easy about the way he looked. He had gone thin and gaunt a long time ago, but he was still Father. Now — in a moment — he looked as if a hand had reached into him and cut the threads of his life.

  “Is he going to die?” I found the tongue to ask.

  “He always was going to,” Nettie answered.

  “I mean, soon?”

  “Ben,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

  Harrison asked, “Think I should try to get the doctor?”

  Nettie shook her head as if to say, That won’t help.

  Then I said, “We can’t wait for Sunday.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nettie snapped.

  I said, “We have to start building the barn.”

  “Please, Ben!” she cried out, shaking her head again. “Don’t go on so!”

  “We have to,” I said. “We do! He has to have it.”

  Harrison said, “I don’t think he has to have anything.”

  “But we promised we’d do it!” I cried.

  Nettie rebuked me sharply: “No one promised anything.”

  “I did,” I replied. “Harrison was there. And Father agreed.”

  “Agreed to what?”

  “Getting better if we built the barn.”

  “Is that true?” Nettie asked Harrison.

  He looked away. “It’s what Ben said.”

  Nettie sat down on a chair, pressing her hands to her face.

  “We could call in Tod,” Harrison offered. “Or even the Gartells.”

  “No,” I insisted, “it must be just us.”

  “Ben, you exhaust me more than Father.” Nettie turned from us, but we stood there looking at her.

  I said, “It’s going to make him better.”

  She shuddered.

  “It will!” I insisted.

  Finally Nettie gave a small lift to her shoulders. I knew then that she had given way and that Harrison would follow.

  By sunup next morning, we were ready. I tried to feed Father, but it was futile. He would take no food. Nor did he make a response of any kind. All we could do was heap up the fire, make sure he was warm, then leave him on his bed.

  Outside, Harrison was in charge. We needed him to be, because Nettie and I had only a small notion as to what was to be done. But under Harrison’s instruction, we began by digging a shallow trench along the four lines of the barn, the exception being the five feet marking the door. Then he and Nettie hauled in big rocks and began laying them in that trench for the foundation.

  Of course to make those stones set right, to make a level foundation, was no easy task. It took much lifting and chopping out of bits of earth, as well as filling some back in. Often the rocks themselves had to be chipped. Harrison was forever resetting stones, casting his eye upon their lines this way, then that way.

  I was all for saying, All that matters is getting the barn built; but I knew that was wrong and that Harrison had to do it properly. Actually he sounded much like Mr. Dortmeister, constantly saying that if
the foundation was not solid, nothing else would stand. He meant it, too.

  While he and Nettie were wrestling the big rocks into the trench, I filled chinks with smaller stones. To smooth it off, I hauled mud up from the creek, crumbled in tiny bits of branch, and stuffed this wattle and daub in the cracks.

  That first day we did not leave off until nightfall took our eyes, but even so, it was two and a half days before Harrison said the foundation was complete.

  “We should show it to Father.”

  “He can’t see it, Ben,” Nettie answered.

  “Maybe he can feel it,” I suggested.

  “No!” she said.

  I did not argue but next day started off by dragging our table outside and putting Father on it. Whether he knew what we were doing we couldn’t tell. But there seemed to be some improvement in his condition. That is, I was able to get some food into him, a thin mash of ground wheat and milk. Now and again — if you could catch it — his eyes would open. But his cheeks were more diminished. His color stayed gray. All in all, his state was a discouragement.

  With the foundation set, the real barn building could begin. Harrison told us which log to start with. Nettie and I roped it and tied it to the ox yoke, and the great beasts dragged it to the foundation. Then the three of us lifted it, pushed it, and finally set it in place on the rocks, flat side out. The first log was down.

  Excited, I ran to Father and shouted, “The barn is going up!” I would have given much for the quick blink of an eye but saw not a flicker.

  The farm work that should have been tended to was ignored, though we did milk the cow. The mule was set to pasture. Otherwise we worked on the barn from early morning till late at night. It was my idea to light a fire in the very center of the rectangle. There being no roof yet, there was no danger, and the light the fire cast enabled us to work longer hours.

  Slowly the barn began to rise. By the end of the first week — working as hard as we could — we had the walls up. The front wall was higher than the others so as to give the flat roof a slant down toward the west. Harrison had said the winds usually blew from that direction.