The Barn, page 2
She put down the teapot and folded her arms across her chest. “Drink your tea.”
“Don’t you know I hate tea? What’s got into you?”
“What do you think, Pa? You know how rude you were last night. And all Kanita’s doing is saving the farm so it doesn’t go to the bank?”
“She’s saving it for herself.”
Clara sighed and sat next to me. She stroked my head like I was a dog. It felt good, but I tried not to show it.
“Mark loved Kanita. Isn’t that enough?”
“She is a dancer, Clara. A dirty whore.”
“Pa, she’s a ballet dancer! Please, this needs to stop.”
“It’ll stop when I’m dead.”
“Keep this up and that won’t be too long, because I’ll kill you.”
I chuckled. “Now you sound like your mother.”
A breeze caught the window curtain.
“No,” she said, “I don’t. If I sounded like Ma, I would be egging you on each time you insulted Kanita.”
“Clara,” I warned.
She stood up. “If I sounded like Ma, I would be calling her a sight more dreadful things than what you called her last night.”
“Quiet,” I said. “Don’t you dare talk ill of your mother.”
Clara stomped her foot. “If I was Ma, I would have slammed the door in her face and said, maybe this’ll teach Mark to gamble and round up sluts. I would’ve said better my son was dead than marry a coon! See, Pa? Now I sound like my mother. Or don’t you remember what she was really like?”
I turned my head away and stared at the green-patterned wallpaper.
The bed springs shifted as she sat back down. “Did you mean what you said last night, about burning the place?”
“Course not,” I said. “Besides, nature’s taking care of that without my help.” I turned toward her. My girl looked older. The worry lines around her eyes were the same shape as mine.
“That’s not what I mean.” She put a hand on my forearm. “I’ve worked side by side with you on this farm for thirty years. My whole life. It’s my home too. Please don’t forget.”
I saw what she was driving at. There were things I could do, involving lawyers and papers. She was afraid I might betray her. My eyes welled up at the thought.
Clara kissed me on the forehead and got up. The door shut and I was left alone with a kettle full of cooling tea.
I reached for the cup. It tasted bitter, but warm, not so bad as all that.
I hadn’t drunk tea since I did it to please Margaret. On lazy Saturday mornings, my wife would sip at one of these cups and read in bed. I held the newspaper and watched her from the corner of my eye. When she was deep into a book she got this look of concentration. She leaned in, eyes wide, long curly hair falling around her shoulders. I watched her hands turn the page. Her hands were delicate, long like a piano player’s, calloused from hours spent knitting and tending the animals, warm and coarse. When they touched me I knew I had a home.
THOSE FIRST WEEKS, I STAYED IN bed except when Clara wheeled me outside. I did a lot of resting, which was fine as long as I was tired. But I spent long nights not sleeping, looking out the window at what was left of the barn, the way the moonlight hit the foundation. It was all char and rubble except for that layer of rock dug into the ground.
The nights it rained, I thought of Mark drenched on our doorstep. He was seventeen. He had left home the year before and we were mad about it. Hadn’t seen him in eleven months. Margaret opened the door, and there he was. My son. He looked sallow. He’d gambled his money away and needed help, whatever we could give. A place to stay.
Margaret said he’d be welcome once he put his own life back together. She closed the door on him. I watched through the window as he walked away.
When Mark bought his casino five years later, I congratulated my wife on taking a stand I wouldn’t have.
Our son had no tolerance for debtors. He had sent some associates, rough types, to collect from a man who owed him. The next week, the man followed Mark home and shot him down on his front porch. Kanita had his dinner waiting inside.
FOUR MONTHS LATER I WAS ON my feet. No wheelchair, no walker, no cane. One morning in April, I was having coffee in the living room. The scent of fresh apple pie drifted through the house. I heard a sharp moan from Kanita’s room. Clara’s skirts rustled in the kitchen. A door opened and closed.
The clock above the television ticked off a few minutes. There was a loud cry, then Clara’s low, soothing voice.
The door opened. They limped into the living room. The girl’s arm hung over Clara’s shoulder. Clara bowed under the weight. I lowered my cup and met my daughter’s eyes.
“Pa, the door!” she said.
I snapped to it and let them out, then followed them to the sedan and opened the passenger door. I grabbed hold of the girl’s arm to help Clara lower her in. Kanita doubled over and screamed.
Clara kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll call when there’s news.”
She split to the driver’s side and started the engine.
I stayed near the phone all day, took the receiver with me when I went outside. I was jarring in the pantry when it rang.
“Pa, it’s a boy,” Clara said. “Mark Junior!”
I screwed the cap onto a jar of preserves and placed it on the shelf.
“Just wait till you see him,” she said. “How soon can you get here?”
I remembered holding Mark when he was born. He was only six pounds, the length of my forearm. He grabbed my finger, crying. Then he looked at me and stopped.
“Pa?”
I stuck a label on a jar—strawberry. Kanita would be laid out, exhausted, a proud spark in her eye. Even with Clara holding her hand through the contractions, she had to be missing her husband. I imagined taking the mulatto baby from her arms, and smiling at her, which I’d never actually done, and it seemed almost possible.
“Daddy?”
But to Clara, I’d always been Pa. Only Mark had ever called me Daddy, which is why the girl said it when she told me he was dead.
“I won’t be meeting you there,” I said, gentle as I could.
Clara’s line was quiet.
I put the strawberry jar on the shelf.
There were muffled sounds, like she was covering the receiver. Then something like a sob. Finally, her line clicked.
I decided to get some air.
I walked to the north pasture. My limp was pretty bad, so I took it slow. March rains had been lush, and spring was everywhere in evidence. The hills that blocked out Chavez City were bright green. Clara and the hired man had painted the fence posts and got rid of the gophers. The barley grew in dense orange spikes. All the weeds in the field were gone.
I passed the footings where the barn door used to be and stood for a while at Baxter’s stall. A warm breeze was blowing. To the east, the orchard trees swayed. I could hear the cattle going on in the pasture, acres away. It surprised me how open it all felt.
A charred piece of metal stuck up from under the rubble. The weather vane. I bent over carefully and picked it up. I sat down on a ledge and ran my hands over it. You could still make out the shape of the rooster and the pointer, now just a nub.
Mark and I built the barn over months and months. When we were done, I climbed up on the roof and attached this vane. Clara, Mark, and Margaret all clapped when I finished nailing it down and spun it.
The ground was mostly ash, but once I cleared that away, I was able to dig a hole and drop the base of the vane inside. The nub pointed at the hills, toward the city. That didn’t seem right, so I shifted it around and pointed it at the house. I imagined Clara, Kanita, the baby, and the hired man snug around the hearth. I recalled the give of Margaret’s finger beneath her white gold wedding band, the tears in her eyes as I slid it over her knuckle.
I filled in the hole and steadied the vane with a hunk of concrete.
About the Author
Erin Wilcox is a writer, poet, editor, and musician. The former nonfiction editor of Drunken Boat and copyeditor for Alaska Quarterly Review, she has edited some of the finest talent of our day, from Grace Paley to 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo. Erin maintains a vigorous freelance editorial practice and writes for publications such as Copyediting and The Rumpus. Her creative work has been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Praxis: Gender and Cultural Critiques (SUNY Oneonta), Cold Flashes (University of Alaska Press), and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press). Her story “Half a World Away” was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize.
Erin Wilcox, The Barn
