7:40 in the Morning
The first truss went up at 7:40 in the morning.
I know the time because I looked at my watch. I wanted to remember it. Eleven men on ropes and pike poles, and Pete Hanson standing in the middle of the barnyard with his arm up like a conductor, calling out, “Easy. Easy. Now walk her up.”
And the truss rose. Slow. A big triangle of yellow pine against the gray sky, swinging a little, then settling into place on the top plates with a soft thump you could feel in your feet.
Somebody whistled. Somebody else whooped. Then the whole barnyard was clapping, seventy people in work boots and seed caps, clapping for a piece of wood.
I stood in the wet grass with a roaster of scrambled eggs.
Eighteen-quart Nesco roaster, plugged into an orange extension cord that ran all the way back to the machine shed. Four dozen eggs, a pound of shredded cheddar, a little milk. Another roaster beside it full of sausage. Two coffee urns on a sheet of plywood laid across sawhorses.
I was supposed to be serving. I couldn’t move. I just stood there with a serving spoon in my hand and watched that truss settle.
Our barn had been flat for eleven weeks.
My name is Lorrie Bauer. I’m forty-six years old. I’ve been married to Dwayne Bauer for twenty-two of those years, and I’ve lived on this farm outside Cedar Bluff, Nebraska, for every one of them.
I came here from Omaha. A town girl, my father-in-law called me, the first time Dwayne brought me home. I didn’t know a heifer from a steer. I didn’t know you don’t wear white shoes to a hog sale. I learned.
I learned most things on this place. I learned them in that barn.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
To tell you why seventy people showed up on a Saturday in July to put a roof back over our heads, I have to tell you about the Thursday it got taken off.
And I have to tell you about Vernon.
Chapter Two: The Thursday
The twister came on a Thursday in April. The eighteenth. A little after five in the afternoon.
We’d been watching the sky since lunch. It had that color it gets in spring. Green underneath, like a bruise. The air was warm and heavy and smelled like rain and wet dirt. The radio had been saying “conditions favorable” since noon.
Dwayne was out in the barn with the calves. We’d had fourteen that spring. Angus crosses, most of them less than three weeks old. He was bedding them down with fresh straw, because the weather was turning.
I was in the kitchen. I had a meatloaf in the oven.
The siren in Cedar Bluff went off at 5:06. You can hear it from our place on a still day, four miles away, faint and wavering.
I went to the back door. I looked west.
It was coming across the Ostrander quarter. A gray rope hanging down out of the clouds, swinging back and forth like a snake trying to make up its mind. It was maybe two miles off. Then it wasn’t. Then it was a mile and a half and getting wider, and the sound was coming with it.
People say it sounds like a train. That’s not right. It sounds like everything at once. Like the whole sky is tearing.
“Dwayne!” I screamed. “Dwayne!”
He came out of the barn at a dead run. Caleb was right behind him. Our son was ten that spring, and he went everywhere his dad did. I didn’t even know he was out there.
We made it to the basement. Down the outside steps, through the old cellar door, into the corner under the stairs where we keep the lantern and the jugs of water and the weather radio. Dwayne pulled Caleb and me down and put his body over both of us.
Then the house shook.
It shook like a dog shaking water off. The windows upstairs blew in. I heard glass. I heard something huge hit the side of the house and keep going. My ears popped so hard I thought my head would split.
And then it was gone.
The whole thing took maybe forty seconds.
When we came up, the house was standing.
Most of the windows were gone. The porch roof was in the front yard. A tree limb the size of a car was lying across the hood of my Buick. Shingles everywhere, like somebody dumped a box of playing cards over the farm.
But the house was standing.
Then Dwayne turned around. And he made a sound I’ll never forget.
The barn was gone.
Not damaged. Not leaning. Gone. Folded down like a hand closing. The whole big red gambrel roof had come down on top of itself, and the walls had gone out sideways under it, and now it was just a pile. A heap of red tin and broken beams and hay and mud, taller than me.
The haymow. The calf pens. The workbench. Dwayne’s grandfather’s tools on the pegboard. The 1952 Farmall Super C that Dwayne was restoring in the corner, three winters’ worth of work.
All of it under the roof in the mud.
And the calves.
Dwayne ran to the pile. He started pulling at the tin with his bare hands. It was jagged. It cut his palms open. He didn’t stop.
“Dwayne!” I grabbed his arm. “Dwayne, stop. You can’t. It’s not safe.”
“They’re in there, Lorrie. They’re in there.”
He pulled loose and went back at it. I stood there holding Caleb’s hand. Caleb was crying. I don’t think I was. I don’t think I could.
The neighbors came within twenty minutes. That’s how it is out here.
Marv Ochs, from a mile east, in his old Chevy. The Hanson boys with a skid loader. Ruthie and Gary Stahl with a chainsaw and a first aid kit. They cleared the tree off the road. They wrapped Dwayne’s hands. And they started taking that barn apart, one sheet of tin at a time, until it got too dark to see.
They got eleven of the calves out. Alive.
Three didn’t make it.
Dwayne carried each of those three out himself and laid them in the bed of the pickup. Then he sat down on the tailgate in the dark, with his bandaged hands in his lap, and put his head down, and didn’t move for a long time.
Chapter Three: The Name on the Policy
You need to understand how things are set up on this place. It matters for everything else.
The farm is in Vernon’s name. Most of it.
Vernon Bauer is Dwayne’s father. He’s seventy-four. He was born on this land, in the front bedroom of the house his grandfather built in 1912, the house Dwayne and I live in now. When Vernon married Dwayne’s mother, June, they built a newer house a half mile up the road, on the home quarter. Ranch style, brick. That’s where Vernon lives now, alone, since June died three summers ago. 