Barned to Death

“The barn on the foot of my family’s property wasn’t just a dilapidated, ramshackle mess of rusty nails and rotten shingles: it was a treasure trove of memories. A countryside, pine-board vault of recollections, mostly the fond type and some that were...well, not so much.

“That ol’ barn once contained life; it had once been home to births and prized pigs, potlucks and parties, recitals and weddins. It was always warm and musty smellin’, but in a pleasant, soothin’ way—like your grandma’s house or a sunny day in the woods. And if it wasn’t full of the clatter of people or the raucous music of those local string bands Ma would always invite over, you could hear the animals in the barn clear across the land. Over the years, it housed more loyal livestock, good friends, warm food and cheap, headache inducin’ wine than my agin’ mind cares to recall. But if the woodwork could talk, it’d tell you from time to time, it also sheltered death.

“The ol’ barn’s back left corner had once held a stall that had seen the premature passin’ of what Uncle Joe had unfortunately nicknamed, ‘the family’s lucky calf.’ My brothers and I had named her Lucy. We might as well have called her Lucifer for all the good fortune that ‘lucky calf’ brought.

“It had only been a couple weeks after Lucy’s birth that the bank had issued a notice of foreclosure on our land; a devil of a man, dressed in a grey suit with a black tie and a smile thinner than my Ma’s mornin’ coffee, came to the door of our ranch to inform us of the foreclosure, but Pa had been in the barn, occupied with our ‘lucky calf.’ Lucy had been sick all that day and he had spent the whole mornin’, afternoon and most of that evenin’, nursin’ her better. Lucy passed ‘bout two hours after the bank-man left.

“Next week after that...well, maybe a week or two after that, Pa killed himself. ‘Course, us kids—my brothers and me—we didn’t know that he did that. For us, one day he was there chorin’ on the land, one day he wasn’t. Nobody told us nothin’ till long after. He had left Ma and Uncle Joe a note, splainin’ to them that he’d be more valuable dead; that the land and the ranch could stay in the family if they used the money from his insurance to pay the bank. He killed himself in a fire, you see. Burned that ol’ barn down with him. Made it look like the wirin’ had sparked the hayloft up. It was an awful thing, losin’ Pa and seein’ that ol’, beautiful barn reduced to ashes on the same day. Lots of memories gone up in a puff of smoke. Lots of love lost to the fire.

“‘Course, the bank sent another suited-devil a decade later, once the money from Pa’s insurance had all dried up. But I was a man by then and out on my own, joined up with the army and gone to war. And when I wasn’t there, the bank stripped the land and my family was scattered ‘cross the country. They smashed apart our ranch house and that ol’ barn my brothers and Uncle Joe and I had reconstructed so carefully. They sold the land to some company which sold it to some other company which I heard sold it to some other-other company a few years ago, ‘til we got here.”

“Excuse me, are you going to buy anything?”

“No home, no barn...It’s been hard ever since. But here we are, now, in this fine establishment. Took me a while to find the place—this, ‘Pottery Barn,’ of yours. You’ve changed it a lot, but I still found it. Have you worked here long?”

The shaggy-headed, nose-studded teen with a bedraggled ‘I-woke-up-five-minutes-before-my-shift-started’ look about their creased uniform and bleary eyes, stood nonplussed behind the register of the sterile-smelling, fluorescently-lit crockery shop. They tilted their head and squinted their eyes, equally exasperated and confused by the question. “Uhhmm, sure, like, I guess. A few months.” The teen exhaled tiredly and wrinkled their nose at the silver-haired, disheveled customer; a miasma hung about their grimy facade. “Sorry, but again, are you going to buy anything?”

The customer shrugged their weary shoulders and shook their head gently. “No, I’ve paid enough. But could you point me to the restroom in this barn?”

The teen cautiously regarded the loquacious customer across the counter, seemed to calculate if they’d get in trouble by allowing a non-paying patron to use the bathroom in the sparsely populated Pottery Barn and sighed. “Yeah,” they said, gesturing to the rear of the store, “It’s back there to the left, in the corner.”