Hex

The old barn held more than memories

Grandma had insisted for years that we don't tear down the old barn, but after it finally collapsed in the storm, there was nothing to do but salvage the fallen lumber. Dark lines of grain, emphasized by age, told the story of the oak beams and planks hardened by season after season of sun and cold and ice and rain, and my contacts in the city paid good money for it, enough to pay for a modern steel barn.

I had gathered the pieces of the old hex decoration from near the peak of the barn, highly valued by interior designers, and lugged the wooden planks into the farmhouse, promising to set them up for her as memory of the old barn. The old barn had been a big part of her life -- a big part of all of our lives, I guess, so I wanted to make sure she had something special to remember it by.

Grandma was sitting at the yellow Formica table, dressed in her Sunday church clothes, sifting through old pictures and papers in a shoebox. She barely looked up. "There won't be room for it."

"I'll make it work."

"Don't bother, I won't be around long enough to enjoy it. Take it back to the city and put it in your house."

"Grandma, you have a lot more years ahead of you."

She grunted and shoved a faded black and white picture at me. It showed the old barn, then new, with a young couple in front of it, standing formally, holding a baby. The faces weren't clear, but it was obvious from the context who it was. "That barn was built the same year your mom was born."

I calculated the numbers and only ended up reminding myself that even I was getting older. No wonder Grandma was feeling old.

"Is that Grandpa?"

"Yep. I'm looking for a better picture of him."

"I'm surprised you kept any pictures of him after he ran off on you and mom."

She responded with the same words she would use when I commented on a rusted old shovel with a broken handle in the shed. "You never know when something will come in handy."

Grandma was a strong woman, and proud. It must be difficult for her to let go and let others help. She managed to raise mom and put her through college, running the farm all by herself. When I moved to the city and offered to build her an apartment in my house so she can live out her years in comfort, she insisted on staying on the farm with her chickens and cows and sunflowers and memories.

Oh, so many memories. Now that mom and dad are both gone, I still enjoy escaping the city and driving to the old farm to relive happy summers visiting Grandma. I might need to arrange for someone to drop in on her regularly, since she's getting feeble and I live so far away.

The roar of the backhoe outside, reminded me of when I was seventeen and I finally got Grandpa's old Cadillac running again. Despite being in the barn for forty years, I got the engine running. The muffler had rotted away, and it the racket it made brought Grandma storming into the barn, with her shotgun in her arms and fury on her face.

That car would have been worth a fortune now if she had let me continue my work on it, but it stayed untouched in the barn after that to continue rotting until the barn finally fell on it.

But where the backhoe's diesel engine brought back a brief sense of pride in my teenage accomplishment, Grandma seemed to get even more morose. "Here's your grandfather's old driver's license."

It was neat touching a real piece of history, even if it was Grandpa. By all accounts, he was a drunkard, a womanizer, and abusive. But despite running off on Grandma, he was still part of my ancestry. His smile in the picture was a bit odd. "His teeth?"

"He had two gold teeth, right in front."

She dug into the box and pulled out other pictures. "That might be the best picture I have of him."

I nodded and slid the old driver's license back to her.

"Can you fetch my stationary box for me?"

I retrieved the old wooden box from beneath the rocking chair's side table. "You feeling okay?"

"Oh, fine. I just have a little bit of writing to do."

"Grandma, it's just the barn. Things change. The new barn will be even better. You don't have to move to the city with me, you can stay here as long as you want. I'll get someone to help you out, no one's going to make ylae."

"Tell your man on the bulldozer to keep an eye out in scrap pile for my old sheep sheers."

"Everything will be okay, Grandma. You'll see"

She shook her head and plowed into her writing task with an exaggerated concentration that made it clear that she didn't want to talk anymore.

I stood there a while, but eventually drifted off outside to watch the work on clearing the debris of the barn.

The planks we couldn't salvage, the rotted bottoms of posts, the rusted crushed hulk of the Caddie, bails of wire, and rotted hay all heaped up for burning. The backhoe ground down through the dirt, leveling the land for the new barn, pushing the excess soil into a separate pile.

Then the worker on the backhoe turned off the engine and scurried over to the dirt pile. He waved me over, then reached down to pick up a rock.

Not a rock.

From the dirt beneath the barn, beneath the rusted and crushed Caddie, he held the white bone of a skull with two gleaming golden front teeth.