The father of Jessica is a retired county judge named Arvid Nelson, a tall, courtly man with white hair, and he nodded at the envelope lying by my plate. “Gunther,” he said, “you have carried that thing all through supper. You set it down every time someone passed the potatoes and picked it up again. What is in it?” Through the window behind him I could see the new side by side and the trailer sitting in the yard of Kurt, still wearing their dealer tags, shining in the porch light. “It is a letter from the insurance company,” I said. “About the barn.”
Kurt put his fork down. My son is forty seven, a heavy, restless man in a camouflage fleece, with the jaw of my father, and I saw the jaw tighten. “Dad, we went over that,” he said. “The claim was denied. The adjuster said the wiring was old.” “That is what you told me in March,” I said. “Here is what they told me.” I took out the sheet and unfolded it. “Claim approved. Sixty four thousand dollars. Check cashed in the month of April, at the bank in Onalaska, into an account ending in 3392.” I laid it on the tablecloth. “That is your account, Kurt.”
Nobody breathed. Jessica, who had been passing the rolls, stopped with the basket in the air, and I watched her look at her husband, then at the window, then at the machines in the yard that she had admired all summer. She is forty three, a school secretary, a kind and frightened woman. “Kurt,” she said, “you told me the side by side was a trade for the old truck.” “It was,” he said. “Partly.” His voice cracked on the second word. “Kurt,” said Arvid Nelson quietly. “Look at your father.”
A white envelope lay beside a dinner plate and gave one milk hauler the supper hour to bring his son back to the old farm.
He did not. He stared at his plate instead, and for a moment I thought he would walk out into the dark. Instead, he began to talk. The barn had burned in January, he said, and he had seen the check come to me and thought, he has so much, he sold the company, he will never miss it. He had a boat loan he was ashamed of. He wanted the machine so badly he could taste it. “I told myself you did not need it,” he said. “I told myself it was practically mine already, since I would get it all someday.”
I listened until he finished. A man of seventy four learns, if he is lucky, to hear the words behind the words. “Kurt,” I said, “the barn that burned was the barn of your grandfather. He built it in 1951 with his own hands and eleven neighbors. The money in that check was not mine. It was his, and your grandmother, and the cows that stood in it.” I turned the envelope over. “You did not take from me. You took from them.” He lowered his head into his hands, and his shoulders moved.
Arvid Nelson cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was with the voice of a man who had said hard things in a courtroom for thirty years. “Kurt, I am going to say something as the father of your wife, and not as a judge. You have a way out of this. It is a narrow way. You take it tonight, in front of the people who love you, and you do not stop until it is done.” Kurt looked up. His face was wet. “What do I do?” he asked. It was the first honest question he had asked in years.
I told him. The side by side and the trailer would go back to the dealer in the morning, and the dealer would take them, because I had already called him. The rest of the money, whatever remained, would go into a new account in both our names. What was gone would be repaid out of his paycheck at the creamery, a few hundred dollars a month for as long as it took. “And in the spring,” I said, “you will come out to the farm on a Saturday with a hammer. We are going to put up a small shed on the old foundation.”
Jessica reached across and put her hand over his. She said nothing. She did not need to. The look she gave her husband was the look of a woman who had decided, in a single moment, to stay. The oldest grandchild came in from the porch in socks, asked what was the matter, was told nothing, and went out again. Arvid Nelson refilled my coffee. “Gunther,” he said, “that is the finest piece of fathering I have seen in a long while.” I told him it was the only kind I knew how to do.
The dealer took the machines back on Saturday, with a restocking fee that came out of the pocket of Kurt. He paid it without a word. The payments began in May, and he never missed one. Through the summer he came to the farm, and we framed that shed together, board by board, with the radio on a stump, and we did not talk much. One day in August he straightened up, wiped his forehead, and said, “Dad, I wish I had asked.” I handed him a nail. “Ask now,” I said.
We finished the shed in October, and it is a small, plain, good one, with a green door. Kurt painted a number on the lintel, 1951, in white. In the snow of that first winter, he sat with me in it on two milk crates, with a space heater and a thermos of coffee, and we looked out at the empty place where the old barn had been. The fields were white and clean. “It was a good barn,” he said. I agreed. We sat there a long time, and the heater ticked, and the coffee was still warm.
