The Barn
The barn was where we lived as kids. It was built somewhere in the 1800’s, pre-civil war. We knew this because there was still a pile of bricks back in the grove of trees that were made by slaves from the very ground we now played upon. The disconnect between the largess of our childhood freedoms and the total servitude of the men who toiled to make these bricks we held in our hands was so complete that the profundity of the picture was lost on us. We dug them up from their century-old graveyard in the woods and dragged them about making paths and playgrounds for our mid-century imaginations.
The good bricks, the ones they used, formed the walls and windows of the lower story of the barn. The horses stuck their heads out over them from inside their stalls, languidly chewing and surveying a world that for their purposes, resembled exactly the world of the horses who lived in those stalls in 1850. Time in the country, the real country of our childhoods, seemed to us then to simply stand still.
The rest of that massive barn rested on a foundation of field stone that came from the property and, as with the bricks, had been dug, drug, and pushed into position by the same men who had forged the bricks. I wonder, now, which was harder. Did those men relish one task over another? Or was every job just that, an endless drudgery of back breaking labor that left them broken and with nothing to show but the leftovers from the big house kitchen. And yet, those walls held an architectural beauty that was stunning to us even then. Dry-stacked with no mortar, set so perfectly and even as a level, they supported the massive timbers and hand-hewn planks that formed the floor that stretched from end to end and covered the horses that lived below.
The wooden walls of the barn rose from this floor and the roof, some fifty feet or more above it, arched over it all like a cathedral. There was an actual reverence when you walked into the barn. The immensity of the space was, to us as eight-year-olds, as grand as any cathedral. A cathedral we had only seen in books back then. The timber in the walls was not fitted tightly, there were gaps between each board. They allowed air to flow through and keep the hay stored inside from getting moist from the southern humidity and suddenly exploding. That happened one day at the Martin’s Dairy farm a couple of miles up the lane. The explosion was so loud it rocked the ground under our feet and an actual mushroom cloud spewed skyward. We thought a bomb had been dropped. It was 1963, do the math.
The loft in our barn was accessible by a wooden ladder, almost vertical, that rose from the floor. Once, the loft had been for hay storage but now, the unused bales had long ago broken down and were a tumble of tinder dry, sharp-ended, spikes. We split those still semi-intact bales fully apart and spread them around to form rolling hills of hay. They were endless hours of imaginary landscape for our fertile minds. At summer’s end, when the milkweed pods had dried and were bursting all around the creek bed, we diligently hauled sacks of these up into the loft. After splitting them open and shredding the feather-lite seeds within them, we carefully spread them over all the hay in as thick a layer as we could manage. We called the cloud-white scape “Heaven”. The name stuck.
Heaven was where we told each other our deepest secrets, our most forbidden thoughts. We shared our dreams, bitched about our chores, hid from our parents. Later, as the years passed, it was where we had our first kisses, and more. We would drag horse blankets up there to try and construct make-out pads (alright beds) that would shield our bare bits from the razor-sharp ends of the ancient straw. I never did a poll, but I can pretty well tally who among us lost their virginity up in Heaven. The smell of dried hay. Still. To this day. I smile.
Lying up there in Heaven, the dust from the hay would float and coat all the air in the barn and the sunlight, slipping though the gaps in the walls, would illuminate the dust and add yet another dreamscape to our view from Heaven. Except for Heaven, the upper barn, the main barn, was not used for anything but storage. The horses lived below until we built a newer barn up closer to the house. Until then, winters were a slog through the swamp, across the creek, and up the hill where we had to muck the stalls, clean the tack, and brush and scrape the horses after every ride.
Something I only now have connected!
The creek meandered through the field, more swamp than creek, and truthfully more sewer than anything else. There was no septic tank. At all. The sewer from the big house just drained out a pipe and emptied into the creek for years, as it had since they put indoor plumbing in the house. Somehow, we knew enough to play upstream from the pipe.
Our meanderings to the barn involved hopping onto and over two small “islands”. Island is giving them more credit than they deserve. They were humps of field that the stream spit around before rejoining a few yards downstream. I don’t know why but what I just realized is our nomenclature. One was Devil’s Island and the other Angel Island. Combine that with our ultimate destination of Heaven and we have the perfect Catholic trifecta. It never dawned on any of us. It just now filtered through sixty years of hay dust to hit my brain. Strange the way our minds work, so free of associations as children and so restricted as adults.
We moved the horses up to the new barn; the old one had served the farm well for more than 150 years. We were all mostly grown now, probably sixteen or so and Heaven has served its’ purpose. Years passed and one Sunday morning I was lazing on the porch swing by the back door waiting for the rest of the family to get home from Mass. It was a sunny, warm, summer morning. I don’t recall if I heard a creak or a groan or was simply enjoying the view out over the fields. The old barn was probably a good football field away from the main house.
With no preamble, the barn slowly splinted and screamed and almost gracefully sank in on itself. A cloud of dust, straw, dirt; a century-plus of life, billowed softly up and enshrouded the foundations. The collapse was complete and total. Heaven was buried amid the rubble along with our childhood and our innocence. The floor held strong, and the stalls underneath were still intact and protected by those sturdy granite and brick walls forged so long ago. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Heaven was just a long ago dream, a softly billowing play space that existed only for us, a very chosen few.
On one of my trips back east years ago I drove up the lane and parked at the old barn gate. Thirty more years had passed and the field, so long fallow and untended, had grown into a small forest and a wild meadow. I trudged over the unmown hay and walked around the foundation of the barn. Still there but now crumbling in places, finally. I was surprised at the emotion. It was visceral. It was time-travel. It was transportive. As I was walking back to the car I stopped. I turned and went back one last time. Before I climbed into the car for the long drive back to California, I hefted one huge, sparking, magnificent piece of crystal-lace granite into the car with me. I carry this rock with me, always. It sits at the front door of every house I have lived in since.
My foundation is strong.
