That Old Barn

I wrote another short story (evidently I only have one in me per year, ha!) for the Bess Streeter Aldrich Short Story contest.  It didn't win or even place this year, but it was so fun to write.  It is based loosely off of family folklore on the Francl side, I hope you enjoy.

Dorothy silently berated herself as she fanned smoke away from the charred remains on the stovetop.  Why had she turned the gas flame up so high?  Why had she put the chicken to fry on the stove in the first place?  She was better at baked chicken.  Why didn’t she just do what she was good at?

Dorothy, her inner voice mocked, you sure are good at burning things.  She snorted in cynical agreement to herself.

Harry, her responsible ten year old, would certainly have alerted her to the inferno raging on the stovetop, but today he was miles away at the country school house, as was Charlie, her 8 year old who might have sounded the alarm.  

It was too much to expect her usually observant 4 year old daughter Ellen to have noticed.  While Ellen noticed most things, at the moment the chicken turned to char, Ellen was engulfed with Dorothy combatting Little Jim’s explosion.  It was the biggest blowout the mother had experienced in her 10 years of parenting. 

Little Jim, just 15 months old, was cutting molars, which in itself caused horrible rashes and diaper disasters. On top of that, he had evidently gotten into something that disagreed with him.  Who knew whether it was chicken feed, or fishing worms, or raw corn flour, or crocus blossoms or any number of unthinkable things stuck in the creases of his chubby thumb as he sucked it? Everything went in his mouth these days, and something had hurtled right through the dear boy bringing with it everything in its path.  

At least the smell of that diaper is drowned out by the smell of the charred chicken, Dorothy thought.  Smoke billowed out each window she opened on her sojourn around the house. Ellen trailed behind still holding the offending diaper.  Little Jim enjoyed the view from his mother’s hip, and as they walked back into the kitchen he squealed with delight at the sight of the smoldering black lump not even fit for the dogs.  

That’s when Dorothy caught a glimpse of it through the kitchen window.  That old barn.  That old barn that she hated.  It was the first structure erected on the home place back when Ed’s parents had settled the section.  It wasn’t the classic kind of barn, the kind you’d paint red and white and you’d preserve and enjoy for generations. This “barn” was rectangular in shape, but had an awkwardly off-center peak. One side of the roof had a gentle pitch that tempted daring boys to use the rickety wooden ladder to clamber up and toss pine cones or whatever else they could find onto unsuspecting passers by. The other side had a pitch so steep it was almost vertical, but not so vertical that daring boys stayed off the ridge cap.  No, indeed. Dorothy caught Harry straddling that ridge cap just last week, which had landed Harry behind the woodshed with Ed.  

Speedily built for utility, the rickety structure had always had problems.  Despite the leaks, cracks, creaks, and leaning, Ed’s parents couldn’t bear to see the thing torn down - the first thing they ever built - when they’d lived on the place. 

But Dorothy had no such attachment to the vile thing.

If burning things was what she did, then by golly, burn them she would!  

“Ellen, follow Mommy,” Dorothy said.  She marched out and opened the side door to the old barn. “Throw the diaper in on the floor, big helper,” Dorothy instructed.  

“But, Mommy?” Ellen’s voice had not just a hint of concern and obstinance in it.

“Ellen(!)”  

The fierceness and firmness of the single word left no room for question or hesitation.  Ellen hurled the diaper inside the door and stepped back.  

“Good girl. Jimmy, this is gonna make you happy, but you must stay with Mommy.”

Dorothy strode back to the house and got the long bit of linen from the back of the rocking chair.  As she tied Jimmy on her back with it, she grinned.  It had rained last night, and Ed was away working at the farthest field.  If that wasn’t Providence, she didn’t know a thing that was!  She had asked Ed a hundred times to do something with that old barn.  He was busy.  She understood that, but he hadn’t been that busy for the last six years.  She’d said when they moved onto the home place back then that the old barn had to go.  Gentle reminders, joking ultimatums, and knock-down-drag-out fights had done nothing to convince Ed that she meant business.  Well, this would.

The matches, hidden away from little hands on the top of the shiny new refrigerator, joined Dorothy, Ellen, and little Jim on their trip back out to the old barn.  

Despite the rain, the wood that made up the old barn was so old, brittle, and dry, that Dorothy didn’t even bother with kerosene.  She simply grabbed a handful of old straw bedding from the chicken coop on the way by, tossed it next to the old barn’s leaning door frame, and lit the match.

This is what today was made for.  Bright sunshine, blue sky, fluffy white clouds easing by, and orange and red flames licking their way up and across that blasted old barn.

Dorothy made sure the water tank by the hydrant was full and then screwed the hose onto the hydrant.  The day was bright and cheery, but the damp spring and the recent rain meant that the grass and plants were green, the dirt beneath them was moist, and it was the perfect day to burn down a barn.  That old barn.  That old barn that she hated.

Little Jim squealed with delight as the smoke billowed out of the barn loft’s door.  The door just below that awkward off-set peak had been hanging open on a single hinge since the wind from the blizzard that winter had broken the latch. For as long as she’d known, the door only had one hinge anyway, and the only thing that kept it from incessantly banging in the incessant wind was that they kept it latched.  Until the latch broke.  

The crisp crackling of the dry wood incinerating itself played in sharp contrast to the memory of the low, erratic thudding of that barn door through the last of the winter and early spring.  Dorothy could hardly believe her luck that she’d never hear that maddening sound again.

It took longer than she thought but still just long enough for the barn to be too far gone to save when she spotted the dust of Ed’s tractor barrelling, as fast as a tractor can, down the dirt road.  Holding Ellen’s hand with little Jim peeking over her shoulder, she stood before the flames and braced herself for what was coming.  

As the tractor rounded the shelter belt of trees and slowed just enough to make the turn into the drive, Ed’s face registered sheer relief rather than the anger she expected.  

Was he glad she’d burned it? 

Then it hit her.  From the field he’d been in, it probably looked like the house had caught fire!  Her bitterness toward the barn and resolve to defend her rash actions dissolved as she realized the terror she’d put in Ed.

Though he was her first and only love, and she his, they were both strong and stubborn people who loved deeply but had to fight desperately to hang on to each other when their wills crossed ways.  Sometimes it was deafeningly loud.  Sometimes it was deafeningly silent.  Sometimes it was just plain hard to put up with each other.  But they did it.  

She’d expected the deafeningly loud version of “discussion” to ensue when Ed arrived, but instead, he climbed down out of the tractor, scooped up Ellen, kissed little Jim, and put his arm around Dorothy.  

Although it was a silent interaction, it wasn’t the deafeningly silent kind.  She heard him take a deep breath full of relief and gratitude before he looked down at her.

“Dorothy, how are we gonna sleep at night without that confounded banging barn door?”

She looked back at him, brown eyes shining with the heat and passion of the barn’s demise. “We’ll manage,” she said. Then she spat out, “I just couldn’t stand that dad-burned barn one more day.”

Ellen tugged tentatively on her mother’s skirts, “But Mama, you burned the barn,” she corrected.

Astonished, Dorothy and Ed looked down into the innocent, honest, bright blue eyes of Ellen, the observant little thing. 

They were still wiping away tears of laughter when the neighbors started showing up.  

The story of Dorothy Frank burning down that “blasted old barn” swept across the county like the wild fire of a story it was and became something of a local legend.  

Mr. Harrison at the General Store smiled every time he sold a new box of matches to Dorothy.  Seemed she’d been buying them more frequently since that fire, he thought to himself, but maybe he just noticed when she bought them now. 

Ed never bought matches at the General Store. He didn’t have to, because no matter how many times she replaced them, the matches kept disappearing from the top of the shiny new refrigerator, especially if Ed was working in the farthest field.