A LIGHT IN THE BARN
And on the eighth day, God looked down on His planned paradise and said,
“I need a caretaker.”
So God made a farmer.
– Paul Harvey
My father usually wakes up before the sky breaks in the morning. He watches the sun crack open over the hills like an egg, spilling its yolk yellow into a mixing bowl of shadows and valleys. All alone, he calls the cows from the field, lets them march past him, single file, into the milking parlor. This is his army, the barn his base, my mother his right-hand man. His work hasn’t always been a war, but since his uncle’s death, pastures have become battlefields; he fights to keep going.
I watch him from the window, the limp in his walk. I flinch when I hear the pumps, the lights blinking on all at once. Beneath the floor, the cupboards creak, the heater turns on, the fire alarm beeps loudly, needing new batteries. Things keep breaking. Things keep getting fixed. A cow has a calf; that baby grows until it has a baby of its own, and on and on forever for generations. I can’t imagine how many footprints those hills have had.
Dad lies to us and says he is selling the farm when spring comes: auction off the tractors, the chicken coop, the hay bales left in the loft. We all smile and nod and agree, laugh because it feels like we are supposed to, because some kind of script tells us to.
I look at him, and I see the farm. I see the milking parlor in the wrinkles around his eyes, the free-stall barn in his eyelashes; I hear the groaning of the water pumping into the heifer trough in his laugh.
I’ve seen all those things before—in the bend of my grandmother’s back, in my great-uncle George’s hands. Sometimes my mom and my sister will show traces of the plow in the way they talk, the purr of a piece of machinery starting up, shaking the still air with forgotten dust.
I grew up on a farm and I can feel it all around me. But I’ll look at my reflection in a mirror, a window, in the stainless steel of the milktank, and wonder: where do I feel it in me?
While I remember the thickness of the fields during harvest, I also know the bareness of what a drought can look like. At the same time my father was taken to the hospital for a failing heart, our corn crop was like a patchwork quilt: some places plain dirt, others only clumps of yellow weeds.
Dad was laying on a hospital bed, his flannel shirt unbuttoned to reveal several white bandages on his chest, tubed and taped to a tall blinking machine beside him. I think of him in the milking parlor, holding a milker above his head, the four inflations dangling around his hand.
He looked at Mom. “It’s not good,” he said simply. Always to the point.
Mom walked over to Dad and gripped his hand, their fingers laced together, his dark and tan, my mom’s startlingly white. “Don’t worry about anything,” she whispered. “We’ll take care of the farm.”
He tried to shift his weight, but grimaced because of the tubes, the way he had been laying for hours. “It’s in your hands,” he said.
“We’ll do our best.”
“That’s all I’ll ever ask for.”
My mom gripped the steering wheel as we drove home. Some one asked if one of us would like to ride up in the ambulance with him. Neither of us could because we had to go home to milk, we had to feed the calves, we had to make sure the pump was still running in the parlor. Kristen Kimball wrote on this life: “A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later.”
I kept thinking of my parent’s intertwined hands, palms together. A flash of heartbreak went through my chest. Is that what it felt like for Dad sometimes? Just a flash? Or was it a dull ache, seeping into your bones? Did he feel anything at all?
I had no idea that while I was suffering through my first heartbreak, my chest raw and aching, my father’s heart was literally breaking, pumping slower, working harder, barely moving at some moments. My pain was no match to his, but I thought mine took up much more space in our house.
When my great-uncle George got sick, my father worked harder. My sister and I were asked to do the same thing. For almost five years—starting when I was in seventh grade to the spring of my senior year in high school—we went out to the barn after we got home from school and helped till my mom took over after she was done with her job as a secretary in town.
During that time, I felt like I could smell the barn on me when I went to school, to church. No matter how hard I scrubbed in the shower, underneath Dove soap was the scent of milky calf’s breath, sickly sweet hay, the ripe smell of manure. It was a smell I always associated with my great-uncle and my dad. I never thought it would be on my skin, never thought my sister and I would be sniffing each other’s heads, saying, “I don’t smell a thing on you. Is it coming from me? Check my hair!”
When I was in sixth grade my friend and I would have a race of who could make it to the top of the hay loft the fastest. Starting on the hard wooden floor scattered with shells of corn and little hills of dust, we would climb over round bales stacked on top of each other. Each one was at least four feet high and I was pulling myself onto the fourth one: my friend in front of me—she was always beating me at things like this.
Dad was working that day, driving in and out of the barn with the skid-steer.
I felt a flash of childish anger as I saw her legs disappear above me. And then I felt myself falling. My right wrist splintered underneath me when I hit the barn floor. It didn’t hurt right away, even though I heard something crack.
The barn ceiling was so high, so tall, and for a moment I felt like I had fallen from way up there.
I remember Dad being there so fast, not even knowing where he had come from. I remember him carrying me to our house. I remember that smell as I buried my face in his shoulder; it was on my clothes later, in my hair.
He was always very conscious of when his daughters were hurting. When George finally died after months in a nursing home, the pastor of our church asked me to sing at his funeral. I couldn’t—not for the first death of someone very close to me. After I said I couldn’t, I hid in my room thinking I had failed the family. Dad came into my room and touched my shoulder.
“Amie,” he began, then groaned. “Ellie, I mean… I understand.”
Nothing else was said as I laughed a little and leaned against his shoulder.
I don’t understand why he mixes up his daughters’ names and then knows which cow is which by the different black and white marking on their tails. Maybe it was because as he came to comfort me, he was also thinking of his eldest daughter and the same kind of protective love he has for her. Maybe he thinks so much about saying the right things that everything he feels and wants to speak all comes rushing out together.
He’s a farmer—they don’t do things a piece at time. They work until the job gets done, even if that means through the night, just to start all over the next morning. The farm has taught me the same things it has taught him: a work ethic that involves endurance and strength both mentally and physically; how to love the simple things around me—the blooming of a sunrise and the way my mother sings; when to grab hold of the opportunities given to me and when to rest in the peace that there will always be next year.
We are all given roles when we are born. One with descriptions and settings and italicized thoughts. But then the drama begins, and we only look back at our lives in the quiet moments, in the darkness the scene changes, to see how we decided to tell the story.
My father has always played his part so well. I could never picture him standing on any other stage. Sometimes I forget the words I’m meant to say, but when I look at him I am reminded of the entire script, of the curtain calls, of the director’s notes.
Some days I look out to the barn in the late evening when darkness has crept back across the fields and see a light, so small and so bright, stretching across the gravel and the stones. A couple weeks after the surgery that left a raw, red scar down the middle of his chest, I see that light in the barn, my father’s silhouette as he walks between the stalls, still playing his part, fulfilling his role like no one else can.
I still can’t see the traces of the farm on my skin in my reflection, no matter how hard I squint and trace my fingers. But I can feel it when Dad looks at me, when my mom smiles, when my sister hugs me. I can feel it deep inside, pushing against my chest, right underneath my ribcage—where my heart is.
