Barn

A barn’s mystery is greater than any church or cathedral. It rises from the very dirt, sweat and stench it provides and then relies upon for its own survival.

A barn, more importantly an old barn, one with wooden sides and sagging doors, a foundation of fieldstone collected by family and hired help and piled through seasons of tilling, sometimes cemented, sometimes not, a dirt floor compacted and transformed harder than concrete from generations of human boots, wheels of machinery and wagons, spit, the hoof of beast, is at once a place of home. Generations of dust and mud and harvest.

Seconds after you enter its shadowy interior, your vision is forced to readjust. The senses peak. Even if it no longer boards livestock there is always movement—scurrying cats, ubiquitous to any farm. Restless swallows in mud nests. A stray chicken. If the farm is lucky, owls roost in the loft to feed off mice and rats and snakes that feed off grain. And each other. Somewhere in the shadows, bats shudder upside down from rafters.

An old barn was definitely improvisation. Not architecture or technology. Tin-can lids tacked over knotholes. The best, wallpapered with the yearly lineage of license plates. Leather tackle gone dry and stiff. Hinges were makeshift things of old tires. Doors, scraps of wood zig-zagged together with rusty nails. Windows rarely opened, draped in the dusty gauze of spider webs. Dried black-bottle flies peppered the sills like burnt popcorn. And when a pane cracked or broke, a discarded panel of wood, even cardboard, most often replaced it.

“Barns are really all about shit,” Beulah Delaney surmised in her matter-of-fact-from-experience kind of way. Cow shit. Horse shit. Pig shit. Chicken shit. Sheep shit. A big fuckin’ outhouse for animals. Even people. No woman wants no man with clumped-up muddy boots and filthy hands walking into her clean house to do his business. You keep the hay in the loft and throw it down to muck up shit. Just like toilet paper.

“‘Course, the newer barns are pole barns. ‘Lectrified from the start. A lot have poured concrete floors for easy cleaning. Indoor plumbing from the get-go. The works. Nowdays it’s rare to have a hayloft and in some places even illegal ‘cause of insurance purposes. Easy kindling for lightning strikes. Many a barn has been burnt to the ground because of unlucky strikes. More and more have tin roofs.

“Hay don’t come in bales anyway now’days. It’s rolled then tarped over for easy storage outside.

“Walk into one of these new pole barns and it just don’t feel natural. Has the feel of enterprise and big business. They even have fans the size of jet engines to keep out dust and air-rated and all.

“We got us a good one as far as barns go. One of the oldest ‘round. Kept the roof repaired, the downfall of any barn if it leaks. Kept it painted. Most folks don’t bother no more. A real expense. And then the newer ones are all metal on the outside anyway and don’t need no upkeep. Our doors are oiled and tight-sealed. Tried not to fill it with a lot of junk the way some people do. Old washing machines and garbage. Just invites critters you don’t want.”


But a barn is also the cave and urge of our primal unconsciousness. The loft, a denizen of adolescent lewdness and liquor. Often, the first stir of sexual desire. And touch. Dirty magazines stashed beneath hay bales and pints of cheap liquor to lessen the anxiety. Or the victim’s.

The rafters, a secret, coded genealogy of carved initials connected by the DNA of inscribed hearts and +’s.

Boys often tried to coax and to seduce Beulah up the rafter ladder, the rungs worn from the heavy indent of workboots. But she’d have none of it. “I’m not some animal!” she chastised. “But you go up and have all the fun you want by yourself. I hear your real good at that!”

At most, they’d swing on the rope and maybe kiss. Her large breasts a constant lure. She slapped their hands, sometimes even bit them, and pushed them away. “Nasty!” she yelled when they tried a grope. Some begged, “Aw, c’mon Beaulah, just let me see ‘em, please! I won’t tell anyone, honest.” But she pushed them away. “They ain’t called privates for nothin'."