The Barn
Even the word “barn” is solid and warm. It begins with the baa of a sheep and ends with the lowing of a cow talking to her calf. Beyond the sound of its name, the actual barn is both the storehouse and shelter. Here the grain and sweet-smelling hay are laid up for the winter, here the animals are protected from the chill winds and the snow, and here they eat, sleep, give birth, care for their young, and sometimes die. They fill the place with their presence: the heat from their bodies rising, their breath clouding the cool air; orders of sweat, manure, the sharp ammonia of urine; sounds of footfall, the bumping of a hay-rack in the dark, the rubbing of a neck on a manger, the lowing, the grunting, snorting, and clucking.
This is not a new barn, but an old one, raised before the age of specialization. This is no barn only for horses, or only for cows; this is the all-purpose, turn-of-the-century barn that was built to hold feed, farm tools, and livestock. It has stalls for work horses, tie and box, bays for implements, stanchions for cows, grain room, hayloft, peaks forty feet high. This is the barn snug in the background of the lithograph, while in the barnyard a menagerie of livestock is forever arrested, etched in fine detail: a pair of big-rumped workhorses near the split rail fence, one with a front foot lifted; a spotted cow with horned head turned to one side, looking toward a calf with its back feet kicked playfully up; a huge sow planted firmly in one corner, piglets scattered around her; a few chickens, one perched on top of the haystack--a rooster, wings spread, caught in mid-crow.
The scene is altered on the Christmas card of the old-time countryside. A white farmhouse, now fully visible, stands flanked by leafless trees. Its clapboards make horizontal lines against the white of the snow-covered land, but the greater contrast is the bold red of the barn. The barnyard is empty, the livestock inside. If there is anything at all on the road, it is a sleigh pulled by a pair of horses. There may be tiny figures skating on the frozen pond, but it’s more likely that the windswept ice has no visitors. The imagination must produce the family in the woods beyond the house, bulkily dressed in heavy coats and hats and scarves against the cold. One of them pulls a toboggan on which a Christmas tree rests. Or perhaps the tree is already in the house, rising from its tub of earth, the children are stringing popcorn, and a woman is carefully unwrapping fragile bulbs that had been packed away the year before. There is a stepladder. A man is halfway up, placing an ornament on the top of the tree, a glass spire, an angel, or a star.
But there are no people in sight and, finally, it is the barn that assumes dominion. It is in the foreground, larger than the house, its red paint more appropriate to the season. Lightning rods pierce the gray winter sky. Small windows reveal nothing of what may be inside.
Here in Western New York the barn on my property stands quietly as winter settles in, as quietly as it had the year before, and back through all the years to 1900 when it was built on the foundation of the barn that had burned the previous year. This was well over a decade before the Great War. Most of the men who would die in that fighting were scarcely out of swaddling clothes. Most of the troops who would fight and die during World War II had not yet been born. The words to “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” had not yet been sung. Only 8,000 automobiles existed in America--this was before the household radio, before the telephone, before Christmas cards were mailed by the hundreds of thousands, but were instead hand-delivered, unsigned, accompanied by a calling-card. There were no airplanes overhead. A dirt road ran through the countryside past the barn, commonly traveled by horse and wagon, or horse and sleigh during the winter. Saint Nicholas was completing his transformation from a thin old man in a fur-lined hood to a plump Santa Claus in a tasseled stocking-cap. Then it seemed natural that he, too, would travel by sleigh, and perhaps even through the air, pulled by unusual creatures from a far-off land--possessed as they might be of magical powers.
And so the barn stands quietly as the years swirl by, accumulating as gently as snow. The world changes around it, but the barn hangs on to the past until finally it’s a warehouse of yesterdays. It may be that some of the farm equipment parked inside changes over the years, replaced by the more contemporary, but the barn itself rests heavily on its fieldstone foundation, the beams and boards in place as they have been for over three-quarters of a century.
The supporting beams are sawmill-produced hemlock, eight by ten inches, some of them spanning thirty feet. They might have been seedling in the seventeen hundreds. Where these big timbers intersect they are mortised and pinned with oak pegs an inch in diameter. Vertical beams hold up the sill of the lower roof edge, braced on both sides with diagonal five by fives; the lower roof seems to almost float on these three-fingered candelabra. The rafters soar to the roof peak.
Up in the winter loft when it is stacked full with hay bales, the dimness is broken only by the weak light that comes feebly between shrunken boards, through a nail hole, a knot hole. If it is snowing, the sounds from outside are muffled; it’s as quiet as a cathedral inside. A mouse, perhaps, rustles in some far corner. Protected from the weather, a cow sighs in an open stall down below.
The outer skin of the barn, tongue and groove siding, applied vertically, keeps the cold wind from the animals. The barn had been painted red, darker than ox blood, so long ago that it may even have been the year it was built, and not repainted since. It’s faded now, the blush of half-remembered embarrassment that refuses to be forgotten altogether. A reddish chalk bleeds onto the palm or the shoulder when someone brushes against it.
Inside, on the ground floor, there is almost a maze: rooms small and large, huge bays, dusty equipment, corridors, doors, stairways, hay chutes, ladders. This is one of the reasons city children like to explore barns. What’s in there, they wonder. Where does that lead to?
What’s in this barn--above a work bench at which no one works any longer--is a wall of history, an accumulation of years that displays the past like a random tapestry. The bench is heaped with a gently mound of scrap iron, old bolts, steel rod, and assorted chunks of lumber; the wall area, about ten feet long and seven high, is covered with a variety of objects hung from nails which appear to have been driven into the wood at whatever spot was closest to hand. Near the top of the all a bare bulb protrudes horizontally from its socket. Fly-specked, its glow is soft, golden, no brighter than a lantern. On a late, cold night in winter, it’s a small warm spot, a minor sun above the years.
The one incongruous thing hung on the wall, high and to the left, is an old metal Christmas tree stand, with flaking green and red paint. Its flat-steel, tripod legs are riveted to a fluted cup designed to hold water. The stand hangs askew by one leg, empty cup tilted down, making the barn a Christmas barn the year around, even during the hot summer during haying season, when the wall scarcely rates a glance.
The rest of the wall cascades object by object from the tree holder and bulb down nearly to the bench: three twenty-inch strap hinges, two wooden whiffletrees, a scythe blade, a bucket handle, a gate latch, an umbrella handle, the cylinder portion of a hand tire pump, a lamp shade bracket, a 6 x 12 inch metal tool box designed to fit a farm implement, its top hanging open to expose the underside of “McCormick” stamped in the tin, two steel muskrat traps, a shovel handle, a jointed brass gas can nozzle, a worn colter blade, a flat steel shelf bracket, filigree of iron work filling in its triangle, a rusty tin can nailed fast, holding the stub of a sharpening stone and a glass-cutter handle, a thin brass stencil shaped like a half moon for bushel-basket tops with “UNCLASSIFIED MIN 2 ¼ IN” cut into it, a small rectangle of brass punched with the single word “BALDWIN,” a steel caster, a ball of string, a broken rock guard from a mowing machine, a six inch spike driven through the desiccated body of a mouse, five inches still protruding from the wall, a small ornate key fuzzy with rust, a wooden pulley wheel five inches in diameter encased in a cast iron bracket bearing the words “The NEY CO. MF’G CANTON, OHIO,” three long “V” belts, short lengths of harness hardened into coils, a fabric hand loop from an automobile, a bearing carefully wrapped in cloth and hung by baling twine, a crudely made basket of stiff wire with a rope head harness for a horse that bit, three rusty harness buckles, four electric fence insulators, and a stainless steel radiator clamp.
There hasn’t been much added to the wall in the last decade or so, but most of the recent items gleam like new ornaments. It’s the mouse impaled by the spike that transfixes the children, too. Who did that? The nail passes through the mouse’s body back to front, just below the rib cage. The back legs are spread out flat as if it had died on its stomach, head in a trap; the tail hold a single curve, a curl that comes back on itself to form a circle. It makes the letter “O.” The posture of the mouse suggests it was removed from a trap and nailed up--a warning--stay out of the grain room. This will happen to you. Even so, the warning went unheeded. Mice still invade the grain bins, some of them no doubt distantly related to the one pierced by the nail.
Above and slightly to the right of the mouse is the dried body of a bat. Found dead on the hay in the cavern of the loft, it’s the one new addition that doesn’t announce its recent arrival. It must have died in winter, falling as lightly as a leaf from where it had hung upside down, weakened into death because it hadn’t the reserves to last out the long season of cold. On its back, wings spread, it slowly mummified. Now there is nothing left but delicate bones covered with a parchment of skin. Only slightly larger than the mouse--the wings make the difference--it’s hooked over a finishing nail by one elbow joint. It faces out from the wall, in some way the spirit of the mouse ascending.
Outside, now, the night is clear and cold. The ancient constellations of the northern sky are spread above the barn. A satellite winks as it draws a line through them. There is an intermittent faint jingle like harness bells in the distance, but it may be only a loose pane of glass blown against its frame by the wind. Straw rustles inside a stall as a cow kneels, preparing to lie down. It is Christmas Eve, the one time each year that the farm animals, from midnight until dawn, are said to gain the power of speech. It is believed that they tell the story of the Christ-child’s birth in a manger among their own kind, and that death is the fate of any human who hears them speaking.
If they speak at all, it’s likely that they do tell the story, but they speak about many other things, as well. They speak haltingly of the building that gives them shelter, of the others before them who have lived there, of the dried grasses that tumble into the racks and into the mangers every day. The chickens and other fowl squawk, frightened by the syllables that escape their beaks. Where? they ask. Where? They inquire after the missing. The sow grunts to her half-grown litter, sounding out the words to Levine’s “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Startled into immobility, they are intent on the curious sounds that issue from her throat. “Not this pig,” she intones. “Not this pig.”
The cattle also speak, the long jaws revolving, their thick tongues shaping with effort the unfamiliar utterances. They tell stories of vast herds, of savannas that spanned continents, of an ancestor whose horns cradled the world, of the promise of the Milky Way splashed across the sky. They speak in the words of James Dickey of “grass rolling/ Under their feet forever.” They retell the tale about the blue ox Babe, and his dragging a plow that dug out the Grand Canyon. They quote Whitman who said: “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid/ and self-contained,” but because of their expressionless faces it is difficult to tell whether they repeat his words proudly or with a sneer. They speak of the two-legged creatures in centuries past who built huge bonfires on this night to strengthen the fading sun, to encourage its return. They tell about the stars, what the ancient Sumerians called the “heavenly flock.” With reverence they mention Taurus, Aries, Capricornus.
Reluctantly, with lowered voices that rush like the harsh whispers of a rising wind, they refer to other things that they can scarcely comprehend: to the night of talking in other parts of the world--Brazil, where the summer sunshine blazes at year’s end, where flowers bloom, and there is dancing for the two-legged ones, fireworks at dusk--to bullfighting, to slaughterhouses. Finally, the words slur, grow indistinguishable from moans. Then they all seem to notice at once that the cold, silent dawn is breaking.
Inside the farmhouse the man has long since gone to bed and now he sleeps deeply and untroubled, the sleep of a child. It was past midnight when he cupped his hands to the window glass, looking toward the barn. Although he knew that he could move soundlessly through the gathering snow to the barn where he might hear the animals talking, he decided not to. He was not afraid of hearing them and dying. It would almost be worth it. He was afraid he would not hear them.
For a long moment he’d peered through his cupped hands. He saw the snow falling as thickly as goose down, the light he had left on in the barn, a small dim circle of faith surrounded by darkness, and the barn looming up, walls of blood disappearing into the curtains of snow.
Now, outside, the animals are silent, their mouths still, eyes empty. The light grows stronger. The mouse is still on its nail, the bat still ascending. A last few flakes of snow float down, large, clinging to one another as softly as feathers, a white Christmas, after all.
***
This is not a new barn, but an old one, raised before the age of specialization. This is no barn only for horses, or only for cows; this is the all-purpose, turn-of-the-century barn that was built to hold feed, farm tools, and livestock. It has stalls for work horses, tie and box, bays for implements, stanchions for cows, grain room, hayloft, peaks forty feet high. This is the barn snug in the background of the lithograph, while in the barnyard a menagerie of livestock is forever arrested, etched in fine detail: a pair of big-rumped workhorses near the split rail fence, one with a front foot lifted; a spotted cow with horned head turned to one side, looking toward a calf with its back feet kicked playfully up; a huge sow planted firmly in one corner, piglets scattered around her; a few chickens, one perched on top of the haystack--a rooster, wings spread, caught in mid-crow.
The scene is altered on the Christmas card of the old-time countryside. A white farmhouse, now fully visible, stands flanked by leafless trees. Its clapboards make horizontal lines against the white of the snow-covered land, but the greater contrast is the bold red of the barn. The barnyard is empty, the livestock inside. If there is anything at all on the road, it is a sleigh pulled by a pair of horses. There may be tiny figures skating on the frozen pond, but it’s more likely that the windswept ice has no visitors. The imagination must produce the family in the woods beyond the house, bulkily dressed in heavy coats and hats and scarves against the cold. One of them pulls a toboggan on which a Christmas tree rests. Or perhaps the tree is already in the house, rising from its tub of earth, the children are stringing popcorn, and a woman is carefully unwrapping fragile bulbs that had been packed away the year before. There is a stepladder. A man is halfway up, placing an ornament on the top of the tree, a glass spire, an angel, or a star.
But there are no people in sight and, finally, it is the barn that assumes dominion. It is in the foreground, larger than the house, its red paint more appropriate to the season. Lightning rods pierce the gray winter sky. Small windows reveal nothing of what may be inside.
Here in Western New York the barn on my property stands quietly as winter settles in, as quietly as it had the year before, and back through all the years to 1900 when it was built on the foundation of the barn that had burned the previous year. This was well over a decade before the Great War. Most of the men who would die in that fighting were scarcely out of swaddling clothes. Most of the troops who would fight and die during World War II had not yet been born. The words to “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” had not yet been sung. Only 8,000 automobiles existed in America--this was before the household radio, before the telephone, before Christmas cards were mailed by the hundreds of thousands, but were instead hand-delivered, unsigned, accompanied by a calling-card. There were no airplanes overhead. A dirt road ran through the countryside past the barn, commonly traveled by horse and wagon, or horse and sleigh during the winter. Saint Nicholas was completing his transformation from a thin old man in a fur-lined hood to a plump Santa Claus in a tasseled stocking-cap. Then it seemed natural that he, too, would travel by sleigh, and perhaps even through the air, pulled by unusual creatures from a far-off land--possessed as they might be of magical powers.
And so the barn stands quietly as the years swirl by, accumulating as gently as snow. The world changes around it, but the barn hangs on to the past until finally it’s a warehouse of yesterdays. It may be that some of the farm equipment parked inside changes over the years, replaced by the more contemporary, but the barn itself rests heavily on its fieldstone foundation, the beams and boards in place as they have been for over three-quarters of a century.
The supporting beams are sawmill-produced hemlock, eight by ten inches, some of them spanning thirty feet. They might have been seedling in the seventeen hundreds. Where these big timbers intersect they are mortised and pinned with oak pegs an inch in diameter. Vertical beams hold up the sill of the lower roof edge, braced on both sides with diagonal five by fives; the lower roof seems to almost float on these three-fingered candelabra. The rafters soar to the roof peak.
Up in the winter loft when it is stacked full with hay bales, the dimness is broken only by the weak light that comes feebly between shrunken boards, through a nail hole, a knot hole. If it is snowing, the sounds from outside are muffled; it’s as quiet as a cathedral inside. A mouse, perhaps, rustles in some far corner. Protected from the weather, a cow sighs in an open stall down below.
The outer skin of the barn, tongue and groove siding, applied vertically, keeps the cold wind from the animals. The barn had been painted red, darker than ox blood, so long ago that it may even have been the year it was built, and not repainted since. It’s faded now, the blush of half-remembered embarrassment that refuses to be forgotten altogether. A reddish chalk bleeds onto the palm or the shoulder when someone brushes against it.
Inside, on the ground floor, there is almost a maze: rooms small and large, huge bays, dusty equipment, corridors, doors, stairways, hay chutes, ladders. This is one of the reasons city children like to explore barns. What’s in there, they wonder. Where does that lead to?
What’s in this barn--above a work bench at which no one works any longer--is a wall of history, an accumulation of years that displays the past like a random tapestry. The bench is heaped with a gently mound of scrap iron, old bolts, steel rod, and assorted chunks of lumber; the wall area, about ten feet long and seven high, is covered with a variety of objects hung from nails which appear to have been driven into the wood at whatever spot was closest to hand. Near the top of the all a bare bulb protrudes horizontally from its socket. Fly-specked, its glow is soft, golden, no brighter than a lantern. On a late, cold night in winter, it’s a small warm spot, a minor sun above the years.
The one incongruous thing hung on the wall, high and to the left, is an old metal Christmas tree stand, with flaking green and red paint. Its flat-steel, tripod legs are riveted to a fluted cup designed to hold water. The stand hangs askew by one leg, empty cup tilted down, making the barn a Christmas barn the year around, even during the hot summer during haying season, when the wall scarcely rates a glance.
The rest of the wall cascades object by object from the tree holder and bulb down nearly to the bench: three twenty-inch strap hinges, two wooden whiffletrees, a scythe blade, a bucket handle, a gate latch, an umbrella handle, the cylinder portion of a hand tire pump, a lamp shade bracket, a 6 x 12 inch metal tool box designed to fit a farm implement, its top hanging open to expose the underside of “McCormick” stamped in the tin, two steel muskrat traps, a shovel handle, a jointed brass gas can nozzle, a worn colter blade, a flat steel shelf bracket, filigree of iron work filling in its triangle, a rusty tin can nailed fast, holding the stub of a sharpening stone and a glass-cutter handle, a thin brass stencil shaped like a half moon for bushel-basket tops with “UNCLASSIFIED MIN 2 ¼ IN” cut into it, a small rectangle of brass punched with the single word “BALDWIN,” a steel caster, a ball of string, a broken rock guard from a mowing machine, a six inch spike driven through the desiccated body of a mouse, five inches still protruding from the wall, a small ornate key fuzzy with rust, a wooden pulley wheel five inches in diameter encased in a cast iron bracket bearing the words “The NEY CO. MF’G CANTON, OHIO,” three long “V” belts, short lengths of harness hardened into coils, a fabric hand loop from an automobile, a bearing carefully wrapped in cloth and hung by baling twine, a crudely made basket of stiff wire with a rope head harness for a horse that bit, three rusty harness buckles, four electric fence insulators, and a stainless steel radiator clamp.
There hasn’t been much added to the wall in the last decade or so, but most of the recent items gleam like new ornaments. It’s the mouse impaled by the spike that transfixes the children, too. Who did that? The nail passes through the mouse’s body back to front, just below the rib cage. The back legs are spread out flat as if it had died on its stomach, head in a trap; the tail hold a single curve, a curl that comes back on itself to form a circle. It makes the letter “O.” The posture of the mouse suggests it was removed from a trap and nailed up--a warning--stay out of the grain room. This will happen to you. Even so, the warning went unheeded. Mice still invade the grain bins, some of them no doubt distantly related to the one pierced by the nail.
Above and slightly to the right of the mouse is the dried body of a bat. Found dead on the hay in the cavern of the loft, it’s the one new addition that doesn’t announce its recent arrival. It must have died in winter, falling as lightly as a leaf from where it had hung upside down, weakened into death because it hadn’t the reserves to last out the long season of cold. On its back, wings spread, it slowly mummified. Now there is nothing left but delicate bones covered with a parchment of skin. Only slightly larger than the mouse--the wings make the difference--it’s hooked over a finishing nail by one elbow joint. It faces out from the wall, in some way the spirit of the mouse ascending.
Outside, now, the night is clear and cold. The ancient constellations of the northern sky are spread above the barn. A satellite winks as it draws a line through them. There is an intermittent faint jingle like harness bells in the distance, but it may be only a loose pane of glass blown against its frame by the wind. Straw rustles inside a stall as a cow kneels, preparing to lie down. It is Christmas Eve, the one time each year that the farm animals, from midnight until dawn, are said to gain the power of speech. It is believed that they tell the story of the Christ-child’s birth in a manger among their own kind, and that death is the fate of any human who hears them speaking.
If they speak at all, it’s likely that they do tell the story, but they speak about many other things, as well. They speak haltingly of the building that gives them shelter, of the others before them who have lived there, of the dried grasses that tumble into the racks and into the mangers every day. The chickens and other fowl squawk, frightened by the syllables that escape their beaks. Where? they ask. Where? They inquire after the missing. The sow grunts to her half-grown litter, sounding out the words to Levine’s “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Startled into immobility, they are intent on the curious sounds that issue from her throat. “Not this pig,” she intones. “Not this pig.”
The cattle also speak, the long jaws revolving, their thick tongues shaping with effort the unfamiliar utterances. They tell stories of vast herds, of savannas that spanned continents, of an ancestor whose horns cradled the world, of the promise of the Milky Way splashed across the sky. They speak in the words of James Dickey of “grass rolling/ Under their feet forever.” They retell the tale about the blue ox Babe, and his dragging a plow that dug out the Grand Canyon. They quote Whitman who said: “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid/ and self-contained,” but because of their expressionless faces it is difficult to tell whether they repeat his words proudly or with a sneer. They speak of the two-legged creatures in centuries past who built huge bonfires on this night to strengthen the fading sun, to encourage its return. They tell about the stars, what the ancient Sumerians called the “heavenly flock.” With reverence they mention Taurus, Aries, Capricornus.
Reluctantly, with lowered voices that rush like the harsh whispers of a rising wind, they refer to other things that they can scarcely comprehend: to the night of talking in other parts of the world--Brazil, where the summer sunshine blazes at year’s end, where flowers bloom, and there is dancing for the two-legged ones, fireworks at dusk--to bullfighting, to slaughterhouses. Finally, the words slur, grow indistinguishable from moans. Then they all seem to notice at once that the cold, silent dawn is breaking.
Inside the farmhouse the man has long since gone to bed and now he sleeps deeply and untroubled, the sleep of a child. It was past midnight when he cupped his hands to the window glass, looking toward the barn. Although he knew that he could move soundlessly through the gathering snow to the barn where he might hear the animals talking, he decided not to. He was not afraid of hearing them and dying. It would almost be worth it. He was afraid he would not hear them.
For a long moment he’d peered through his cupped hands. He saw the snow falling as thickly as goose down, the light he had left on in the barn, a small dim circle of faith surrounded by darkness, and the barn looming up, walls of blood disappearing into the curtains of snow.
Now, outside, the animals are silent, their mouths still, eyes empty. The light grows stronger. The mouse is still on its nail, the bat still ascending. A last few flakes of snow float down, large, clinging to one another as softly as feathers, a white Christmas, after all.
***
"The Barn" was previously published in The Hartford Courant, 25 December 1985, under the title "The Barn: Thick with Mysteries of Years--and Christmases--Past."
