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Barn - Part Two

By Ben Greenman

Here's what you need to know. Two sisters. The first, our narrator, is pregnant and married to a farmer named Berne. The second, Sarah, has remarried after the death of her first husband, a hardware store owner named Ed. The first sister worked in the store as a teenager, before Ed became her brother-in-law, and had a fling with Ed's teenage son from his first marriage, Dave. On to part two...

When Ed died, Dave went to seed. He wasn't even going to come back for the funeral, he told me on the telephone, because coming back was proof that his dad was dead and the only thing left was Sarah. I told him that he needed to pay his respects, and that he needed to think about Sarah for a minute, also, because she loved Ed as much as Dave did, and this was the time that they needed to set aside their differences. He didn't say anything on the telephone, but he must have liked my advice, because the morning of the funeral, he showed up at the church. I'm just going to stay for the day, he told me, but he was in town the next day, and the day after that, and after a month it became obvious that he wasn't going to make it out of town any time soon. Mainly it was the drink, although the women didn't help either. He set up a studio over the hardware store and started painting all the girls in town. Some of the fathers of the girls weren't too thrilled about having a handsome young painter with a taste for the booze and an eye for the ladies set up shop in their midst. It was probably one of those fathers who went by Dave's studio one night and beat him up. He was in pretty bad shape afterward, not because the beating was so severe, but because he slipped down the stairs while he was leaving his studio and ended up smacking his hipbone on the banister-post.

I let him come live in the barn of Berne's farm. Berne wasn't too pleased about the arrangement, but not because he knew about me and Dave. He wasn't too pleased because it was so soon after the wedding, and he wanted to have some time for the two of us, and also because he's just that type of guy: not too pleased. I told him that I felt somewhat responsible for Dave, because he was kind of my nephew, being my sister's husband's son. I also reminded him how hard it was for him to lose his own father. And then I told him that if he let Dave come to stay with us I would be a very good wife, if he knew what I meant, and he did, and he rolled his eyes and laughed. If you don't try to make babies, it's a sin, he said.

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It is because of Berne's dad that, when we were dating, half the time he said he didn't want any children. Children just keep people together who shouldn't be together, he said. The other half of the time he said he wanted children, because children are the best part of love. Not sex? I said. I was just joking, of course, but he got all serious. I have two rules, he said. One is to honor and love, and the other is to keep procreation sacred.

I have only one rule, and that's that I refuse to have only one child. Only children like Berne and Dave end up with this idea that everything their parents do is because of them. Children with brothers and sisters, like me and Sarah, have it better. We learn to communicate, to spare the feelings of others, to wait and see.

There are many examples, but I can only think of one now. When I was about eight, and Sarah was about ten, our daddy lost his job in the post office. For about six weeks, he was at home, and he was driving everybody crazy, rearranging the items in the kitchen, polishing things that he had never looked at before, let alone polished. The main thing he did was ask us to play catch in the yard. Every hour of every day it seemed like he wanted to play catch: to go outside and toss a tennis ball back and forth. He said it soothed him. For some funny reason, he only wanted one of us out there at a time. Probably because it doubled the amount of time he could spend playing catch. One day, Sarah was out there for about an hour, and then she ran in and took a popsicle out of the freezer. I'm not going back out, she said. You go. I didn't want to go, so I didn't. After about twenty minutes, our daddy still hadn't come inside, and my mom told me I had better go out and see what was keeping Frank. She always called him Frank, even to me. I went outside and he was sitting on the back stairs, bouncing the tennis ball between his knees. You ready? he said. I shook my head. Just coming to see what's keeping you, I said. God damn, he said, and threw the ball over the back fence, as far as it could go.

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Sarah and I were close. She was only two years older, which meant that all the things that were happening to me were fresh in her memory. Getting your period, kissing, going to first base, going all the way, but also other stuff like how to dress on your first day in school, and how to hold a cigarette so that you didn't look like you were imitating someone from the movies. She was always a little louder than me and a little wilder. When she was sixteen she was going with this boy named Billy, and she got pregnant, and she had one of her friends drive her down south of Lincoln for an abortion. She made me promise not to tell our mom or dad, and I didn't. After that she was afraid that she couldn't get pregnant again, and maybe she was right, because she didn't from Lou, who she went with for two years, and she didn't with Jack, who she lived with for a year, and she didn't with Ed. Right at the beginning of her time with Ed, our dad died, heart attack, and for a few weeks we talked every day on the telephone. Our mother was sick by then, too, with lung cancer, and she was in and out of the hospital. I hope she goes soon, Sarah said. She needs to be with Frank. That was the other thing about only children: When parents passed, there was no one who felt the same exact things you were feeling.