Renewal 5 - an Untimely Fall by Jf Perkins Read Free Book Online Page A

the hope in the world, and said out loud, “Well, it beats living in a tree in this weather.”
    The wind was shrieking around the barn, through the open gaps in the weathered wood, and across the dead power lines strung from one outbuilding to the next. The clouds were solid, lumpy, and dark with that peculiar smell of snow. They were streaming southward so fast that any snowflakes were probably holding on tight to anything the clouds had to offer.
    We unloaded our possessions quickly, with the unconscious desire to get out from under that sky as quickly as possible. Everything was piled haphazardly inside the crooked doors, with our organized father making no effort to create his usual stacks. I was worried about him. The events at the school were still clearly on his mind. Arturo was safely back, but only half as effective as he was when he left, and now he was faced with a barn that was old before George was born, and would provide virtually no shelter from the cold he was expecting.
    Dad looked around and gave himself a snap-out-of-it shake before he hopped back on the hay wagon and rumbled off with George to retrieve the car from our camp site. While he was away, Mom took over and had us going through the barn, looking for anything that might be useful. We didn’t find much that seemed useful at the time, but outside, in the barn’s lean-to shelter where George kept tractor implements, we found a few pieces of plywood. Mom had us drag them into the barn, and directed Kirk to nail them up on the north wall of the barn. She reasoned that most of the really cold wind would come from the north, and closing the gaps on that side would be the most shelter we could manage with the materials at hand. She overlooked the obvious.
    The barn was open on the ground level other than a tack room, a row of stalls, and the support poles that held the leaning structure upright. The space overhead was divided into a three dimensional grid, which seemed to be part of the structure until I spotted two levels of dry tobacco hanging over the front walls of the stalls. I didn’t know it was tobacco at the time, but I correctly reasoned that the grid work was intended as drying racks. In the back corner, behind the four stalls, was a tall stack of dusty old hay bales.
    I remembered something Dad had said about lining our storage pit at the camp with hay bales for insulation, and the obvious idea hit me. I began to explain it to Mom, and she picked it up before I finished the first sentence. Being a kid means being alternately amazed at how dumb parents are, and how unbelievably smart they can be if you help them a little bit. She instantly had everyone, except Arturo and the little boys, dragging hay bales into position, first stacking along the north wall, and then out from the corners. We stacked them up as high as we could reach, and then Kirk climbed up the original stack to walk out along our new walls and hoist another row on top. At least the adults could stand up without losing a hat to the wind. When we were done, the barn had become much more livable. It wasn’t warm, but at least it felt more secure than the treehouse.
    Dad eventually arrived in the car, via a chain attached to the hay wagon. He called us outside to help him wrestle it in line with the barn’s double doors. When he saw what we had done, he actually cracked a smile, rare in those days, and gave my mom a hug. Then we moved all the gear and food to one side and pushed the car into the barn.
    George politely gave us some time to settle into our new space, but Mom was not even close to settling. Dad had left for less than an hour and came back to discover that the politics of power had shifted. I wondered how much was a change in my mother, and how much was the opening Dad left for her when the trauma of the school began to take its toll. She called us all together for an extended family conference, and we watched in amazement as she laid down the law.
    “Ok,