That Old Barn

by Tracy Million Simmons

It was a bitter cold night in 2001 when a frantic pounding at our door woke me from a deep sleep. I slipped from bed and pulled my robe on. As the chill of the night air hit me, the heat from the blaze of a fire captured my attention. I couldn’t even focus on the man who stood on our porch, trying to give me the news.

          “Is it a house?” he asked. “I saw the fire from the highway.”

          We lived at my grandmother’s place, right next door to the home I’d grown up in. The old barn beyond was enveloped in flickering tongues of yellow and white. Enormous flames crackled and danced in sharp contrast to the freezing temperature of the night air.

          Our rural neighborhood was a family affair. My parents had been there for more than forty years. They bought the old farmstead from my dad’s relatives. My grandmother’s house and my aunt’s house were close enough we could carry on conversations from the steps of our front porches. Down the road, my brother and uncle had houses. I was there with my husband and kids, living in the middle of the place I’d called home for most of my life.

          Fire trucks arrived in record time. Our nighttime visitor must have made the call on his way to our door. Huge water tankers turned our normally silent, peaceful little acreage into a hive of activity. Two trucks were driven directly up to the fire. Two more parked on the road in reserve.

          One fireman was an acquaintance, the brother of a good friend. He quickly made himself our liaison. The barn was beyond saving, but the firefighters would remain to settle the fire and make sure that it would not spread. The night air was unusually calm for western Kansas. Likely, this was the reason I had not smelled smoke earlier. There was no night breeze or stereotypical wind to carry the smell of burning timber to our windows, no more than a few hundred yards away.

          I huddled in my nightclothes and watched the old barn burn, the hundred-year-old structure that had been the backdrop of so much of my childhood. The contrast between the roaring flames and the icy formations clinging to the bare branches of the nearby trees was hard to comprehend. There was magic in the power of those hoses as they shot water to meet the forces that made that old barn shudder.

          I remembered finding kittens beneath the rafters in the hay loft, a favorite childhood pastime. I would watch the wild barn cats, knowing that their swollen bellies meant new arrivals were expected. It was my goal to find those kittens early and tame each and every one of them. I learned about the nature of a wild beast beneath those rafters. Success luring one kitten into my waiting arms was followed by failure to tame a litter mate who hissed and spit at my every attempt until it was old enough to run away like its mother.

          I climbed from ladder to rafter to ladder again in that old barn. I learned to swing from hands to knees and crawl and hoist myself in acrobatic fashion. Getting around was more than half the fun. Passageways were full of secrets and mystery, perhaps even a little danger. There were remnants of cleanliness in the old milking room, stories of past entrepreneurial efforts in what was left of the pig farrow crates, and even more ancient family history in the fascinating antique feed grinder beneath the stairway. I pictured all of those things inside that barn, wondering at the spark that could ignite such an inferno.

          What would happen to the ghosts? I wondered, for in the child’s heart within me, the barn would always be a place of spooks and goblins, of thrilling chills and misty gloom. Even in the early morning hours when I would rush to throw hay from the loft before the school bus arrived, the rays of twilight would dance and mingle with a century of dust that seemed forever to cloud the air within the barn and the images would make the hair on my arms stand on end. So many creeks and groans broke the stillness of the morning. It was as if the barn itself breathed, stretched, and prepared for a new day.

          I never before experienced a fire of that magnitude and I hope never to experience it again. It was two o’clock in the morning, when the roof finally collapsed. I thought of my cousins who used to slide down that roof with me as if we were at an amusement park. We were warned against it dozens of times, but the thrill of slipping down that steep incline and then struggling to bring ourselves to a halt before tumbling off the lesser slope to the ground was more than we could resist. I remained rooted, barely noticing the continued drop of temperature as my childhood playground turned to ashes.

For many months after the barn succumbed to flames, I would startle awake, imagining the smell of burning hay filled my bedroom. I felt sorrow for coming generations, the kids and cousins who would miss out on climbing those ladders, swinging from those rafters, discovering nests of baby kittens, and encountering ghosts… all that was possible in that old barn.