When my dad laid his hand on that axed-hewn beam, against the grain of all those decades, I could see the running of his veins where the sap once flowed to the sky.
He was leaning over the pile of wood beams and talking of swing beams and post holes and counting the hours the crane had been there and how he could hardly bare to watch when the Mennonite crew had to use a chainsaw to cut a brace from a tie beam because the wood pegs wouldn’t budge and I nodded and watched his blood course through vessels, and saw how mine rise too and run blue rivers, veins forking, dividing, gurgling away, never a sound.
Dad’s dismantling history. He ferreted out an abandoned barn down a side road, just back of the land we farm to the south, and he called in a crew of Mennonites to disassemble the structure, one century-old peg at a time.
He’ll truck the stacked the beams the three miles down the road to the home farm where the Mennonite crew will reassemble a smaller, reconfigured version of the barn, an apt weathered gallery for his collection of antique trucks, Farm-all tractors and the general farm paraphernalia that makes his eyes glisten and his voice catch.
“Just plain wrong to let these barns fall down.” Dad moves his hand, stuffs it in pocket of his Wranglers and I look up into those eyes framed in crowfeet and storylines.
He shakes his head and I wonder when Dad’s singed his hair on time’s flames and how did I miss him growing old and how wood hacked raw with sharp silver, rain and wind-lined with rings of days, can make his heart burn like that. Does something to me too, old wood.
When an edge of a beam splinters in the prying, snapping it high, throwing it long, Dad climbs the ladder up to the floor of the mow, retrieves the slab from mat of rotting straw and lays it rightfully back in the beam.
“You’ll glue it later?”
He looks me clear through, sure and straight. “Whatever it takes.”
I look down at the beam.
“See here?” He points to a chewed up mortise joint in a crossbeam. “You can see it here: this barn’s been disassembled once before and moved. She’s been torn down twice.”
Twice pulled apart. I want to find his eyes again.
But the crane engine revs and he turns to watch the next post and beam catch air. The Mennonites in their suspenders lean back, ropes thick as a boy’s arm wrapped around their wrists, muscles and eye steadying the swing of the weight of wood tough enough to hold up the sky for a generation or two. What else can crack off above root and stand dead and strong that long?
When the crane swings the beam my way, to the west, towards home and all that was, and the brace and the joint are over my head, I want to cry for the loosed joints. I want to howl for the mortise reefed apart, crumble knee to the ground for the injustice of the pegs pounded out. I want to see this tore apart barn as the mirror of our broken home, our parents uncoupled, our family unfastened. I want to laugh, the wild strangled cry-laugh, that he winces over chain saws to beams and not divorce papers to vows, how he cares about keeping barns standing and not his wife and the three children made in his marriage bed.
I want to see this dismantling as us undone. That’s my base, wild squall before a pile of beams.
But hasn’t she twice revived?
Twice she’s been razed and twice she’ll be raised.
Dad may be dismantling history…… but he’s reconciling the pieces. Barn’ll be scarred and cut through and misshapen but the pegs will be driven through again and she’ll find her feet again and she’ll press against the sky again and the rain will drum the roof and the roosting pigeons will sleep under storm.
I want to say how the beams unhitched lay ruined. But God says yes, grieve for I grieve, but never forget Who knows about hammer and spike and wood and the rising again.
To find Dad’s eyes again. To somehow let the heart stammer it out: I’m trying to believe in the father-love, in the rebuilding. That God raises beauty from impossible rubble and what’s been broken apart will find new life. I believe.
Rain clouds build in the west and the pigeons thrum wings.
Lord God, You know our brokenness. Let us know Your restoring.
“They’ll rebuild the old ruins,
raise a new city out of the wreckage.
They’ll start over on the ruined cities,
take the rubble left behind and make it new.” ~Isa. 61:4
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