“Build It Right”

No more riding in a scream-filled death trap for two hours a day.   No more heavy burden of books breaking my spirit and back.  No Wally Winter trying to give me a wedgie every time I saw him after fifth hour.  No more Mrs. Youngs peering at me over her fancy glasses, threatening me with all manner of detention for not reading another boring chapter on the origin of the English language.  

Yes, all of this was over, and summer beckoned me. Summer, that beautiful time of year when a boy gets to be a boy, when fishing and hunting and swimming are the only things that have to get done.  Oh sure, there are chores when you live on a farm, but now they could be spread out over a whole week instead of being crammed into two days on a weekend, and I wouldn’t need to be up early on Saturdays in order to get them all done.  I could sleep in, maybe till noon, and then lay around most of the day doing nothing if I wanted to.  It was going to be heavenly!

My brother Johnny had pretty much the same game plan for that summer, so we stayed up  real late that first night of break watching The Incredible Hulk and Mission: Impossible.  We finally hit the sack about 11:30, both of us taking a holiday from brushing our teeth in celebration of the end of another school year. Johnny flipped out the light in our room, and I was out almost the moment I hit the bed.

BANG!  BANG! BANG!

I jerked straight up and at first had no idea where I was.  Then it hit me – bed, bedroom, house, home.  Oh, I was in my room!

“Get up!” I heard someone yell.

That was no dream. Someone was making much too much noise at…what time was it?  It was barely light outside, but just enough came through the window for me to see the face of our alarm clock.  It was 6:00.

6:00!  It’s Saturday at 6:00!  In the morning!  Who would be up this early?

It was Dad, of course. He yelled up the stairs again for Johnny and me to get dressed and meet him outside.

Parents love to get up early. Kids on the other hand need sleep. At least that’s what parents are always telling us.  I think there should be a law that parents can’t wake their kids up before 9:00 on a Saturday.

I threw back my covers, which by morning was usually just a thin sheet; at bedtime, I would start with two blankets covering me, but each of them usually got kicked off during the night because I would start sweating like crazy.  Then, I would get cold, so I would pull one blanket back on me and the sweating cycle would start again.  One day I licked my sheet just to see if it sweat really tasted like salt.  I probably won’t do that again.

I rolled out of my bed and grabbed my jeans off the floor where I had left them the night before.  I sat back on the bed, slipped my legs into them until my toes were touching the knees of the pant legs, and then jumped off the bed and pulled them on the rest of the way before my feet hit the wood floor. Since I had ripped holes in the toes of most of my socks by pulling them up wrong, this time I slid my feet in until my toes were at the end, then I pulled them over my ankles and up my calves (although I knew they would fall down later because my calves were so skinny).  Then, I grabbed my least dirty t-shirt and pulled it over my head and I was dressed, but still half asleep.

Johnny hadn’t made quite as much progress.  Actually, he was still in bed.  So I grabbed one of my pillows and gave him a whack on the legs.  I figured that was a safe place to hit him rather than on the head, which mattered because if he got riled up after a head shot, he would probably grab me and put me in a headlock.  And he could do it too, because he was three years older and about 30 pounds heavier.  He was a football player and a good one, so when you are my size you are careful about picking a fight with someone who viciously tackles people for fun.

After another whack on the legs, Johnny got up robotically and got dressed with his eyes still closed. We headed downstairs into the kitchen wondering what wonderful, marvelous adventure Dad had in mind for us today.  Could it be fishing at Sweezy’s Pond, or target shooting with our new 20 gauges?  More likely, he’ll want us to put fresh hay out for the horses or fix the fence along the hillside edge of our property so the cows won’t wander off again into the Campbell’s land.

We managed to wolf down a bowl of Sugar Smacks before Dad came back in the house to find us.  We finished another half bowl quickly, threw the dirty dishes on top of the ones from last night and then met him by the open field next to the pole barn.  I hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a huge pile of wood stacked along the side of the pole barn along with tools, ladders, and a bunch of other stuff.  This didn’t look good.

“Boys,” Dad announced, “We are going to build a barn this summer.”

The groans from Johnny and me probably were heard across the whole county.  “But Dad,” I said,  “It’s summer break!  We already have chores, and we were also going to practice our target shooting this summer so we’d be ready for pheasant hunting season in the fall.  How are we going have time to do that and build a barn too?”   I thought this was a great point and I waited for Dad to agree and skip the whole barn-building plan.

Dad didn’t look like he thought so though.  “Boys, building a barn is more important than messing around all summer.  We’ve needed a barn since the old one fell in during that storm last month.  And I can’t do it by myself, so you two are drafted.”

Dad liked to talk in military terms because it reminded him of his days in the Marines.

“But,” he continued, “I will double your allowance since we’ll be working a lot this summer.  We’ll have to take care of our chores first thing in the morning and then get to work on the barn.  It’ll take working pretty much every day to get it done before school starts.”

Now, that extra money would come in handy for rides, games, cotton candy and saltwater taffy at the state fair in August.  And while I knew I could come up with a bunch of other good reasons why it made more sense for us to get extra allowance andnot build a barn, I figured he wouldn’t listen. Once he had decided on something, there wasn’t much chance of changing his mind.  I could tell Johnny was thinking the same thing.  We just hung our heads and stood there, trying to look pitiful.

“So fall in and let’s get started!” Dad said, trying to build our enthusiasm with his most excited voice. Hoo boy.  Yippee.

Dad had staked out a flat area behind and to the east of our house where the barn would be raised. Our first job was to dig up the sunflower garden on that spot; as we pulled them from the ground, I got one last sweet smell of nectar from each of them. I also started shoving seeds into my pockets, but Johnny said they weren’t ready to eat yet, so I threw them at him until he started to get that mad look.  When we finished that work, we started digging postholes – Dad said we had to dig down two feet by hand, and then he would dig another four feet with an auger.  He said the foundation was the most important part of the building.  The first one took us a half hour to dig down the two feet in the hard ground, so that meant this was going to take a while!

Actually, it only took us two days to finish putting the posts up.  The hole digging was tough, but getting the poles to stand up straight was, too.  The sakrete got on our hands, mostly because we stuck our fingers in it to carve our initials after it was in the holes.  Dad told us to wash it off quick because it could burn our skin, so we ran over to the hose on the side of the house.  I made it there first, and I slowly washed mine off while Johnny waited.  When he turned his head, I soaked him good and then dropped the hose and ran away as fast as I could back towards the barn. Score one for me!

Since the next day was a Sunday, Dad let us have that day off and we needed it. Being thirteen years old, I didn’t have a lot of muscles but what I did have were sore, so Johnny and me went over to Sweezy’s and spent the day doing cannonballs off the float and lazily swimming in the cool water. Johnny also grabbed some flat rocks and we had a skimming contest. I managed a personal record nine skips on one throw, but Johnny beat that with a Sweezy’s record fourteen skips! Maybe our sore arms had something to do with our rock skipping success that day; Johnny said something about better wrist snaps when the arm moves slower but I didn’t really understand. Anyway, Johnny carved his name, the date and his record number of skips on the tree above all the previous record holders and created a thirteen-and-under list on another tree so I could record my record throws, too

We walked back home and as we got close to the house we caught a strong whiff of evil; we knew what would be waiting – chili.  Dad wasn’t much of a cook so most nights we had simple stuff like burgers, dogs, or chicken spaghetti, but our family had a tradition that Sunday night meant chili or chicken potpie.  Dad made a mean chili, as hot as possible, and it took a lot of Pepsi to flush it down before it burned all the skin off your throat.  We had chicken potpie last week (the store-bought kind), which meant the chili was coming tonight.  Johnny and me weren’t the biggest chili fans, but we knew Dad wanted the tradition to live on and we appreciated that he worked hard on the farm and still made time for something that reminded us of fun nights over dinner for as long as we could both remember.

When Monday morning came, we were back at it.  Before we started, though, Dad said he forgot to tell us the most important thing.  “As your grandpa would say: Build it right and sleep well at night,’ Dad said.  “This barn we’re building has to last us 30 years, and it will if we build it right. So there are a few rules we’re going to follow: first, if you aren’t sure, ask; second, don’t settle for ok even if you have to do it over again to get it right; and third, if you make a mistake, own it and fix it.”

That day, we started framing the structure of the barn with 2×6 pieces of cedar.  I liked the smell of cedar.  It reminded me of Christmas trees, which reminded me of presents, which reminded me of the tackle box I got last year, which reminded me of fishing, which I wished I was doing now.  But, framing the barn was much better than posthole digging, so we worked fast and after about three hours Dad could tell we needed a break.

“Fall out soldiers,” Dad bellowed from what would become the north entrance to Barley (me and Johnny decided on that name; it just had a nice ring – Barley the Barn).  We both climbed down our ladders and followed Dad over to the picnic table under the red oak tree to suck down some sweet tea. We drank and rested while Dad started telling us stories about the old barn, the one that fell down.

“I spent many days in that barn when I was your age, boys.  One of my chores was to muck out the stalls every day, so I had to get used to the smell of cow manure.  Actually, I never got used to it, just kind of lost my sense of smell, thank God. When I’d finish that, I’d milk the cows just like I taught you boys.  Even when I wasn’t doing chores though, I’d stay there and talk to your grandpa while he worked.  Besides taking care of the cows and horses, it seemed liked he was always welding something in that barn, a tractor wheel, a plow tooth, something.  There would be so many sparks flying around, it looked liked July 4^thand it’s amazing the thing didn’t catch on fire with all that hay around.  But it never did, never did.”

Dad kept talking till he said the break was over and then we all went back to work.  The framing took us three weeks to finish, and somehow I survived, even though I tripped over boards on the ground three times and face-planted into the dirt, lost my hammer in the grass and had to get Dad and Johnny to help me find it (“gear adrift is a gift” which I learned means if someone finds something you lost, you just gave it to them), got yelled at by Dad for shaking the ladder while Johnny was way up at the top, and stepped on two nails that somehow didn’t go all the way through the bottom of my shoes.  Other than those adventures, the framing days were pretty much the same sunup to dinnertime, unless it rained, which it didn’t do often enough.

When the framing was done, we built the roof trusses, twelve of them.  Dad said the roof was the most important part of the barn, but I was learning that he said that about everything.  That work went pretty fast.  We finished them in two and a half days and at lunch, Dad went back to telling us more barn tales.

“Got my first kiss in the old barn, you know.  It was Shelly Butler who lived over on Chief Noonday Road back then.  She was a friend of my sister so she was over here a lot. I thought she was pretty and I thought she had her eye on me, too.  So, one day, on her birthday, I walked up to her in the barn, kissed her right on the lips and said ‘Happy birthday Shelly!’.  You see boys, welding sparks weren’t the only sparks flying in that barn!”

I must have look confused because Dad said, “You know…sparks!”

I wasn’t getting it until I looked over at Johnny and saw him pretending to kiss and hug a barn pole.  

A year ago, I know I would have said (or at least thought) that was gross.  But girls are more interesting now that I’m a young man. “So what happened then?” I asked Dad, knowing they didn’t get married because our mom’s name was Eileen.

“She didn’t know what to do” Dad said.  “She looked at me and she started to smile but then she narrowed her eyes and said ‘William, don’t you ever do that again’ and then she ran off.  Didn’t see her for a couple of weeks after that and when I did, she didn’t look me in the eye any more.  I did notice her balling her hand up into a fist when I got close to her one time, so I figured I better not try that again.”

“Did Mom know about this?” I asked.  She might not have liked Dad kissing another girl.

“Heck, I didn’t even meet your mom till about 15 years later.  The only person who was there was your grandpa, and he got a good laugh out of the whole thing.  Still remember what he said too, ‘Build it right, son.  Slow and steady will get the job done’.”

So that’s where that saying came from, I thought.  Interesting that Grandpa seemed to often talk in rhymes.

“Guess I was like most boys, thinking their dads were born old and didn’t understand what it was like to be young and in love,” Dad said.

In love!  Now I was sure Mom didn’t know about this.

After hearing about Dad’s romance as a boy, we went back to work on the roof.  But, I was distracted most of that afternoon and I think Johnny was too.  What was it like kissing a girl?  I didn’t see myself being as brave as Dad (after all, he did become a Marine, so he must have always been brave) so maybe I’d never get to kiss one!  Now I was worried because there was all this pressure to hurry up and kiss somebody before I got too old.  Guess I better start looking for a girl who would let me.

I thought about this all afternoon and when we finished hanging the trusses and quit for the day, I laid down in the soft grass on the hill next to the other side of the pole barn, thinking.  Dagger, our old barn cat who didn’t have a home since the old barn fell down and was impatiently waiting for us to finish building Barley, came over, stretched out and laid down next to me, pushing against my leg.  Dagger had probably the longest tail of any cat alive, so when she moved it back and forth, it tickled both of my legs at the same time.  We both looked up into the sky for an answer to our problems.

I hadn’t noticed him at first since I was thinking hard, but when Dad lightly tapped me with the toe of his boot, I sat up fast and said, “What?”.  

He could tell I was thinking about something, I guess, and when he asked, “What’s up bud?” I wasn’t sure what to say.  I wished Mom were still here.  I didn’t really want to talk to Dad about girls because it might make him think about Mom and get sad again.  

So I said, “Nothing”, hoping that would be enough.  

Dad stood there for a minute, a whole minute (at least it felt like it) just looking at me and finally said, “OK, let’s get some dinner”.

Half the summer was over now and we still had a lot of work to do to finish Barley.  Once the roof was in place, it felt like a real building for the first time.  But now Barley needed walls.  I had never seen more two inch galvanized nails in my whole life (not even at Dorsheln’s Farm Store) and we were going to have to pound all of them through the wood walls into the posts and crossbeams.  Sore arms, here we come!

After two days of this, I was pretty sure I could hit a nail on the head a hundred times in a row with my eyes closed.  Johnny said to try my left hand, but when I did I missed the nail head about as often as I hit it.  And with all the pounding the three of us were doing, I was probably going deaf too.

During our afternoon break one day, we were all pretty quiet for a while.  Johnny seemed like he was in a funk, which happened some days for no reason I could tell.  Dad hadn’t said much all day actually when he finally said, “Did I ever tell you boys about how I met your mother?”  Like I said, we didn’t talk about Mom much.  Mostly I just remembered how she loved Johnny and me and Dad, and how she did things moms do around a house that kids love, like making apple pies and chocolate chip cookies, washing my hair in the kitchen sink and then rubbing it with a towel until it was dry but crazy messy, and kissing the top of my head before I went to school every day.  We had a few pictures of her; one from high school, one in a fancy dress with Dad standing next to her in a suit (he must of borrowed it because I never saw it in the house) and one sitting on a bed with either me or Johnny lying next to her when we were babies.

We knew she was from Iowa and had moved here when she was about our age.  She had lived at home with her mom until she and Dad got married. I don’t think her mom liked Dad and I know we never her saw her much anymore.  She didn’t have any sisters or brothers and since Dad’s sister had moved to Virginia years ago, we didn’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins or really any family around.

Anyway, Dad didn’t wait for an answer, which was OK because Johnny and me always wanted to know more about her. “When your grandpa died about twenty years ago, I moved back here and took over the farm.  The place was in decent shape even though your grandpa was in his 70’s when he passed; he still did all the work around here himself, too. The one thing he didn’t do was fix the barn.  The roof leaked, the paint had peeled back so bad the bare wood was starting to rot in a bunch of places and that dirt floor was a mess.  So, I worked most nights fixing it up.  I patched the roof, put in a concrete floor and gave it a new coat of paint and that barn looked almost brand new.  This was about 1978 and I know that because a friend of mine from the VFW came by and asked if they could hold their annual fundraiser dance in the barn that year.  They held that dance every year and this was the fifth one, five years after the boys came back from Vietnam.”

Dad never went to Vietnam, I knew that, but he always was proud of his days in the Marines and so it didn’t surprise me that he would do something to help veterans.

He continued, “They brought in a country band and probably 200 people showed up.  Now I was a heck of a two-stepper in those days, but hadn’t been out dancing that night yet.  I went to the bar to get a fresh beer and there was your mother.  I had seen her around and thought she was cute but I hadn’t ever talked to her.  I said hi and she said hi and then she said ‘Have you been out on the dance floor’ and I said nope, and she said ‘Don’t you dance?’ which was clearly an invitation to ask her to dance, right?”

Johnny said, “Maybe she just wondered if you danced, you know, or she was just starting conversation?”

“You sound just like her,” Dad said.  “She always said she wasn’t asking but I know better.  Anyway, we went out to dance and didn’t stop until the band was done for the night.  And that’s how I met your mother”

Now I really had problems. Not only did I have to find a girl and kiss her, but I had to dance as well! I knew right then that I was doomed.

“So after that you got married?” I asked. 

But Dad was done talking for now.  “Let’s get back to work boys,”  he said.

The walls were up now so all that was left to do was pour the concrete for the floor and paint and Barely would be a real barn.  Dad brought in premix concrete in a big turning truck and poured it so all we had to do was level the floor and let it dry.  Painting was another story because by now it was mid August so it was like 95 degrees every day.  We worked in our shorts with no shirts; because of the heat, our shirts just got all sweaty and stuck to our skin, and I didn’t need any help getting sweaty.  But boy, did we get sunburned.  Johnny looked just like a stoplight!

We finished the first coat of paint right at dinnertime on a Saturday, and Dad said let’s just get it done tomorrow, so we were going to work our first Sunday of the summer. Saturday night we celebrated by cooking steaks and baked potatoes on the charcoal grill, and then eating them under the red oak tree.  Johnny was the biggest carnivore of the three of us, so he had a huge steak and still managed to finish what I didn’t eat of mine too.

All of us were pretty beat that night so once we finished eating and talking for a while, Dad said, “One day and a wake-up, boys”, which I learned meant we were done tomorrow, so we hit the sack.

Sunday came and we were ready to finish the job.  We burned through half the painting in the morning and then sat down for lunch.  I just had to ask again.

“Dad, after the dance with Mom, what happened?”

He smiled and said, “Well, I drove her home since it was late.  She was living about three miles away then, still living with her mom.  I walked her to her door and I figured after all that dancing and the ride home, I had earned a real goodnight kiss.  But I decided not to ask for one after thinking about it”

“Did you chicken out?” I asked, hopefully.

“I was in the Marines, boy. You don’t chicken out if you were in the Marines.  No, I really liked your Mom right away.  So while I was standing there with her at her front door, for some reason my dad popped into my head and I thought of what he would say if he was still here ‘Build it right, son’.  I thought maybe I’d take it slow with her, so I just said good night and left.  Your mom told me later that she was real impressed by that, that she thought I must have been a real gentleman.  So after that I called her up, we started dating and then going steady and a couple years later we got married.”

“I thought that ‘build it right’ thing was about building barns,” I said.

“Well, it is son.  But some lessons you learn in life end up being about more than you thought when you learned them.  Thanks to my old man, I learned to build a good barn and I got a mighty fine wife too, your Mom.  And a lot of the reason why was I took the time to do it right when I was doing something important”

After that, we knocked off the last coat of paint and then stepped back a hundred feet and admired our work.  Barley was a good barn, and even though fishing would have been better, Johnny and me learned a lot that summer about barns, our mom and dad, and about girls. After being scared to death at first, I was pretty sure it would be OK.  All I had to do was take it slow when I met someone I liked and build it right (and learn to dance!)

This story was inspired by my friend Gar Seifullin