Dirt Under My Nails by Marilee Foster

Author:Marilee Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bridgeworks
Published: 2002-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

PART OF BEING YOUNG AND FEARLESS on a farm was taking advantage of its architecture. A huge, rickety barn with crumbling lean-tos that once occupied most of our backyard was a logical and unsupervised destination. The exterior of this building was unimpressive, covered mostly by mossy shingles that the horses, when bored, gnawed on. But inside were lofts, trap doors and cavernous spaces where things were stored and forgotten.

The years that the barn was used to store hay or straw were probably, in terms of terrain, the best. Harvesting straw, hoisting bales that weighed nearly as much as we did onto wagons, and then again by human chain unloading and restacking them in the mow—two bales this way, two that—was the hardest and scratchiest work I have ever known. When the barn was full, I couldn’t tell if the tinderbox of straw we’d built inside actually helped hold up the oldest and most decrepit wing of the post-and-beam building. If I stood back near the fence, it seemed as if the windowless sides bowed more now than when we had begun. We wondered about the pile and if it should shift, could the whole thing, straw and timber, slide sideways and tumble down as one great heap into the front pasture? And yet, acknowledging the precariousness of the arrangement, we could not resist the wall of slippery gold bales.

As we climbed, we knotted our fingers through the sisal twine and wedged our toes between the bales. When strings let go, which they often did, the bale with one side loose responded to the uneven binding by letting its individual “flakes” jettison out of the elaborate, interlocking pile. I felt the snap, pulled my body tight to the “face” and froze. Other climbers, above and below, breathlessly waited for a slow schism, a restructuring tremor, to move through the entire mow. I resumed my climb then, a little less hastily.

At the top you were at eye level with the barn rafters. Someone had thrown, at some fortuitous moment, a rope up over the highest beam. It must have come off a whaling ship, and it was all small hands could do to get around the cable’s girth, so a loop had been made, a single stirrup on which a bare foot would lead the whole body out over the canyon, an adjacent bay of broken and discarded bales. We took turns all afternoon, swinging, yet aware of the slow creak in the timbers that our small bodies triggered. Somehow, no rafter ever gave way.

There are other buildings on the farm that provided us with accessible rooftops. Because of the way potato cellars are built—into the ground—a shingled roof of forty-five degrees serves as a natural extension of the steep grass slopes that envelop and keep the storage barns cool. We did not entertain any danger by clambering up these roofs; we were light and the momentum of an error rarely carried us far.

Tonight, with my heavier and presumably easier-to-break body, I nearly talk myself out of trying to clamber up the potato cellar roof.

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