“Quit fussing, Donna.”
That was all he said. He said it to his pie.
It was Sunday dinner, the first week of June, and my brother Vince was at my table the way he had been at my table most Sundays since his wife, Pam, started working weekends at the nursing home. I had made a chuck roast with carrots and the rhubarb pie he likes, and I had waited until the pie on purpose, because Vince is easier to talk to with a fork in his hand.
“Vince,” I had said, “could you move the hay wagon? I’d like to get the car inside before hail season.”
He cut the point off his slice and ate it.
“Quit fussing, Donna. There’s plenty of room in that shed.”
“There is,” I said. “It’s all behind your wagon.”
“I’ll get to it.”
“You said that at Easter.”
He looked up then, and he was not angry. That is the part I want to be fair about. He looked at me the way you look at a sister who has asked you three times whether you locked the car. Fond. A little tired.
“It’s a wagon,” he said. “It isn’t hurting anything. You’ve got forty acres of yard to park in.”
Then he asked if there was any more coffee, and there was, and I poured it.
My husband, Len, built that machine shed in the summer of 1998. Sixty feet wide, a hundred and twenty feet long, sixteen foot sidewalls, with a sliding door thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high on each end so he could drive a combine in the north end and out the south without ever having to back up. He was proud of that. He hated backing a combine.
We are eleven miles northeast of Pierre, up on the flat above the river breaks, on the quarter Len’s dad homesteaded his second try. The shed sits north of the house with a shelterbelt of cedar and Chinese elm behind it, and when the wind comes across from the Missouri it sings in the door tracks.
Vince helped build it. I want that said early. He was working for the state highway department then, and he took two weeks of vacation and spent them on a rented scissor lift, setting sixty foot trusses with Len and a crane operator from Fort Pierre. He never took a dime. Len tried to pay him and Vince folded the check in half and put it in the offering plate at our church, which Len thought was the funniest thing a man had ever done to him.
So it was Len’s shed, and Vince had sweat in it. I understand that. I understood it for nine years.
Len died in March of 2017. It was his heart, at the kitchen sink, with the water still running. He was fifty-eight. I called the ambulance and then I called my brother, and Vince drove out from town on glare ice in nineteen minutes and sat at my kitchen table until it got light. He did not say much. He made the coffee wrong and we drank it anyway.
In May he showed up with a boat on a trailer.
“The city won’t let me leave it on the street,” he said. “Len always said there was room.”
Len had always said that. It was true.
“Put it wherever,” I told him.
The camper came the next spring. Twenty-six feet, a bumper pull, and he backed it in tight along the west wall with its tail hanging over the end of Len’s workbench.
“Just till I pour a pad at home,” he said.
He did not pour a pad at home.
In 2019 he bought a hay wagon at a farm auction near Blunt, a flat rack on a four-wheel running gear, because the church youth group wanted to do a hayride at the fall festival. They did the hayride. One time. Then he pulled the wagon in the big south door, could not get it turned, unhooked it crossways about ten feet inside, and said, “Just for now.”
The second boat came in 2021. It was an old sixteen foot aluminum fishing boat he bought off a widower in town for four hundred dollars, meaning to fix it up for the grandkids. He parked it beside the wagon.
And that was the south door. A wagon crossways and a boat beside it, and behind them, sixty feet of clean concrete that nothing with four wheels and a license plate could get to.
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