I suppose there are folks who've never entered the hallway of a barn. Never inhaled wafts of cut hay and fecundity. I have, though. And although my barns have for the most part suffered defeat by pounding wind, rain, and hoof, they are static in the eye of my mind.
My first barn aligned the back property of my grandparents small mountain farm in Morgan county. It was rectangular and long with stalls and rooms for hay and implements. My most vivid memory was my boyhood amble from the house through the cornfield to the barn when I encountered Billy Joe's Doberman, Lady, with her new pups in one of the stalls. She greeted me with a display of white fangs separated by smaller pickets and a gurgling growl that terrified me stone cold. That barn was never painted. It just sat there until one day I noticed that it had disappeared as though it had never existed. It's queer how the mind forgets matter shortly after that matter is removed from sight. Forgetting must follow.
My second barn still stands. It is red though I don't know if it was always painted red. It housed furniture that was eventually sold through a salvage store that stood just in front of the structure on main highway. When I was younger I got a hand job in the loft there between the vertical box springs and mattresses. I also smoked a lot of weed and imbibed in a line or two of the deadly South American export that exists as the result of man's chemical exploitation of the tropical flora that abounds there, and the American appetite for more. I don't go back to that barn anymore. I haven't been there for a very long time. It's better that way. For me.
My second barn was black. It sat atop a flat farm in Chickamauga, Georgia. My buddy's father had bought the farm and sweated to rehabilitate it, including the great barn, which was traditionally two-storied and tall with a half hexagon tin roof that spilled down from way above to the flat slanted roofs on either side. I wrestled a bull calf there for the amusement and impression of the others. Her name was Sadie. Everyone else was afraid of her. But I, who had much, much more to prove, would face off with ol' Sadie and grab her neck and hang on for dear life until I could persuade her to land on her side in the shit and mud, at which time I announced that I won yet another match with the feared bull, who was more like an aspiring adolescent like me with much more to learn about this life and its people. For example, I would learn that wrestling a bull calf from its feet would be among the least complex tasks that would await my complicated life, which was unfolding before me like some larval curiosity. This was my second barn. I was thirteen.
My third barn was red. Classic. It had a loft with two levels. Below the stalls were aligned on either side of the hallway. It was the first, but fortunately not the last barn in which I would, years and years hence, make love amid seed and the floating aroma of tamed animals while "spilling seeds in the hay great barn.". I put her down and loved her in the loft. Just like that. She had just returned from a beach trip with her family. Naked, her tan lines sent me into sexual orbit. Her breasts, her lower pelvis, and her museum quality behind, all white and thus accentuated for me as if to say, "focus all of your attention here, young man, these are the elements of the woman that you will forever separate from her true identity, and you will have become ordinary and callous on account of your narrow lens." Later, I bush-hogged over a bumble bee nest once beside the structure and ran stung to the barn. On another occasion I took shelter when lightning struck nearby and sent a jolt through my body in the driving rain as I steered the Ford 4000 away beneath gray and electric cloudbanks. The more I consider this particular barn, the nearer I get to who I might have been during its era. I see a vague sillouette of the youth standing in the hallway, but I can't make him out. To this day, I cannot make him out.
A barn that had been built decades earlier stood only yards from the Wolftever Creek. I remember that the barn was isolated in a woodsy pixel of Hamilton county, Tennessee, near an unincorporated hamlet called Ooltewah, which means in Native American, "cry of the owl." In hindsight I now realize that I did a bad thing there. I grabbed a beautiful milk snake and pulled it from the hole in the floorboards it had eyed for its escape, and withdrew the long serpent and threw it in the firepit and watched it burn and draw up into an agony that I cannot envision. I did this to impress upon the men for whom I worked. I needed that then. Fear not, young man, lest you appear weak and frail and undeserving of the company of real men. I will answer for what I did. I am sorry for what I did. But that is insufficient.
I remember the two barns in Morristown where I fucked, made love, whatever it's called. I got caught in the act by a farmer in one barn. He kindly turned away and allowed us to try, as best we could, to pull our clothes on and fix our hair as if this was going to kindle any notion at all in the farmer that we may have been reading to each other - perhaps the bible. He returned, walking gently upon that pixel of earth that his family had probably owned for generations. And as if to remind us that his eyesight had not failed him he looked at us both and acknowledged that we were "making a little love" on his property and that it was okay." I didn't get caught in the second Morristown barn but I recall insisting upon a fast one (quickie in moron parlance) because I then had a history, albeit singular, of getting caught fucking in a barn.
My very own barn has been dismantled and held for naught. There is nothing left save a single piece of rock that lies flush with the earth upon which one of the load bearing supports once stepped. I installed a sign above the first level of the simple, square two-level structure that I picked up at some antique store that read "Butternut Crackers are Extra Good!' Red with white letters and an exclamation point. Simple. Simpler times. There I loved again. Loftsex. From time to time I look up about 12 feet to a swath of empty space and imagine how odd it now is to think that I loved her in that space. Now, beneath it, I still do.
And finally, there is that unvanquished barn in White Pine where Cupcake was stored in a stable. She was a walking horse that I purchased for my daughter, Emily. In our opinion she walked just fine and needed no further instruction. We had no intention of training or frightening her into stepping high in the air in some morbid horsedance. We just wanted to love her and ride her from time to time. And we did. All of us. We'd withdraw Cupcake from her stall and fit her with all the accouterments. I created a special harness that did not involve the insertion of a horizontal steel bar behind her teeth that would be jerked to and fro for god knows how long. The barn was ordinary and I have to admit that by the time I purchased Cupcake for my daughter, the horse was too. It was too late to draw draw out its identity. It had become chattel. Property. A thing. Now years on Cupcake reminds of an untitled poem by Tom Pollack, which I call The Tiger, that saddens me every time I read it:
I saw through the bars
That defined his small world
A great tiger
Asleep in the sun
Near a small tropical tree
Planted and carefully maintained
By the Caretakers.
Nearby was a large vessel
Which was always filled
With fresh water
And a platter
Which was periodically supplied
With raw meat.
I felt sorry for the poor beast
And imagined that he was dreaming
Of a time long ago
And a place far away;
However, after a time
He stirred
And looked at me
And I could tell at once
That the Big Cat
Had not dreamed
For a long time.
T.J. (Tom) Pollack, from his rare book, entitled Zingers
One day I traveled to White Pine, released Cupcake from her stall, and fitted her with her saddle and gear. I rode into the field of the adjacent landowner and returned. Beside the barn there was a stand of hardwoods with a path snaking between them. I took the path and rode her between woods until I neared the barn. There she jerked of her own volition toward the structure even though I was not at all ready to end our time together. When Cupcake veered right, I slid left and fell to the hard ground on my left side crushing my ribs. Why did she desire confinement. Was Tom's Tiger like that, too. Do animals become institutionalized? Are barn the institutions. The prisons.
So, in any event, these are hallways of the hallmark barns of my life. The working farm with the barn as its proud centerpiece is all but gone and given way to corporate operations and the conversion of the family farm into subdivided and restricted lots.
But I take some solace in the lingering fact that although many of these structures are weathered, missing their wooden teeth, and leaning obscenely out of square, they will probably still be around when I'm dead and gone. It reminds me of how little time I have remaining. I must get busy filling my loft with as much joy as I can fit into my ever-expanding consciousness.
