The Old Red Barn of Pa's

Entire generations of Webber families must have used the now rickety old red barn that sat on the property line’s very outskirt and had a rather falling down roof, as a sort of soul dumping ground. All of the old toys like the eyeless and once-hawked as porcelain dolls were there with the outgrown children’s clothes, all aside assorted hopes and dreams; conglomerated, safe from the eyes of the outer world perhaps, but not from gnashing teeth of the extra-large rats who enjoyed more than their fill of options for food and nesting fodder.

Almost none of the current Webbers’ ever ventured out there either- there was little to no reason to do so as the place was gill stuffed in all this randomness and abandonment. The youngest girl child of the family, Connie, however; had even heard tale it was not truly owned by her Pa. The old red barn had been just sort of left to grow ferral, both by time and any sense of reason, many, many generations ago, as if incidentally.

It did look uninviting. The old red barn was crocked and sat as if bending over decades from the abuses done by wind and rain. There was mold and the accompanying stale stench. The antique style glass in the top windows, the ones of which still had any glass in them at all, was not translucent, nor would ever have been even if not covered so haphazardly in grime. The only remaining barn door, which was hopelessly cracked and bore an off-white crusty color, banged mercilessly loudly at night. And, it only seemed to do so at night when the rest of the acres were dead, calm, silent.

Lil Connie had discovered the old red barn or thought she had in that naive way of discoverers that she had in fact “charted” a new thing that certainly must be devoid of having its own history. In the middle of the afternoon, it had been once on a blazing hot, unforgiving summer’s day in northern Pennsylvania when Connie and the big red barn first met. She had been panting, running out of breath from a streak of running across the meadow she knew, into the darker backwoods that she did not. The old red barn just stood there, as if staring at her with as much anxious delight at suddenly seeing a stranger as Connie felt also growing within herself.

That moment she would not forget. As the humidity tore at her forehead creating beads of rolling sweat, she quickly had ducked inside to hide from the unforgiving sun. The torrents of rain rattled down all around her right then! Some droplets still hit her arms inside of the barn of course- from the cracked and splintered holes in the barn’s shoddy interiors and roof.

“You ain’t gonna need dis un!” Her Auntie Victoria spoke plainly while throwing a very pointy old brazier as if almost joyously over her shoulder. Twelve years later, Connie, who was not at all to be referred to as “Lil” anymore, was with her Auntie Victoria- the now by default family matriarch, as the two were attempting to make piles out of the debris in the old red barn. “For once and for all” the two remaining ancestors were going to clean it up, but only because Connie was soon to be married and leave the grounds and she had to be betrothed with something worthwhile, after all.

Connie would not have worn that bra. Connie’s breasts were angular and small and that was true. They barely showed in the tight greasy sundress top she wore in the heat of this day. As the fabric clung to her, her nipples minded the tiny scratching of all that dust in the air there between her and her Auntie as Auntie threw up the debris and Connie looked on in staring despair.

An old dresser drawer without any sign of its host sat there between the two. Auntie made short work of dragging it across the dirt of the floor and sighing very much aloud. Beautiful handmade lacy and tatted undergarments were in that broken drawer. Corsets in an oranged tan that was once someone’s flesh tone, decrepit panties that would have supported garters and themselves halfway up a midsection emerged only to be tossed aside.

As Auntie Victoria continued to throw items around as if looking for a pot of gold magically to appear, Connie could not help but settle down into a sort of seat amid some awkwardly misshaped and cracking garden planters. Her mind wandered, as it had always done historically in the barn. Connie reminisced about those days so long before when this space had seemed to be just hers as if its existence was for her solace alone and not simply as an unspoken family secret.

Connie had run in there and banged her head on the low beams by the door more than a few times, said her prayers, told her secrets to the rats about school days, and disappointments in family and boys. She had played dress-up there by herself at one point. She had taken all her clothes off and danced around on another occasion. It had been here in the old red barn that Connie had first taught herself to know pleasure. Many pleasures, as she researched her desires, books of crumpled poetry she found, and the smells of crumpled roses that always hung in the thick air in there. In Connie’s mind, there had always deserved to be a huge trellis upon at least one outer wall of her big red barn, but in reality, roses never kept bloom anywhere nearby, instead always wilting.

And now, as Auntie binged and slung dust-layered items, many of them broken and all of them long cast aside, Connie knew better than to utter any words to try to stop her. Connie had to have a dowery. There had to be something of value in all this rubble. Connie’s hope chest was almost entirely otherwise bare- little to cook with and no skill with a needle and thread anyway.

Connie gawked helplessly as Auntie tore around other peoples’ belongings. She wanted to stop her, to end this snowball of expectations and humility that she alone was not a hot commodity. Connie’s new life had also known no such discussion containing the words of love she only knew from finding that old poetry. Connie had never felt so alone.

“Adoration, the vastness of her beauty, romance lingering in the air,” the words seemed long ago, yet echoed.

Connie suddenly felt sickened, her stomach a queasy up the rolling ball. She batted her eyes all around in the dust clouds and rat-stunk feces piles. She knew in her heart there was nothing in these walls of hers that anyone would truly desire- for she had searched and had never found such within herself.

Connie tossed back her hair in its single braid to the back like Connie knew she had to toss out such feelings. The man she was soon to marry would never need to see the old red barn on the inside. He certainly could not be permitted to if their situation was to move forward as the rest of town wished. Connie’s pride was to remain silent.

Let Auntie Victoria scramble about and worry about conventions that had never served her family well in the past. Connie knew what she must do to go on- she would wad up all of her old red barn yearnings in all of their pubescent glory and hope for the excitement of a then-unknown future, and simply faint.

Connie fainted then. She let herself. And, as she fell to the dirt on the floor of the big red barn, Auntie barely noticed, but instead merely used her booted foot to push Connie’s body aside to a corner. Next, Auntie Victoria propped Connie up on her left elbow and hip in a lurching squat. Connie’s eyeballs now were completely dry and foggy and distant like an endless stare. Her dress was smudged and greyed even more by the dust, as if in an instant. One sock fell. Her braid had now become a timeless tangle, not unlike a spider’s web.

Connie was not dead. It was more like she had not lived, her whole world erased by time and boredom and loss of whatever fervor her youth had held for her life. Auntie Victoria had seen to this over time by ignoring her and today was more like the culmination.

Connie would sit there in the old red barn from now until the end of time in this manner. Connie had turned into one of those dolls, the dolls one always sees in the terrors of night or the corners of a barn, or the winced thoughts stuck within one’s mind as we all age and we all forget how to breathe in the world, when the barn’s holding cell world of suffocation no longer shelters us, once we each realize that even our places of solitude where we have dreamt would have been our salvation, are nothing more than wood that disintegrates only slower than our minds dissolve themselves or our fervors simply erase.