The Barn Door

The old barn had been on my grandparents’ property for as long as I knew. It was a landmark of our town, sitting there for at least as long as my grandfather’s grandfather had been shoeing mules over a hundred years ago.

To me, the barn had always felt eerie. Maybe it was the peeling white paint that covered its dark, splintering wood. Maybe it was because I never saw anyone or anything go in or out of it. Maybe it was because my parents had told my brother and me that we weren’t allowed to play inside there. Whatever the reason, every time I went to Grandma and Grandpa’s, the old barn on the edge of their property felt like a decaying ghost, its dilapidated doors hiding whatever ominous mysteries lay inside.

The day I finally did go inside the old barn stands out in my childhood memory. My older brother, Stan, and I were wading barefoot in the warm, muddy pond on the corner of my grandparents’ property. It was summertime and the shallow pond that filled up during every summer rainstorm was the closest thing there was to a pool.

As we squished mud between our toes, I felt a drop of warm rain hit the back of my neck. Large raindrops slowly began trickling down from the sky, splashing into the water around my brother and me. Soon the telltale sound of thunder rumbled through the sky and we knew it was time to go inside.

Barefoot and muddy, Stan and I walked through the tall yellow grass that stood between the pond and my grandparents’ house, wind blowing behind to aid us on our journey, when a soft wooden knock bumped through the air. I looked and saw that the small door on the side of the barn was open, slowly swinging in the wind. Even though I was twenty yards or so from the barn, my palms began to tingle. Standing next to me, Stan was also staring at the open barn door.

“What do you think is inside?” he asked, almost breathless.

This wasn’t the first time we’d talked about what could be inside the barn. Among our popular theories were old donkey skeletons, chests full of stolen two-dollar bills (something my grandma seemed to have an endless supply of), or torture devices invented by Grandpa (whom we didn’t like). Despite having spent plenty of time theorizing about it, we’d never actually seen what was inside. Stan claimed to have peeked through a slit in the barn wall once, but it had been too dark for him to see anything.

For the first time, however, one of the doors was open. Stan wasn’t asking because he was casually wondering what was inside. He was asking because he wanted to go look.

“I don’t know,” I said, mouth going as dry as the summer rain, hoping Stan wouldn’t walk toward the barn; I knew if he went, brother code obligated me to follow.

However, like all older brothers do, Stan did the opposite of what I wanted and began walking towards the barn, its door still gently knocking in the wind. In slow motion, I followed behind him a good pace or two, trying to delay the moment I would reach the barn door.

Stan’s prior claim of it being very dark inside proved true. As I dazedly approached the open door, I couldn’t see a single thing except the black interior. Stan stood frozen in the doorway, but hearing me approach behind, he stepped into the darkness. Eyeballs popping out of their sockets, I followed him like the good brother I was.

Before my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the smell of old wood and cat urine filled my nostrils. Slowly, the shape of a dust-covered Mercury Comet emerged from the darkness. Surrounding the old car were piles of miscellanea: upturned chairs, filing cabinets, broken tables, crumbling cardboard boxes, stacks of wood. I looked up into the rafters and saw that except for a few boxes, they were mostly empty. Whoever was filling the barn seemed to favor the disorganization covering the barn’s lower half rather than the higher, less-accessible space above.

As my eyes scanned the barn’s dark interior and its dust-covered debris, a shape emerged from one of the rafters. It stretched out and curved its back, tail sticking straight out. The largest cat I’d ever seen in my young life stared directly down at Stan and me and let out a loud hiss, its pale fur standing on end in the barn’s musty darkness. At that same moment, as if from the piles of refuse within the barn itself, a voice called out: “STANLEY! GORDON DERBY!”

Without a word or glance to each other, Stan and I bolted from the darkness of the barn into the pitter-patter of rain and thunder outside. Our barefoot, mud-caked feet flew like turkey hens through the crinkly yellow grass to our grandparents’ house where Grandma was standing at the front door.

“Where in the Sam Hill have you two boys been? It’s been raining and thundering almost ten minutes. Didn’t you hear me calling your names?”

Without waiting for an answer, she delivered two quick swats to our behinds then sat us at the kitchen table with a plate of almond sandies and no milk, her favorite treat.

I didn’t look back in the barn for the rest of my childhood, and neither did Stan, as far as I know. We contented ourselves to the muddy pond, tall grass, and, when it was raining, Grandma’s kitchen table with her dry almond sandies, leaving the barn to stand desolate for another century or more.