My family has lived on the same plot of land for four generations. When my great-great-grandparents first moved here, it was a full hundred acres, complete with fields, a rolling pasture, and even a wooded section in the northwestern corner with a creek running across it. That section was the first to go, along with the western fields in 1936, when the Depression finally hit the family’s pocketbook. Next went half of the eastern fields when my grandfather enlisted in the Navy in ’42, and the other half followed in ’73 when my father took a job at the factory in town. The pasture to the north was the last thing to go; my parents sold it off when my brother David was born in ’87, and with it the last of the livestock. When I was born two years later, there were two acres left, with the farmhouse on one side of the long gravel driveway, a vegetable garden behind, a small storage shed with a carport at the top of the driveway, and a long-disused barn directly opposite the house.
This barn had long been a source of aggravation for my father. It had been in need of repairs when he was a child, but the money had simply never come up for it. When he sold the livestock, he’d wanted desperately to tear it down, but he couldn’t even afford to do that. Ironically, he found that that the cheapest route was to let the thing fall down on its own, because then it would be an “act of God” and the family could collect the insurance on it. It had since survived two near misses by tornadoes and a wind storm two summers ago that brought down a huge oak tree in the front yard; the tree had been there since my grandfather was a child, but somehow that barn had managed to survive what the tree could not. And so the structure remained, year after year, rotting and rickety, but still inexplicably upright.
I remember being told very sternly as a child that I was never to play in or near the barn, and later that same day sneaking inside with David and our younger brother, Andrew, who was just five at the time. We dared Andrew to climb up into the hayloft and walk across the rafters to the other side, but he got scared and ran to the house to tell Dad, and David and I both got a rare spanking and were sent to bed without supper. Later that evening, I witnessed for the first time something that was to become a familiar sight to me as I got older: looking out the window of the bedroom window at twilight, as my mother was clearing away the supper dishes downstairs in the kitchen, I saw my father walk from the house to the middle of the driveway and stand, hands on his hips, staring at the barn for a long, long moment. Then, he leaned down and picked up a large chunk of gravel and hurled it with all his might. It bounced off a mossy gray board just above the barn door and came to rest a few feet away, but my father was already leaning over and picking up another rock. This one went through the hole beside the door where a window used to be. He hurled another, and another, until finally my mother came out and wrapped her arms around him from behind, trapping his arms against his sides, and whispered something in his ear. He slumped?I could almost hear the sigh?and shook his head, and a moment later she took him by the hand and led him back into the house.
Over the years, I saw him repeat this ritual many times?when our youngest brother Tommy got hit in the head with a baseball and spent the afternoon in the hospital with a severe concussion; when I wrecked the family pickup truck three months after getting my driver’s license; when David dropped out of high school after his junior year and joined the Army.
Watching my father throwing rocks at the barn had planted the seeds of habit in me as well. When I failed to make my school’s baseball team in fifth grade, I threw an inning’s worth of retaliatory pitches straight into in imaginary strike zone on the lower half of the barn door. When I couldn’t afford the class trip to Washington D.C. in 8th grade because my father had been laid off, I actually knocked out a loose board up near the roof.
“It’s a double benefit,” my father had explained to my disapproving mother over dinner that evening. “It lets you get your anger out without hurting anybody, and who knows, maybe one day we’ll actually bring the damn thing down.”
“Language, Charles,” my mother had gently scolded, but she seemed at least somewhat reassured, if not entirely approving of my new stress reliever.
My father’s most recent bout of rock-throwing had taken place eight months ago, when Andrew was diagnosed with leukemia, just a week and a day after his fourteenth birthday. He’d fainted at school, in the middle of P.E., which was uncharacteristic of my brother, who’d always been a stellar athlete. My mother took him to the doctor, and three days and two hospital visits later, the results were in: Andrew had cancer.
My father stayed in the driveway for well over two hours that night, flinging every rock he could lay his hands on at the shadowy face of the barn, throwing with all his might until his strength was spent and he sank to the ground in the middle of the driveway, tears streaming down his face in the moonlight. I watched from my bedroom window, wanting to comfort him but feeling lost myself, unsure of what to say. He stayed there until my mother finally returned from the hospital in the small hours of the morning and gently shepherded him to bed.
The next two months were strange and silent. Life seemed to go on as usual: I finished eleventh grade and resumed working almost full-time at the Tractor Supply store in town, just as I had for the past two summers, and Tommy’s farm league baseball team won their first three games. But with both David and Andrew gone, the house seemed huge and depressingly empty.  It felt like walking around in a graveyard, especially with my parents’ gaunt, worried expressions. Throwing rocks went from an occasional habit to a daily routine. Every time I stepped outside, whether it was to go to work or simply to get the mail, I’d pick up a pebble and wing it at the barn. The building never gave any sign acknowledging my efforts, but deep in my subconscious, an absurdly hopeful voice seemed to whisper, “This one! This is the rock that’ll bring it down!” It never came down, of course, but that fact did nothing to silence my thoughts.
Andrew finally returned at the end of June; he looked pale and unbearably skinny, but seeing him grinning weakly on the living room couch dressed in his own clothes was a huge improvement over the hospital bed and gown I’d gown, and a tentative breath of life seemed to return to the house. My parents seemed to relax somewhat as well, but my mother still seemed older, more tired, and there was a constant, nagging worry in my father’s eyes.
On a Saturday afternoon a month after Andrew’s return, I came home from work to find my dad tinkering around under the hood of the battered pickup truck in the driveway, souvenir of my early driving experience that he was slowly restoring to health. He had run an extension cord from the kitchen to a boom box on the front porch, from which John Mellencamp’s voice issued forth across the lawn, crooning something nostalgic about peace and patriotism and the Midwest.
“Dad, you’re such a cliché,” I teased as a climbed out of the family’s other car, my mother’s faded blue Ford sedan.
“Oh gee thanks, love you too.” His tone was glib, but to me his voice sounded somehow strained and false.
I walked up behind him and asked, “Are you alright?”
He gave me a long, searching look. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision, and he replied, “Andrew had a checkup today.”
“And...?”
“And the doctor says he needs an operation. Some new?I forget what it’s called. Point is, it’s?well, it’s damned expensive.”
I was rather taken aback. My parents had always been very careful not to discuss the family’s finances in front of us, I guess because they didn’t want us to worry. We always knew when things were extra tight, but to hear my father actually say something about it was unnerving, to say the least.
“I?is there anything I can do to help?” I inquired.
“No James, I don’t want you to worry. This isn’t your battle. You don’t need your mom’s and my responsibilities on your plate.”
I thought for a moment. I’d been saving up money for college since I was eight?pocket change, earnings from odd jobs and working after school and during the summer?and had accumulated a decent amount.
“Dad, there’s my college account?I mean, if you needed some money, I could?”
“No.” His voice was firm. “You’ve worked hard to save that money for school. I’m not going to touch it, and neither are you. I don’t want you throwing away your future.” I sighed, picked up a rock, and heaved it at the barn, where it bounced off a crooked window frame. Dad reached over and ruffled my hair like a kid’s. “Don’t worry, son. We’ll figure something out.”
I walked into the cool, dim kitchen to find Andrew sitting at the table, drinking a glass of lemonade. I sat down next to him and asked, “So how ya feeling?”
He shrugged. “Been better. Been worse.”
“Wanna play a video game or something?” I suggested. Mom was at work and Tommy was at baseball practice, so it was one of the few times we had undisputed access to the TV. Andrew agreed and we made our way to the living room where I plugged in his game console. It was an outdated system, but still provided us with plenty of entertainment. He selected a NASCAR game and we spent the next half hour creating mayhem on a virtual racetrack.
We didn’t notice the storm clouds gathering outside until a huge crack of thunder rattled the picture frames on the shelf above the TV. Seconds later, the power went out.
“Hey, no fair! I had you on that one!” I exclaimed good-naturedly.
Just then, we heard Dad’s voice from the kitchen, where he had been working on a crossword puzzle after coming inside. “Hey guys, I think we might wanna head downstairs. The radio says it’s lookin’ to be a real doozy.”
We knew the drill. Grumbling halfheartedly, we gathered two flashlights and some batteries and met Dad in the kitchen, where he was waiting with the radio and a battery powered lantern. We slipped out the back door and through the dim, greenish twilight to the cellar doors along the back of the house. Descending into the darkness, Dad fastened the doors behind us and we made ourselves comfortable on the floor, listening to the wind overhead and waiting. The wind screeched and howled and roared, louder than I could ever remember it sounding before. There were bangs and crashes of things hitting the doors, and the incessant creaking of the old farmhouse overhead. Finally though, the wind died down, and the only sound we could hear was the pounding of the rain above us.
Standing and stretching the kinks out of our legs, we made our way carefully back up the stairs and Dad pried open the latch on the doors. Rain poured in on us, but we were so glad for the fresh air that we didn’t mind. We climbed out of the cellar and looked around, surveying the damage. There were tree branches all over the yard, some of them quite large, and the woodpile next to the shed had come unstacked. There were a few shingles missing from the roof of the house, but it looked otherwise unscathed. Then I heard Andrew let out a gasp behind me. I turned to find him and Dad both staring openmouthed at?nothing. Where the barn had stood not an hour before, there was a huge blank space; it had completely disappeared.
Dad looked from the space to Andrew to me and back to the space, a grin slowly spreading over his face. “Boys,” he said, glee rising in his voice, “I think things are going to change for the better around here.”