He listened for a while. He could not hear it again. The wind dropped and there was only the rattle of the tin and the heifers chewing.
Settling, he thought. Snow load. A wet snow was heavy, heavier than people understood, as much as twenty pounds to the square foot when it got deep enough and packed itself down. The old roof would settle under it. It had settled under it before.
At the door, on his way out, he found himself looking at the third stall on the east side. It was empty. He kept it empty. He had not put an animal in it in two years. It was where Ilse had been calving out a heifer of her own on the morning of the twenty-fourth of March, 1983, while he was in Thedford at the Farmers Home office arguing with Ardell Fenske about an operating loan, and it was where Fly had found her, an hour and a half later, lying in the straw on her side with the calf born and up and nosing at her face. The doctor at the hospital in North Platte had said it was an aneurysm. He had said it would have been very fast. He had said, gently, that there was nothing anyone could have done even if they had been standing right beside her. Arne had not been standing right beside her. He had been in Thedford. Fly had stood beside her and barked until her voice gave out, and then she had run the three and a half miles to the Kasper place, because the Kaspers were nearest and because the Kasper collie was her mother, and it was Albin Kasper who had come in his pickup with Fly in the cab and found Ilse, and Albin who had called the ambulance from the house, and Albin who had sat with her in the straw until it came, and Albin who had driven to Thedford to find Arne and tell him.
He had never thanked him. He thought about that, standing at the barn door. In two years he had never once said a word about it to Albin Kasper. He had not been able to. Every time he had tried, the words had been stopped by something, something about the windmill and his father and the fact that it should have been him there and not a Kasper, and he had shaken Albin's hand at the funeral and said nothing, and after that the moment had gone by and there was never going to be another.
He went out and slid the door shut behind him. Fly met him in the yard and walked him back to the house pressed against his legs.
The power went out at twenty minutes to four in the afternoon.
He was at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of a Purina calendar, adding up hay. The light over the table flickered and went out with a soft electrical sigh, and the refrigerator stopped humming, and the Zenith went silent in the middle of a man in Lexington saying the word Ogallala. Outside the yard light was gone. The barn was gone. There was only the white roaring wall of snow in the window, lit by nothing.
He sat for a moment and listened to the house. Without the refrigerator and the radio it was as quiet as he had ever heard it. He could hear the clock over the stove, and Fly breathing under the table.
Then he got up and did the things you do.