"Pulling your calf."
"I heard a shot."
"That wasn't a shot. That was your ridge." The voice was strained, coming in pieces, as though the man talking had to stop between words to do something else with his body. "Listen to me. She's going. The beam's going. There's a split in it you could put your arm in, and a piece of the loft floor come down about an hour ago right over the third stall and took my flashlight, and my lantern, and about half of me. I've got my leg caught under a joist. I can't get up. And I've got chains on your heifer's calf and the calf's coming backwards and if I let go of 'em it'll go back in and she'll lose it and maybe herself."
Arne stood in the dark with the rifle.
He would think about that moment for the rest of his life too. How long he stood there. It could not have been more than a few seconds. But in those seconds everything he had been carrying all day, and all winter, and for two years, went through him at once, and he could feel each piece of it go. The word on the door. The courthouse steps. The calving chains. Something he should have done in the fall. And underneath all of it, his father's voice saying that you could trust a Kasper with your horse but not with your fence, and his own voice by the stock trailer in October saying, I'll worry about my barn, Albin. You might worry about your own place.
"The third stall," he said. He did not know why that was what he said.
"It's the only one with a head catch. She was down and turned wrong in the alley and I got her up and put her in there." A grunt, a long breath. "I'm sorry, Arne. I know. I know about the stall. There wasn't any other place."
Over his head the barn made a sound he had never heard a building make. A long, slow, splintering groan, like a tree going down a long way off, and the darkness above him filled with a sifting hiss, and something small and hard fell past his face and struck the floor of the alley. A nail. A big square-cut nail his grandfather had driven in 1911, pulled out of its hole by the weight above it.
The groan stopped. The barn held.