"Turn him. Quarter turn. Toward you."
He let go of the chain and put his hands on the calf's legs and turned, slowly, against the heat and the weight of her, a quarter turn, the way he had done it fifty times in daylight, and felt the hips slip. "Now," said Albin, and the heifer pushed, and they pulled, and the calf came all at once in a rush of water and weight into Arne's lap, and he went over backward in the straw with it on top of him.
It was not breathing. He knew it before he touched its face. There was no movement in it at all, a hundred pounds of wet dead weight. He got his fingers into its mouth in the dark and swept out the mucus, and found its nostrils and cleared them, and pulled a stem of straw out from under him and pushed it up one nostril, hard, the old way, and nothing happened, and he did it again, and he got his hands on its ribs and rubbed, rough, the way Ilse used to rub a lamb with a feed sack, and he heard himself saying, "Come on. Come on now. Come on," and over his head the barn made the long splintering sound again, louder, closer, and a whole sheet of snow came down through the dark on top of them, and the calf in his lap jerked, and sneezed, and coughed, and took a breath.
"Arne," said Albin. "Arne. The bar."
He felt for it. It was in the straw where he had dropped it. He found the joist across Albin's shin by following Albin's leg, a rough-sawn two-by-ten, heavy as a railroad tie, its far end up on the edge of the manger, and he found a place under it with the point of the bar and put a block under the bar, a broken piece of the stall board, and leaned. His knee went. He did not care. He leaned on the bar with his whole weight and his whole life, and the joist lifted, an inch, two, and Albin dragged his leg out from under it with a sound between his teeth Arne would not forget.
Above them something gave. Not the long groan now. A sharp series of cracks, one after another, running away down the length of the barn toward the north end like a string of firecrackers.
"Go," said Albin. "Go. Get the calf."
He got the calf. He got his arms under it and stood up, and his knee nearly put him down again, and he got it over his shoulders the way you carry a deer, the wet weight of it hanging down both sides of his neck, its legs in his fists. Albin was up behind him somehow, one hand clamped on Arne's coat. The heifer was up too. A heifer will always get up after; that is the one mercy of it. She was up and bawling at her calf, and Albin whistled, short, twice, and out of the dark Fly was there, and the heifer was moving, out of the stall, down the alley, and they went after her, Arne with his hand on the wall and the calf on his shoulders and Albin hopping and hauling on his coat, the south door a gray shape in the black, twelve feet, eight, four, and the cracks running back up the barn toward them, and then they were through it into the roaring snow, and Albin went down, and Arne went down on top of him, and the calf fell in the drift between them, and behind them the barn came in.
It did not fall all at once. It folded. The ridge went first, in the middle, over the third stall, and the roof came down after it on both sides like a book closing, and the sound of it went on and on, a long tearing thunder of timber and tin that went under the noise of the storm and came up through the ground into their hands and knees. Snow blew out of the south door in a great white cloud and buried them. Then there was only the wind again.