"I know it."
"I went up in the loft to throw down that twine you said I could have. And I looked at your ridge." He had turned his hat around in his hands. "That center beam's checked bad. Right about over the third stall on the east side. There's a split running maybe eight, nine feet, and it's opened up since I was last up there. I put my hand in it to the second knuckle." He had held up his hand to show. "I'd get somebody to look at it before winter. Maybe post it. Or sister a new timber in alongside."
Arne had stood with his rope half coiled. He remembered the dust coming up off the corral and the smell of burnt hair and the calves bawling in the trap, and Albin's face, careful and worried in a way that had annoyed him even then. And he remembered that over Albin's shoulder, parked by the machine shed, sat a white government Ford with a county seal on the door, because Ardell Fenske had driven out that morning to count the Kasper calves for the collateral report, and was still there with his clipboard.
He remembered the exact words that had come out of his own mouth.
"I'll worry about my barn, Albin," he had said. "You might worry about your own place."
And Albin had looked at him for a long moment, and put his hat on, and said, "All right, Arne," and walked away.
Three months later, on the twenty-second of January, the Kasper place was sold on the courthouse steps in Mullen.
Arne turned away from the sink. In the corner of the kitchen, beside the door to the back porch, his father's rifle stood in its rack, a Winchester Model 94 in .30-30 that he used for coyotes and for the occasional animal that could not be saved. It had been on the rack since the day he had come home from the courthouse in January. Before that it had been in the closet in the hall. He had moved it the night he found the word on his barn.
He did not want to think about that either. He looked at the clock over the stove. It was a quarter to seven. The heifers would need hay at eight. The snow was coming sideways now past the yard light, and the light itself had begun to flicker, very slightly, every time a big gust hit the line, a little stutter in the bulb that he could see reflected in the glass of the Zenith.