The Barn Exercise - Take 2

From John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers:

“Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing.”

The barn and the memories it contained were not enough. Images of violence and ending flooded in. Flowing tears obscured the view of the barn into an impressionistic painting. Life, and with it cessation, both seemed that way now –blurred without definition, mingling into other material, nothing exactly beginning and nothing exactly ending. But the barn came back into focus, again rearing its ugly head and its beautiful memories that only reminded that no more memories would be made in the barn. A vicious cycle made only more vicious by being unavoidable. Not looking at the barn meant avoiding the barn which meant it was there to avoid. If it was there, they were there. Together. Learning and teaching about the tractor, learning and teaching how to clean the guns and skin the dear, finding the 9/16 socket over and over again, fixing the leaks in the roof, learning and teaching about learning and teaching. Together. Deny the barn, deny the information you received, deny the truth…but then did those things happen in the barn. Are they beautiful if… Weren’t they strong men? Weren’t they strong in the barn? Didn’t they work hard and have muscles? Didn’t they talk about strength and toughness in the barn? Didn’t they develop strong hands and callous fingers working in the barn, living and working like men? Together? But wasn’t one of the many lessons about this truth? This truth that now permeated the barn? This truth that stared back like a mirror from the barn that stood motionless…motionless like the heart that once beat…with strength, with fervor…and with what was surely kissing Cindy Farmer after a birthday party in the barn. Was her heart still beating? Why? What allowed her heart to be beating? They were both alive in that barn when they kissed. They were both in their youth and ready to grow older. They both talked about the future in that barn. But god dammit the future stopped arriving today for one of them. And that barn out there, that fucking barn is a reminder; a reminder of a heart not beating and of the other hearts that remain beating without just deserts. Without just deserts. A lifeless structure incites, reminds, regardless of red paint and white trim, regardless of an inanimate tractor and inanimate tools, regardless of a leaky roof fixed together, or a fifth of whiskey hid from mom. Regardless of one beating, heavy heart, staring though sobbed tears at a barn that has its red doors open, the most important door is now closed.