The Barn Exercise - Take Drei

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.”

There was a path worn to the barn. Down to brown dirt with almost perfectly careened grass edges; worn over thousands if not millions of footsteps from the house to the barn. The barn became a tree house of sorts to the kids. They could play games there and run around and use the ladder to the loft and they told secrets to each other.  Dishes could still be done without worry and the baseball game could still be heard on the radio whilst keeping an ear out for a “mommy” or “daddy.” And they sure did call that barn their own, to the point where the barn was off limits to mom and dad. “You have the house, we have the barn,” was said more than a few times when barn hay was touched by a grown-up’s shoe. From their first steps to their teens, they found new ways to grow up in the barn. Suzie’s first  try on a bike was racing from the open red doors, silvery handlebar tassels whipping in the wind, smile as wide as a Cheshire cat with that ole lone front tooth making her seem crazy as ever. She wrecked not twenty feet from the barn but she was back up in a flash ready to try again. She also had her first kiss in that barn. She told the tale years later at her rehearsal dinner, held in the barn of course. It was a beautiful dinner with fried chicken piled to the loft, mounds of Cole slaw and potato salad, cheap beer and wine in old metal coolers, and fingers sticky from watermelon capped the dinner. She was marrying a good man, that same man that kissed her for the first time in the barn. While this memory was nice, there was no getting around the truth. The barn may have protected them once but now it seemed to hold the truth, tight inside the oak beams, behind the huge double doors, down in the hay and under the tool table where they once hid during hide and seek, it sat. Maybe if they had not spent so much time out there? Maybe mistakes were made, in the barn and elsewhere. The barn wasn’t going to bring anybody back, not now, not ever; it was only going to remind. Reminding was pain now. Memories are nice when new ones are going to be made but they are the devil the past is all there is. The past is all there is that sits in that barn now. Who could go in there now? Maybe strangers could. Who could even look at that barn now? From the kitchen window it was watched though. And on the same day the truth shoved aside a life for oil, the sun burned hot orange on that barn.

Where was the flag going to go? The one they folded up and presented. The barn seemed the right place but who could go in there now? That barn was where the time was spent, the cars fixed, the girls kissed, the beers drank, the guns cleaned and the deer skinned but who could go in there now?