Mrs. Barns
Mrs. Barns had married John Arnold. Both had been widowed. Both were small-town farm stock. I had worked alongside John at a small, local steel fabrication shop where many farmers and a few welders from a nearby Caterpillar plant came to work part-time during the winter months. Me and a few others worked there after high school. It was good money at the time and a friendly place to work. Hoeing fields and bailing hay had been my first job. But working at Walt's steel fab shop was actually my first real job.
I learned that John's farm was as far out on the western edge of town, as where my parents had put down roots, east of town. They had rented an old eighteen hundreds farmhouse complete with barns and corn cribs in the back sitting on about one hundred and eighty acres. I would learn later at our fiftieth high school reunion that many of my classmates had the false impression that my family had money. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was a big, three-story house with a widow walk and a wrap-around porch. It was big but by no means a mansion even by standards back in that day.
John, Jim, Walter and Lenny were the four primary farmers who worked at old man Patterson's growing agriculture-oriented, steel fabrication shop. Except for John, I thought Jim, Walt and Lenny were all a lark. Jim had large Indian elephant ears and often explained them by joking that when God was handing out body parts, he had thought he heard "beers" being offered and he had shouted, "I'll take two large ones." I liked Jim from the start. Walt was older than the others. His farm was famous for having a barn leaning westward at a nearly a forty-five-degree angle, sustained in that position by several poles propping. It was a vain attempt to keep it from falling over but such can be life. Walter had a good laugh, but always with a cigarette in hand. Lenny was more an electrician than a farmer. He had less than a hundred acres which he and his two sons share cropped. He was skinny, walked half hunched over, had a whiny sort of voice, and lit one filterless Lucky Strike with the butt of the previous one. Both Lenny and Walt would die of emphysema.
John Arnold had twelve hundred acres to keep him busy. This was back when corn pickers picked four rows at a time and harvest took a full two months. With today's equipment, it takes less than two weeks. John was the quiet one. He always sat at the head of the break room table. We all gave him space as he was gruff with us "young upstarts."
Patterson's ended the week with a half day on Saturday. I guess I had caught John's eye because he had asked if I was interested in making a little extra cash. I immediately assumed that meant some sort of farm work. "I'll pay you five dollars an hour but you'll be working for the wife. She has some odds and ends she wants done around the house." Wow! Five dollars an hour? That was almost double the minimum wage that we were earning as high schoolers at the shop. "Sure," I volunteered. "Can you start next week?" John had asked.
Upon graduating high school, my dad had gifted me with a two-door Dodge Phoenix complete with a slant six and three on the tree. Like every boy back then, we would often gather after a game out on some lonely stretch of road to see who had the fastest beater. I must admit, that six had some spunk to it, often beating small-block Chevy V-8s.
And so it was the next Saturday after lunch that I drove my black mamba back down the long drive into John Arnold's grouping of barns, machine sheds, and a beautiful two-story house. John waved as I got out, wiping his hands on a red hand rag, and pointing to the house. "Go around to the front and ring the doorbell." It was one o'clock. No time clock needed to be punched in.
I had never met Mrs. Arnold. When she opened the door I introduced myself. "Mrs. Arnold, Hi! I'm Brian and John said you were looking for some help around the house?"
"Birds of a feather," as my mother was fond of saying. Sizing me up and down, through the screen door, in a baritone voice that was as cold and pitiless as my fifth-grade teacher's had been, she barked, "It's Mrs. Barns. Get that straight right now young man." Pushing her way out onto the porch. "You see here? John has set up the ladder over there and some scaffolding up here. I want you to scrape off all this old peeling paint. Once you've done that, then come see me." With that she spun on heel and disappeared back into the house.
I suppose most boys my age would have cowered or been off put by Mrs. Barns' brashness. However, I was at the age where the immense size of that woman's breasts dissipated all such thoughts. My brother would be a lifetime subscriber to Playboy which, when he wasn't around, gave me the opportunity to steal a copy or two and hide in the bathroom salivating over the buxom beauties captured on those glossy pages. But there wasn't a single woman in all those pages that even came close to what had greeted me at the door on that first meeting of Mrs. Barns.
Most of the hard work had already been done by someone else. All the posts and railing had been reworked to such a degree that they looked new. Some new cedar siding had replaced a few boards around by the entrance to the house. The original siding required very little care before it would be ready for paint. The ceiling of the wrap-around porch, however, was another story. I estimated that it would take me the rest of the afternoon to just get one leg of it scraped to where it would be ready for paint.
To my surprise, around two-thirty, three o'clock, Mrs. Barns popped her head back out the door, looking at my progress before popping back inside. I guess no comment was a good comment. Soon she reappeared.
