The contractor packed his crane and left with the bents still lying in the grass.
Walt Brenner watched it happen from his porch on Route 9, across the lane, with Biscuit asleep against his boot. The crane went first, rolling out onto the county road with its arm folded down.
Then the flatbed. Then the contractor's pickup, fast, gravel spitting from the tires.
On Brandon Hale's hillside, where the wedding barn was supposed to stand, four timber frame bents lay flat on the new floor deck like the ribs of a giant animal. Beside them, under blue tarps, were the purlins and plates and braces and rafters. Two hundred pieces of green white oak, cut and numbered and waiting.
Brandon stood alone in the middle of it with his phone in his hand.
Walt finished his coffee. Then he got up, and Biscuit got up, and they walked across the lane together.
"They went bankrupt," Brandon said. He was forty-one, from Cincinnati, and Walt had never seen him without a smile until now. "The whole company. The owner called me from the road. He's sorry. The crane's leased, and the leasing company took it back this morning. The crew's gone. My deposit's gone."
"How much of it?"
"Forty thousand." Brandon put his phone in his pocket. "The first wedding's May fifteenth. A nurse from Marietta and her fireman. Then eleven more this year, every one of them paid a deposit. And the guy from the timber yard says if this oak lies out in the weather for a month, it'll start to twist."
"He's right," Walt said. "It will."
Walt walked slowly along the first bent. Two posts, sixteen feet tall. A tie beam across the top.
Two curved braces. He ran his hand over a joint, a tenon sitting in its mortise, the oak still damp and smelling sharp, almost sour, the way green white oak smells.
The work was good. Somebody in that shop had known what they were doing.
"Another crane company can come out in June," Brandon said. "Maybe. If they can fit us in. And a crew to run it, for another thirty thousand dollars I don't have."
Walt straightened up.
"You don't need a crane," he said. "They raised barns in this county for a hundred and fifty years without one."
Brandon looked at him.
"I helped raise one by hand in 1977," Walt said. "Emil Lutz's son-in-law's barn, out on Hollow Creek. Forty men and a gin pole and a lot of pie. Emil ran the lift. He was seventy that year, and he called every pull." Walt looked at the bents in the grass. "I was the young fellow on the rope."
"And now?"
"Now I guess I'm the old fellow."
By Saturday morning, word had gone around Pine Hollow the way it always did, by way of Dot's counter.
Dot came up the hill at seven with six dozen sausage biscuits and four urns of coffee in the back of Earl's truck. Earl came with her. Hank came, with a box of tow straps he swore he'd never used on anything this important.
Clay came with his good lariats and an opinion on every knot. Pastor Sam came in his work boots. Tyler came with six of his buddies from the fire department, all of them young and wide-shouldered and very interested in the biscuits.
Brandon's wife, Jenna, brought folding chairs. Their son Owen, six, brought his kitten, which Jenna made him take back to the house.
Walt had spent Friday on the deck.
He'd checked every joint on the first bent. He'd rigged a gin pole, a tall straight ash log, guyed with ropes to stakes in four directions, with a block and tackle hanging from the top. He'd laid out the pike poles, twelve of them, long poles with iron points that the young men would use to push the bent up once it got higher than they could reach.
And he'd tied off one more rope that the young men didn't pay much attention to. A long line from the top of the bent, running out the far side and down the hill to a fence post he'd sunk four feet deep in concrete on Thursday.
"What's that one for?" Tyler asked.
"That's the snub line," Walt said. "It's the most important rope here. It's what keeps the bent from going over the top, or coming back down on your head. Earl's on the snub line. Earl doesn't let go of things."
Earl took the rope and wrapped it once around the post, and stood there like a man who intended to stay all day.
Walt had left Friday afternoon for an hour, to get white oak pegs from his barn. He'd split them himself by hand over the winter, the old way, because a split peg follows the grain and a sawn peg doesn't.
When he came back, two of Brandon's friends from Cincinnati had gotten ahead of him.
"We bored the peg holes in the tenons," one of them said proudly. "To save you time. Straight through, the way the holes in the posts go. We used a long bit and lined it up perfect."
Walt looked at the holes for a long moment.
He thought about saying something. He thought about Emil Lutz, who'd always said the job will teach a man faster than you can. And he thought about forty people coming up the hill at seven in the morning with biscuits.
"All right," he'd said. "Let's peg it."
At eight o'clock Saturday morning, Pastor Sam said a short prayer over the first bent. Then Walt stood at the end of the deck where the whole crew could see him.
"Old men call," he said. "Young men lift. When I say heave, you heave together. When I say hold, you hold. And if I say down, you don't let go. You walk it down slow."
Thirty pairs of hands took hold of the tie beam.
"Heave," Walt said.
The bent came up off the deck. Waist high.
Shoulder high. The young men set the pike poles and pushed, and the ropes on the gin pole took up, and the great oak frame rose into the gray March sky, sixteen feet tall and climbing.
"Heave," Walt said. "Heave."
Halfway up, a sound came out of the oak.
A long, low creak, like a door in an old house. Then another, sharper. Walt's eyes went to the joint at the top of the left post, where the tie beam met it.
The tenon was moving. Pulling out of the mortise, a quarter inch at a time, and the pegs were bending.
"Hold," Walt said.