Rust & Starlight
Chapter 3 : The Barn Loft
The barn was a hundred and twenty years old if it was a day. Mason could tell by the timber framing—massive oak beams held together with wooden pegs instead of nails, the joints darkened by a century of humidity and hay dust. The main floor was divided into three stalls (empty now, though the smell of horse lingered), a tack room full of leather and rust, and a hayloft above that had been converted into something almost livable.
Wren led him up a creaking wooden ladder—not stairs, a ladder—and pushed open a door at the top.
“Home,” she said dryly.
The loft was a single room, maybe fifteen feet square. The walls were raw wood, chinked with dried mud and moss. A cot sat in the corner, dressed with a wool blanket and a pillow that looked older than Mason. There was a small wooden table with a kerosene lamp, a washbasin with a chipped enamel pitcher, and a window that faced east—toward the rising sun and the endless Kansas prairie.
On the table, someone had placed a stack of books. Farm Repairs for Beginners. The Kansas Farmer’s Almanac, 1987. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.
Mason picked up the last one, frowning.
“That’s mine,” Wren said quickly. She snatched it from his hands, her cheeks flushing. “I must have left it up here. Don’t read it.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
She tucked the book under her arm and pointed to a metal chest in the corner. “There are extra blankets in there. The outhouse is behind the barn—sorry, no indoor plumbing up here. The main house has a bathroom, but that’s for me. You can use it once a day, at a time we agree on, and you will not linger.”
“Understood.”
“For meals, you’ll eat in the kitchen with me. I don’t believe in separate tables. And you’ll wash your own dishes.”
Mason nodded. He was too tired to argue, too humiliated to push back. But as he looked around the loft—the rough wood, the single window, the complete absence of anything electronic—a strange feeling settled in his chest. It was almost like relief.
“When do I start on the fence?” he asked.
Wren checked her watch—a battered Timex with a cracked face. “You have two hours until lunch. I’ll show you where the tools are.”
She climbed down the ladder without waiting. Mason followed, his legs shaky, his head still throbbing. The barn floor smelled of hay and dust and something else—something sweet, like dried apples.
Wren led him to the tack room. Inside, along with saddles and bridles, there was a workbench covered in tools. Post-hole diggers. Wire stretchers. A hammer with a wooden handle worn smooth by decades of use. A box of fence staples. Two pairs of leather gloves.
“The break is about two hundred yards from here,” she said, handing him a pair of gloves. “I’ve already pulled out the worst of the damaged posts. You’ll need to dig new holes, set the posts, and restretch the wire. I’ll show you once.”
“Once?”
“Once. After that, you’re on your own.”
They walked to the fence line. The morning had warmed slightly, but a wind was picking up—the kind of wind that blew straight through denim and flannel, reminding you that Kansas answered to no one. Wren stopped at the first gap, where four fence posts had been snapped like toothpicks and the barbed wire lay coiled on the ground like a sleeping snake.
“Watch,” she said.
For the next twenty minutes, she worked. Her movements were efficient, almost brutal—no wasted energy, no hesitation. She dug a post hole with the diggers, her arms flexing beneath the gray sweater. She dropped a new cedar post into the hole, checked its alignment with a level she pulled from her back pocket, and tamped the dirt around it with a steel bar. Then she took the wire stretcher, attached it to the loose strands, and cranked until the wire sang with tension. Staples. Hammer. Done.
She turned to him, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her glove.
“Your turn.”
Mason looked at the remaining three gaps. At the pile of cedar posts. At the wire stretcher that weighed more than his guitar.
“I’m going to be terrible at this,” he said.
“Probably.”
“Like, embarrassingly bad.”
“Almost certainly.”
He picked up the post-hole diggers.
By the end of the first day, Mason had managed to set exactly one post. It was crooked. He’d also given himself a blister the size of a quarter, gotten barbed wire tangled around his ankle, and dropped the hammer on his own foot. Wren had watched from the porch for most of the afternoon, not offering help, just watching—like a scientist observing a particularly inept lab rat.
At sunset, she called him in for dinner.
The kitchen was warm, filled with the smell of roasted chicken and thyme. A simple wooden table sat in the center, set for two. Wren had changed into a clean shirt—a faded flannel with the sleeves rolled up—and her hair was braided down her back.
“Sit,” she said.
Mason sat. His hands were raw, his shoulders screamed, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this tired without alcohol involved.
She placed a plate in front of him: chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans that tasted like they’d come from her own garden. No conversation. Just the sound of forks on plates and the distant moo of a cow.
Midway through the meal, Mason looked up.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Really.”
Wren chewed a green bean, considering. Then she set down her fork.
“Because my husband Luke was a lot like you,” she said quietly. “Before the war, I mean. He was talented and reckless and he drank too much and he thought the world owed him something. And then he went to Afghanistan and came back in a box, and I realized that nobody had ever made him sit still long enough to figure out who he was without the noise.”
She met his eyes.
“I’m not doing this for you, Mason. I’m doing this because I couldn’t save Luke, and maybe—just maybe—I can keep some other woman from getting that phone call.”
The kitchen was silent. Outside, the wind had died, and the first stars were appearing over the prairie.
Mason picked up his fork and finished his dinner.
That night, lying on the cot in the barn loft, listening to the creak of the old timbers and the distant hoot of an owl, he realized something that frightened him:
He hadn’t thought about whiskey once.