Wyatt Harlow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Wyatt woke at three in the morning to water on his face. The storm had been building since dinner, and now it was here. He pulled on his boots and ran across the yard with a flashlight. The beam swept up the side of the white barn with the forest green shutters, and he saw the hole. Half the north slope of the roof was gone. Shingles lay in the mud. Rain poured straight through onto the feed sacks and the tool bench below. He stood in the doorway and did the math fast. Forty sacks of grain. The seed for the spring plot. His father's hand tools, the good ones with the oiled handles. All of it would rot or rust before sunrise if he left it. He had no money for a roofer and no time to wait for one. He grabbed a tarp from the tack room and tried to throw it over the feed. The wind caught it and dragged it into the yard. He chased it down, soaked through, and came back panting. He needed hands, and he only had two. He called Analeia. She did not pick up. He remembered she had driven to her sister's for the weekend. He called the next name in his phone. Savannah answered on the fourth ring, voice thick with sleep. "My barn roof is gone," he said. "I'm losing everything in it." She was there in twenty minutes. She was the redhead who ran the little studio at the end of the county road, the one who painted horses for tourists. He barely knew her. She climbed out of her car in a paint-stained jacket, curly ginger hair already flat with rain, and did not waste a second asking questions. "Where do you want it?" she said. "Farmhouse porch. Anything dry." They worked for three hours. She dragged feed sacks two at a time, bent double, boots sliding in the mud. He carried the tool bench across the yard in three trips. They stacked grain against the porch rail under the overhang. They wrapped the seed bins in her drop cloths. When the last sack was clear, he climbed a ladder and nailed a spare tarp across the worst of the hole. It would hold for a week. Not longer. The rain thinned at dawn. They sat on the porch steps, shaking. Her sleeve was torn at the elbow. She was bleeding a little and did not seem to notice. "Thank you," he said. "You owe me breakfast." She wiped her face with a wet hand and smeared mud across her cheek. "And a new jacket." He looked at the barn. The feed was saved. The tools were saved. But the roof was still open, and a real repair would cost more than he had in the coffee tin above the stove. He had bought himself a few dry days and nothing else. He needed cash again, and he needed it before the next storm.