The metal door rattled open onto a clanging void, concrete floor, tin roof, railed pens, feeding troughs, lengths of pipe that once held rat poison. There was no other debris there save what had been used for the cows. Even the murky air had a different quality from the air of the barn, a stale but still acrid odour come of the long disintegration of shit and straw, which had seemed to impregnate even the metal. He put on overalls and gloves and tied a handkerchief across his face, and spent a day clearing, putting what might be sold at auction or for scrap out into the yard where the rain washed it down. His mother saw it there and came out to see what he was doing, wearing a big black oilskin because the rain was hard, came into the shed and pushed back the dripping hood to look about her. How long since she had last been in there? Not since the cows left, perhaps, when it was a bright space soft with straw and warmed by the beasts. But the electricity had been cut off long ago, wires hanging loose, overhead sockets dangling smashed bulbs. She went to push the door fully back and let in more light, of whatever light there was outside on a day like that, but the door was stuck in its runners, it wouldn’t go any further. She was coughing in the churned-up, sour-smelling dust, holding her hand to her mouth.

What are you doing?

Clearing.

Why?

To take it down. We don’t need it any more. We can put up a modern grain store instead.

And he said he would take down the cart barn too.

But it’s a lovely old cart barn.

But that’s what it is. It was built for carts.

Didn’t she see, the point wasn’t the past but the present?

You and your bright new toys, she said, turning away and back out into the rain.

As if a man was still only a boy.