During Hide and Seek, a Young Boy Disappeared

We were playing hide and seek in the barns—my brother, me, and the two neighbor boys. But the youngest boy went missing.

Alexander, the rooster

Joe dashed into the hen pen in the back of the second barn and looked behind the thick, wooden box on legs. The box held seven straw nests for hens to lay eggs without anyone watching from the front, unless you pulled down the cover. The back side was all open for the hens to climb into.

Jerry searched the corners of the two connected barns—which were also called an Aroostook barn—where the walls seemed to twist and turn. You never knew what could be hiding on the other side. His canvas sneakers flopped over the long boards that were not nailed down, so Dad and his crew could flip them up to get at the potato bins below.

Floor boards up during potato harvest at the Fred Russell farm,1980s

Joe ran under the southwest side of the haymow. Bicycles leaned against one wall. A milky-white kitchen table stood by another with spool-shaped legs and sides that folded down. In another corner sat a black and nickel-plated wood stove that Great-Aunt Fern Spear used in the kitchen years ago, before Dad bought the place, and Great-Uncle Forest’s black, metal safe with gold lettering on the front. A cracked door, green with yellow panels, stood behind the table.

The two boys went into the empty stable (all the cows were out in the pasture by the pond, and the rabbits in their summer hutch). Soon they came out through the milk room and shook their heads.

“We don’t know where he is,” Joe said.

“Come out, come out wherever you are!” they yelled with their hands cupped around their mouths.

The wind whistled through the funny metal vents that sat on top of the barn roofs, and the swallows chirped in their nests along the square beams over our heads.

Maybe he went outside. Or worse, maybe someone kidnapped him. “I never saw him leave,” Joe finally said. “He’s here somewhere.”

They went down the stairs into the house cellar attached to the shed that was in between the house and the first barn. They retraced all their previous steps, thinking he might have come out of one hiding place and run to another without us knowing.

I stood in the middle where the first barn was connected to the second—where Uncle Forest and his crew had moved one barn down from a field by way of horses, ropes, and logs and attached it to the first. I looked at the four-paned windows above the haymows, trying to see into the shadows.

Joe, a few years prior to this story

From far away, I heard my brother. “I don’t believe it! That’s a great place!”

I ran to the shed where the three of them were chuckling. “Where was he?” I asked, suddenly feeling left out of the bigger kid games.

The youngest boy with the curly, dark hair crawled back under the metal kerosene tank propped up by a wooden frame about three feet above the floor. Way under the tank, on the back wall, was a board nailed along the bottom. When he put his sneakers on top of that board, you couldn’t see his feet from the front of the tank. He had just enough space from behind to stand.

I was jealous that Gene had found such a great spot to hide, but happy that the barns hadn’t swallowed him up.