I remember it like it was yesterday, and before that moment I thought that life was perfect. I was doing my chores as I had for years and continue to do to this day. I recall the events leading up to the accident so clearly it is as if they were burned into the front of my brain. A psychologist once told me that having witnessed such an accident would make me a stronger individual in the future. At the time I hadn’t had any idea what he meant; in fact only recently did I have even a vague understanding of what that statement was supposed to mean.

I remember walking into the barn on an exceedingly cold February morning and trying to inhale the wonderful smell of warm dairy cows. The cold air caught in my nose and I sneezed instead. I looked into the barn and I saw the hired helper, Eddie, bending over our farm’s steer, Brutis, who we were raising for beef, looking for an udder to milk. Eddie was new to the farm and could not yet tell the cows apart from the steers. Brutis had sneaked passed Eddie into the barn pretending to be a cow and stood there waiting to be milked and waiting for the grain that came along with the milking. At the moment that I walked in, Eddie’s expression was priceless. His face turned bright red and he quickly turned away from me as though he thought that if he didn’t see me then I didn’t see him. I remember deciding to walk out of the milking barn and leave Eddie alone to deal with Brutis and then deciding to start chores without Eva, my best friend who also helped out with the farm, because I was in a hurry to get home and warm up. I remember walking down the narrow aisle to the other barn and then realizing that I still needed to get hay.

I was back to the other end of the long barn when I heard the crunch. At first I didn’t think much of it; working in a barn I was used to all sorts of random noises. I glanced over my shoulder and did a double take. A chunk of ceiling was lying on the floor. I looked up to see where the ceiling had come from, and a foot was sticking through a hole like a groundhog peering out of its burrow. I was only eight and had no idea what to do, so I yelled for Eddie who came stumbling out of the milking barn still looking flustered from his Brutis incident. I pointed up to the foot, but by then it was too late. The owner of the foot must have shifted her weight because a large section of ceiling gave way, and Eva came tumbling down. She hit the concrete floor on her feet, I heard a terrible crack, and one of her legs gave way.

Eddie and I ran to her and knelt down. Eddie then jumped up and I was in no doubt why: the conveyor belt in the milking room was squealing; it was stuck and the tension was going to make it snap soon. The belt was three feet wide and about every five years it jammed. When that happened, all you could do was get as far away as possible before it snapped. It always caused huge amounts of damage to the milking barn. Eddie didn’t know this; it was only his second week of working on the farm. He was only 19, he was from the city, and he had no idea what the belt was about to do. “Eddie” I shouted, “Stop! It’s going to kill you.” I ran after him. The belt snapped and I saw Eddie hurled across the room like a pebble shot from a slingshot. My eyes stung. I wasn’t sure if it was from the dust now falling from the ceiling or from the tears welling up in my eyes. The smell of burning rubber was overpowering. Cows and machine parts were strewn all over the milking barn and somewhere under there was Eddie. I screamed and ran, forgetting about Eva and her fall, forgetting about Eddie.

I had to get out of there. At that point I was in denial of the whole thing, pretending that someone could just fix everything. When I got to the other end of the barn I stopped and stood in shock until the fire crew arrived. One man picked up Eva and carried her out towards the parade of trucks lined up outside of the barn. Most of the crew was in the milking barn, looking for Eddie, but one man came towards me. The rest of that week was a blur; I was sick and stayed away from the barn until the day of Eddie’s funeral. Until that day, none of it had seemed real to me, but as the coffin was lowered into the ground, I realized that Eddie was gone forever.

During the days after the funeral, I began to fall into a state of depression. I barley ate. I didn’t want to leave the barn now, thinking that I would see Eddie again, bending over under Brutis, looking for that silly udder. I was blaming myself for Eddie’s death and Eva’s injury. Eva was my best friend; she wasn’t going to be home from the hospital for two more days. She had broken her left leg in three places and her right foot in two places. Even after Eva returned from the hospital, I continued to spend most of my time in the hayloft with the musty old bales of hay and the dark tunnel over the long barn that now had holes in the floor. The holes seemed like an insult to me, reminding me of what I was convinced was my fault. As I sat alone in the dark hayloft day after day, I came up with wilder and wilder ways that I could have saved Eddie. Each time a new idea came into my mind I began to sob and I would bury my head in a pillow of hay.

After I failed to return home for three days in a row, my mother came up to the hayloft to talk to me. She found me muttering to myself. When she tried to approach me I began to scream and climb to the top of the barn. When I fell asleep that night my mother brought me back to the house and later to see a doctor. The doctor sent us to a psychologist who proved to be just as nuts as I was.

My mother was definitely not happy with this crazy man draining our bank account and when he told me that, having witnessed such a horrible accident as I did at such a young age I might suffer from shock and therefore trauma for the rest of my life, my mother, who was a very down to earth person, had had enough of Dr. Vandertramp’s craziness.

As I listened to her rant about the doctor all the way home, my mood slowly became better as I listened to her familiar voice, and when she said that she should have known better than to pay a man who had been stupid enough to go to school for an extra four years just to get some extra letters added after his name, I couldn’t help but giggle. I had never before heard an adult complain about the need to go to school and receive an education and it somehow lightened my mood. From that point on, I slowly became better. I began talking to people again and I played with Eva for the first time since the accident.

From then until now, at 32 years of age, I have spent my life on our farm, running it, often in the barn, not out of depression but because I love to be there. My farm is now the only one left in Hartland, Vermont and I have been told by more than one person that it takes a strong character to run a farm in New England. Maybe Dr. Vandertramp wasn’t totally wrong in telling me that if seeing the accident didn’t ruin my life it could possibly make me a stronger individual in the future.

Now, as I stand in the barn, the milking machine hooked up to the cows, its efficient, modern hum in the background underneath their plaintive mooings, sometimes I can still see Eddie, standing next to Brutis, that perplexed look on his face, and I can smile as I remember him.