The Man at the Hired Help Table
Gene, the bandleader, was sixty-eight years old with a gray ponytail. He led a five-piece band out of Kokomo that played every barn and fire hall in four counties, and he played a pedal steel he had owned longer than I had been alive. He walked to the front microphone and tapped it twice with a knuckle. He caught the eye of the caterer’s boy at the side door and tipped his head toward the pump shed, and the boy took off running. Then his voice went out over the whole barn.
“Folks,” he said, gently. “I am not saying this to shame anybody. But before that man goes anywhere else, this room ought to hear where he has been since sunup.”
Nobody breathed.
“We pulled in here at nine to set up,” Gene said. “Nine o’clock, and there was no power in this barn. None. Not a light. Not a cooler. Not a plug in the building. The caterer had a little generator that ran his ovens and nothing else. He lent us half an hour of it to check the PA, and then he needed it back. We sat out in that gravel lot with a truck full of amplifiers and nothing to plug them into, and I figured we’d be playing this wedding on acoustic guitars and a washboard.”
A few people laughed, not sure yet whether it was a joke.
“And all that morning,” Gene said, “there was a man down in that lane with a shovel. Just one man, and a boy of sixteen who couldn’t keep up with him, and a fellow in a van with a meter. I watched that man dig from nine o’clock until half past eleven, and then shovel that clay back into the ground. In the sun. It was ninety-one degrees by noon. I offered him my water twice and he said he had his own jug, thank you. When a lady in a headset told him to move his truck off the lawn, he moved his truck and went right back to digging. And not once, not one time, did he stop to tell any of us who he was or why he was doing it.”
He stopped. He turned and looked at my father.
“I figured he was the best-paid man in Indiana,” Gene said, “to work like that. Then Harold told me what he was being paid.” He shook his head. “Nothing. I think Harold ought to tell it. He is standing right there.”
I turned.
In the doorway to the kitchen stood Mr. Deel, who owned the barn. He was seventy-one, a retired dairyman with a bad knee and a white mustache, in his Sunday shirt with the sleeves rolled. He had been out at the pump shed on the phone with Marty, and he was still holding the shop rag he had been using on his hands. I could see it was trembling.
“Well,” Mr. Deel said. He came out slowly, wiping his hands on the rag, and he did not take the microphone. He just spoke, and the room was so quiet that everyone heard him. “I was going to leave it alone. Earl asked me to. He made me promise. I told him I would not tell the kids until after the cake.”
“Harold,” my father said quietly.
“I am sorry, Earl. I’m breaking my word. I think I have to.”
This is what Mr. Deel told the barn, in his slow dairyman’s voice, while a hundred and forty people forgot about their dinner.