The Barn Dance That Built a House

I have to tell you something about my father now, because it’s the reason this story went the way it did.

His name was Harlan Koehn, and in the fall of 1985 he lost his farm. That was the year the banks called the notes all over the Midwest. We had two hundred and forty acres south of Plainfield and a good name, and neither one was worth a nickel by then. I was twenty-three, and I stood in the yard with my arms crossed while the auctioneer sold my father’s tractor to a man from two counties over.

That winter the church ladies held a benefit supper. They meant it with their whole hearts. They hung a banner in the fellowship hall and set a coffee can with his name on it by the door.

My father drove to the church and parked in the lot. He left the engine running for the heater, and he sat in that pickup for two hours with his hat on while the entire town ate a supper in his honor on the other side of the wall. My mother carried a plate out to him wrapped in tinfoil. He left it on the dash until it froze.

Every one of those people loved him. He just could not walk through that door and be the man the banner said he was.

But three years later, at a wedding dance in the American Legion hall, I watched him waltz my mother across the floor in front of the same people. A man who had been at that supper bought him a beer. Nobody said a word, and my father drank it. That was as close as he ever came to taking something from his neighbors.

A dance, you see. At a dance, a man can be given something without anyone having to say he is being given it.

I didn’t think of that in Gary’s office. I thought of it on Thursday, at Pat Lindahl’s kitchen table in Denver, in the middle of a conversation that had nothing to do with dancing.

Gary had asked Bree to make an inventory of everything the house held. It’s what insurance wants: every item, room by room. Bree had been working on it every night after the children were down, in pencil on yellow legal paper. She asked me to help her get it typed.

I sat beside her and read the list out loud while she corrected me.

It went on for eleven pages. She had started in the kitchen. A mixer, red, a wedding present. A crockpot. A bread bowl that had been Grandma Dettmer’s. A colander with one bent foot. Eleven coffee mugs, because the twelfth had broken in September. Upstairs, Ada’s winter boots, size one and a half. A box of Colt’s plastic tractors, the green one missing a wheel. Nate’s work boots, size eleven, and his father’s pocketknife.

On page five I came to a line that stopped me.

Josie’s blue blanket (can’t replace).

“That one’s not worth anything,” Bree said, looking at the table. “I just wanted it written down somewhere that it was there.”

She had gone over the word “replace” twice in pencil.

She had found that blanket at a church rummage sale in March, before Josie was born, a hand-knit blue thing with a satin edge that somebody’s grandmother had made. Josie had slept with it every night of her life. Bree had snatched it out of the crib on her way down the stairs, she was nearly sure, and somewhere between the kitchen door and the lane it was gone.