The Barn Dance That Built a House

Lorraine kept the numbered list in a manila folder under her register. Anyone who asked got a line. They said, “Put me down for something,” and she read them one, and they wrote their name on the back.

Nate Dettmer stood eight inches from that folder buying a box of wood screws on the Tuesday of the second week. Lorraine said she hoped he’d come to the dance on Saturday, and he said he didn’t think so. She slid the folder under the Sunday paper with her hand shaking so hard that she had to sit down afterward.

By the end of the first week, a hundred and eighty of the two hundred and twelve lines were taken. The high school ag kids came on a Saturday and scrubbed the barn floor with push brooms and hot water, and Walt’s grandson hauled out eleven wagonloads of old hay. Dennis borrowed six propane heaters from Hartman Heating and strung extension cords across the rafters like clotheslines. Marv Gruber, who leads the Wapsi Valley Ramblers, said he’d play for free and then spent twenty minutes explaining that if I ever repeated that he’d deny it.

Gladys Rademacher took line eighty-seven.

I had been dreading that one. Gladys is seventy-nine. She came to Lorraine’s counter with her purse over her arm and asked what was left, and when Lorraine got down to eighty-seven, she stopped.

“That one says can’t replace,” Lorraine said.

“I read it,” said Gladys. “I’ll take it.”

“Gladys, it’s a baby blanket somebody knit. You can’t buy that.”

“I didn’t say buy.” Gladys wrote her name on the back of the folder in her careful schoolteacher’s hand. “Put me down.”

Arvid Halverson, who is ninety-one and was Vern Dettmer’s oldest friend, came to the fellowship hall one afternoon and sat across from me in a folding chair for ten minutes without a word. Then he handed me a cashier’s check, folded in half, and said, “I knew Elmer Dettmer. He’d want that house up.” I unfolded it in the car. It was for ten thousand dollars.

The week of the dance, Clem Oltrogge walked the lot with me. He said he’d frame the house on weekends with his own crew and charge only for the lumber, if somebody would stand behind the materials. I told him somebody would. I didn’t know how. I said it anyway.

And through all of it, I had a stone in my stomach, because I had not told Bree about the list.

She had written that list for an insurance adjuster. She had not written it for two hundred people to pick over like a rummage sale. I could not have told you she would see the love in it.

“What if she’s furious?” I said to Dennis one night.

He didn’t open his eyes. “Then she’s furious. Then you say you’re sorry.” He found my hand under the quilt. “Colleen, it’s a good thing, even if you did it wrong.”

I said nothing. But it helped, a little, that he was so sure.

On the Thursday before the dance, I called Nate at his in-laws’.

“Walt’s holding a dance Saturday,” I said. “The whole county’s coming. Bring the kids and come eat.”

He was quiet a long time.

“We’re not much for dancing right now, Mrs. Hovland.”