The Barn Dance That Built a House

He kept my hand a moment longer than a handshake lasts. Then he said the thing I think about more than any other.

“Who do I pay back?”

I looked at the barn. At Walt in his good flannel, and Alma with her pies, and Gladys already in a folding chair with her knitting, and Clem Oltrogge by the wall with his arms folded, trying to look like a man who’d had nothing to do with any of it.

“Nate,” I said, “start by saying hello to some of them. It’s a long line.”

It took him two hours. He went around that barn with Josie on his hip and shook every hand in it. I had feared I would see shame on his face, and I didn’t.

Later, when the band took a break, Duane Kuhlman, who has been the auctioneer in this county for forty years, climbed onto the bandstand with a microphone. When I asked him to run the pies he had said, “I’ll do it on one condition, which is that nobody asks me to be solemn.”

The first pie was Alma’s lemon meringue. It opened at twenty dollars, and Hank Dreyer and Kyle Brandt went at each other for six minutes while the barn roared, until Hank won it at $1,150 and carried it to the children’s table.

“That’s for the kids,” he said. “Don’t share it with your fathers.”

Ada ate half of it with her hands.

It went on. A quilt the Zion circle finished in four weeks went for $2,800. A man I had never met, in a Go-Hawks jacket, paid $400 for a loaf of bread and said he didn’t even like bread.

Lorraine had set a galvanized milk pail at the end of the pie table with a card taped to it. There was no name on the card. It said only: For the house.

I stood by the table around nine o’clock and watched them come. A farmer in a seed cap pushed a folded check into the pail without breaking stride. A high school girl emptied a cookie jar of tip money. A woman from the nursing home slipped in a twenty and then, thinking nobody was looking, another twenty.

Nate danced with Ada standing on his boots. He danced once with Bree, close, with the baby asleep between them. I saw Walt Vogel dance Alma once around his own barn floor, and she let him lead for a change.

The last song ended at eleven. People went home slowly, in groups, with their collars up. Lorraine stood at the door with her clicker and said goodnight to every one of them by name.

At a quarter to one, she and Alma and I sat down with the milk pail at Walt’s kitchen table. We counted under the yellow light with a rubber band for every hundred and a pencil for the total. Alma took the checks. Lorraine took the bills. I did the coin, and I did it twice.

It was a quarter to two when Lorraine put her pencil down. She checked her adding machine tape against her pad, and then she did it again from the bottom.

“Colleen,” she said. “Sixty-three thousand, eight hundred and eighty-two dollars.”

None of us said anything for what felt like a full minute. Arvid’s ten thousand was in there, and the quilt, and the pies, and the farmer’s folded check, and the girl’s tip money. Four hundred and thirty-eight people had put something in a milk pail or bid on something they didn’t want.