The Dance I Threw in the Shed

The Card Table At The Door

The first thing I saw when I turned off the county road was my cousin Barry. He was sitting behind a card table in the mouth of my grandfather’s barn.

A cash box sat open in front of him. A roll of orange raffle tickets lay by his elbow.

He had a folding chair, a lantern, and a hand-lettered sign taped to a sawhorse. The sign said Harvest Dance in my cousin’s block letters. Under that it said Admission. Under that it said a number.

The number was eight dollars.

I sat in my truck at the end of the lane with the engine running and watched. The Kettler girls handed Barry a twenty and waited for him to count out their change.

They were sixteen, maybe seventeen. They had done chores all week for that money.

Behind Barry the barn glowed the way it had glowed every harvest my whole life. String lights ran up into the hip of the roof. Somebody had swept the old threshing floor clean. A fiddle was already going somewhere back in the warm dark.

It was the last Saturday in October, cold enough to see your breath. Half the county was coming up my grandfather’s lane to pay my cousin to stand in a building that belonged to me.

I want to tell you I drove up there calm. I did not.

My hands were tight on the wheel. There was a hot thing moving around behind my ribs that I did not like.

But I have watched men lose a thing twice. Once when it is taken, and once again when they let the taking turn them mean.

My grandfather used to say that. He said a man who wrestles a hog in the mud just gets muddy, and the hog likes it.

So I did not drive up. I backed out onto the county road and went home to think.

Home is a quarter mile south on our ground, past the drainage ditch and the line of Osage orange my grandfather planted the year Kennedy was shot.