The Dance I Threw in the Shed

The Can By The Door

He did not come in that night. He got in his truck and drove home, and I did not see him for three weeks.

But the night after Thanksgiving he showed up at my place with a toolbox. He climbed up on the barn roof, my grandfather’s barn, and patched the two sheets of steel that were lifting.

He would not take a dime for it. When he came down he stood in the yard a while, and we did not say much.

Between men who grew up together, that is most of an apology.

We are going to run the dance together again next year, in the barn, the way it was supposed to be. There will be a coffee can by the door and no card table.

Barry wanted that written down somewhere. So I am writing it here.

I asked him once, that night in the yard, what made him put the price on it.

He thought about it a long time. “I saw all those people coming,” he said, “and I was broke, Neil, and I thought, there’s a gate right there, and a man could stand in it.”

He shook his head. “I forgot what the barn was for. You stood in a shed and reminded me.”

I kept the dented coffee can. It sits on the workbench in the shed, under my grandmother’s quilt, next to the forty coffee cans of bolts.

This past winter a family three miles over lost their heat the week of Christmas. A young couple with a baby.

I know about heat. It is what I do. I went over and fixed their furnace and would not take anything for it.

But I took the money out of the dance can to buy the part, because that is where that money goes. And because somewhere there is a little book that goes back forty years with a new line in it in my handwriting now.

My grandfather left me a barn to hold. I finally understand that what he meant was the people, not the building.

The lights are still up in the shed. I never took them down, and I do not expect I ever will.

Some nights in the dead of winter I go out there to work on the tractor, and I turn them on instead of the fluorescents.

I can almost hear it. Two old people turning slow on the concrete, and a fiddle, and a floor that cost nobody a dime.