The Dance I Threw in the Shed

How Barry Got The Keys

Here is the part where I have to be fair to Barry. The church lady in my own head will not let me past it otherwise, and she is right.

Barry is my first cousin, my uncle’s son, two years older than me. When we were boys he was the one who could do everything.

He could drive the grain truck at twelve. He could throw a bale to the top of the stack.

He was loud and funny, and the hired men liked him better than they liked me. I did not blame them. So did I.

Life did not go easy on Barry. He farmed and lost it in the bad years, the way a lot of good men did.

He sold machinery, and that folded. The last few years he had been doing a little of this and a little of that. I knew without being told that money was tight in his house.

When Grandpa died, I could not run the dance alone. I live forty minutes off, in town, where I fix heating and cooling for a living.

I asked Barry to help me put it on, the way the family always had. He said yes before I finished asking.

That first year he was a wonder. He strung the lights better than I could. He found the band.

He swept the floor and set the bales. He ran a hayride for the kids out to the pumpkin field and back.

People told me all night what a good thing it was that the dance went on. And somewhere in there, standing in the middle of a thing he had made run right, Barry stopped seeing a dance his uncle used to throw.

He saw a gate. He saw two hundred people coming up a lane, and a man could stand at that gate.

Every one of those people would pay to get past him. My grandfather had spent sixty years making sure no one ever had to.

Barry looked at the same crowd and did the arithmetic.

I did not see it happen. I only saw the result. The card table. The cash box. The Kettler girls counting out their chore money in the cold.