The Dance I Threw in the Shed

The Phone Call That Did Not Fix It

You are going to ask why I did not just call him. Pick up the phone, Neil, tell your cousin it is your barn and your dance and the coffee can goes back by the door.

I did call him. Two weeks before, when the flyer went around the co-op with the eight-dollar price on it and my phone started ringing.

People were asking me if it was true.

Barry did not fight me on the phone. That was the thing. He agreed with everything I said.

He said the barn was mine, no argument. He said Grandpa was a saint. He said the free dance was a beautiful tradition.

And then he said the roof needs work, Neil. The insurance on a public event is not nothing.

The band does not play for a coffee can anymore. Somebody has to front all that, and that somebody is me, and I am not made of money.

So there is a door charge this year. And if you do not like it, you are welcome to run it yourself.

Every single thing he said had a true bone in it. The roof does need a patch. Insurance is real. A band costs money now.

That is what made it hard. He had wrapped the taking inside a stack of true things.

To pull it apart I would have to call my own cousin a liar in front of a crowd he had worked three weeks to gather.

And he knew something else. He knew I would not stand at the door of my grandfather’s barn and turn away the county.

I would not make a scene on that threshing floor. Whatever I did, I would not do it there.

That floor was holy to me, and he had counted on my own decency to keep me off it.

He was right about that. I was not going to fight him in the barn. So I was going to have to find another floor.

The Shed

I have a machine shed on my place. A pole barn, forty by sixty, with a concrete floor my grandfather poured in 1979.

There is a row of fluorescent lights and a propane heater hanging in the corner for when I work on the tractor in January.

It is not a pretty building. It is a working building.

There was a planter in it, and a grain auger, and a workbench with forty years of coffee cans full of bolts. There were oil spots on the concrete you could not scrub out with lye.

I stood in the open door of it the Wednesday before the dance. I looked at that floor and I thought, that is enough floor.

I had three days. I called in a favor at work and took Thursday and Friday off, and I started hauling.

The planter went out into the yard under a tarp. The auger went behind the shed.