I drove out to Hap’s on Friday morning. He lives alone in a little white house with a woodpile taller than the house and a dog named after a president. I forget which one.
I did not try to talk him out of Barry’s dance. I sat at his kitchen table and told him what I was doing.
I told him I could not pay him what Barry could. I asked him if there was any way in the world he would play the free one.
Hap looked at me a long time over his coffee. Then he said, “Your granddad paid me the first time in 1961. You know what he paid me?”
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I said I did not.
“A ham,” Hap said. “And he said, Hap, there’s folks here can’t dance anywhere else.” He set his cup down. “I been thinking about that ham for sixty years.”
He looked at the window a while. “You get me a chair and a cup of that cider, Neil, and I’ll play your floor till my arm gives out. Barry can find a record player.”
The Shed Fills
Saturday night came cold and clear. A harvest moon the color of a hen’s egg sat over the Osage orange.
I did not go up to Barry’s. I stood in the door of my lit-up shed at six o’clock with Kim and Jeff and a hundred cups of coffee and more pie than sense.
I watched the headlights come up the county road. I honestly did not know which way they would turn.
The dance at the barn started at seven. Barry had the paper and the price and three weeks of talk. I had a shed and a fiddler and a quarter mile of dark between me and him.
At twenty past six an old Buick slowed at the end of my lane. The blinker came on. It turned in.
It was Hap, following his own directions, with his fiddle case on the seat beside him. He parked by the door and got out stiff and looked up at my strands of light.
“Well,” he said. “You weren’t lying about the lights.”
He set up his chair where I put it, by the warm corner near the heater. He tuned.
The sound of a fiddle tuning in a cold shed is a sound that pulls people the way the smell of coffee does.
At half past six a second car turned in. It was the Kettler girls and their mother.
The mother rolled down her window and called out to me. “Neil, is it true there’s no charge?”