The Dance I Threw in the Shed

What Came Down The Lane

I did not know what was happening up at the barn until later. I did not go look. Going to look would have been the mud and the hog.

But people trickle. By eight, folks who had started up at Barry’s were coming down my lane.

The ones who had paid their eight dollars and then stood in a thinning crowd in the big barn. They had been listening to a record player, because Hap never showed and the band Barry hired turned out to be one young man with a guitar and a speaker.

They did not come down to stick it to Barry. They came down because they heard the fiddle.

You can hear a fiddle a quarter mile on a cold clear night. It came down the lane and over the ditch, and it pulled them the way it pulls everybody.

One by one the barn emptied and the shed filled. Barry was left standing in a lit barn with a cash box and almost nobody to spend it on.

A man named Dale Ostrander came down with his whole family, four kids and a grandbaby. He stopped in my doorway and looked around at the lights and the pies.

“I paid Barry,” he said. “I’m not sore about it. But my dad got a ham off your grandad one year we were down to nothing.”

He put a folded bill in the can on his way past, on top of the eight dollars he had already spent that night. I did not look to see what it was. That was the whole idea of the can.

He came down himself near the end. I saw his truck pull in, and I went out to the yard to meet him.

Whatever was going to be said between us was not going to be said in front of the dancers.

He stood by his truck with his hands in his jacket. He looked at my shed all lit up and shaking with the music. He looked at me.

For a second the old Barry was in his face. The one who could drive the grain truck at twelve.

“You got Hap,” he said.

“I got Hap,” I said.

He nodded slow. He looked at the ground. “I made forty cars’ worth up there, and then they all walked out on me.”

He gave a short laugh with no fun in it. “You didn’t even have to be ugly about it. You just lit a shed.”

I could have let him stand there in it. Part of me wanted to.

But Ruth was there too, and so was my grandfather, and the coffee can was full by the door.

“Barry,” I said. “Come in and get some pie. Bring your box.”

“There’s a can by the door does the same thing your box does,” I said. “Except folks can see where it goes.”