The Last Call in Our Hayloft

The flyer was thumbtacked to the corkboard by the register at the feed store, right between a lost beagle and a man selling round bales off a field in Granville.

It was a plain sheet of yellow paper. Grange Hall, September Dance, Saturday, 1 PM. Caller from Rutland. Light lunch to follow. Everyone welcome.

I read it twice with a fifty pound bag of layer pellets still on my shoulder. Then I set the bag down on the counter and read it a third time, because I thought I had missed my father’s name.

I hadn’t missed it. It wasn’t there.

My father is Wilbur Pettit. He is 82 years old, and he had called the square dance at our Grange hall on the second Saturday of every month since September of 1976. That September dance was supposed to be his fiftieth anniversary.

Fifty years. Not one month skipped that anybody could remember, except the winter of the ice storm when the hall had no power, and even then he called a dance in the church basement by lantern light.

I stood there with my hand flat on that yellow paper until Neoma, who has bought her chicken feed from me for eleven years, asked me if I was feeling all right.

“Fine,” I said. “Just reading.”

I rang her up. I gave her the wrong change. She gave it back to me and patted my hand, and I knew from the way she did it that she had already read the flyer herself.

How Dad Found Out

Dad did not see the flyer at the feed store. Dad found out standing in line at the post office, which is how everybody in our part of the world finds out everything.

Pearline, the Grange secretary, was in line ahead of him with a package for her grandson in the service. She turned around, saw who it was, and went white as a dish towel.

She told me later she thought he already knew. She thought Randall had told him. Randall is my brother, Dad’s son, and Randall is president of our Grange.

He hadn’t told him. Nobody had told him. My father, who had driven to that hall six hundred times with his records and his little speaker box and his thermos of coffee, learned in a post office line that somebody else had his dance.

Pearline did her best. She said there had been a vote at the August meeting. She said the committee felt it was time to bring in some new blood. She said the young caller from Rutland was very good.

Then Dad asked her the question he always asks, the one that makes people tell him the truth. He just said, “Pearline, what did my boy say?”

And she told him.

Randall had stood up in front of thirty Grange members on a hot August evening and said that Dad would embarrass himself. He said Dad loses his place now. He said, and I am quoting Pearline quoting him, “I am not going to stand there and watch my father make a fool of himself in front of the whole county.”

Then the committee voted. Randall’s vote carried it, three to two.