The Last Call in Our Hayloft

After the Last Call

The set ended at five minutes to four. Dad called, “Promenade home and thank your partner,” and then he said into the microphone, “That’s fifty years, folks. Thank you for every one of them.”

Nobody clapped at first. Then everybody did, all 160 of them, plus the folks on the bales and the kids and Mack in the doorway in his barn boots, ready to go milk.

Dad came out from behind the bales very carefully, one hand on the rail. Randall was at his side before I was. He put out his hand, and Dad took it, and he stepped out onto the open floor.

They stood there holding hands, the same way Dad and Fenton had held hands at noon. Neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Randall said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I should have asked you.”

“You should have,” Dad said. “But you called it right.”

The Cake

Delpha lit all fifty candles on that sheet cake down by the milk house in the late afternoon sun, and it took her two books of matches, and half of them went out in the breeze before she was done. Nobody cared.

Dad blew out what was left. Arvella and two of the little ones helped. He cut the first piece and gave it to Fenton.

Mack went down to milk. Half the men in the yard went down to help him without anybody asking, still in their dancing shirts, and the cows came in early to all that company and didn’t seem to mind.

Randall stayed until the last car was gone. He stacked folding chairs. He helped Odessa carry her guitar case down the bridge. He swept the loft with Arvella’s push broom without anybody telling him to, and when he was done, he stood in the big doors with the broom and looked out over the valley for a while.

What Happened at the Grange

At the October meeting, Randall stood up in front of the membership and told them he had been wrong.

Pearline told me he did not make excuses. He said he had been afraid for his father and had let it make him small. He said he should have asked Dad before he ever brought it to a vote, and that a man who called a dance for fifty years had the right to decide when he was done.

He made a motion that Wilbur Pettit be named Caller Emeritus of the Grange for life, with the right to call a set at any dance he chose. Pearline seconded it before he sat down. It carried twelve to nothing.

The young caller from Rutland, Royal, came to the October dance himself. He asked Dad to call the first set with him. They stood at the microphone together, and Dad called and Royal listened, and the hall was full.

The Rail Is Still There

Dad doesn’t call every month anymore. He calls when he wants to. Some months he wants to and some months he just comes and sits by the coffee and taps his boot.

The bales went back in our loft in October, all three thousand of them. Mack restacked them one Saturday with Finis and Randall, who drove over without being asked and threw bales until dark.

But Mack never took down that two-by-four rail between those two posts. It’s still there. He says it’s because he never got around to it.

I go up in the loft some afternoons when the light comes through the doors. I put my hand on that rail, the way Dad did, just for a second.

Then I go down and help with the milking.