The Last Call in Our Hayloft

What Happened Last Spring

I need to be fair to my brother here, because the story is not worth telling if I am not.

Last April, at the spring dance, Dad was calling a singing call he has done a thousand times. Halfway through the second figure he stopped. The music kept going. Eight squares of dancers stood there waiting, and my father stood at the microphone with his mouth a little open, looking at nothing.

It lasted maybe twenty seconds. It felt like a week. I was in the kitchen cutting pie and I heard the floor go quiet under the music, and I knew before I even turned around.

Randall was the one who walked up and took the microphone out of Dad’s hand. He called the rest of that figure himself, a little rusty but right, and then he put the record back on the start and handed the microphone back. Dad finished the night. Nobody said a word about it.

But I watched Randall’s face the rest of that evening. He was red from the collar up, and it was not anger. It was the look of a man who had seen something he could not unsee.

Randall loves our father. I want that said plainly. He was not trying to be cruel. He was trying to protect Dad from a room full of people watching him slip, and somewhere in all that fear he decided that protecting Dad meant deciding for him.

So that was his reason. It was a human reason. It was still wrong. You do not take a man’s fiftieth year away from him behind his back and then tell a hall full of his friends that he is a fool before you tell him anything at all.

Dad at the Counter

The next morning Dad came into the feed store.

He came in at ten past seven, which is when he has come in every Tuesday since Mom died, and he bought a twenty-five pound bag of chicken scratch. He has six hens. He had a full bag at home. I knew that because I had sold him one on Friday.

I rang it up anyway. He counted out his money in the slow careful way he does now, laying each bill flat.

“You saw the paper,” he said.

“I saw it.”

He looked over at the corkboard. He did not go read it. He just looked at that yellow square from across the store like it was a dog he didn’t trust.

“Fifty years,” he said. “I’d have liked to finish it. That’s all. I’d have liked to say I finished it.”

Then he picked up his bag of scratch he didn’t need and carried it out to his truck. He set it in the bed and got in the cab, and he sat there with the engine off for twenty minutes. I watched him through the front window the whole time between customers.

He didn’t cry. Dad doesn’t cry. He just sat with both hands on the wheel, looking at the hills across the road, the way he used to sit on the tractor at the end of a row when the light was going.

When he finally pulled out, I went into the back by the mineral blocks and called Randall.