The Last Call in Our Hayloft

The Phone Call With Randall

“You should have told him,” I said.

“I was going to tell him.”

“He found out in the post office, Randall. From Pearline. In line.”

There was a long breath on the other end. I could hear his shop radio going behind him. Randall runs a small engine repair business out of his garage, chainsaws and mowers and the occasional outboard, and he is good at it.

“Janine, you were there in April,” he said. “You saw him. You want that to happen again in front of a hundred people? On his anniversary? With a cake on the table and his name on a banner?”

“I want him to decide that.”

“He can’t decide it. That’s the whole thing. He doesn’t know when it’s going to happen.”

“Then he takes the chance. It’s his chance to take.”

“It’s my Grange,” Randall said, and I could tell he wished he hadn’t said it that way the second it was out. “It’s my name on the committee. I am the one who has to stand up there.”

“No,” I said. “Dad is the one who has to stand up there. That’s what you took from him.”

He didn’t answer. After a while he said he had a customer, which may have been true, and we hung up.

I stood there in the back of the feed store smelling molasses and salt and dust. And I understood that I could not fix this the way I wanted to.

It was the Grange’s hall. It was Randall’s vote, and the vote had carried. I could go to the September meeting and stand up and make a fuss, and maybe I could turn one committee member, and maybe they’d hold another vote in October, and by then the fiftieth anniversary would be gone.

I couldn’t change the hall. I couldn’t change the vote.

But Mack and I had a barn.

The Barn

We live on Mack’s family place, four miles up the road from Dad. It’s a dairy farm, sixty head of Holsteins, and the barn is an old bank barn built into the side of a hill in 1891, the way they did them in this country.

The cows are down below in the stable. The hayloft is up top, and you drive into it straight off the hill across a wooden barn bridge, through doors big enough to take a loaded hay wagon.

That loft is sixty feet long and forty wide, with hand-hewn beams you could not put your arms around. Every winter it holds about forty tons of hay.

I told Mack all of it at supper that evening, with the sun still on the back porch. Dad in the post office line. Randall’s words. Dad in his truck with the engine off. The kids listened without a word, which is rare in our house.

Mack is not a talker. He milks at five in the morning and five in the afternoon, and in between he fixes what’s broken, and he has never once in twenty-four years of marriage made a speech. He ate his pork chop. He drank his milk.

Then he set his fork down on his plate, square, the way he does.

“How many people you figure?” he said.

I knew what he meant right away. I had been thinking it since the back room of the feed store and had not let myself say it out loud.

“I don’t know. Fifty. A hundred, if word gets around.”

“Floor’ll hold it,” he said. “It holds forty ton of hay every winter. A hundred people is maybe eight ton, dancing or not.”

“Mack, it’s full of hay right now.”

“Then we move the hay.”

Our son Finis, who is sixteen, said, “We could stack the bales around the edges. People could sit on them.”

Our daughter Arvella, who is thirteen and has never in her life volunteered for anything that involved a broom, said, “I’ll sweep.”