The Last Call in Our Hayloft

Two Days of Bales

Mack wanted the floor checked before anybody danced on it. He was right. His cousin Thurman builds pole barns for a living, and Thurman came over on Thursday and walked every inch of that loft with a flashlight and a framing hammer, tapping beams and lying on his back in the stable looking up at the joists.

“She’s sound,” Thurman said finally, brushing chaff off his shirt. “They built these to hold weight. You could dance a herd of heifers up there.”

So we moved the hay.

It was square bales, about three thousand of them, put up in July. Mack ran the bale elevator backward and the tractor and wagon, and Finis and I stacked. We built walls of bales three high along both long sides and across the back, with a taller stack at one end for Dad’s microphone.

My arms ached in places I didn’t know had muscles. Arvella drove the tractor on the second day while Mack and Finis threw, and I watched her sit up straight on that seat with her jaw set, and I thought she looked exactly like my mother.

When the bales were stacked, Arvella swept.

She swept that loft for two afternoons. Hay chaff, pigeon feathers, eighty years of dust in the cracks. She used the push broom and then the corn broom and then a shop vac Mack ran an extension cord to from the milk house. When she was done, the September sun came through the big doors and lit up the boards so you could see every line of the grain.

“Grandpa’s going to slide on that,” she said, worried.

“No,” Mack said. “Grandpa’s going to stand still and holler. The rest of us are going to slide.”

Calling Fenton

The night before we told Dad, I called Fenton.

Fenton is 79. He played fiddle for my father at the very first barn dance Dad ever called, in somebody’s kitchen in the spring of 1975, a year before the Grange ever hired him. They played together for forty years after that, until Fenton’s hands got bad and he quit the regular dances.

I had not finished my second sentence when Fenton said, “What time?”

“One o’clock. Saturday. The same day the Grange has it.”

“I’ll be there at noon to tune,” he said. “Tell your dad I’ll bring the old bow.”

Odessa, who has played rhythm guitar at the Grange dances for thirty years, heard about it from Fenton and called me herself. She said she was not going to play for a caller from Rutland on Wilbur’s anniversary, committee or no committee, and she’d be in our barn with her guitar.

Telling Randall

I called Randall one more time. I owed him that.

“We’re having a dance in our hayloft on Saturday,” I said. “One o’clock, the same as the hall. That was always Dad’s hour. I’m not trying to take anything from you. I just won’t let Dad’s fiftieth go by in a post office line.”

“You’re setting up a competition.”

“I’m setting up a dance. You’re welcome to come. I mean that.”

“You know what’s going to happen,” he said, and his voice cracked a little. “You know he could freeze up there with all those people watching.”

“Then he freezes with people who love him watching,” I said. “That’s different than freezing alone in his kitchen because his son decided he was done.”

He hung up on me. I sat there holding the phone for a while. I said a prayer for him, and I meant it, and then I went out to help Mack finish the chores.