The Last Call in Our Hayloft

Telling Dad

Dad was on his porch Friday morning with his coffee when I drove up. He hadn’t shaved. That worried me more than anything. My father has shaved every morning of his life, including the day Mom died.

“I need you to come up to our place tomorrow at noon,” I said. “Wear your red shirt.”

“What for?”

“For your dance.”

He looked at me over his cup. I told him all of it. The barn, the bales, Thurman on his back in the stable, Arvella and the shop vac, Fenton and the old bow, Odessa and her guitar.

He didn’t say anything for so long I thought he might be angry. Then he set the coffee cup down on the porch rail very carefully, the way he lays his bills on the counter.

“Who’s coming?” he said.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve been telling people at the store.”

“You didn’t put up a flyer?”

“No, Dad. No flyer.”

He nodded slowly. “Your mother never would have put up a flyer either,” he said. “She’d have just told people.”

Then he went in and shaved.

Word Getting Around

I didn’t put up a flyer. I didn’t post anything on the computer. I just told people across the counter at the feed store that week, the way news has always traveled up here.

“Dad’s calling his fiftieth in our hayloft Saturday,” I’d say, ringing up mineral and fly spray and dog food. “One o’clock. Bring a dish if you want.”

I didn’t say anything about Randall. I didn’t have to. Everybody had already read the yellow flyer.

Some people just nodded. Some people said they’d try. A man I barely knew, who buys goat feed once a month, stood there for a second and then said, “My folks met at one of Wilbur’s dances in 1978. I’ll bring them.”

By Thursday I had lost count of how many people had said they’d come.

Saturday Morning

Saturday came up clear and warm, one of those September days in dairy country when the maples on the ridge are just starting to turn and the air smells like cut corn.

Mack milked early. He had the cows out on pasture by nine, and he hosed the barn bridge down and laid sawdust where the boards were slick.

Finis and Mack hung a long orange extension cord from the milk house up through the hay chute, and Thurman set up the little speaker and the microphone stand on top of a stack of square bales at the far end of the loft, so Dad could stand behind it at chest height and see every square.

Arvella made a sign in marker that said Wilbur Pettit 50 Years and taped it to a beam. Then she took it down because she thought Grandpa might not like it, and then she put it back up because I told her he would.

The ladies started coming at eleven with food. Casseroles and baked beans and a ham, three kinds of pie, a whole sheet cake from Delpha with fifty candles in a box beside it that she said we could decide about later. We set it all up on sawhorse tables in the shade by the milk house.

Fenton came at noon like he said. He sat on a hay bale by the speaker in his good flannel shirt and tuned that fiddle for twenty minutes, and every few minutes he played a few bars of something and then stopped and smiled to himself.