The Last Call in Our Hayloft

Dad Comes Up the Bridge

Dad drove up at half past twelve.

He was wearing his red western shirt with the pearl snaps and the string tie with the silver slide that Mom gave him on their twenty-fifth anniversary. His white hair was combed wet. He had his old record case in one hand out of fifty years of habit, though Fenton and Odessa were going to play live.

He walked up the barn bridge slow, one hand on the railing, and stopped in the big doors and looked at the loft.

The light was coming in behind him across those swept boards. The bales were stacked neat along the walls. Fenton raised his bow to him. And there were already maybe forty people in that loft, sitting on bales, standing in clusters, kids running in circles.

Dad stood in the doorway for a long time.

“Well,” he finally said. “Well, now.”

Fenton stood up and the two of them shook hands, and then they just held on to each other’s hand without shaking it for a while.

The People Kept Coming

From one o’clock on, people kept coming up that barn bridge.

They parked in the hayfield, all down the edge of the corn, along the road clear to the mailbox. Mack and Finis directed traffic in their barn boots.

Old couples came, the ones who met at Dad’s dances in the seventies and married and had kids and brought their kids to his dances, and now brought their grandkids. Young families came with little ones on their shoulders who had never seen a square dance in their lives.

Clovis came, who is 88, with his wife on his arm. Alpha came, who taught most of us in the fourth grade. Wiley came from the milk co-op, still in his work uniform, and said he’d snuck off for an hour.

At two o’clock Finis went around with a clicker counter he’d brought from school, counting only people who danced, not people who sat. He came over and showed it to me.

One hundred sixty.

Calling the First Set

There wasn’t room for 160 dancers on that floor at once. Thurman had figured about ten squares of eight could fit with room to swing. So we danced in turns. Half on the floor, half on the bales, and every few tunes Dad would call, “Change it up,” and the bales would empty and fill again.

Before the first tune, Dad stood behind his stack of bales and took the microphone off the stand. The barn went quiet.

He didn’t make a speech. He just bowed his head for a second, the way he does before supper. A few people bowed theirs too. Then he looked up and nodded to Fenton.

Fenton put that old bow on the strings, and Odessa came in on the guitar, and Dad called.

“Bow to your partner, bow to your corner, all join hands and circle to the left.”

His voice came out of that little speaker a little thin at first, and then it filled out, the way it always did once the floor started moving. Ten squares went circling, and the boards boomed under all those feet like a drum.