The Last Call in Our Hayloft

The Hour Without a Miss

Dad called for an hour without missing.

Allemande left, right and left grand, swing your partner and promenade. Ladies to the center, gents around. He did patter calls and singing calls, the old ones from the seventies and a couple I’d never heard. He made jokes into the microphone. He told Clovis to quit showing off.

Clovis was swinging his wife like it was 1980. His wife was laughing so hard she had to hold on to his suspenders.

Arvella learned to do-si-do from Alpha, who stood behind her and guided her by the shoulders the way she guided all of us through long division. Finis danced with a girl from the next town over and turned so red I worried for him.

The children were the best part. The little ones couldn’t follow the calls at all, and it didn’t matter. Dad would see one of them going the wrong way and call something just for them. “Little fella in the blue boots, you go back to your mama now.” The whole floor would laugh and the little fella would run back to his mama, proud as a rooster.

The Square Nearest Him

I danced in the square nearest Dad, right beside his bales. I wore my denim skirt and my white blouse because that’s what Mom always wore to the dances, and I wanted Dad to look over and see a little of her.

Once, coming out of a swing, I looked up and he was looking right at me.

He didn’t say anything into the microphone. He just mouthed two words over the top of it. Thank you.

I had to look at the floor for a whole figure after that.

Dad’s Hand on the Rail

Mack had nailed a length of two-by-four between two posts beside Dad’s bale stack, about waist high, so he’d have something to hold. Dad didn’t say a word about it. But I noticed that every time he turned to face a new side of the loft, his left hand went out and found that rail.

He didn’t lean on it. He just touched it. A second, maybe two. Like a man touching the doorframe of a house he grew up in, to be sure it was still there.

Then he’d grin and call the next figure.

I watched that hand all afternoon. I think I loved my father more in that hour, watching his hand find that rail, than I ever had in my life.

The Hall Across Town

I found out later what was happening at the Grange hall while we danced.

The caller from Rutland was a nice young man named Royal with a good sound system and a binder of new calls. He set up at noon. The ladies’ auxiliary had put out coffee and sandwiches and a cake that said Happy September.

At one o’clock there were four couples on the floor. Two of them were committee members and their wives. One was a couple passing through who’d seen the flyer at the diner. The fourth was Randall, dancing with Pearline, who had come to help set up and felt she couldn’t leave him there alone.

Royal called three tunes to four couples, which is barely one square, in a hall built for twenty. Then he turned down his music and asked if everybody was waiting on more folks.

Royal kept calling. By three o’clock the four couples had become two. Pearline told me Randall stood by the coffee urn for most of an hour without saying anything. The two committee members kept looking at their watches. One of the wives finally said what everybody was thinking.

“They’re all up at Pettit’s barn,” she said. “Every one of them.”

Pearline said Randall set his coffee down and walked out to his truck, and sat in the Grange lot a long while before he ever turned the key.