The Last Call in Our Hayloft

The Last Set

At a quarter to four, Dad announced the last set.

Mack had to milk at five. Everybody knew it. Nobody in dairy country holds a dance past milking.

“This is the last one, folks,” Dad said into the microphone. “Fifty years. Let’s get every square full.”

The bales emptied. People who’d been sitting all afternoon came out on the floor. Clovis’s wife pulled Neoma off her bale. Fenton stood up to play, which he hadn’t done all day, his bow arm working like it was 1975.

Ten squares filled. Dad looked out over them, and he looked so happy I couldn’t hardly stand it.

He started the last set. Honor your partner. Circle left. Allemande. Grand right and left. Swing and promenade home.

Halfway through it, a truck pulled into the yard.

Randall at the Door

I saw it through the big doors. Randall’s truck came slow up the drive, past all the cars in the hayfield, and stopped at the foot of the barn bridge.

He got out and stood there with his hand on the truck door for a minute. Then he started up the bridge.

He walked slow, like it was a steep hill and not a wooden ramp. He was in his work clothes, his good jacket over them. He looked older than I’d ever seen him look.

He came to the top of the barn bridge and stopped in the hayloft door, in the same place Dad had stood three hours earlier, with the September light coming in behind him.

Dad was in the middle of a promenade, ten squares of couples walking around the loft arm in arm, and he looked up from the microphone and saw his son standing in the door.

And he lost his place.

The Floor Slows

It was just like April. His mouth stayed open a little. His eyes went somewhere far away. His hand went out for the rail and held on to it.

The promenade wound down. Couples got back to their home spots and stood there waiting. Ten squares, eighty people, all of them stopped on the floor, and eighty more on the bales holding their breath.

Fenton kept playing, softer, his bow just barely on the strings. Odessa kept her guitar going under him like a heartbeat.

I stood in my square below Dad, close enough to touch the toe of his boot, and I didn’t know what to do. If I called the next figure for him, it would be April all over again, somebody taking the microphone out of his hand.

I looked at the door.

Randall’s face was white. I knew exactly what he was seeing. He was seeing the thing he’d been afraid of, the thing he’d taken the dance away from Dad to prevent, happening right in front of him in front of the whole county.

He opened his mouth.