The Last Call in Our Hayloft

What Randall Did

He didn’t walk up and take the microphone. That’s what I want people to know. He didn’t come across that floor and save his father from the crowd.

He stayed right there in the hayloft door, and he called the next figure out loud in his own voice, without a microphone, the way he would have called it to Dad in the kitchen when he was ten years old and Dad was teaching him.

“Allemande left with your left hand,” Randall called, “back to your partner for a right and left grand.”

And he said it in Dad’s cadence. Not his own. Dad’s exact old rhythm, the little lift on “grand,” the way Dad had called it for fifty years.

He wasn’t calling the dance. He was calling to Dad.

Dad’s head came up. He looked at his son across the whole length of that loft, over all those squares, and I saw it come back into his face. The music, the floor, the figure. All of it, coming back.

Then Dad lifted the microphone and picked it right up off Randall’s line, like catching a rope.

“Right and left grand, now, meet your honey, give her a swing,” Dad called. And the floor went.

Every Square Moving

Ten squares started up all at once. The boards boomed. Fenton put his whole arm into it. Odessa came up loud. And the people on the bales started clapping in time, eighty of them, the way they used to clap at the Grange when a set was really going.

Nobody said a thing about it. Nobody looked at Dad funny. Clovis just swung his wife a little higher. Alpha nodded to herself the way she did when a slow student finally got it.

That’s what I think about now. A whole barn full of people who had danced with my father their whole lives, and when he lost his place, they did not stop. They just stood there and waited, kind as could be, and then they went right on with him.

Dad called the rest of that set without a single miss. He was smiling so big his voice changed.

And in the middle of it he looked over at the door and said into the microphone, “Randall Pettit, there’s a square down here short a man. Get in it.”

Randall Steps In

It was Arvella’s square. Her partner, a little boy of about eight, had run off to his mama, and she was standing there by herself with her hands out.

Randall stood in the door a second longer. I watched his chin work.

Then he took off his good jacket and laid it over a hay bale, and he walked across that swept floor in his work boots, past all those squares, while the whole barn watched him.

He didn’t look at me. I didn’t need him to. He walked straight to his niece and took her hands.

Dad called, “Swing your partner,” and Randall swung Arvella, and she laughed out loud, and Dad’s voice cracked on the next line but he got through it.