The Waltz Dad Wrote for Mama

The Birthday

The eighteenth of April was a sunny afternoon, warm for the season, with the redbuds out along the fence row and the pasture just turning green.

We opened both big doors on the barn so the light poured in across the new floor.

Seth went to get Dad at noon. He came back an hour later with Dad in the front seat and Effie in the back.

Dad was wearing a pressed white shirt and the silver bolo tie Mama gave him on their twentieth anniversary. Darla had pressed the shirt. I knew her ironing.

His white hair was combed back neat, and he looked around the yard with a kind of polite puzzlement, like a man who has come to the wrong house but is too courteous to say so.

“Whose place is this?” he asked me when I took his arm.

“It’s mine, Dad,” I said. “Mine and Seth’s. It’s your birthday. You’re eighty today.”

“Eighty,” he said, like he was trying the word out. Then he smiled at me. “Well. That’s a lot of years for a man to get.”

We set him in a folding chair at the end of the dance floor right by the hay bales.

People started coming at half past one. They came in pickups and old sedans, and some of the families walked across the field from the next farm.

By two o’clock, there were close to a hundred people in our barn and our yard. Old men in feed store caps.

Women in church dresses. Young families with babies on their hips. Men Dad had worked the county roads with for thirty years.

Darla came at a quarter past two. She drove herself and parked at the far end of the yard.

She came in by herself, carrying a pound cake on a plate, and set it on the food table. Then she sat in a folding chair near the door, by herself.

Nobody went over to her. Not for a long time. I watched her sit there with her pocketbook in her lap and her eyes on my father across the room, and I knew she knew.

Every one of them knew what she had done, and she knew they knew, and she sat there anyway.

I will give her that. She sat there anyway.

The Music

A boy from the high school and his granddaddy played guitar and banjo for the first hour, the old songs. People danced.

The floor boards from that old fellowship hall boomed under their feet. Dad tapped his foot. Twice, I saw his left hand moving on his knee.

Clement came at three. Seth’s cousin brought him, and he walked in slow, with his cane in one hand and his red fiddle case in the other.

A lot of people had not seen him at a dance in eight years. A little cheer went up when he came in.

He came straight to Dad’s chair. Dad looked up at him, and something moved behind his eyes. He did not say Clement’s name. But he reached up and took Clement’s hand in both of his and held on to it.

“Orval,” Clement said. “Happy birthday, old son.”

“Clement,” Dad said, slow, like the word was coming up from the bottom of a well. Clement’s eyes filled up. He patted Dad’s shoulder and came over to where I stood by the hay bales.

“You ready?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” Clement said. “Nobody’s ever ready. Get it out.”