Free A Far Piece to Canaan by Sam Halpern Page A

who was Rosemary’s mom and dad; a man and woman who didn’t even live around us, who lost their son at a place called Tulage and put their arms around Bob and cried and nobody said nothing for a while; a woman from Middletown and her boy who lost his legs at Normandy; Mr. and Mrs. Langley who lived where the bus turned around on the Dry Branch Road; Mr. Carl Budkins who was also from Middletown and was the best banjo player in the parts and had been on the radio once; Mr. Dillard and his boy JR who had got shot two, three times in France; and lots of others.
    Everyone was milling around in the yard, talking and laughing and telling Bob how great it was he was home and what a great thing he had done for his country. Bob just kind of acted sheepish. A couple minutes after Bess Clark got there, he went out to his pickup and brought back a quart mason jar filled with white mule and all the men took some drinks and kept passing it around and suddenly Mr. Mac yelled, “We gonna have us a hoedown, by God,” and everybody yelled, “Yeah!” and Dad said all right, he’d clean out the center of the stock barn, throw down some straw, set some planks on sawhorses to put stuff to eat on, and we’d sure as hell have one and for everybody to come back about seven o’clock and tell everybody around they were invited. The women said they’d bring food and get other neighbor women to do the same. Bess Clark, who was short but had a big pair of shoulders, kind of laughed and said he thought he’d just bring something to drink. Several people said they’d bring their music, including Mr. Budkins, so we knew we were gonna have great music because Mr. Mac was a fiddling fool hisself and most everybody played something in our parts.
    Later that day, I saw Fred and asked him about inviting Lonnie and his pa because there was going to be drinking. Fred said we shouldn’t invite Lonnie and that he’d understand. As far as LD was concerned, his pa wouldn’t let him go because there was going to be music and dancing and drinking and LD’s pa didn’t believe in doing that because God didn’t like it.
    You should’ve seen the barn. Everything was spiffed up. Pretty soon folks started coming in. All the men were dressed in new Levi’s and their best colored shirts, and the women wore bright dresses that swung out when they turned around. Bob and JR and the other boys who had been in the war were wearing their uniforms, and everybody was helping get set up for the hoedown. Man, there was a lot to eat. Ham, roast beef, fried chicken, candied yams, Sunday potatoes, peas, corn, beans, squash, four, five different kinds of salads, eight, ten pies and cakes and biscuits with honey, and coffee and iced tea and beer and, of course, white mule.
    While people were eating, Mr. Mac began tuning his fiddle and sipped on some of Bess Clark’s stuff. It was funny watching him because he was kind of tall and old and skinny and his face was wrinkled and brown but he was rawboned and when he held the fiddle by the neck, about half of it was covered. Pretty soon all the musicians were tuning up while they were gnawing on chicken bones and plunking on guitars and banjos and every now and then tightening the little screws at the tops. It was starting to get dark and people fired up coal oil lanterns and hung them from the rafters or on pegs that stuck out from the big beams between the sheds. They really made a pretty light. Then Mr. Mac and the other players put down bales of straw kind of stacked like and started playing. They could really play, boy, beginning with “Old Joe Clark,” and a lot of people were clapping hands and stamping feet and one of them was Rosemary, who was there with her folks and dancing with JR and Bob, but mostly with Bob. I could tell she really liked him and that he liked her and my heart jumped up in my throat. He was my brother and this was his dance and