World Made by Hand

Forty-five

We warmed up with some nice loose-limbed old-time tunes starting with “The Maysville Road,” “Big Scioty,” “Saint Anne’s Reel,” “Lost Indian,” “Granny Will Your Dog Bite,” “Speed the Plow,” “Hell among the Yearlings,” and “Blackberry Blossom.” We played the tunes in clumps, medley-style, and either we were in especially fine form, or we were pretty lit, or both, because we all swapped glances around the stage, Andy and Dan and Eric and Charles and Bruce and Leslie and me, and all of us had big goofy smiles plastered on our faces like we hadn’t felt so good in a long time, and how could we be so dumb as to have neglected the music circle all these weeks. And the crowd below got into the spirit right away, with no bashful waiting around for somebody else to step out on the dance floor first. They all went right to it. By the time we got some traction on “Big Scioty,” what do you know but Brother Minor emerged from the crowd, jumped up on stage, and began calling figures. You could tell that he knew what he was doing. Between calls, he plugged a Jew’s harp in his mouth and twanged along with our tunes-another of his strange talents.

When we completed the opening medleys, Loren came over to the stage with a big pitcher of cider for us. Jane Ann, I couldn’t fail to notice, lingered off to the side of the dance floor with her arms wrapped around herself, as if holding on for dear life. She was wearing a beautiful old peacock blue sequined satin gown that seemed to hark way back to the mid-twentieth century, something that Barbara Stanwyck would have worn to the Academy Awards in 1953. It frightened me to think how gone the past was, and to see Jane Ann looking so beautiful and so desolate. But then Eric sent a pipe around the circle, and we hit the cider again and started in on the main part of the program, which was the contra dance part, the pieces we really excelled at, the English eighteenth-century dance tunes out ofJohn Playford’s English Dancing Master anthologies. These tunes included “Juice of the Barley,” “Newcastle,” “Lord Burghley’s Maggot” (meaning a “whim,” not a worm), “Liliburlero,” “The Chestnut,” “The Rakes of Rochester,” “Gathering Peascods,” and a few of the beautiful Irish O’Carolan tunes that Shawn Watling had liked so much: “Sheebeg and Sheemore,” “Planxty Irwin,” and “Fanny Power.” The Union Grove people knew what to do, but everybody else was confused by the antique steps, which were more complex than square dance figures, and the New Faith people stood off to the sides watching. Eventually, a few at a time, they ventured to join in the lines and quadrilles on the dance floor, and our people showed them every consideration in teaching them how it all went.

Our set ran over an hour. At the break, I climbed down from the stage and was immediately engulfed by Elsie DeLong, Cody’s wife, a rather large woman of about sixty, with breasts like Hubbard squashes, and evidently quite drunk. She planted her lips on mine and said, “I’ll take him,” to her surrounding girlfriends, who howled and cackled. I slipped out of her clutches and made off through the crowd. Near the door, Brother Jobe took me aside by the arm.

“The jenny’s yours,” he said.

“Huh?”

“That little donk you all rescued down in Albany. You can have her and the cart she come with. I daresay you could use her.”

“Why, thank you. But I have nowhere to keep her.”

“You can keep her over our way for now. Come and get her when you need her.”

“Okay. Gosh. I appreciate that.”

“I’d like to breed her to our jack, though, if you don’t mind.”

“By all means.”

“It can only help to have a few more donks. Especially a younger jack. Oh, say, suppose you could manage a turn at the old `Virginia Reel’ when you boys come back on? It’d mean a lot to my people.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Didn’t you like that other little gift I sent your way?”

“I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but…”

“You’re a hard case, old son.”

“Just an old heathen.”

He reached up and tousled my hair like he was my camp counselor and then peeled off to flirt with some of the Union Grove ladies.

I made my way out of the barn. It was mercifully cooler in the fresh air, and the night smelled sweetly of hay. My head swam, as much from playing hard for an hour as from all the cider and pot. I found a quiet spot in the vicinity of the bar where I had run into Annabelle earlier. Stephen Bullock stepped up to me there.

“Robert,” he said. He proffered a pitcher but I declined for the moment.

“Swell party, Stephen,” I said and burped. “Pardon.”

“The pleasure is ours, I assure you. Tell me something: are you shacked up with the young widow of the unfortunate fellow who got shot some weeks back?”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Doesn’t look so good.”

“People have got the wrong idea,” I said.

“I’m going to have to convene a grand jury on that killing.”

“I thought sooner or later you would.”

“And you’ll be called to give testimony.”

“I expected that too.”

“Just so you know.”

Musicians were tuning up over the PA system inside the barn. It seemed like it had been an awful short break. Something sounded off.

“Who’s that playing inside?” I said.

“That’d be our boys,” Bullock said. “I told them they could play the breaks. They’re not as good as your bunch, but it’ll be good practice for them to play in front of strangers.”

We stood there listening for a while. It was a weird mix: more than one guitar, banjo, bass, a trombone, and a saxophone in there somewhere. When the tuning was done, they went into a raggedy Dixieland version of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” the kind of thing you might have heard on a Carnival Cruise in the old days.

“Hey, let me ask you something, Stephen: just what do you suppose I’m doing with that young widow?”

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Is she here with you tonight?”

“No, she’s back in town, because she knows everybody would be giving her the hairy eyeball.”

“That was prudent, at least.”

“Goddammit, Stephen.”

“I’m not being facetious.”

“Do you think she should go out and get a job selling real estate or something? Maybe rent an apartment and mail-order a sofa from Crate and Barrel?”

’Well, obviously…”

“Her house burned down and she has a little girl.”

“She can come over here and live,” he said. “We could use a young female. And a child too. Our people are not reproducing that well.”

“You’re as bad as Brother Jobe.”

“Well, we’ve got similar problems, both of us having to look out for large organizations with complicated social considerations in extraordinary times. You think this all just runs itself?”

“I’m well aware of your responsibilities, Stephen.”

“Hell, you’re welcome to come over here, Robert, and bring the young widow and child with you. I’d build you all a house if you did.”

“Thanks, but I like living in town.”

“The invitation stands if you change your mind.”

He patted me on the shoulder and headed back to the party. The band had moved on to “Mack the Knife.” It made me wonder what Bertolt Brecht might think of how we were living now. It made me painfully aware of how over the twentieth century was. Even more oddly, it prompted me to remember the night long ago when, by happenstance, I sat through part of a Wayne New ton show in Las Vegas. Where did Wayne Newton go when the USA went to shit? I was more stoned than I had realized. And so when I saw Jane Ann come toward me in her sparkling blue gown in the moonlight I was dazzled by the sight of her.

She took me by the hand, and we walked up a grassy lane into the orchard behind Bullock’s house. She didn’t have to say anything. I was suddenly on fire for her. We sat down in the cool grass up in the orchard, and she hiked her gown over her head in a single swift motion so that she was just pale skin, silvery hair, and fragrance lying before me in the grass. I was less agile getting free of my own clothing, and my hunger for her was, as always, sharpened by the ache of my moral failure. Then we were upon each other, and everything beyond the field of our senses fell into darkness for a while as we enacted the old urgencies.

Afterward we lay side by side under a plum tree looking at the stars through boughs laden with early fruit, waiting for our hearts to stop pounding. Bullock’s band was playing an old standard I recognized, but I couldn’t remember the title to save my life.

“What’s that tune?” I said.

“Beyond the Sea,” Jane Ann said. “Has she come to your bed yet?”

“No,” I said.

“She will.”

“Maybe she’s got more moral fiber than I do.”

“Women are not moral animals,” she said.

“What a thing to say.”

“Look at me: the minister’s wife.”

“I see someone sweet and beautiful and kind.”

I heard voices and saw shapes moving darkly up the grassy lane. Jane Ann and I automatically shielded our faces. A man and a woman tumbled past us perhaps ten yards away. Apparently they didn’t see us. The woman tripped on something and giggled. I thought it sounded like Annabelle. The man said, “Sssshhhh,” drunkenly. Whoever it was, he had a beard, so he was not one of the New Faith men. He helped her up. They both laughed and continued on. You had to marvel at the determination of that bunch.

“You must think I’m pathetic,” Jane Ann said when they were out of earshot.

“You don’t have to run yourself down.”

“What do you think of me?”

“You’re a human being in an odd situation in a strange time.”

“How diplomatic.”

“It’s how it is.”

“Maybe we’re just wicked, Robert.”

“I wouldn’t encourage you to think so.”

“It’s getting to Loren.”

“Do you two ever talk about this?”

“Are you crazy?” she said.

“I’m not there when you two are alone. I don’t know what you talk about.”

“Do you ever talk to Loren about how you’re fucking his wife when the two of you are off on one of your fishing adventures?”

“Of course not. Do you want me to?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Maybe we should just stop this, then.”

“If you do, I’ll kill myself.”

“That’s a heckuva thing to say.”

Jane Ann started to cry quietly. “Why her and not me?”

“I can’t bust up you and Loren.”

“Why not?”

“Do you want to leave him? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know,” she said and cried some more.

We didn’t speak for a while. Jane Ann continued crying quietly, squeezing my hand. Meanwhile the music had stopped, and then I heard instruments tuning up again, including a fiddle, Bruce Wheedon of our bunch, since the others hadn’t had a fiddle, and I realized I had to get back down there.

“We’re on again,” I said. “I have to go back in and play.”

“Okay,” she said. “You go. I’ll come down in a little while, after a decent interval.”

“You know if you killed yourself I would be very sad and guilty for the rest of my life.”

“I know,” she said. And I then left her up there under the plum tree.