Arnie had a cassette player in the trunk of his Buick, because Arnie has everything in the trunk of his Buick, and he brought it into the Eagles club between sets, plugged it in beside the bass drum, and pressed play. For a moment there was only hiss, the sound of wind in an empty barn. Then a man cleared his throat, close to the microphone, and said, in a voice I had not heard in two years and knew in my spine, “Nadine. If you are hearing this, they are trying to sell the drums.”
It was Vern. He had recorded it in the living room, I could tell, from the tick of the clock and the creak of his chair. He said he was sorry to be using a tape recorder to say it, but his voice was better than his handwriting. He said that Jolene was a good girl and she would find the drums embarrassing, because she had never seen them played. And then he said, “So I kept a recording of the Spencer barn dance, the night of the thirtieth of June, 1973, off the radio. Listen.”
A polka began, tinny and bright. A fiddle, an accordion, and under them a drum, sharp and merry, riding the beat like a girl on a horse. It was not the drumming of a church secretary. It was the drumming of a nineteen year old in a ponytail, grinning at the man across the stage, who was grinning back. I felt the whole Eagles hall go quiet, two hundred dancers stopped in the middle of the floor, the way you freeze at a clap of thunder. Jolene had her hand over her mouth.
At the end of the song, the crowd roared on the tape, and Vern spoke over it. “That was your mother, Jolene. She was the best drummer in Webster County, and she gave it up to raise you. She never complained. When I am gone, do not let them sell the kit. It is not a piece of furniture. It is the best part of her.” The tape hissed, and clicked, and was still.
Jolene crumpled onto the edge of the riser and wept. I held her, the way one holds a daughter who has finally been told the truth, with my arm over her shoulder and my cheek on her head. I told her I had never hidden it. I had simply put it in a closet after she was born, because a baby needs a mother more than a mother needs a stage. I had never meant for her to feel left out of it. I had only meant to be there.
She said she was ashamed. She had pictured the drums as the toy of an old man, a monument to a dead father who could not let go. She had never imagined they had belonged to me. She told me she had already called the collector in Ames that afternoon and canceled for good, and had told him with great pleasure what he could do with his nine hundred dollars. I laughed so hard I cried, and Arnie, from behind his accordion, laughed too.
The rhythm a person keeps in her heart never leaves her; it only waits for someone to ask her to play.
Arnie stood up and cleared his throat. He announced to the hall that the Jolly Dutchmen had a new member, and he wanted her to come and take a bow. I had been with the group for four months. Everybody knew. But he insisted. The hall rose in a long rumble of applause, two hundred pairs of hands, and I stood behind the silver sparkle kit with the sticks of Vern crossed over my chest, and I bowed so low my cymbals shivered.
We played the second set with Jolene dancing. She did not know the steps, but she had the feet of her father. She danced the beer barrel polka with an old farmer, then with Arnie, then with her husband Dale, who had come in the door looking bewildered. I kept the beat. I did not miss one fill. When the last waltz ended, my arms ached and my face hurt from smiling, and I thought I might be the happiest woman in Iowa.
The next week Jolene took the cassette to a studio in Ames, of all places, and had it copied to a disc and cleaned of hiss. She printed a cover from the flyer of 1973, with the little picture of Vern and a girl with a ponytail behind the drums. She gave me the first copy at Sunday dinner. Inside the cover she had written in her own round hand: For Nadine. Do not let anyone sell it. Not ever.
In February the Jolly Dutchmen made a record of our own, in the basement of the Eagles, with Jolene running the microphones and Dale holding the cables. We sold two hundred copies at the church fish fry. The money paid for new curtains at the hall and a scholarship for a young drummer at the high school in Fort Dodge. The first winner was a girl of sixteen with a ponytail. I let her hold the sticks of Vern for one song.
The Ludwig kit stands in the living room again, in the corner by the window, where the afternoon light makes the silver sparkle glow like a lake. The friends of Jolene come over, and she shows them. She tells the story with her hands. Nobody calls it humiliating. They call it a treasure, and it is, but that is not the word I would choose. I would say that it is simply mine, and his, and on Friday nights, ours.