Couples filled the floor while I pushed open the front doors, and I could hear it before I could see it, which is the only part of this I take any pride in.
A good floor under a two-step sounds like rain on a roof. That floor was thudding.
By the third song there were people coming off it. Not mad, just done, the way you get done when your knees are working harder than they should and you cannot say why. A woman turned an ankle in front of the bandstand and sat the rest of it out with her shoe off.
That hall has a sprung floor. Maple over sleepers set on rubber, laid in 1948, and it is the reason people drove sixty miles to dance in it.
A floor like that has to be swept out from under, not just across, because the grit works down into the joints and kills the spring. And it has to be waxed with the right thing, which is not the paste in the can at the farm store.
My father’s recipe is written in pencil on the inside of the broom closet door, and it has been there since 1961, and the new owner had hung a mop bucket over the bottom third of it.
Three parts carnauba, one part beeswax, cut with turpentine, laid thin and buffed by hand with a weighted block, and never in wet weather.
At the bottom, under the recipe, is the part that is not instructions.
Do it Thursday so it is hard by Friday. It takes four hours and nobody will ever thank you for it, and every person on that floor will have a better night and not know why. That is the whole job, son. Do not go looking for more than that.
I did not go clean it during the dance. I want to be plain, because people around here have made me sound better than I was.
I went and got my block and my tin out of my truck, and I sat on the bench by the door with them in my lap for about an hour, and I watched a floor my family kept for seventy years get walked to death.
The owner came and found me around eleven. He is thirty-eight and out of Fort Worth and he did not say sorry, he said, what is wrong with it.
I told him. He asked me what it would take.
We did it that Thursday, him and me and two of his kitchen boys, four hours, and I made him do the last two rows himself with the block so he would know what he was buying.
He pays me now. Two Thursdays a month, on the books, and he had a brass plate made for the broom closet door to keep the mop bucket off my father’s handwriting, which was his own idea and which I did not ask for.
People do come for the music. He was right about that and I never argued it.
They just do not come back if the floor is dead, and not one of them could tell you that is the reason, and that is exactly why somebody has to be the man who sweeps it.