Tom Pooler could be heard pulling his shoes out from under the stove.
"Yaas, by gollies, let's show 'em haow we done a barn dance. We hain't so stiff with rheumatics but what we kin step a figger yet, hey, Nannie?"
The other men about the stove shambled after Tom to the middle of the floor. The older women, exhorted by their daughters and husbands, were at last persuaded to forsake their chairs and join the circle.
Although nearly all of the "old folks" were under fifty and most of them in the thirties and forties, it was a scarecrow array of bent limbs, bowed shoulders, sunken chests, twisted contortions, and jagged angularities, that formed the circle for the old folks' dance. Grotesque in their deformities, these men and women, who should have been in the full flower of their lives, were already classed among the aged. And old they were in body and spirit. It was only on such rare occasions as this that the stimulation of social feeling and corn whiskey incited them to try to imitate with Punch and Judy antics the natural gaiety of youth.
"Yaas, we'll teach 'em haow to step a dance," cried Andy Blackford, the father of Jerry, floundering into the wrong place in the chain and grabbing the wrong partner with his great, seamy, wart-covered hands. "This is haow we done it in the old days, hain't it, Aunt Susie?"
The skinny, dried-up, little women in their black dresses and white aprons did not get much enjoyment out of the dance. There was neither lure nor mystery about the other sex for them any more; and they were disgusted and nauseated by the foul whiskey breath that spewed out upon them from their partners' mouths. The thought of the hard-earned money thrown away upon said whiskey did not tend to make them more cheerful. They went through the dance as they had gone through everything else since childhood, as a matter of course, because the circumstances of their lives demanded it of them.
Toward the close of the dance, Tom Pooler fell sprawling upon the floor. The drink had gone to his legs as well as to his head. He took the fall as an unwarranted insult to his dignity and scrambled to his feet flushed with whiskey, importance and indignation.
"I tell ye, I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Nobody don't dass say nuthin to Tom Pooler that he don't wanta hear—not Ezry Pettit ner Hiram Stone ner none of 'em. I don't take no sass from nobody no matter haow much land they got. I bet I cud lick any man in Scott County. I tell ye I'm a baar in the woods."
"You shet up yer mouth, ye dern ole fool an' don't git to quarrelin' in yer own house. Whatcha drink all that whiskey fer?" admonished Aunt Nannie in a loud whisper close to his ear. He glared at her with small, fiery, bloodshot eyes, like an angry old boar at bay. She met the glare firmly and calmly. Under her cold gaze that had restrained him so many times before he calmed down. But for a long time he kept muttering to himself: "I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Yaas, sir, I'm a baar in the woods."
The young people had paid no attention to the dancing of their elders. They had slipped away into corners and were absorbed in their own affairs.