Grandpère by Janet Romain Page B

He grins at everyone and sits down. “Still remember the old steps, but I can’t make this old body do them.”
    I think he is pretty tickled that he can still do any of them.
    Darcy says they drove halfway last night so they can spend the whole day here. The man is a workaholic. He has his laptop with him, and after visiting with us for a short time, he disappears into the office to “just do a couple of things that I should have done before I left.” His brothers-in-law tell him to do it fast, as the sled team is about to saddle up.
    The women all decide to stay in the house, and we sit around the living room, playing with the baby. Faith says he is the cutest baby she has ever seen. Darcy had a vasectomy after Sarah was born, so there’s no hope for Faith to have a baby by the time-honoured method. She claims not to care, that Tammy and Sarah are her girls, but she always seems to have a soft spot for the babies. I think she has called each successive nephew the cutest one ever.
    It is colder out today, and soon the sledders troop back in, letting clouds of cold air billow through the doorway.
    “You can use that sled any time now, Mom,” Jesse tells me. “We got the electric start working. Dad had a brand new battery on the bench, so we just added the acid and charged it. You should take it out in the spring and recharge it next fall.”
    Jesse is under the impression that I can do anything. I probably can take the battery out of the snowmobile in the spring, but I probably won’t. Parker tells me not to bother anyway, since he’ll do it when he’s out at breakup.
    We make an early meal, mostly of leftovers from yesterday’s feast remade into turkey soup, vegetable pie and four big casseroles. I bake the biggest moose roast from the freezer, which must be twelve pounds with no bone in it. Everyone loves it and laments that they never get moose meat anymore. When Lorne was alive, we always had moose meat and other wild game, but the boys have not gone hunting since.
    Ryan, however, is just itching to get old enough to go hunting. Clint says Ryan’s going to get his firearms licence and hunting licence in the spring. They’re two separate courses, but only a couple of days each. Grandpère snorts at this and says it takes at least ten years to train a hunter, not two days. Clint holds his ground, though, and tells Grandpère it’s not as though he’s completely green, since he’s gone hunting with his dad.
    After supper Clint grabs Lorne’s fiddle, and Darcy pulls out his. We pull all the furniture to the wall and take turns doing the jig. There are over thirty different steps in the jig, but we don’t know them all, so our dances are usually a couple of steps each. Then we bow in front of another person, who gets up and does his own piece. It’s fun, and some of our dance steps must be originals, but nobody cares if they’re right or not. When it’s Parker’s turn, he holds his arms totally rigid at his sides, and uses a crossover step that tilts his upper body back and forth sideways. This is one of the traditional steps, and the young boys are impressed. Each one in his turn tries to emulate him, with Grandpère tapping out the beat on the floor with the butt of his stick, the two fiddlers working their way through “Liza Jane” and “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” then into “The Woodchopper’s Reel,” and the rest of us clapping out the rhythm. What a great way to end Boxing Day.
    The girls sleep in the office with me, and we whisper to each other far into the night. They have boyfriends and cellphones and talk to each other sometimes about things that I know nothing about. Their cellphones connect to the internet and have hundreds of hours of music stored in little computer chips. They let me listen to their best song ever, but to me it just sounds raucous and tinny through the little earbuds. We have a great night.
    In the morning everyone leaves right after breakfast except Clint and Patty,