The Wedding in Grandpa Vern’s Hayfield
We took 14 south out of La Crosse in Luke’s pickup, down through Coon Valley and up the long grade to Westby, with the August corn tasseled out on the ridges.
Neither of us talked for the first ten miles.
“We don’t have a wedding,” I said finally.
“We’ve got a date, a pastor and a dress. That’s three things.” He had both hands on the wheel. “I’ve been sitting on that list for a week, Hannah.”
I turned and looked at him.
“She emailed it to me last Saturday. Asked me to bring you around to the idea.” His jaw was working. “I told her no. I told her she’d have to cut sixty of ours first. I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t know she was going to hand it to you over coffee cake.”
“You should have told me.”
“I should have. I thought I’d handled it.” He glanced over. “I’m sorry. I won’t do that one again.”
That is the kind of apology you can build on. I took the list out of my purse and unfolded it on my knee.
“Your mother thinks I smell like a barn.”
“You do smell like a barn.” He reached over and took my hand. “I asked you to marry me in a barn. I’d have been in a bad spot if I minded.”
He had, too. He had asked me in the alley of our tie-stall with a cow named Pearl trying to eat his sleeve.
We pulled in our drive at twenty to five. The cows were already bunched at the gate, bawling at us for being late, and my mother was coming across the yard in her boots with her hair tied up in a bandana.
“How was Cynthia?” she called.
“We’ll tell you after milking,” I said.
Because that’s the other thing about a dairy. It does not care what kind of day you have had. The cows come first, and the crying, if there’s going to be any, waits until the pipeline is washed.
We told them at the kitchen table at seven-thirty, over cold meatloaf, with the barn radio still playing through the window screen.
My mother, Deb, read the list first. She read it standing at the counter, and she did not say anything, but she got to the bottom of the first page and put her hand flat against her breastbone and held it there.
Then she passed it to Grandpa Vern.
My grandfather is eighty-three years old. He is my father’s father. When Dad died, Grandpa was sixty-seven and had been thinking about selling the cows, and instead he put his barn coat back on and milked alongside my mother for sixteen more years. He still does the morning shift. He wears a pressed plaid shirt to the feed mill. He has never in my hearing said an unkind thing about a woman.
He pushed his glasses up on his forehead, which is how he reads, and he went down that list name by name with his finger, the way he goes down a breeding chart.
He stopped about a third of the way down.
“Roy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“She’s got my brother on here.”
“Yes, Grandpa.”
“Roy stood up with me at my wedding. Nineteen sixty-six.” He kept going. “The Bauers. Jeff.” His finger slowed. “Well. Here’s the whole crew that milked for us when Tom passed. Every last one.”
Nobody said anything. The radio out in the barn was giving the hog markets.
I was ready for him to be angry. I think I wanted him to be, a little.