The Wedding in Grandpa Vern’s Hayfield
Instead he laid the paper down on the oilcloth and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand, very gently, the way you would smooth a quilt over somebody sleeping.
“What’d she say the reason was?”
I looked at Luke. Luke looked at his plate.
“She said they’re farm people,” I said. “She said they wouldn’t be comfortable.”
Grandpa thought about that for a good while.
“Well,” he said. “She’s not wrong about the second part. Roy’d sooner have a tooth pulled than hand his truck keys to a boy in a red vest.”
My mother let out a sound that was half a laugh.
“What did you two do?” Grandpa asked.
“I canceled the room,” Luke said. “It was my call and I made it. I owe my mother thirty-five hundred dollars and I don’t have anyplace to marry your granddaughter.”
Grandpa studied him across the table. He had liked Luke from the first day, when Luke brought a busload of freshmen out to see a working dairy and crawled under our manure spreader in a clean shirt to show them a sheared pin. But I had never seen him look at Luke quite like that.
“Third crop comes off the east field first part of September,” Grandpa said. “Eleven acres. It lays about as level as anything on this ridge.”
Luke lifted his head.
“A hayfield’s flat enough to dance on,” Grandpa said, “if you cut it short and pick the rocks.”
“Vern,” my mother said. “A hundred and sixty people.”
“Deb, we fed two hundred at the Bauers’ fiftieth and that was in a machine shed.” He tapped the list. “And I’d say we’ve got a pretty fair start on a work crew right here.”
My mother picked up the list. She looked at it a long moment. Then she went to the refrigerator, and she folded the top inch of the page under so the words To Remove did not show, and she stuck it on the door with the Holstein magnet from the co-op.
“Nobody hears why,” Grandpa said. “You understand me? All three of you. Folks hear where, and they hear when. That’s all. That woman’s going to be family, and I won’t have her walking into a field full of people who know what she thought of them.”
“She did think it, though,” my mother said.
“Maybe so. People think all kinds of things.” He got up, slowly, one hand on the table. “Doesn’t mean they have to wear it around their neck the rest of their life.”
He went and got his cap off the nail.
“Where are you going?” I asked him. It was nearly eight.
“To see a man about a tent.”
Mr. Bauer has farmed the place east of ours for fifty years, and about twenty years back, when milk was bad, he bought a used party tent at an auction and started renting it out for graduations. Now he has four. The big one is forty feet by eighty, white, and rents for sixteen hundred dollars a weekend.
Grandpa came home at nine-thirty and hung his cap back up.
“What did he say?” my mother asked.
“He said the third Saturday’s open.”
“And what’s he want for it?”
“He said he’s still paying me for the summer he broke his leg.” Grandpa sat down to unlace his boots. “I baled his second crop that year. Nineteen ninety-four. I told him that note was paid off a long time ago, and he told me I don’t get to say when it’s paid.”