The Wedding in Grandpa Vern’s Hayfield
Then he bent down, and I was close enough by then to hear it.
“There’s a dance after,” he said. “I’ve got about one waltz a year left in me, and I’d be obliged if you’d take it.”
She looked up at him. She could not seem to find anything to say.
“You think it over,” he told her. “I’ve got to go give a girl away.”
He walked me down that mowed strip at one o’clock with the concertina playing a hymn. He took his cap back at the very last second and held it over his heart.
I do not remember most of what Pastor Dave said. I remember Luke’s hands shaking, those careful hands, so badly that he nearly dropped my ring in the stubble, and one of his students calling out “Measure twice, Mr. K,” and the whole field laughing.
And I remember that when Pastor Dave asked who gives this woman, Grandpa said, “Her mother and I do, and her father would have,” and his voice held right up until the last word.
I looked over at the front row then.
Cynthia was crying.
Not hiding it, not dabbing at it. She was crying the way a mother cries when her only son is standing in the sunlight promising himself to somebody, which is the right time to cry and the right reason, and my mother, sitting on the bale beside her, reached over without looking and put a clean handkerchief in her hand.
Cynthia took it. She held on to my mother’s wrist for a second before she let go.
Then Luke kissed me, and the tuba came in, and that was that. I was married in a hayfield.
We ate under the tent at long tables with white paper down the middle. Real plates, I will have you know. The church ladies had brought the church’s own.
Jeff forked brats off the cooker with a cigar in his teeth, unlit, on account of the ladies. Kids ran through with chocolate milk mustaches.
I kept an eye on Cynthia. I could not help it.
She sat where my mother put her, between Marge and Mrs. Bauer. For a while she sat very straight and ate very little. But Marge has never in her life let a person sit quiet at a table, and by the time the pie came around I saw Cynthia say something, and I saw Mrs. Bauer laugh, and I saw Cynthia look surprised that she had been funny.
She had her shoes off under the table. I saw that too. She had slipped them off and set them side by side in the grass.
At four the band struck up, and Luke and I had the first dance on that plywood floor with the kids’ names underneath it, and then the polkas started and the whole floor boomed like a drum.
About the fifth number they slowed it down to a waltz.
Grandpa Vern got up from his table. He crossed the tent and stopped in front of Cynthia and held out his hand, palm up, and did not say a word.
She went with him in her stocking feet.
He is a good dancer. All those old farmers are; it was the only entertainment they had. He held her the old way, at a proper distance, and turned her around that floor like something that might break.
I was dancing with Roy by then, close enough to hear, and I am not sorry I listened.