The Day I Set Down My Cane
“You look just like a girl on a calendar,” Vera said. Her voice was thin and clear as a bell. “Don’t you let him walk too fast, honey. His hip’s bad.”
A ripple of laughter went through the church, soft and warm, the kind that carries somebody. I heard it as clearly as I have heard anything in my life.
We went on.
Past the seventh pew, where three aides from Prairie View had their arms around one another. Past the eighth, where her sponsor in the Cardinals cap had finally taken it off and was holding it in both hands against his chest. He had sat in that basement with her three nights a week for five years.
The ninth pew.
The front.
The front pew on her side went by on my left, polished and empty. I looked at it. Codi did not.
Pastor Lund was waiting with his book open. Nate came down the single step to meet us. He reached for Codi’s hand with one of his and for mine with the other, and he held mine hard, and said, “Thank you, sir,” in a voice that cracked clean across.
Pastor Lund cleared his throat and addressed the church. He asked the old question, the way it’s printed in the book.
“Who presents this woman to be married to this man?”
“I do,” I said. My voice carried farther than I meant it to. In a church built before microphones, you only have to speak like a person. “Her grandfather. And her grandmother, who would be standing right here if she could. And her church, and this whole county, if it’s willing.”
There was a noise behind me.
It was not a word. It was a hundred and some people saying “yes” in their chests, without opening their mouths.
I let go of her arm and put her hand in Nate’s.
And I did a thing I had not planned. I turned around and I looked at that whole church, every face I knew, and I said the only other thing I had.
“She’s a good woman. I want it said out loud in this room. She’s a good woman.”
Then I went to my seat in the front pew. It was the one beside the empty one. I sat down so hard that I heard the wood groan.
The rest of the wedding was ordinary, and I am glad of it. Pastor Lund read from First Corinthians, the part everybody knows. Nate said his vows in a voice that had to start over twice. When it came to the rings, he reached into his pocket, and I watched his hand stop, and come out slowly, and open.
He was holding a worn gold band.
Codi looked at it, then at him, and then, quick as a bird, at me.
I had not known. I swear it on Lorraine. She had given it to him the night before, in the kitchen of his mother’s house, after the phone call from Sheila. She told him the whole story of it, start to end. And he had asked her whether she wanted it on her hand.
“It’s yours,” Nate said, quietly, in front of the whole church. “Your grandmother’s. You brought it back. I’d like you to wear it first, before anything I could buy.”
He slid it on her finger.
It fit. She had taken it to Hanlon’s in the county seat to be sized in August.
Inside the band, the letters I could not see from where I sat, L and E, 1966, were warm against her skin.