The Thirty Feet to the Altar

The barn door

The music started. It was a guitar and a violin, a couple of college kids Jake knew from Paxton. Dale and Karen slid the big barn door open the rest of the way, and a hundred and sixty people stood up and turned around.

I could see all of them. The afternoon light came in low through the west windows, gold on the straw on the floor. Jake was at the front under the lights, with the preacher from our church. Sheila was in the front row on the left side, in a pale green dress, with her phone already up to take a picture.

I took the canes off the back of the chair. I set the tips on the concrete. I locked the brakes, which Mandy had made me do about two thousand times.

Then I stood up.

I’ve thought a lot about how to describe what happened in that barn. It went quiet. Not polite wedding quiet. It went quiet the way a field goes quiet before a storm, when even the birds quit.

The violin player stopped. The guitar player kept going about two more bars and then he stopped too.

Hannah made a sound beside me. Not a word. Just a sound.

“Take my arm, baby,” I said.

She put her hand inside my elbow, above the cane, light as a bird. She was shaking worse than I was.

Shift right. Swing left. Catch it. Shift left. Swing right.

Halfway

I had practiced it so many times that the first ten steps went fine. I could feel every face in that barn but I kept my eyes on the blue tape that Karen had left under the altar. Somebody on the right side was crying out loud. I think it was my Aunt Lois.

At the crack in the concrete I stepped over it with the right foot.

That was about step nineteen. Halfway.

And at step twenty, my left leg started to go.

It’s hard to explain to somebody who has never had it. It doesn’t hurt. The leg just quits listening. It starts to shake from the knee down, and the shaking goes up into your hip, and you can feel the floor coming toward you even though you haven’t moved yet.

I stopped. I held on to those two canes and I held on to Hannah, and I stood there in the middle of the aisle with my whole left side shaking like a fence wire in the wind.

“Daddy,” Hannah whispered. “Daddy, it’s okay. It’s okay. We can stop.”

“Not yet,” I said.

Then I heard boots on the concrete. Jake had left the altar.

He didn’t run. He walked down the aisle toward us, steady, the way he’d walk out to a pole in an ice storm, and nobody in that barn said a word. He came up on my left side, where my bad leg was, and he put his hand under my elbow, right above the cane, and his other arm across the back of my belt.

“I’ve got you, sir,” he said. “You lead. I’m just here.”

And I walked the last twenty two steps with my daughter on my right arm and my son in law on my left. When we got to the blue tape, I didn’t need to bend down. I was standing up. I kissed Hannah on the forehead, the way I’d been picturing since the year 2000.

Then Jake and Dale got the folding chair someone had brought up from the front row, and I sat down in it, and I didn’t stand up again for the rest of the ceremony. I didn’t need to.