The Barn Where The County Got Married

Chapter 2

Harlan and I were married in June of 1975, under the roof of that same barn, and we did not pay a dime for the hall because there was no hall and there was no dime.

We were twenty and twenty-one. He drove a grain truck and I waited tables at the cafe that used to sit by the grain elevator, and between us we had enough put by for a used stove and a mattress and not one thing more.

My mother cried about it, not because she was sad, but because she had always pictured the fellowship hall with the good coffee urns and the folding chairs that matched.

My father did not say much. He never did.

But two weeks before the wedding I came home and found him up on a ladder in the barn with a push broom and a bucket, sweeping sixty years of chaff off the floor.

He had scrubbed the big loft window until you could see the pasture through it. He had rigged two kerosene lanterns on wire from the center beam, and he had borrowed benches from the church and set them in rows on the clean plank floor.

He climbed down, wiped his hands on his overalls, and told me that a barn his own father helped raise was good enough to get married in, and that the Lord had never once cared about matching chairs.

So Harlan and I stood up in that barn on a Saturday evening with the loft window gone gold behind us and the whole county smelling like cut hay, and the preacher married us, and my father stood in the back with his hat in his hands and did not say one word the entire time.

I have been to weddings in cathedrals since. I have been to weddings in country clubs with ice sculptures.

I have never once seen anything more beautiful than my father’s clean barn floor and that gold window and his two lanterns swinging a little in the June air.

I never forgot how that felt. To be handed a beautiful day you could not possibly have bought for yourself. That feeling is the whole reason for everything that came after.

Chapter 3

My father passed in 1984, and the farm came to Harlan and me, the barn with it.

For a couple of years it just stood there holding our round bales and a few head of cattle, the way a barn is supposed to.

Then came the spring of 1986, and the Pruitt boy.

Earl Pruitt was nineteen, worked the night shift at the feed mill, and had been going steady with his girl since the tenth grade. He came up my drive one evening in a truck with one working headlight, and he stood on my porch turning his cap in his hands and could not get his words to line up.

I finally said it for him. I asked if he was trying to ask me something.

He said the fellowship hall wanted ninety dollars for the Saturday, plus a deposit, and ninety dollars was more than he cleared in two weeks at the mill, and somebody at church had said the Teales had a pretty barn, and he was sorry to even ask, and he would understand if I said no.

I thought about my father on that ladder with the push broom.

I told him yes before he finished being sorry.

I told him there would be no ninety dollars and no deposit and no talk of money at all, that the barn was his for the Saturday, and that I would sweep it out myself.