The Two Chairs On The Lawn

I did not have a speech ready. I just told him the truth, because he is a pastor and because I was too far into it to dress it up.

“It’s our fiftieth today,” I said. “Your daddy married us right in there fifty years ago. There was going to be a dinner and it fell through. So we thought we’d just, well. Say it again. Ourselves. If that’s all right to do on your grass.”

Pastor Reed looked at us for a moment. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the people spilling out of the church, forty or fifty of them in their Sunday clothes, and something crossed his face that I can only call gladness.

“All right to do on my grass,” he said. “Folks, hold up a minute.”

And he raised his voice the way he does from the pulpit, so it carried across the whole yard.

“Harold and Eunice were married in this church fifty years ago today. They’re going to say their vows again, right here. I expect they’d be glad of witnesses.”

The lawn fills up

Nobody left.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. It was Sunday noon, with pot roasts in slow ovens all over the county and football coming on, and not one soul got in a car and drove off.

They came down across the grass instead. They made a loose ring around our two chairs, the old farmers and their wives, the young family that sits in the back, the Vandersomething kids who always squirm. Somebody went and got the folding chairs, the brown metal ones from the fellowship hall, and set them up along the edge for the ones whose knees are bad, and I heard them clacking open behind me, that sound a church folding chair makes.

Pastor Reed stood between us with no book. He did it from memory, and from the heart, and he kept it simple.

“Harold,” he said. “Say to her what you want to say.”

And here is the part I did not plan for, the part that undid me.

Harold could not.

He opened his mouth and nothing came. My Harold, who has never been thrown by anything, not the barn fire in ’88 and not the year the beans drowned and not the night we nearly lost Gary to the croup. He sat there in his kitchen chair with his big hands out, and his chin went, and no words would come.

So he just took my two hands in his two hands. He held them. He looked at me and his eyes ran over and he did not wipe them, and he held my hands and he shook his head a little, like, you know, Eunice. You know all of it. I can’t get it up and out but you know.

And I did know.

“I know, old man,” I said. “I know.”

I do not think there was a dry eye left in that churchyard. I heard Delores from the choir give a sob behind me that she did not even try to hide.

Then it was my turn, and I found I could talk, I always could, so I talked for both of us.