The Two Chairs On The Lawn

What I said

“I take you again, Harold,” I said. “I took you at nineteen when I didn’t know a thing, and I’d take you now knowing everything.”

“I take the quiet man who oils the chair instead of making a speech about it.”

“I take you for the mornings and the long afternoons and the nights the phone rings with bad news. I take you poor, because we have been, and I’d take you poor again.”

“I’m not tired of you,” I said. “Whatever anybody told anybody, I am not too tired for you. I’ve got more years of you in me yet, if the Lord lends them.”

Pastor Reed put his hand over our joined hands.

“By the grace of God and in front of these people,” he said, “I say what my father said. What God joined, let no man part. Harold, you may kiss your wife. Again.”

And Harold kissed me, there in the kitchen chair, in front of the whole Mount Olive congregation, and they clapped, and some of them hooted, and the young family’s little boy yelled “again” and everybody laughed.

The fiddle and the cake

I would have been full to the brim right there. But the heartland is not done with you when you think it is.

Old Lovell was in the crowd. Lovell farmed next to Harold’s people for forty years and he is near ninety now and he keeps a fiddle in the back of his car the way some men keep jumper cables, just in case the day calls for it.

The day called for it. He went and got it, and he tuned it standing on the grass with his ear down to the strings, and then he played us the “Tennessee Waltz” right there on the lawn, slow and a little scratchy, and Harold stood me up out of my chair and we danced on the grass in front of the church.

We are not dancers. We have maybe danced four times in fifty years. We shuffled in a little circle and I put my head on his white shirt and I could hear his heart going, and Lovell’s fiddle went on, and that is a thing I will have behind my eyes until the day I die.

And while we were shuffling, Delores from the choir had slipped off. She lives close, just down the road. She came back in her car with a sheet cake.