The Forty Acres I Gave My Bride

We were married at nine o’clock at Trinity Lutheran, the little white country church two miles from the Ostergaard place, where Hannah had been baptized and confirmed and where her grandparents were buried out back.

I wore a navy suit, the first suit I ever owned that wasn’t for a funeral, with a small white boutonniere that my mother pinned on me in the church basement with shaking hands.

Hannah wore a simple white dress with no lace, because she said lace made her itch.

Her brown hair was pinned up off her neck. When she came up the aisle on her father’s arm, I forgot how to breathe for a second.

Arvid walked her up stiff as a fence post. When the pastor asked who gives this woman, he said, “Her mother and I do,” in a voice so low the back rows didn’t hear it. Then he put her hand in mine and sat down.

I don’t remember the sermon. I remember Hannah’s hand in mine, warm and a little damp, and her thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles the whole time like she was keeping count.

After the vows, everybody went downstairs to the fellowship hall for breakfast. That’s how the Ostergaards had always done it. A morning wedding, a church breakfast, and then everyone home in time to check cattle.

The church women had been up since five.

There was egg bake in big foil pans, ham, caramel rolls, fruit salad, and church coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in, poured from the big silver percolator that had been there since before I was born.

Hannah and I sat at the head table with our parents and her grandmother. Grandma Marie was eighty-eight, Arvid’s mother, and she had come in a wheelchair with a lap blanket even though it was already seventy-five degrees.

Grandma Marie had grown up two miles from my grandfather. They went to the same country school as kids, before it closed. She used to tell Hannah that Walt Rasmussen was the only boy in the school who never pulled her braids.

I waited until the plates were mostly cleared and the noise in the hall had settled into that easy Saturday-morning hum. Then I reached into the inside pocket of my suit coat and took out the envelope.

I took the certified copy out, still folded in thirds, and set it next to Hannah’s coffee cup.

“What’s this?” she asked. She smiled, a little puzzled. “Did you write me a poem?”

“Wedding present,” I said. “Open it.”

She unfolded it on the white paper tablecloth and smoothed the creases with the side of her hand. I watched her eyes go across the top line, where it said Warranty Deed, and then down.

I watched her find the legal description. Then my grandfather’s name in the chain of title. Then the line that said Grantee, Hannah Marie Ostergaard, and the recorder’s stamp in the corner with Monday’s date.

She read it twice. I could see her lips moving the second time, the way they do when she reads drug dosages at the clinic and wants to be sure.

Then she put her hand over her mouth.

“Clint,” she whispered. “This is Grandpa Walt’s. This is your forty.”