The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

Saturday morning

Saturday came up cool and gray, the way October so often does in west-central Minnesota. Fifty-four degrees by noon. No wind, which is a small miracle out here. The maples on the courthouse lawn had gone gold that week, all at once, the way they do, and the leaves were coming down slow under the white sky.

I was at their house by ten. Grandma was already up and dressed in the blue dress, sitting on the edge of the bed with the veil in her lap in its tissue paper.

“I don’t know how my mother did it,” she said. “With the pins.”

“Do you want me to do it?”

She shook her head. “I’ll do it. You hold the pins.”

So I held the bobby pins, and she sat in front of her dresser mirror and set the veil on her short white curls, and pinned it, one pin at a time, slowly, with her hands not quite steady. Twice she missed and the pin slid out, and twice she just picked it up and tried again. She did not ask me to take over. I did not offer.

When she was done she looked at herself for a long time in the mirror.

“There,” she said. “There she is.”

I went out to the living room and found Grandpa standing in front of the hall closet in his good white shirt, holding a navy suit coat on its hanger. It was the coat from my grandparents’ fiftieth, from Glen’s wedding, from every funeral in the county for twenty years.

Grandma had moved the buttons on it twice over the years. He put it on and buttoned it and stood up as straight as he could.

“Still fits,” he said.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

He went back to the dresser and opened the top drawer and took out a thin black tie. I knew without asking which one it was. It had gone a little shiny at the knot.

“Same one?” I asked.

“Same one,” he said. “Only one I ever bought.”

The steps

We drove the six blocks to the courthouse in my car, at about four miles an hour. Grandpa sat up front with his hand on the dash. Grandma sat in back with the little photograph in her lap, holding it by the edges like the old print might bruise.

I had to park two blocks away. Cars were lined up both sides of Main Street, and pickups on the side streets all the way past the Lutheran church, and a man in an orange vest from the Lions Club was waving people into the bank lot.

“Who died?” Grandpa said, half joking, turning his head to see.

“Nobody, Grandpa,” I said. “It’s for you.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He just sat there a minute with his hand on the dash.

We walked up the side of the lawn, slowly, Grandma holding Grandpa’s arm, me a half step behind. People saw us coming and went quiet, the way people do, a hush that rolled out across the lawn ahead of us like wind across a field of oats.

The courthouse is limestone, built in the eighteen-nineties, with four stone columns and a wide flight of steps up to the big front doors. Those doors are always locked on Saturday. But when we came around the corner, they were standing wide open.

Mr. Pfaff was standing just inside them in his work jacket, with his ring of keys on his belt.

He had come in on his day off.

He told me later his own father had been the custodian in 1961, and had swept the steps that Saturday morning, and had told the story at supper every October after. “Dad always said the judge married them in his shirtsleeves,” Mr. Pfaff said. “He said you’d never seen a girl so happy. I figured they ought to have the doors open, like they did for them back then.”

At the bottom of the steps, Grandpa stopped.

He reached up and straightened the thin black tie. His fingers shook. It took him a long time to get the knot right, working it up snug with his thumb, the way he had done it every Sunday of my whole life, the way he must have done it on this same spot sixty-five years ago at twenty-three, the day before he got on a train to Fort Lewis.

Grandma watched him do it. She did not help. She knew better.

When he was done, he held out his hand, and she took it.

They went up the steps together, one at a time, slow. I went one step below them, in the mustard yellow sweater Grandma had knit me the Christmas I was twenty-two, ready to catch either one if they wobbled.

Neither one did.