The Night the Linemen Lit the Sale Barn

My mother came at ten with a pan of bars and an apron on over her good clothes.

She worked all morning beside the 4-H moms without saying much. Daddy did not come with her. Nobody asked her where he was, and she did not offer.

The wedding itself was at the Methodist church at three. That part was simple, and it was beautiful.

I wore a short white lace dress I bought off a rack in Wichita, and my brown cowboy boots with it, and I wore my hair down in curls the way Grant likes it.

Daddy walked me down the aisle. I want that said, because it matters.

He had told Mama on Friday night that he would walk me, money or no money, because he was still my father.

He wore his good suit and his good boots, and his arm was stiff as a board under my hand.

At the end of the aisle he kissed my cheek and gave me to Grant. He did not say anything. His eyes were wet, and he would not look at Grant.

Then he sat down in the front pew next to Mama and held his hat on his knee for the rest of it.

After the ceremony, while everyone was throwing birdseed on the church steps, I saw him get into his pickup alone and pull out onto the highway, going south toward home.

Mama watched him go. Then she got in with my aunt and rode out to the sale barn.

We got to the yard about five. The tables were up, the cakes were out, and somebody’s cousin was testing his speakers with a George Strait song that bounced off the barn roof.

People were coming in from the lot, more than I had invited, more than I had even met.

Then I heard the trucks.

You can hear a bucket truck before you see it, the low diesel growl and the rattle of everything in the bins.

Two of them came up the gravel road from the highway, nose to tail, white co-op trucks with their booms folded down, straight off the storm job in Dodge.

Grant had come home Friday to be at the church, but the rest of the crew had stayed to finish.

They worked until past midnight, slept maybe four hours in the motel, set the last poles by noon, and then drove a hundred and fifty miles to be there by five. They had not even gone home first.

Hank was driving the first truck. He swung it in along the east side of the pens, careful as a man parking a hearse, and set the outriggers on blocks.

The second truck went along the west side. There were maybe sixty feet of smooth dirt yard between them, with steel pens along both edges.

Then the booms went up. Slow. Both of them at once, the hydraulics groaning, the buckets lifting into the evening sky over the pens.

People stopped talking. The whole yard just stood there with their plates in their hands and watched those booms climb.

Two of the men went up in the buckets. They had a crate of string lights that Hank’s wife had bought in Great Bend with money the crew pooled on the drive home, and they hung them from one bucket across to the other in one long run that sagged in a soft curve over the middle of the yard.

Then they came back down and left the buckets up empty.