The Wedding Under Grandpa’s Cottonwood

I told her straight. I have never seen the point in going around a thing with my children.

She listened with both hands around a cup of coffee, and when I finished she set it down.

“She rented it,” Brooke said. “Our day. To strangers.”

“For twenty-five hundred dollars,” I said. “For the roof.”

“Did she say she was sorry?”

I thought about it. “She said family can always pick another date.”

Brooke looked out the window for a long time. Our kitchen window faces south, over the yard and the shelterbelt, and past that the hayfield, white and flat under the snow.

“We can’t pick another date,” she said. “Cole’s grandma and grandpa already have their motel in town. They’re driving over from Miles City. Grandpa Hendricks is eighty-four, Mama. He told Cole this is his last long drive.”

“I know, honey.”

“And Pastor Monty is gone the whole rest of June for his daughter’s baby. And the thirteenth was Grandma’s birthday.” She meant my mother. “I picked it for Grandma.”

That was the part I hadn’t let myself think about yet. My mother would have been seventy-five on the thirteenth.

She has been gone seven years, and there is not a day I don’t reach for the phone to call her.

Brooke cried then, just once, hard, with her face in her hands.

I came around the table and held her the way I used to when she was small and got thrown off the pony.

When she was done she wiped her face with the heel of her hand and blew her nose on a napkin, and she looked out that window again. Then she said it.

“Mama. What about Grandpa’s tree?”

You have to understand about the tree. It stands out in the middle of our hayfield by itself, a cottonwood so big that three grown men cannot reach around it.

You can see it from the highway two miles off.

My grandfather planted it in the spring of 1951.

He dug it as a whip out of the bank of the Sheyenne River, no bigger around than his thumb, and carried it home on the floorboards of his Ford.

He planted it the week my mother was born. His first girl.

He told everybody he wanted something growing on the place that would be standing when she was an old woman, and it was.

When he broke that ground into hayfield, he farmed around the tree.

Every year since, whoever ran the mower went around it. My father did. Then Gordy. Seventy-five years of farming around one tree.

When the land came down, the home place and the barn went to Sylvia and the hayfield went to my mother.