The Wedding Under Grandpa’s Cottonwood

Then it came to me. That tree has been mine for seven years, and it was always partly my mother’s.

“Under the cottonwood,” I said.

“Under the cottonwood,” Brooke said. “In June. In the hay.”

Cole came out that Saturday and walked the field with Gordy.

There was still snow in the low spots, and they walked it anyway in their overshoes, out to the tree and back, twice.

Cole buys cattle for a sale barn in Jamestown. He is a big, careful young man who measures everything with his eyes before he says a word.

I liked him the first day Brooke brought him home.

“Two hundred people,” he said, at the kitchen table after. “You’d want chairs in rows, an aisle, room for the pastor under the tree. That’s maybe sixty feet by eighty. The ground’s flat enough.”

“Bathrooms,” Gordy said.

“Two of the portable ones from Haugen Septic,” Cole said. “I already called. Three hundred for the weekend, and he’ll set them behind the shelterbelt so they’re out of the pictures.”

“And if it rains?” I said.

“Then we’re in the Bethany basement,” Gordy said. “Same as every funeral and anniversary in this county. Nobody’s ever died of a church basement.”

That made Brooke laugh, and it was the first time I had heard her laugh since the yard. I made a note on the calendar. Then I picked up the phone.

I called the church ladies. Not to complain. I want to be clear about that, because people later said I had gone around town telling everybody. I didn’t. I asked for chairs.

I called Lucille first. She runs the kitchen at the Methodist church and has for thirty years.

I said the barn had fallen through and we were going to have the wedding out under the cottonwood.

There was a little pause on the line. Lucille has known my family since before I was born, and she knows who owns the barn.

“How many chairs, hon,” was all she said.

The Methodists had forty wooden folding chairs in the basement closet, the old slatted kind. Joan at St.

Mary’s said the Catholics could do seventy if we came and got them Friday after the rosary group.

Pastor Monty said Bethany could spare sixty and he would stack them himself.

The Baptist church out on the county road had thirty, and the pastor’s wife, Hattie, said she would bring a pan of bars with them.

Sixty, seventy, forty, and thirty. Two hundred chairs from four churches.

Not one of them matched another church’s, and half of them had somebody’s name painted on the back from a fundraiser in 1970-something.

Nobody asked me why. That was the thing I remember most. Small towns know everything, and they mostly have the decency not to make you say it out loud.