The Wedding Under Grandpa’s Cottonwood

Thy will be done, she would say, drying the last pan, and then she would hum it again from the top.

Gordy came out of the shelterbelt with our girl on his arm.

I have played that organ at maybe three hundred weddings and five hundred funerals at Bethany.

I know how to keep playing no matter what is happening in front of me. I have done it at my own father’s funeral.

I nearly stopped anyway.

Brooke had baby’s breath in her long light-brown hair, and she wore a simple white lace dress, nothing fancy, the kind of dress that looks like it has always existed.

Gordy had his good suit on and was walking very slowly.

They came down the mown aisle between the mismatched chairs, and the stubble whispered under her dress.

Two hundred people stood up from four churches’ chairs. Some of them had known her since the day she was baptized.

Halfway down, Brooke turned her head toward the organ.

She didn’t stop walking. But when they came even with me, she let go of her father’s arm for one second and reached up and laid her hand over my hand on the keys.

“Grandma’s song,” she said. Just that.

Then she took Gordy’s arm again and went on to the tree. I kept playing. I don’t know how.

My feet kept pumping and my fingers kept finding the keys, and I could not see a single note through my tears.

Gordy gave her to Cole under the cottonwood and came back and sat in the front row.

That big quiet man sat there in his good suit with his hat on his knee and cried like a boy, and he didn’t care who saw.

Pastor Monty read from Ruth, the part about where you go I will go. He kept it short.

He knows this county, and he knows a field in June is no place for a long sermon.

They said their vows under that tree my grandfather carried home on the floorboards in 1951. A meadowlark sang the whole time from a fence post along the road.

There was one more piece to it, and only four of us knew. Pastor Monty and Gordy and I had arranged it with Wendall, the custodian at Bethany.

Bethany sits a quarter mile up the section road from our field, a white frame church with a steeple you can see for miles.

It has a real bell, cast in Ohio in 1912, the same bell that rang for my mother’s wedding and my own.

Wendall had stood on the church steps all through the ceremony, watching for Pastor Monty’s hand.

When Pastor said, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” he lifted his right arm high over his head.

Wendall went inside and pulled the rope.