The Wedding Under Grandpa’s Cottonwood

That bell carries a mile on a still day. Everybody out here knows it. You can hear it on Sunday mornings clear across the section, all the way over to the home place.

It was a still day.

It rang over the field, and over the chairs and the round bales and the people and the cottonwood.

It rang while Cole kissed our girl and the whole crowd laughed and clapped and the little kids on the bales cheered.

Wendall rang it a good long while. He rang it twenty-six times, one for each year of her life.

He told me later his arms ached for two days and it was worth every minute.

I didn’t think about the barn while it rang. I want to be honest about that.

I wasn’t thinking about Sylvia or about Fargo or about anything at all except my girl in her lace dress under that tree.

Afterward we ate in the field. The ladies from all four churches had set up tables along the shelterbelt, and the food just kept coming out of car trunks and pickup beds.

Egg coffee in the big enamel pots, boiled on two propane burners, the way the Bethany ladies have made it for a hundred years.

Ham buns. Three kinds of salad with marshmallows in them. Rhubarb bars. Lemon bars. Hattie’s scotcheroos.

Somebody’s uncle had an accordion. Somebody else had a fiddle.

By four o’clock there was old-time music going under the cottonwood and people were dancing a schottische on the mown alfalfa like it was the Grange hall floor.

Grandpa Hendricks danced one slow waltz with his wife of sixty-one years, cane and all.

Cole’s grandmother cried the whole way through it and told me after it was the best wedding she had ever been to, including her own.

Around six, Lucille’s grandson Vance came across the field from the section road. He is seventeen. He had been hired that day by Sylvia’s Fargo people to help park cars at the barn.

He found me at the coffee table and took a ham bun and ate half of it before he said anything.

Then he lowered his voice, the way a boy does when he thinks he is telling you something important.

“Mrs. Ekberg,” he said. “When that bell went off, every single one of them Fargo people turned around. The bride’s mother asked whose wedding that was.”

I didn’t say anything. I poured him a cup of coffee.

“Your aunt told her,” Vance said. “She said, ‘My sister’s granddaughter.’ Then she went and stood in the big barn door, and she just stood there and listened till it quit. She didn’t talk to nobody.”

I thanked him. I gave him two more bars wrapped in a napkin, and he went off to find his grandmother.