The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

The hymn

Elam brought Mom to the top of the walk and gave her hand to Dad, the same as he did sixty-five years ago in the rain.

The pastor didn’t do the whole service. He read a little of the old vows, and Mom and Dad said “I do” again, Mom clear and Dad a half beat behind her, watching her face for when to say it.

Then the pastor asked if anybody remembered what they sang that day in 1961. Before Mom could answer, Dad lifted his head.

“Blest be the tie that binds,” he sang.

His voice was thin and cracked and a little flat, the voice of a man who sang bass in the back pew for seventy years. But he sang the whole first verse. Every word. He didn’t miss one.

“Our hearts in Christian love,” he sang. “The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.”

Mom didn’t sing. She couldn’t. She stood beside him in her pale pink dress with her hand pressed flat against her chest, and she just looked at him.

By the second verse the whole lawn was singing along, a hundred voices under the maples. But that first verse was his. He carried it all by himself, and he carried it all the way.

I looked down at the bottom of the steps. Vonda was holding Mom’s roses against her chest with both arms, and she was crying the way she hadn’t let herself cry on the porch at Christmas.

When the hymn was over, Dad turned around and looked down the steps. He looked at Vonda a long moment, standing there with the flowers. I saw the question cross his face, and I saw him not quite find the answer.

Then he said, “You’re holding your mother’s flowers.”

“Yes, Dad,” Vonda said.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good. You hang on to those.”

He didn’t say her name. But she called him Dad, and he answered to it. And Vonda nodded and held those roses like they were the last thing in the world.

Cake

We cut the white sheet cake at half past three. Dad and Mom held the knife together, the way they did in the picture in the album, and the first piece fell over sideways and Dad said, “Well, that one’s mine,” and ate it with his fingers.

Elam sat beside him the rest of the afternoon. They talked about the 1960 drought and a Farmall that caught fire and a bull that put Elam over a fence in 1958.

I don’t think Dad remembered that I had arranged any of it. He didn’t need to.

Lottie had brought the little flower basket from her cedar chest, white wicker gone yellow with age. She set it on the head table in front of Mom, and Mom put her hand on it and didn’t say anything for a while.

The McAlisterville cousin came and found me by the coffee urns. He shook my hand like he was pumping water.

“I almost stayed home,” he said. “I’d have never forgiven myself.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

He looked across the lawn at Vonda, who was sitting now in her chair at the end of the head table with Mom’s roses in a water glass in front of her. “She meant well, I guess,” he said.

“She did,” I said. “She was wrong. But she did.”