The Checks
Within a month Roland mailed back every deposit. All four. Forty-five hundred dollars apiece, eighteen thousand dollars in all, in personal checks with his name on them.
He sold forty head of his cows at the sale barn to do it. I know because Ilse keeps books at the feed store, and she heard it from three different men buying feed.
He sent Hallie’s check with a short note. She showed it to me. It said, “I am sorry for what I did to your wedding. I hope you are happy. Roland Schaal.”
It was not much of a note. But it was his handwriting, and he signed his whole name, and I think that cost him more than the cows did.
Hallie used the money to put a down payment on a little house in town with a yard big enough for two dogs. Grandma moved in with them that winter.
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He also left the white chairs. One Saturday in November, Anton found all one hundred fifty of them stacked neatly on our side of the cattle guard, covered with a tarp, with no note at all.
The Barn
Roland did not sell the barn. Nobody from Austin wanted it after word got around, and nobody local would touch it. The bank worked something out with him, I am told, but I never asked what.
He never reopened it. He never asked me to run it again, and I never offered. Some things you can forgive and still not go back to.
We see him at church sometimes. He sits in the back. I nod to him and he nods to me. At Thanksgiving Anton took him a plate, and Roland took it.
That is where we are with Roland. It is not a happy ending for him. It is not supposed to be.
But the door is not shut either, and I pray about it on Sundays more than I would tell anyone.
The Lights
We married three more couples under the oaks that fall. The schoolteacher’s wedding was cold and windy and everyone wore their coats, and it was still beautiful.
The girl from Houston married in November in a sweater over her dress.
Every Saturday the guests parked along Roland’s fence and walked past his barn to get to us. Every Saturday the barn doors stayed shut.
That winter, after the last wedding, Anton went out to the oaks with his ladder and three hundred feet of wire and a box of plain white bulbs.
He strung them through the lower branches of the big oak and the two beside it, carefully, the way he does everything, so not one staple went into the bark. He tied every run with soft cord.
The first time he tested them, on a gray December afternoon, my sisters came over and we sat out there in our coats with coffee.
The bulbs hung over the empty rise where Hallie had stood in the October sun.
“Spring,” Frieda said. “You’ve already got three girls asking about spring.”
“I know,” I said.
Anton strung lights in the oaks that winter, and the barn across the road stayed locked.