The Wedding Under the Live Oaks

Frieda and Ilse

My sister Frieda Moos is forty-seven and runs the school cafeteria in town. My sister Ilse is the oldest of us and keeps books for a feed store.

Neither one of them asked me a single question on the phone except what time.

They were in my pasture by one o’clock. Frieda brought a notepad, two pairs of work gloves, and a thermos of iced tea. Ilse brought a shovel, a rake, and a five-gallon bucket.

“Cow patties,” Ilse said, before she even said hello. “If the bride’s walking on grass, nobody’s stepping in anything.”

We stood under the oaks and made a list on the hood of Frieda’s car. I still have that list. It is folded in my Bible now, and the paper is soft from being handled.

Chairs, one hundred forty. Tables, eighteen. An arch. Restrooms. Power for the band. Somewhere for the caterer. Parking. Fire ants. Grandma’s walker.

“The chairs are the big one,” Frieda said. “All your white chairs are locked in that barn.”

They were. One hundred fifty white folding chairs, every one of them bought out of our share over nine years, sitting behind Roland’s new padlock.

Ilse got on the phone with our church. The fellowship hall had ninety white folding chairs, the same plain kind, and eight long tables. The church secretary said take them, and bring them back by Sunday school.

Frieda called the party rental place in Kerrville. They had fifty white folding chairs left for the weekend, two dollars and fifty cents apiece. One hundred twenty-five dollars. I put it on my own card.

That was one hundred forty. We had ten tables still to find.

Anton’s Part

Anton came out to the oaks about two o’clock with his truck and a roll of orange extension cord over his shoulder.

He walked the circle once, looking up into the branches the way he looks at a ceiling before he cuts into it.

Then he walked the distance from the house to the rise, counting steps under his breath.

“Two hundred and ten feet,” he said. “That’s too long for cord. I’ll run a temporary feed off the meter pole and put a box at the big oak. The band can plug straight in. So can the caterer’s warmers.”

“Can you do that by Saturday?”

He gave me a look I have been married to for twenty-eight years. “Margo. I did the whole barn in three weekends.”

Then he moved our six cows. He opened the gate to the back trap and walked behind them with a feed bucket, rattling it, and they followed him like children following an ice cream truck.

He locked them in the back trap with water and hay and came back sweating through his shirt. Then he went into the shop and started building an arch.