The Wedding Under the Live Oaks

Friday

Friday was the longest day of my life, and it was also one of the best.

We started at daylight. Ilse and Frieda walked the pasture in rows with the bucket and the shovel, the way we used to pick rocks out of Daddy’s field when we were girls.

I went after the fire ants. Every Texas woman knows a wedding in a pasture is a wedding with fire ants unless you treat the mounds a full day ahead.

I found nineteen of them and treated every one.

At nine o’clock our neighbor Wendel pulled up on his tractor with a shredder behind it. He is seventy-four and does not talk much. He had heard from his wife, who had heard from the church secretary.

“Want it cut short?” he asked.

“Short as you can,” I said.

He mowed that whole pasture in two hours, around every oak, close to the trunks without ever touching bark. When he was done he shut off the tractor and asked where we wanted the tables.

Then he drove to the church with Anton’s trailer and came back with all ninety chairs and eight tables, strapped down with ratchet straps he had brought from his own barn.

By noon the word was out in town. I think every woman I had ever stood beside at a funeral dinner heard about it by lunch.

A woman from our Sunday school class brought two folding tables from her garage. The VFW post lent us eight more, the long kind with the brown tops, so that we had eighteen.

A man I did not know dropped off a stack of extension cords and drove away before I could thank him.

The Arch

Anton built the arch in the shop out of cedar posts he had been saving for a fence. It was simple.

Two posts, a crossbeam, two braces. He sanded the edges so nobody would catch a dress on a splinter.

When he carried it out to the rise and set it in the ground, it looked like it had always been there.

The big oak spread out behind it, and the light came through the leaves onto the crossbeam.

Frieda and Ilse wired white flowers along the top. Not fancy ones.

White roses from the grocery store, white mums from a farm stand on the highway, and some baby’s breath Frieda had left from her daughter’s graduation party.

I stood back from it and had to sit down on the grass for a minute. Ilse came and sat next to me without saying anything and handed me the thermos.