The Wedding Under the Live Oaks

The Other Three Brides

Fredericksburg is not a big town, and Gillespie County is smaller than it looks on a map. By Monday everyone who had been at the wedding had told everyone who had not.

The second bride called me Monday morning. She was a schoolteacher, and her wedding was set for the last Saturday in October at Roland’s barn.

“My aunt was at the Dressler wedding,” she said. “She sent me pictures. Mrs. Schaal, can I get married under the oaks?”

I told her she could, and that there would be no charge for the ground.

She asked about her deposit at the barn. I told her I could not speak for Roland, but she could certainly ask him.

The third bride called that Wednesday. The fourth called Friday, from Houston, where she was in nursing school. She had a November date and had seen pictures on her cousin’s phone.

All three of them moved their dates to our pasture. All three of them asked Roland for their deposits back.

And by then nobody in the county would book a barn that had been locked against a bride two days before her wedding.

I did not tell anybody to stay away from Roland’s barn. I did not have to.

In a small town, people decide those things for themselves, quietly, at the counter at the feed store and in the parking lot after church.

Why

Roland came over on a Sunday afternoon three weeks after the wedding. He did not come to the door.

He walked out to the oaks where Anton was splitting a dead limb that had come down in a wind.

I watched from the kitchen window. I did not go out. That was between brothers.

Anton told me later what Roland said. The spring before, Roland had borrowed against the barn to go into business building cattle trailers with a man from San Angelo.

The man had taken orders, taken money, and then quit paying the shop.

The business folded in August. The note at the bank was coming due, and the barn was on it. The deposits sitting in the barn account were the only money Roland could reach.

“He thought if he locked us out and sold the barn fast, he could cover the note before anybody knew,” Anton said. “He said he figured the girl would find another place. He said everybody finds another place.”

I believe that was his reason. I have thought about it a great deal, and I believe he was scared.

But there are a lot of scared men in the world, and most of them do not lock a twenty-four-year-old girl out of her own wedding.

His reason was real. It did not make what he did right. Anton told him that, out by the oaks, in his quiet voice. Anton said Roland stood there and took it and did not argue.