Church Cay, part 8

Part 8

We were married by his widowed grandfather, a retired Episcopal priest, at what had once been his little church in the middle of the vast prairies of North Dakota. We risked a lot traveling that distance to be married at the end of February, given what the weather could have done, but we didn’t want to wait until spring. Frank was particularly concerned that we marry before I started showing, although by the time we got there, his whole family knew that I was pregnant and didn’t seem to mind. I think Frank was worried that I would be embarrassed later by our wedding pictures if I was visibly with child. Frank was like that, the kind of man who would anticipate how other people might hurt themselves, no matter how slightly, and then do everything in his power to save them.

My mother rode with us to North Dakota on the bench seat of Frank’s pickup truck. We gathered in the church on a Thursday morning, the two of us, my mother, Frank’s mother and father, and his little brother. Outside the sky was clear and aquamarine as ribbons of cream-colored light and ochre shadows snaked through the fields of waving winter grasses on a mild breeze, but in his parents’ car on the way to the church, the radio had said it was nine below zero.

“Her hands are like ice!” Frank said as our families stepped to each side, leaving us standing alone before Grandfather’s open book of prayer. He rubbed my hands quickly but gently, and I thought of the glasses he’d washed and dried a hundred times each at the bar and had never broken one. The hand rubbing warmed my whole body, and I felt like I was floating in warm water while my mother’s lace wedding dress began to lose its starch and swirl around me. Frank put his hand firmly on the back of my arm, thinking, he told me later, that I’d looked like I was going to faint.

In a couple of days, we sent my mother home on the bus, but Frank and I had decided by then to stay. I wanted to have our baby there with his family, and there was plenty for him to do to help his dad make the farm ready for the spring planting of wheat.