by Lee Smith
Helen relaxed. She beamed at me. “I think that’s a wonderful idea, dear. Let me just pack it up for you.” So then I had to wait while she wrapped up the fried chicken and cornbread in waxed paper and put them in a paper bag. I stopped her when she got a Thermos and took it over to the stove.
“That’s all right,” I told her. “I’m going to buy us something to drink at the store.”
“Travis likes his coffee,” Helen said.
“I’m going to get some Coca-Colas,” I said.
“Coca-Colas!” Vonda Louise sounded as if she had never heard of them.
“Waste of money,” Minnie said.
But Helen took the key to the Mercury off its hook and gave it to me, along with a five-dollar bill.
* * *
LUCK WAS WITH me. I found Travis working on the shed by himself, as Claude Vickers had had to take his wife to the doctor in Valleydale. I drove down their driveway and stopped in front of the shed and jumped out. Travis straightened up and grinned, real surprised. He looked from me to the car and back again. “Why, I didn’t know you could drive a car!” he said.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I said. Then before he got too embarrassed I added, “I brought your dinner.”
Travis smiled the biggest smile. “That was mighty nice of you, Missy.” He acted like he expected me to hand his dinner over to him, but I said, “Get in the car. We’re going on a picnic.”
Travis stood there dumbfounded, with his big hands hanging down empty at his sides.
“Get in!” I said again. “I have to eat too, don’t I? Get in the car!”
He did, and after I drove to the Quik-Pik for Cokes, we went over to the Butler Dam, which was real nearby. I talked about one thing and then another on the way to the dam, keeping it light. I told him the whole story of Darnell Ball’s sister’s baby, thinking to amuse him, but he frowned. “Those women all talk too much,” he said. I parked at the picnic area. We got out of the car and walked to one of the stone tables, and I put the bag of food down on it. The water was beautiful that day, rippled by the breeze. Red dogwood leaves had fallen on the table.
Travis looked around uneasily. “Claude Vickers is going to wonder where I am at,” he said.
“You’re on a picnic,” I told him, starting to unwrap everything.
But Travis put his hand on mine. “Let us bless this food first.” Then he took his hand off mine like it was a hot potato, and said grace. I unwrapped the food and served him, which seemed to embarrass yet please him at the same time. We ate in silence, looking out at the water which shone like a mirror in the sun.
“I don’t know when’s the last time I went on a picnic,” Travis said suddenly. “I mean, I have eat outside, of course, on the job and after church and at the Homecoming when we all take dinner on the ground, but that ain’t the same thing. I reckon it’s been since grade school, when they took us in a bus to the endless caverns.”
“Well, that’s too long,” I said. “You ought to enjoy yourself sometimes. You work too hard.” It is true that I was amazed at how hard Travis worked at his day job and at his preaching both, especially since Daddy had never worked another job at all, trusting in the Lord and other people to provide for us.
“The Lord loves work,” Travis said. “He loves a workingman. And so I had best be getting on back over there. Claude will think I have flew the coop.” Travis smiled to think he would do such a wild thing. Then he stood up and stretched, and I knew I would have to hurry or I would miss my chance.
I took a deep breath and went around the table and hugged him. “I just wanted to talk to you by yourself for a minute,” I said. “There’s always so many people around you at the house and at church. I wanted to thank you.” Then I stood on tiptoe and pulled his head down and got him—finally—to kiss me. I knew a lot about kissing due to Lamar, though this was completely different. Travis did not open his mouth at all, but I could tell he liked it.
“I have been wanting to do that,” I said when we quit.
“Lord have mercy.” Travis drew back and looked at me good. “I never meant—” he started, but I put my hand over his mouth. “I know you didn’t,” I said. “I just think you are cute, that’s all.” I realized “cute” was not a word that most people would apply to Travis.
He knew it too. He shook his head, smiling. “Missy, Missy,” he said.
I got a great idea. “Turn around and shut your eyes,” I told him.
He looked at me like I was crazy.
“Go on,” I said. “Keep them shut till I tell you to turn around.”
Of course he humored me in this, as in everything. While he turned his back to me, I took off my sweater and my bra and dropped them down onto the leaves. “Okay,” I said.
Travis turned around and I smiled at him. “Lord God Almighty!” he burst out, horrified. “Girl, cover yourself!”
But he did not close his eyes.
I reached forward and took his hand and brought it up to touch me. He leaped back as if he had stuck it in the fire. I started giggling then. “Travis Word,” I said, “I guess you’ll just have to marry me now. What do you think?”
I will never forget how he looked at that moment, standing there in his work clothes at the Butler Dam, staring at me with his Adam’s apple popping up and down—a man out of place on a picnic, a good man in a bad world. First he looked like he would faint. Then he swallowed hard a couple of times and grinned. “I reckon I will have to,” he said. “Now put your clothes back on.”
I did, which relieved him a lot, and then I drove him back to Claude Vickers’s, where he worked for the rest of the afternoon before coming home to tell his sisters the news. Meanwhile I did this and that around the house, until Helen told me I had the fidgets. I was so scared he might change his mind. But when he got home he told them straightaway. He kept his arm around me and grinned the whole time he was telling them. The sisters had a fit, as you might imagine, with Vonda Louise in tears and Helen saying, “Well, I swan! I swan!” over and over. Minnie said she had a wedding dress that I could wear.
I was sorry to hear this, as I had hoped I could pick out my own wedding dress, but Travis nodded. “Let’s see if it fits her,” he said.
Minnie looked at me. “It’ll fit,” she said.
* * *
AND IT DID. It fit like it had been made for me instead of Minnie, and though I wondered privately whether it would be bad luck to wear it since her own short marriage had ended so tragically, finally I chose to say nothing about this and to count my blessings instead. The dress had a long full skirt with a dropped waist, and long puff sleeves tapering to little points at the wrist. Thirty tiny buttons ran up the back. After Helen told me what they were made of, I loved to say it over and over to myself—“Mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl, mother-of-pearl.” The dress was okay. It was a lot prettier than anything I would ever have expected Minnie to own. It must have been a much younger, sweeter, very different Minnie who had chosen it, I decided, and when I mentioned this to Travis, he nodded.
“We are put through some terrible tests,” he admitted, “and some of us does better on them than others.” He also told me that Minnie had been real pretty as a girl, which I could not even imagine until he found some old pictures and proved it to me. It was really true. During the brief period of our engagement, I was learning that my fiancé was not only good but wise. I loved that word “fiancé” too, saying it over and over as often as “mother-of-pearl.” Helen heard me doing this in my bedroom one afternoon and knocked on the door. “Cut that out,” she snapped. “Brother is not your fiancé. He is too old to be a fiancé.”
Back to the dress. It had a deep V-neck, which both Helen and Minnie felt “showed too much,” and so they decided to put a lace inset in it, though Vonda Louise voted with me to leave it alone.
“But you wore it like it is,” I sa
id to Minnie. “How come you wore it, if it shows too much?”
Helen snorted. “Minnie didn’t have nothing to show.”
This sent Vonda Louise off into a fit of giggles and embarrassed Travis so much that he bolted for the door, ending the argument. Minnie and Helen won, of course. Mabel Reed drove the two of them to the fabric outlet in Valleydale, where they bought a pretty square of Belgian lace to sew in the neckline, plus a shoulder-length illusion veil attached to a white lace bow. The bow hid a barrette, so I could pin it on top of my hair, which I would wear up, of course. I would wear my hair back or up from that time forward, as a married woman, a preacher’s wife. The veil was a surprise for me, and my first reaction was disappointment that I had not gotten to go along to Valleydale with Helen and Minnie, though they had explained to me that there was not enough room in Mabel Reed’s car because she had a Volkswagen and she was going over there to buy drapery material which would take up a lot of room. I was a little bit mad at them when Mabel Reed dropped them off that afternoon.
But then Helen pulled the veil out of the bag and held it up high so that it floated out on the air like a cloud, and I caught my breath, it was so pretty.
“Oh, try it on her,” Vonda Louise said. “Try it on her!” And they did, with me sitting in a chair so they could pin it in place. Then Vonda Louise pulled me over to the oval mirror which hung by the door, and I had to gasp again. I looked beautiful. Right beside my own reflection in the mirror appeared Helen’s and Minnie’s and Vonda Louise’s, Helen and Minnie frowning, Vonda Louise all smiles.
“Do you like it?” Helen asked.
“Oh yes!” I threw my arms around her in a big hug. “I love it! Thank you so much!”
“Good,” she said, stiffening up.
“Thank you too, Minnie.” I turned toward her, but Minnie was already gone, having slipped silently out the door. I looked at myself in the mirror for a good long while then, as all kind of things ran through my mind, such as the day Evelyn had played bride in the house up on Scrabble Creek, and how Mama had cried to see her. I wondered how Evelyn was, and where she was, and if she had worn a wedding gown when she got married. I thought about Billie Jean and how she had loved her paper dolls, and how many times we had walked the bride doll down the aisle. I smiled at myself in the wavy mirror, turning this way and that. I felt like a paper doll myself, all dressed up by Travis’s sisters.
“Quick, quick! Take it off!” Helen said when we heard Travis’s step on the porch. “He can’t see you in that until the wedding, it’s bad luck!” But I was still struggling to unhook the barrette when he came in.
“Don’t look! Don’t look!” Vonda Louise was nearly in tears.
But Travis did look. He stopped right where he was in the doorway and looked his fill.
“What do you think?” I said.
“I think you look like an angel,” he said. “I believe that God has sent me an angel of my own.” This made me blush, though I had to smile too.
“Oh go on, get in the kitchen, Travis!” Helen shooed him away, but it was already too late for luck.
* * *
TRAVIS’S SISTERS WERE not the only ones interested in the wedding. Everybody at the Hi-Way Tabernacle just had to get into the act. Garnet Keen volunteered to make the cake for free. It would be three layers high, with silver bells and pink icing. Marge Abernathy would make the mints, old Mrs. Friendly offered her famous cheese straws, Rose Rogers promised to make sausage balls, and John Green said he would donate anything we wanted from his grocery store, such as paper plates and cups and crepe-paper streamers. The wedding would be at the Tabernacle, of course, with the reception immediately following in the fellowship hall. Travis’s senior youth group volunteered to go out to gather evergreens and holly for the church, and after worrying about this for a while, Travis said he believed that would be all right. He did not want people to do too much, Travis said, though it was clear by then that everybody was determined to do as much as they could.
By then it was also becoming clear to me how much everybody in that church and that community thought of Travis Word. They had loved his brother-in-law Thurman, and they loved him. My own daddy had come and left without a trace, like a bad dream. Nobody ever mentioned serpent handling. The only signs we followed were speaking in tongues, which comes natural to people anyway, and the special healing service that Travis always had on Sunday nights, the same as Thurman had had before him. I cannot tell you how many people came up to me—after meeting, or in the store, or on the street in Valleydale—and launched into some big story about how Travis had helped them out when their mother died, or when their baby was sick, or when they fell into debt or trouble or wrongdoing. Everybody seemed to be tickled to death that he was getting married, and wished us well, except for a few old biddies that couldn’t get over the difference in our ages. Most people said it was nice that Travis Word would have a family after all. Helen planned to turn Travis’s upstairs bedroom into the baby room, after he moved downstairs into my room with me. Travis would not move so much as one sock until after the wedding. Everything had to be proper.
During those weeks of the engagement, I got Travis to where he would kiss me for a long time every night after Helen went to bed, but that was all. That was it! though I could see the bulge in his pants, and feel his hot breath on my face. I was real excited, myself, and could scarcely wait, though Travis made it clear that we had to. However, Travis was more excited by not doing it than by doing it, as I would learn.
I would learn a lot of things.
But during the engagement, I worshipped him. He seemed perfect to me. All his decisions about the wedding were practical and wise. When I said that I wanted Carlton Duty to give me away—I would not have invited Daddy, even if I had known where he was—Travis said it might be best if him and me just stood up there together, and nobody gave me away. Otherwise, he said, if I let some complete stranger such as Carlton Duty be in the wedding, all his sisters would get their feelings hurt.
“But you don’t think your sisters would ever want to be in it, do you?” I asked. That idea struck me so funny I couldn’t help but laugh. I could just see Vonda Louise up there!
He grinned. “Well . . .” he said.
“Okay,” I told him. “Carlton and Ruth can just sit in the front row, then, and be my family.”
* * *
WHICH THEY DID, and the wedding went off without a hitch except for Vonda Louise fainting dead away from excitement before it even started. They stretched her out flat on a pew where she still lay—looking like a mountain range of purple polyester—when Travis and I walked down the aisle to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride” being played on the electric keyboard in a jazzed-up way by Bert Riggs, who worked with Travis and played rock-and-roll in his spare time, a habit which Travis was trying to break him of. Right as we were at the door, I heard Vonda Louise asking, “Is it over? Is Travis married yet?” but by then we were outside in the cold air and it was over. Robert Potter stood there waiting with the bell rope in his hands, and the minute he saw us he started pulling it like crazy, ringing that old bell loud enough to wake the dead. Travis went over and patted him on the back and said, “Thank you, son,” and Robert nodded but did not slack off in his efforts, ringing the bell across the whole valley, through the frosty air.
Travis turned to me. “Missy, I love you,” he said, very formal. He picked me up and kissed me so hard I saw stars before my eyes, and when he put me down, I was dizzy. I was so happy! I stood with my husband on the Hi-Way Tabernacle steps as he shook hands and hugged everybody that came pouring out of the church after us, which was exactly what he did after meeting. We were the last ones to walk around the church to the fellowship hall for our reception, along with old Forrest Knight, Thurman Tate’s half brother, who had driven over to marry us. He pastored the church up at Mica Mountain. As we walked, he kept giving us advice from First Corinthians
, all about being married, but I was far too excited to listen.
Now I wish I had.
A great cheer went up as we entered the fellowship hall, where everybody that Travis had ever known in his whole life, baby to man, was gathered. The only people I had there were Ruth and Carlton Duty and little Fannie. Ruth and Carlton were having a fine time and making a good impression, while Fannie had stolen every heart. You couldn’t look at her without touching her hair, it was so pretty—the palest gold, and curly like a halo around her head. And she had the biggest blue eyes. I thought she looked exactly like Mama, but everybody from Piney Ridge claimed she looked like me, as they had never seen Mama, of course.
“But where is Billie?” I cried, when Ruth had finally quit hugging me and I could speak.
Ruth and Carlton looked at each other. “We couldn’t get her to come,” Ruth said, “but she sends you her love.”
“Well, why not? What’s the matter with her?” I asked.
Little Fannie spoke right up. “Mommy had to stay and watch TV,” she said in her loud voice.
I looked at Ruth, who just shook her head. “Things have changed,” she said. “Me and Carlton don’t go to your daddy’s old church no more. We have got a TV now, and go to the Church of Christ. But we can’t hardly get Billie to go anyplace with us. She has gotten real fat,” Ruth added, before she had to lean down and shush Fannie, who liked to talk all the time.
It hurt my feelings that Billie hadn’t come to my wedding, though it didn’t really surprise me. I was sure glad to see Ruth and Carlton, though, and to meet that tough little Fannie, who reminded me more of Evelyn, actually, than shy Billie Jean. Ruth looked exactly the same, except that her curls had turned to purest white. They sat like a crocheted cap on her head. Carlton was as thin and grave as ever, and I’ll swear he was wearing the same old hat! He stood off to one side talking seriously to different men from Piney Ridge. I bet they were talking about Daddy, comparing notes. But I couldn’t worry about them, I had to hug everybody, and cut the cake.