The Cowboy Waited Months for His Mail-Order Bride — Then She Rode Into Town Like a Legend
Chapter 9
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"In the pasture," Willa had said when Pastor Pierce raised an eyebrow. "The creek took its best swing at this family down there. Let it be standing there, low and clear and behaving itself, when the family answers back."The pastor pronounced it sound theology and wrote it in his book for the pasture.The pasture had come back, and the valley rode out in wagons, pies in laps, to see it. The flood had laid down a skin of river soil; the grass stood thicker than any year in memory; and beyond the mended south fence, Miller's Creek ran low and clear. The supper table stood in the cottonwood shade. Rook, washed to a shine, was tied in state by the fence, behaving for once like a character reference.It was not a grand wedding: it had flowers from three gardens that did not match, and a groom who walked down between the wagons on a still-bandaged leg and stood straight anyway at the fence corner with the creek behind him, waiting one more time on very different terms than 11 Saturdays at a church rail.The bride came down the lane the way the legend had started: in a saddle, in a cream dress sewn herself on Marta's machine. She swung down at the fence, and the neighbors who had watched a soaked stranger ride into town in May watched a bride walk the last ten yards through new grass to a man whose face did the rest of the telling.And the ceremony had a ring bearer of six who carried the ring on a cushion across the grass with concentrated terror, delivered it safely, and then said his heart's peace in a small, clear voice that carried clean to the fence line:"Pa, she came back out of the water with you. Does that mean she is ours now the whole time?"The whole pasture laughed, and a few of its older members did the other thing at the same time into handkerchiefs.Pastor Pierce answered the boy first before the vows, because some interruptions are liturgy: "It means, Peter Bennett, that God has been putting this family together for a long time through deep water and long roads. And today the family gets to say yes back. Shall we?"Isaac took Willa's hands, the rope burns healed to thin white lines, and promised to cherish her, to carry the other end of every log, and to keep no door of the house unmentioned between them.She promised in her turn to come—the word made the gathering laugh again, softly—and to keep coming, in March or out of it, through washouts and wagons, all the days of her life, God helping her. Pastor Pierce let those words stand beside the formal ones, and the license was signed on the tailgate of Marta's wagon.When it was done and kissed briefly, decorously, and then at Peter's loud instruction a second time less briefly to general approval, the new family walked up through the pasture toward the house.At the gate Isaac stopped and put his hand on the gate post the way a man thanks a fence that held.