The Whole Valley Called Her the Plain Fiancee, So She Let the Banquet Read the Deed novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Schoolhouse Wedding

Signe's POV

We were married on the first Saturday in March, in the one-room schoolhouse at the bottom of our home field.

The snow had gone off in a week of warm wind.

The winter wheat I had weighed in the fall had come up green again, a thin bright haze over the dark ground.

My father had swept the schoolhouse floor himself.

He had put a jar of early daffodils on every windowsill and rubbed the old coal stove until the iron shone.

A woman from the cellar crew had tied a white ribbon to the bell on the roof without asking anyone's leave.

There were sixty people, which was all the room would hold, standing along the maps.

The cellar crew came in their good coats, and the growers' association in their church jackets.

The old woman came with her dog.

Rhys's father came in his wheelchair, and the nurse in the green cardigan parked him by the stove.

He had a blanket on his knees and a sprig of wheat in his buttonhole.

Helene was not there, and nobody had expected her.

For one hard second at the door I thought I might miss Helene.

Then I remembered the staff table by the kitchen doors, where Helene had seated me, and the thought went.

I wore my mother's green dress.

I had let it out a half inch at the waist and taken the hem up a half inch, and it fit me better than it ever had.

I wore her tortoiseshell glasses on their chain, because I could not imagine doing it without them.

My father walked me down the short aisle between the folding chairs.

He had put on a tie.

He said nothing at all, and halfway there I felt his big hand shake on my arm.

Tobin stood beside Rhys at the front in a rented suit, with the ring in his pocket and a grin on his face.

Rhys stood in his black suit in front of the blackboard where my great-grandfather had once written the day's sums.

He watched me come up the aisle.

I had seen that face cold at a banquet table, flushed in a scale house and wet by a stove.

I had never seen it with nothing held back at all.

The old woman married us.

She had been a justice of the peace for thirty years, it turned out.

She said it all quickly and plainly in her cellar voice, with a wink for my father.

When she came to the vows, she said, "Say it as it comes."

Rhys took both my hands.

He said his vows slowly.

He stopped twice, and once he began again from the start.

He did not apologize, and nobody in the room looked away.

I heard every word, and I will not set them down here, because they are mine.

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