Truck (31 page)

That pretty much salts it.

 

Three days from the altar, and we have a problem. Because of the indispensable role our friend Minister Katrina played in Anneliese's life long
before I made the scene, I happily agreed when Anneliese suggested that Katrina perform our wedding ceremony. Today we have discovered that unbeknownst to Katrina, she has been dropped from the rolls of her church. The story is convoluted and appears to involve venal underhandedness, but in short, her paperwork was pulled over the fact that—I'm paraphrasing Lenny Bruce here—
That Mrs. Johnson, boy, she can throw a baseball just like a man
. T-minus seventy-two hours and we are short one sanctioned officiant. I didn't expect Anneliese to panic, but I was still pleasantly nonplussed when she said, “We'll figure something out.” For the umpteenth time, I thought,
Son, you got lucky
. Two minutes later, I was struck with a solution, albeit something other than standard. When I proposed it to Anneliese and she grinned, I thought,
Seriously, son: L-U-C-K-Y.

Then I telephoned my friend Bob. The same Bob who all those months ago took my call from the parking garage and assured me Anneliese was wonderful and sane.

“Bob. I've got a strange request.”

“Delightful!” Bob has a bit of a flair.

I gave him the details. Asked if he could help us out.

“Oh,” he said. “I would be honored.” I was caught off guard by the softness in his voice, which had shifted from camp to heartfelt in an instant.

 

Two days out now, and this morning I went to see Dan at the Wig-Wam, for one last haircut. It's been a while since I've done more than wave at him. Having Anneliese cut my hair has become one of my favorite little elements of couplehood. I like to sit there quietly while she runs the clippers around my head. The clippers make an annoying clackety-buzz, and I suppose Anneliese uses the time to acquaint herself with newly revealed areas of my scalp, but her tending to me like this seems ceremonial and makes me feel blessed. Perhaps this is why chimpanzees sit still quietly while other chimps pick their nits. But with Anneliese preparing for the wedding, it seemed best to see Dan one more time. We had a nice visit. I updated him on my International and he
took me up the street to look at his Scout, repaired and repainted and back on the road. Then I drove to the Minneapolis airport to meet my buddy Tim.

I first met Tim in the village of Great Wyrley, England, on a summer evening in 1984. He didn't say much, as his front teeth had been knocked out in a pub fight the previous evening. We wound up hanging out for hours a day not saying a word, and have been fast friends since, visiting each other seven or eight times over twenty years. The first time he came to America, I was in one of those stages where I had nothing to drive but the International. We hammered all over the place. My brother John took him out shining deer, and I taught him to shoot a rifle. My grandpa took him fishing. I have a snapshot from that visit, he and I leaned against the truck bed, I with a holstered pistol, he with a rifle across his chest. He is wearing a hat John fashioned from a skunk pelt. When we weren't running, we hung out at my apartment, often going for hours without talking. It is an easy friendship.

Five years have passed since we saw each other last, but I spot him at baggage claim immediately. Back in 1984, I was transitioning from feathered look to spritzed mullet, and Tim was stacking his hair high in a modified Thompson Twins mop. Now his hair is going gray and mine is just going. We are both showing some wear. Lines in the face, fewer sharp edges. But our common history keeps us young. He grabs his bag and picks his way through the crowd and says, “O'rright, mate?” as if we were meeting at the pub the same as every Thursday twenty years ago. All this way just to see me married, and in the car I am overfull with gratitude, so full I try to express it. He grimaces and looks out the passenger window, and mumbles, “No worries, mate, no worries.” A two-hour drive home and we don't say much more.

Back in New Auburn, he grins to see the International refurbished. We load it with food, thermoses, and bedrolls and drive out into the country, deep into a heavily wooded forty well off the road. Parking at the end of the two-track, we hike deeper in, to this little shack I have. Out here you rarely hear so much as a distant engine. This is my stag party: two old friends, talking some, catching up, but mostly just sitting quiet beneath stars that wrap all the way around the world.
We wake to sun and birdsong coming through the shack screens and walk out to the truck. We have to get started on the trip to the farm in Fall Creek. It's going to take longer today, because we're driving down in the International, and due to the sketchy state of the brake and turn signals, we're sticking to back roads wherever we can. We run a long stretch of County Highway F, all rolling farmland and silos and red barns. Downhill we roar, uphill we chug. Even if we were prone to chatter, the cab noise mostly precludes it. We grin now and then, but mostly we just look out the windows and watch the country go by. I downshift to third to make the last long pull up the hill to the Fall Creek farm, and when we top out and break through the trees the first thing I see is how Anneliese's mother and stepfather have the place mowed and painted and generally straightened. A tremendous amount of toil. I feel full in my chest, and my eyes moisten. I guess there's gonna be a lot of that.

 

With all the friends and relatives coming in from so far away tonight, we have decided to forego a rehearsal dinner and instead have a potluck and outdoor dance at the farm. We have a rented tent set up over folding tables and chairs under the big old white pine overlooking the valley, and at supper time, people start showing up with a dish to pass. I cannot and do not like to dance, but tonight I am in good hands, because we have hired oddly named band Duck for the Oyster, a four-piece acoustic group that comes complete with Karen the folk dance caller. A pint-sized woman with an encyclopedic repertoire and a willingness to lead, she has us weaving and snaking around the hilltop, one new dance after the other, from old pioneer reels to Guatemalan traditionals. Honestly, anybody can do it, and everybody does, from Amy to Grandma. Only once do I go into the tent to flop in a folding chair for a break. I hold Anneliese on my lap and what we see is our longtime loved ones, our new families, and our good old friends, everybody swinging and bowing and do-si-doing on this hilltop in the late summer evening, the angling golden light perfectly matched to the mellow, woody fiddle. Anneliese stands and draws me by the hand and
we get back out there and dance until the dew is down and the sun is gone, leaving the night young enough so that everyone may take to bed and be rested for the morning.

 

I bought a suit and tie previous to the wedding, which seemed to be not an issue of caving in but a simple matter of respect. Anneliese has mitigated my discomfort by allowing me to accessorize with steel-toed boots—the same pair I wore on our first date. We are to be married at mid-morning. Already Tim and Grant and I have set up the folding chairs and taken them back down because a light rain is falling. Grant had mowed a natural amphitheater halfway down the hillside, but now we're moving operations back up the hill into the tent. I split for the shower.

There is a little room atop the garage overlooking the yard, and it is there I go to dress. John and Jed join me while I'm knotting my tie, and I do my best to avoid saying anything maudlin, as I have given them enough reason for discomfort over the years as it is. We just sit and shoot the breeze and watch the folding chairs filling, slowly at first, then quickly, and then it is time for a grin, a handshake, and a
see-ya-later
. From playing in the dirt to here. Such good men, my brothers. I get a kick out of the idea that they preceded me down the aisle.

And then I am in the quiet house and there is a soft sound in the hall, and Anneliese steps out before me smiling in a grand dress that tumbles all white and brilliant, but it is only her eyes I can see, blue and clear and strong, and then I kiss her—on the lips lightly and quickly, like the little boy who darts in with roses for the beautiful princess and then darts back. Anneliese gives me her hand, the one I have memorized from a thousand miles away, and her three sisters fall in behind us and Amy leads us out the door, across the yard, and within the tent where we stand before a group of people perhaps best summarized as
without whom
.

We implicate them immediately by asking for their communal blessing. Minister Katrina reads a poem by the Native American elder Oriah Mountain Dreamer and preaches a verse from Isaiah. We
give Amy a heart-shaped locket to represent our becoming a family. Friends and relatives come up in turn to read and sing and speak. One by one they take their part, and what I keep thinking is you hope you can live up to the love of people such as these. I know for a fact there are those in the chairs who wish the service were more churchly, because they kindly took the trouble to say so, but to them I can only reply, You, too, brought us to this moment. Besides, I can see cows from here.

Everything is quite nice—smiles and the occasional dewy moment—until I stand to thank all three sets of our parents, and am overcome with weeping. Not the dignified, solitary-tear-down-the-cheek bit, but a full-on snot-snorking hee-haw. I am grateful that these feelings reside within me, but for the love of Pete, I wish they'd just sort of ease out now and then, not slosh over like a kicked bucket. Now I'll never be able to sit through the wedding video.

Minister Katrina leads us through our vows, and here you are all alone, looking unblinking into the clear eyes of an open soul, promising in this profound present to make your heart available forever. We vow to love and cherish, in good times and in bad, but we also pledge reverence for each other, a word I chose to include specifically based on the example of my father, who has treated my mother exactly so for forty years now. We do not promise to obey, as I simply cannot conjure the circumstance in which Anneliese should be compelled to obey a man whose proudest achievement since high school is the Unified Laundry Theory. Furthermore, left in charge of my own destiny I once wiped my hinder with poison ivy leaves. Reverence, if you really mean it, pretty much handles
obey
.

My dear friend Gene bears me Anneliese's ring, and Anneliese receives mine from her sister Marta. Gene is six inches taller than I, and when he wraps me in a hug I put my head against his chest and I will carry that moment everlasting. After we exchange rings, two of Anneliese's friends from Mexico rope us together in a traditional
lazo
. As they drape it around us, Annie, the farmwife from down the road where Anneliese used to help make hay, says, “
Mercy!
”

Then it is over. Minister Katrina pronounces us, we kiss, and Amy
leads us out of the tent, scattering flower petals from her white wicker basket. She has a lot of petals, and we don't really have anywhere to go, so we take a lap around the galvanized stock tank full of ice and beer.

 

Down at the Masonic Temple the reception kicks off with a family concert. The Temple is one of those classical architectural behemoths run by a dwindling corps of ancient men, but it has a big kitchen in the basement and an intimate auditorium upstairs just perfect for the concert. The stage is draped in a vintage hand-painted backdrop that creates a trompe l'oeil forest.

The concert was a last-minute idea based solely on the availability of the magnificent stage, and we make the best of it. My brother and his barbershop quartet sing their version of “Yes Sir, That's My Baby.” I get up there with three musician pals and my guitar with the old-school International emblem on it and perform a handful of songs. Two written for Anneliese, one for Amy, one for my sister-in-law Leanne because I know she puts flowers on the grave of my brother's first wife and she has brought him back to the living, and the last song we sing for the family members who can't be here, including Sukey and Steve. From Anneliese's side of the family we have aunts and uncles and nephews singing in quartets, an aunt performing an early Romantic piece by Adolph Adam accompanied by another aunt on bassoon and a cousin on piano, and, in a performance for the ages, Cousin Paul's bottle band.

When Cousin Paul asked if he could add the bottle band, I figured he'd set up a card table and rap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on six bottles with a spoon and then we'd give him the hook. What we have instead is a windy tour de force featuring somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five family members, seventy-nine bottles, one kazoo, costume changes, and a series of sight gags involving the body parts of department-store mannequins. Cousin Paul directs the orchestra in tails using a genuine cork-handled baton. The cumulative sound is a swelling, room-filling combination of calliope meets tuba. Really, you should have heard “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

They pulled all this off with something less than two hours of practice, and as I watched Anneliese's ninety-three-year-old grandmother adjust her pearls and hoist her bottle for the chorus of “The Beer-Barrel Polka,” three generations of windblown oom-pah behind her, I thought, I hope they can abide me, because I sure like
them
.

All this while, we had friends working downstairs in the kitchen, rafts of people pitching in. We have hired a local woman to cater—beyond her husband, nearly all of her assistants are our friends, drafted to heat things, do dishes, and stock the buffet line with everything Anneliese and her mother test-kitchened with the caterer in advance: Mexican wedding cakes, Mexican meatballs in a chipotle sauce, homemade salsa-fied bean dip, salads, platters of fresh fruit. And outside in the parking lot, the dearest group of roughnecks with which I have ever been associated—the New Auburn Area Fire Department—is set up with their barbecue trailer, charcoaling chicken by the bucketful.