That whole December day after he proposes with a ring of gold, we cut wood, lay down trees and push the round trunks straight into the saw and the steely teeth of the blade cuts all the rings, all the lined years, into long planks of lumber and I stare smitten at my finger, shift my hand for the flash, dazzled by a diamond.
My father plans on making a forest into a floor.
The Dutch Boy plans on making the farmer’s daughter into his wife.
I make plans to leave and cleave but I don’t know how to leave the older man for the younger man, how to slip a new ring on over the ringing years. I grew up with his name as mine and I look like him and I adore the man who held me first. And for four and a half year, the Dutch Boy woos me and works for my father, tending herds, working fields, hired man with a hope.
Four and a half years makes me worth only about two-thirds of a real Rachel.
Or is seven full years too long for an anxious ardency — and yet years can seem “but a few days because of love…”
So the boy takes the pig-feeding money and picks a diamond out of the pearls and had slipped the ring on in the dark and I had trembled on a night snowing soundlessly, trembled that he really would, that anyone would, and he’d asked my Dad in the morning at the breakfast table, them both making tracks through the drifts on their way in from the barn and the hogs.
I had sat at the top of the stairs, staring at that ring and I had heard the Dutch Boy ask it nervous of his boss and my father and of all the universe, “Could I marry Ann?”
I had hugged my knees to my chest. Gazed at the shimmering stone, inhaled intoxicating air. And I had heard my dad say to the boy asking for the girl’s hand, “Why would you want to do that?”
I heaved hard and the air was bad and it burned.
It’s taken me more than a decade of turning that one line around in my mind, “Why would you want to do that?” to realize my daddy burned in that moment. How he felt time’s flame scorching the grain of the family he’d built. I didn’t know how long a father could hold a daughter tight, will time to stop and the trees not grow rings. The father seed that grows a daughter into a friend becomes another man’s fruit. These are hard things.
The Dutch Boy stammers out that he has prayed and he is sure he wants to marry and I come down to the table bent and awkward and Mama asks giddy to see the ring and I hold out my hand and Dad says we are late already to saw logs into lumber. Time can get away on you.
I go with Dad and the Dutch boy and I hold the trunks becoming boards, stand there in sawdust up to my ankles, the protective bark chewed away from the trees that would make houses and I think of the house we would make and the blade keeps cutting.
Cleaving is matrimonial…. But leaving can be messy.
Dad cried when he walked me down the aisle. He cried when he burned the strewn remnants of the reception and he bit his lip hard but that didn’t stop the halting tears course of sadness down his cheeks or the words that choked out, “Just burning memories, the time that was before.” I cried when Mama walked out.
The Dutch Boy bought his own dirt and herds and became The Farmer and he wore his golden vows only on Sunday for church and kept it in a velvet box in his top drawer the rest of the week and he held me when the tears fell, the trees of the home I grew up now in broke in half, the rings all snapped. Sometimes we grip what’s meant to be released, neglect what’s meant to be cherished and wonder why we stand in sawdust.
I wanted to know why.
I wanted to know why marriages fail and vows split and roofs implode, all the trusses cracking away, and I wanted a weatherproof, divorce-proof marriage, wood that held. I studied with a professor at the university to understand the why and I read all the research and talked to the professors for hours about statistics and theories and rings that hold and I prayed to Him who hung on a Tree to make our rings stay.
The Farmer makes decisions, to buy a tractor, renovate a barn. I have the phone in hand to call the man in my life who always knew best, to get his approval and a son is a son until he finds him a wife and a daughter may be a daughter for the rest of her life —- but she need first be a wife. I don’t dial. I hang up the receiver. I nod approval of my own to the man who is making our life now. Honouring one’s husband is a way to honour one’s father who knows what is to be a husband.
I read stacks on how to make a marriage forever. I take notes. I write essays. The professor gives me a perfect grade. But marriage isn’t flat like paper and it has curves and bumps and the family of origin can become the family of obstacle in creating a family of oneness. I call my Dad on Sundays.
And I learn that God calls us to honour our parents but be a help mate to our partner and I learn the difference is in who is the priority. A girl, I traced my Dad’s farming hands at the end of the day when he lay on the couch sleeping, feeling all the work-worn lines, the etchings of grease, and when the Dutch boy first held my hand I felt it the same, that large, strong man sureness that could work the earth, Adam for his Eve. I think it often now, how his hands are love large like my dad’s. But a woman has only one hand to hold one man’s hand. The other is for helping him. I call my Dad on Sundays.
The Farmer brings in wild phlox that he picked from the roadside. His hands are soil grimed hands. He smiles, winks.
I set the vase in the sun falling long across the oak table, across these old planked boards, across the trees laid down.
Next Wednesday: The Making of a Marriage: Pt 2: 5 Secrets of Marriages that Last
Related Marriage Posts from the Archives:
How to Really Fall in Love all Over Again
JUST: The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Spouse
How Can I be a better Wife
What a Man Can do For a Woman
Brave Affairs
What All the Universe is Trying to Tell You Today
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Photos: The Farmer and his flowers
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