This Month's Story

“Everything was new. I had to learn so many things. I learned to ride and I would go out with John and the men and sometimes we would stay for several days working the fence line and sleeping under the stars. We really didn’t have to but we did because it was so… I don’t know how to tell the feeling.”

It was a beautiful day for a wedding.

Stella and I were in Pass Christian the town on the east bank of the Bay of St Louis. Some friends were getting married. When the music began and the bride came down the aisle, the brightness of the spring day poured in through the large windows of the church. The clean, crisp sunlight was an icing that made everything seem perfect. I like weddings and I leaned back in my seat, relaxed and enjoyed this one.

Later, at the reception, we sat a table with some friends and almost immediately someone asked Stella to dance and quickly the other two couples at the table were up and dancing as well. Not to be outdone, I turned to the woman sitting beside me and asked her if she would like to dance. She smiled and said no thank you.

She had a pleasant smile and I realized I didn’t know her; she was a friend of one of the other couples. She was an older woman in her late seventies or early eighties. We exchanged a few remarks as we sat together and watched the people dancing.

“I really would like to dance,” she volunteered almost wistfully after a minute, “but I twisted my knee in the garden yesterday and I’m afraid to aggravate it any more.”

“May I have the first dance at the next wedding?”

“Of course,” she said and gave me the pleasure of seeing her pleasant smile again. “May I have your name for my dance card?”

I gave it to her and she pantomimed writing it down and then introduced herself.

With this we were soon deep in one of those curiously intimate conversations strangers have who meet briefly and never see each other again. I told her how Stella and I came to live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and about my children and grandchildren in other states. In the telling I mentioned several things that I usually don’t tell people.

I asked her about herself.

“I’m from here,” she said. “I’ve lived here most of my life. I taught in the school system for a long time.”

In answer to my next question, she said that she never married during that time, as she had to take care of her mother.

“It’s an old story,” she said with a trace of bitterness. “Everyone else had families to take care of and I didn’t, so I was the so-called logical one. Of course, while she was alive I couldn’t marry. Who would have me?”

“Then she’s dead?”

“Yes, she died when I was fifty-five. I was lost on what to do with myself for a year. Then a wonderful man came to visit on the Coast for the summer. He started to take me out. We would go to New Orleans or over to Alabama to the Bellingrath Gardens. We went to places I had always wanted to go to, but never would.

“Oh! Were my sisters ever upset. Especially when in September, when it came near for the time he was to leave, he asked me to marry him! He had a ranch in Sheridan, Wyoming and he wanted me to go back with him and live there.”

“Sheridan? I did a field trip there when I was in college years ago. I liked it. Did you say yes?”

“Yes I did, to everyone’s surprise, including myself.

“Again, all my relatives tried to talk me out of it, but we got married anyway. It was a small ceremony, not like this,” she waved her hand to take in the large hall and the many guests. “But it was beautiful. He was only a year older than me and we went to live on his ranch and, Oh! Paul, it was every bit as wonderful as he said it would be.

“It was a horse ranch,” she said smiling, pausing in remembrance. “We did have some cattle and it was fair size as the ranches around there went. The first winter was mild so I had a chance to get used to it and go out and make friends. You’ve been out there so you know how friendly people there can be. In a little while it was like I had always lived there. The second winter was fairly hard, but I loved it.

“Everything was new to me. I had to learn so many things, so very many things. What was wonderful was that I found I could do many of the new things.

“I learned to ride and I would go out with John and the men and sometimes we would stay for several days working the fence line and sleeping under the stars. We really didn’t have to but we did because it was so… Oh, I really don’t know how to describe the feeling.”

She stopped and stared out at the dance floor seeing a place many miles and years away. Despite the noise of the party, it seemed quiet. I found that she was sitting so I could see out the window behind her. As I waited for her to continue, I looked out.

From where I was sitting, I could see the beach and the bright sunlit waters of the Mississippi Sound. A group of pelicans was working the water a little way out and I could see the splash as they dove after fish.

“How long did you stay out there?” I asked after a minute had gone by and she had not spoken. She looked at me as if she were coming up from some deep pool.

She turned and looked out the same window I had been looking through. I doubt if she saw the same things I had seen.

“It was a little over twenty-one years. Twenty-one years! John was a wonderful person. I found that I really couldn’t fault the life I had had before if at the end I had a chance to meet and marry him.

“Oh, things weren’t always perfect. But the times of good far outstripped the times of bad. Everything we did together seemed as if we should have been doing them all our lives.

“John had a slight heart problem. He took his medicine religiously, but one day he had a stroke out in back area. By the time we got a truck out there and got him into town it was too late.

“I did my best to run the place for about a year, but it was too much for me. His son by his first wife came down from the Dakotas with his family to help.

I could see that the son really loved the place; that was where he had been born and raised. I felt after a bit that I didn’t belong, that I was really a fifth wheel. I felt the ranch was rightly his by inheritance and I sold it to him for a small sum and came back here.”

‘How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Let me see. I’m eighty-two now. So that was five, almost six, years ago.” She reached forward and took her Champagne glass and sipped it.

“It was as I had never left here. My sister and everyone else treat me like I’ve barely survived a dreadful experience. I’ve tried telling them of what it was like, but they have never been there; they have no feeling of anywhere else but here.”

She twirled the glass swirling the small amount of Champagne in it and then drank it down.

“One day,” she continued, “I suggested that I take the children horseback riding. My brother-in-law was horrified and absolutely refused letting them go with me. The thought that I could lead an outing like that was beyond him.

“They act like I’m so old when I am around them and I don’t feel like I really am. I feel frustrated and confused. I really don’t know what to do.”

We were interrupted by the dancers as they came back full of the excitement and the fun of the occasion.

All the noise of the room seemed to flood back over us and the brief feeling of isolation I had felt as the two of us talked was gone. We were no longer alone. Stella chastised me for not dancing and my new friend came to my defense, saying that I had been kind enough to stay and keep her company.

Then there was a lot more noise and, as the band struck up the regal Mardi Gras tune “If I Ever Cease to Love,” the bride and groom entered the reception hall. The bride was beautiful and the groom had an embarrassed, but happy look of unexpected happiness.

We all stood up and applauded. My new friend stood next to me and I knew the few moments we had had together were slipping away.

“At least,” I said, “you had the twenty-one years.”

Her answer came in a low voice. With all the noise and bustle in the room as the bride and groom paraded in a broad circle keeping time to the music and applause, I almost missed it.

“Oh! Paul, those twenty-one years went by so fast.”