I Bought The Dress First

By that summer I had given up. That is the plain truth of it. I had not heard from her in over a year — the letters had dried right up, one by one and then nothing — and all around me my friends were pairing off and getting married, one after another, and I would stand back from it and see, all of a sudden, what I had turned into. A loner. That was the word for it. A fellow who had quietly gone off by himself and stopped expecting anything from anybody.

And then one morning it came over me. The tenth of August, 1968, a Wednesday, five o’clock in the morning — I can give you the hour, that is how clear it was. I was up at that hour and my dad called me in to drink mate with him, the way we did, and I sat there at the table with the cup going around and my mind just went, all on its own, down to Paraguay. To her. I woke up and I knew, the way you know a thing that has been decided somewhere below where you do your thinking, in a place you do not have a say in: I was going back down there. Not maybe, not someday. I was going to find out for myself, with my own eyes, whether she was still to be had — and if I had to cross the whole world on borrowed money to do it, then that is what I would do. I got up from the mate and went into the kitchen and told my dad what I meant to do, and by noon that same day I had already bought my ticket.

There was no money for it. There never was, in those days. So I went to a man I sang with in the choir, Jack Fries, and I laid it out for him straight, no dressing on it.

“Jack,” I said, “I’d like to go down and get married and I need fifteen hundred dollars. Would you co-sign for me?”

“Sure,” he said. Just like that. A handshake and a signature, and a man’s good word standing behind mine at the bank.

There was one thing that held me up before I could go. Because I was a Canadian, I needed a visa to get into the country, and Paraguay was the only place at that time that made you have the thing in hand before you landed — everywhere else you got it right there at the airport when you came in, but not Paraguay. So the travel agent took my passport and sent it away down to San Francisco, where there was a Paraguayan consulate, and there was nothing to do but wait on it. He sent it off on the Wednesday, and it came back to me the following Monday. That is why I could not just up and go the day I decided. I had to sit on my hands from the Wednesday to the Monday, waiting on a stamp in a book, and I flew out that Monday night the minute it was in my hand.

And then I did a thing that still makes me shake my head to tell it. Before I had so much as set foot on the airplane, before I knew one way or the other whether she would even see me, I went into a store in Clearbrook and I bought a wedding dress. A real nice one. I think I paid sixty-five dollars that time. I figured, I think it’ll fit her, and I bought it. A grown man on borrowed money, flying off to the other end of the earth after a girl who had not written him in two years, and the first serious thing he buys is the dress she is going to wear if she says yes. You can call that foolish. I have called it that myself, many a time, and laughed about it. But the truth is I had already decided, down where the decisions get made, the same place the morning of the tenth of August had come from. Buying the dress was just me catching up to what I already knew.

I flew out that Monday night on Air Canada, lifted off from Vancouver at eleven minutes past eight, and then it was flight after flight the whole night through — Vancouver to Toronto, and Toronto on to New York, and from New York straight down to Paraguay. I flew the whole way knowing nothing. Very nervous, I was, the whole time, sitting up there in the dark with no notion in the world what I was flying into — whether she was free or spoken for, whether she would so much as see me. Four nights I went without proper sleep by the time I came down out of the sky. I came in on a small plane and put down a good way off from where she lived, fifteen, eighteen kilometres out, and I will tell you why I set it up that way. I had given myself a back door. If I found out she was taken, I meant to turn straight around and go home and never once let on that I had been there. Nobody would ever have known I came at all.

I put up at the Mennonite Motel in Asunción, and it was no sooner than I walked in that there was a whole bunch of fellows I knew from before, and every one of them wanting to know the same thing right off — what was the reason I had come back? I kept my mouth shut. “Oh, just come to visit,” I told them, and left it at that. I did not breathe a word of the real reason to a soul. There was a woman came into my room there at that motel, too, a Lisa Fung, and she sat and asked me all kinds of questions. I thought nothing of it at the time. It was only long after that I put it together — her, and another lady back in Vancouver, a woman my own age, who just before I left had come out and given me a hint, asked me straight why on earth I was going all the way to Paraguay, and told me flat that she herself was available. I never once caught any of it. Not then. That is what being a loner does to a man — every one of those roads was standing open and I walked right past them without so much as a glance, never dreaming a single one of those women had the least interest in me.

And then, the very minute I came down out near her colony, there was a man I knew from before — a fellow who knew Nettie well, too. So I pulled him aside, quiet, and I asked him straight out.

“Do you know Nettie Dueck? Does she have a boyfriend?”

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”

And on the strength of that one word I went to her.

The whole truth of it was not so tidy, and I only pieced it together later on. In those two years of no letters, neither one of us had stood still. I’d taken up with a girl back in Canada, and she’d had a fellow of her own down there. Nobody had been sitting home pining. But there was this one thing she had kept, and had said out loud to people more than once — that she thought John would come back one day. And now here I was, come back. So I went to her.

An hour later I was standing in her farmyard, and she did not know me. She stood and she looked, and she looked again. Two years and more is a long time at that age — a person fills out, a person changes — and here I was out of nowhere, no letter, no warning, no word sent ahead, just a man standing in the yard where no man was expected. It was a big surprise to her, my turning up like that.

I did not crowd her. I told her I had come to find out whether she was still interested, and that I would stay just a couple of weeks and let her think it over. I did not tell her my ticket was good for a whole year. Now her father and I, we went back a long way — he had known me from where I used to work, and he would come around the place to visit with me, and he had thought the world of me for years. That man treated me like royalty. He always did reckon I was a king, and when I turned up in his yard out of nowhere there was nobody on this earth more pleased about it than him. The King himself, he made out, had come down to Paraguay.

And then we courted, and it went fast, the way a thing goes when it has been dammed up two years and the dam breaks. We dated three weeks, every night of them. Every night. But I will not tell you it ran all smooth in my own heart, because it did not. That first week, every single night, my mind was thrown all over the place. Maybe I should leave. Maybe I had made a mistake in coming at all. I did not feel comfortable, and I could hear it in the way she talked to me. She was not the girl I had known before. How could she be. Two years gone, and in those two years I had been out in the wide world and tasted something altogether different from Paraguay, and she had been here living her own life. We were near enough strangers, the two of us, feeling our way back to one another.

And then it was her who got out ahead of me. There was never any proposal, not a real one — one night, after those three weeks, she just up and said it: “I am ready to get married.”

And I said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

That was the whole of the proposal, right there. I had meant to give her time, the couple of weeks I’d promised, and here she had already made up her own mind. We were young, the both of us, and green as grass — by her own reckoning we scarcely knew what we were doing. I had only just turned twenty-three. I had come into the country on the twentieth, walked into their yard on the twenty-first, and on the twenty-third she turned twenty-one. A pair of kids, really. But we did it. We made it. We did it.

There was a fellow already in the picture, mind you — Walter Keller. But she had told him herself, long before I ever stepped off that plane, that when John came back he was history. And her people had made up their minds besides. Her mother and father did not leave it to chance. John, not Walter, they told her. “John is the one you marry.”

So we were to be married, except there was one more wall to get over. The church down there had a rule and it would not bend it for me or for anybody. If you were not a baptized church member, they would not marry you. Now I belonged to my church back in Canada in good standing, so there was nothing for it but to write away home for a letter that said so, and then wait for that letter to make its slow way down to us. And waiting on the mail, of all things. The mail was the very thing that had torn us apart in the first place, those letters my mother took off the box. Now here we were at the end of it, the two of us promised to each other at last, and once again everything hung on an envelope finding its way across the world. We got engaged the beginning of September, a Sunday it was, with a party for it at her mother and father’s place, a whole crowd of folks invited over to mark the day. And then we had to wait until the eighteenth of October to get married, because nobody would marry us before then. It all came down to a piece of paper coming through the mail to say that I was who I said I was, and a free man, and good to marry. It came, in the end.

So there it was. I had woken up one morning with nothing but a certainty, borrowed the money on a handshake, bought the dress before I’d even seen her face, flown four nights across the world on a year-long ticket I never let her see, and landed not knowing whether she was free. And now the last envelope had come through, and we were engaged, the both of us, and the date was set. The girl who had not written me in two years was going to be my wife. I had gone back down there to find out for myself, with my own eyes, and I had my answer. She was to be had after all. I had won her.

Now getting married and getting her home to Canada were two different mountains, and I had not thought hard enough about the second one. All through those months I got around on a motorbike. I had borrowed that fifteen hundred and come down with about five hundred of my own, that was all the money I had, the rest of it borrowed, and some of the borrowed money I put straight into a brand-new bike so the two of us could go and visit back and forth. It did the job for a while. Then in January I sold it again, and I lost some money on it in the selling — that is how those things go when you buy new and sell used, and I was in no position to be losing money on anything.

Because the truth was I owed fifteen hundred dollars, and there was no way on this earth I could pay a debt like that from Paraguay. Fifteen hundred was a lot of money down there, more than a man could dig his way out from under. So it had to be Canada. But Nettie did not want to move. Not at first. I put it to her plain — “There is no way I can pay what I owe from here” — and she turned it over a long time before, all of a sudden, she came around.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Let’s move on to Canada.” And the minute she said it, her mother and father decided they would come too. Soon as she was going, the whole family was going.

We got married the eighteenth of October and we stayed on until February. And then it came time to leave, and I want to tell you it was a sad thing. She had never once been on an airplane in her life, and here she was climbing on one to fly clean out of the only country she had ever known, leaving her whole family behind her. Her father came all the way to Asunción to say his goodbye to her there. She was so close with that man. That was the hard part, watching the two of them, because I knew what he was to her.

And before we ever reached a plane there was the road. Where she lived in the colony out in the Chaco it was four hundred kilometres to the capital, to Asunción, and that ride took the better part of twelve hours. The roads were not paved then the way they are now — it is all paved now, just like here — but back then it was dirt the whole way, and bumpy, very bumpy. Twelve hours of it before we so much as saw an airport.

Then we flew all night. We lifted off from Rio de Janeiro at one o’clock in the night and flew ten hours to New York, and from New York on to Toronto, and then four hours more from Toronto out to Vancouver. New York is where we near about froze to death. I had only a light suit jacket on me, that was all I had, and she had just a sweater, and there was deep snow piled up outside. It was so cold in New York. And she was carrying our first one by then, expecting, and her feet had swelled up so bad she could not get them into her shoes — could not get them into anything at all. The way she tells it, she was near enough barefoot going through that airport, just a pair of flip-flops on her feet in the snow and the cold, because there was nothing else her feet would go into.

Toronto was where they let her into the country, and it was a short thing, quicker than you would think for all the worry I had put into it. The airline had somehow given her only a visa to land, nothing more. But we walked into the officer’s office and he asked me a couple of questions — had I applied for her before, he wanted to know, and I told him I had, three times over, and been turned away every time and told to just come and marry her. He asked, and I answered, and he said, “You’re free to go.” And then he turned to Nettie, very polite, very kind, and he asked her, “How do you like Canada?” And she did not know how to answer him. How could she. She had only just that minute set foot in it. He grabbed his stamp and he stamped her passport, and we went.

Her family came the following May, in 1969. By then Nettie and I were living in Vancouver, and when her people came they went straight to Abbotsford — into the very same farmhouse where my own family had lived before them. They had a big family, same as we’d had, so they needed a big house, and there it was, standing ready. We went out to see them plenty. And that July, the eighth of July, our Eric was born, so her mother and father had come in time to be here for it and to meet him after.

I will not paint it prettier than it was. When I came back with her, if I had had the money in my pocket to do it, I believe I would have turned right around and gone back to Paraguay. Nettie was not received the way she should have been by my mother and dad. And the whole picture just looked so dark to me. No money. No nothing. I could not see through it, could not for the life of me figure how the two of us were going to make it. But we hung in there. We hung in there, and we moved on.