What Matters Is After

We were married on the eighteenth of October, out on the farm, and the whole thing was got up by her mother and father and the neighbours. That was how it was done down there. The bride’s people planned the wedding, and the neighbourhood made the food, everybody cooking and carrying it over and setting it out together, the way the whole community pitched in for a thing like that. There was no party, mind you. There was no such thing as a wedding party in those days, not down there. There was the pastor, and there were the vows, and there were the two of us, and that was a wedding. We did not know it any other way, so we did not feel cheated of anything. That was just what a wedding was.

But there was one thing about that day that I have never been able to make right, and it broke her heart, and it stayed broken about it the rest of her life.

I had carried that dress for her all the way from Canada, the one I bought before I ever got on the airplane. It was a beautiful thing. A real nice pink one, the skirt all poofy, and when she put it on it fit her snug, because she was so slight a thing, a hundred and ten pounds and not an ounce over. Oh, she looked beautiful in it. That was the dress she was going to be married in. That was the dress she had her heart set on.

And her father said no.

“You are not wearing that,” he said. “You are putting on your baptism dress.”

Because that was the rule of the church down there — and it was a hard, foolish rule. Nobody could be married unless they were baptized, I have said that part, but it went further than that. You had to be married in the very dress you were baptized in. Those were the rules, and I will call them what they were. They were Pharisee rules. Every last thing was a rule with that church, the way it was with the Pharisees, rules on top of rules and no heart left in any of them. So she put away the pink dress I had carried five thousand miles, and she stood up in her baptism dress, and the day that was supposed to be hers was taken from her by a rule. It destroyed the whole day for her. She could not even be happy. She told me, years after, that she had always dreamt of a nice wedding, and that it never happened, and then she would say, “And it’s okay.” But it was not okay. I knew it was not. A man knows when a thing has gone into his wife and stayed there.

We had the whole wedding recorded, what there was of it, and we sent the recording up to Canada. And I told my brother plain, “Do not ever erase this, do not ever get rid of it.” And he threw it in the garbage. All of it. There was nothing left. As for photographs, there were hardly any, and the few we had were terrible, the kind nobody wants to look at, because nobody had a proper camera in those days. They did not have it then the way they have it now. So there is almost nothing left of that day to hold in your hand. A bad rule, a thrown-out tape, a handful of poor photos. That is the whole record of it.

But I will tell you what I have come to think about all that, and it is the truest thing I know about getting married. The wedding does not matter. It does not. What matters is the after. What matters is what you build once the one day is over and the rest of the days start coming. That is the part nobody plans for you and nobody can take away.

So let me tell you about the after.

We had six months in Paraguay yet, the two of us, married now and on our own. I kept the job I’d always had, the good one — it was a big industrial place where all the people brought in their cotton and their peanuts to be cleaned and made ready and shipped off out of the country. I ran a machine there that cleaned the cotton seed and got it ready for making the cotton oil. It paid well, that job. We had our own place — we rented at first, and then later we moved into her uncle’s old house out on the farm, and there I think we lived for nothing at all.

And I will be honest about those first married months, because there is no sense telling it any other way. They were not very exciting. A young man marries with a certain idea in his head, that now he is the husband, and the husband is the boss, and that is simply the arrangement. And then he finds out. He finds out he is not the boss of anything. I heard a preacher say it once, years later, and it landed on me like it had been written about my own life. To be called the lord of your house, it has to be earned. You do not get it handed to you with the ring. You earn it, and the way you earn it is respect, and respect goes both directions or it does not go at all. I did not know that at twenty-three. I learned it. The cold feet I’d had back in those first dating weeks, the maybe-I-should-leave of it, had its echo here too, in the early going of being married, where more than once I was not sure I had done the right thing. But you hang in there. That is the whole secret, if there is one. You hang in there and you let the after do its work.

Then it was time to bring her home, and that was its own hard thing, because home for me meant tearing her away from everything she had. She did not want to go. I do not blame her one bit. But I sat her down and I told her the plain arithmetic of it: there was no way on this earth I could pay back what I owed from down there. Fifteen hundred dollars was a fortune in Paraguay. The debt was in Canada and the wages to kill it were in Canada, and so we had to be in Canada. And finally, all of a sudden one day, she said it. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go to Canada.” And once she said yes, her own mother and father made up their minds to come too, and follow along after us, once we had gone on ahead and got ourselves settled.

She had never been on an airplane in her life. And leaving was very sad for her, because she was going on ahead of them all — flying off to Canada with me that February, her whole family still standing there in Paraguay behind her. Her parents and the rest would not come until that May, a few months on. She was close with her father, closer than close, and he came all the way to Asunción to say his goodbye to her there. That was a hard thing to watch, the two of them. I knew something about it myself, what it is to be carried up into the sky away from your people.

Getting to the city was a journey in itself. From the colony out in the Chaco to the capital was four hundred kilometres, and it took us about twelve hours on the bus, because the roads then were not paved the way they are now — it was dirt the whole way, and it was rough, bumpy, every kilometre of it. And then the flying, which went all through the night. We lifted off out of Rio de Janeiro at one o’clock in the morning and flew ten hours to New York, and from New York up to Toronto, and from Toronto another four hours clear across to Vancouver.

New York is where we just about froze to death, the both of us. I had nothing on but a light suit jacket — that was the whole of my protection against it — and she had only a sweater, and we stepped out into a New York winter with the snow piled up deep all around, and it was bitter, bitter cold. We had come from the Chaco, you understand. We did not own the kind of coat a place like that asks for. And she was carrying our first child by then, six months along, and her feet had swollen up so bad she could not get her shoes on at all. So she went through that whole airport in a pair of flip flops. Six months pregnant, a hundred and ten pounds, sick as she’d been the first three months of it, shuffling through the cold in flip flops because her feet would not fit her shoes. That is how my wife came to Canada.

The last gate was Toronto, where they let her into the country, and after all my worrying it was the smallest thing in the world. The airline had only given her some kind of a visa to land, not the full papers — I had tried three separate times to apply for her properly before we ever left, and three times they had waved me off, told me it was a lot of paperwork and money for nothing, that marrying her was the simpler road. So I had married her and brought her, and now here we were in front of the officer in Toronto. He took us into his office and he asked me a couple of questions — had I applied for her before, that sort of thing — and I answered him, and he reached over and got his stamp and stamped her passport and said, “You’re free to go.” That was it. That was the whole of it.

And the one thing he asked her, very politely, was, “How do you like Canada?”

And the poor girl did not know how to answer him. She had been in the country about five minutes. She had no idea yet whether she liked it. We brought her into Canada on the sixteenth of February.

And I would love to tell you that the hard part was behind us then. It was not. It was just getting started.

My own mother and father did not receive her well. I will not dress that up. They let her know, and they let her know plainly, that she was not welcome — and this was a girl six months pregnant who had just left everything she’d ever known on the far side of the world. I tell you, if I’d had the money in my pocket to do it, I’d have turned us both straight around and flown back to Paraguay. That is the honest truth of how it sat with me. The whole picture just looked dark. No money. No nothing. I could not see through it — could not see how on God’s earth we were going to make it. But we hung in there. We always hung in there.

We did not stay under my parents’ roof but about two weeks before we got ourselves out. We had to borrow even to do that, a hundred and fifteen dollars, borrowed, just to put down the first rent on a basement suite. From there it was a couple of months in that basement, and then off to Vancouver for seven months for the work, and then back again to Abbotsford, because that is where the work finally was and where all our people were.

The good work in Vancouver came the way most of the good things in my life came, out of nowhere, by a phone call. There was a man named Harry Jansen who I had worked alongside before, and he rang me up from Vancouver one day and said, “John, I’m looking for a carpenter — can you be in Delta tomorrow morning?”

And I said, “Hold it, hold it now. Hold it right there.”

Because there was a wall in front of me before I could say yes to anything, and the wall was this: we had no car. None. Here was the work I needed, the good work, and a man asking me to stand on a job in Delta come morning, and I had no way on earth to get myself there. So the first thing I had to do was not think about the job at all. The first thing I had to do was figure out how a man with nothing gets his hands on a car by tomorrow. And somehow I scratched it together. We did get one piece of luck setting up, I’ll say that. A family that was moving back to Paraguay wanted shed of everything they owned, a whole suite of furniture for next to nothing, and the apartment along with it, so we took the lot off their hands and walked into a furnished place we could afford. I drove to Delta in my father’s car to start, and once we were living out in Vancouver those bosses did me one better still — they had a work van, and they handed me the keys to it. “Pick us up in the morning,” they said, “drop us off at night, and the rest of the time she’s yours. Drive to Abbotsford whenever you like.” That was the kind of men they were. Harry Jansen’s crew. They were very, very good to me.

We had nothing and we owed everything. By the time it all stacked up — the trip, the setting up, and then a brand-new car bought on borrowed money, a Maverick — I was eight thousand dollars into the bank, and I had not one thing to show for it except a pregnant wife. We were that broke, flat broke, the kind of broke where her own brother came by, took one look, and said, “You guys have no food” — and he was right, there was nothing in the place — and he got in his car and drove to the store and bought us our groceries. That is where we were starting from.

And here is the thing I want set down, because it is the most important thing in the whole story and it is not me. If it was not for her, we would not be sitting in a house like this today. You have to have a wife who is with you all the way, and I had one. She was a worker like you have never seen — a workaholic, the real article. The day before our Eric was born she was out picking raspberries over in Abbotsford, and she picked forty-eight flats of them. Forty-eight. We were living over near Vancouver then, for the work, but the raspberries were an Abbotsford thing, and a woman that far along, the day before her first child comes, picking forty-eight flats. And she could deal with anybody. She would get the banker himself on the telephone and go right at him over the interest — what’s the rate, five and a half, and she’d come straight back with, “Sure, you’re already robbing everybody else, now you want to rob us too?” I could swing a hammer. She could do all the rest of it.

And the strangest, best thing happened to her once she was here. The girl who had not wanted to come, who I’d half had to talk into it — once she got to Canada she changed, and she changed fast. She became a different woman almost overnight. Happy. Happy from the first day, near enough. If I had ever come to her later and said, “Let’s go back, let’s move home to Paraguay,” she would have said, “No, not on your life.” She loved it here. She loved it from day one. And my own mother and father, the same ones who would not make her welcome at the start — they came all the way around in the end, every inch of the way. My father, before it was over, said it straight out: that Nettie was the best daughter-in-law they had.

Her own people made it up here that May, the whole family of them, just as they’d decided to back in Paraguay the day she said yes to me. They settled right into Abbotsford — into the very farmhouse my own big family had lived in before, because they were a big family too and needed the room — and we went back and forth between us all the time after that. They got here that spring, and our boy came that summer. We were still over near Vancouver ourselves then, the two of us, on account of the work — it was the fall, the first of October, before we got ourselves back to Abbotsford for good. So Eric came to us over there, not here. He was born the eighth of July. All through the waiting, people kept asking me what I was hoping for, a boy or a girl, and I had the only answer a man ought to have. “My wish is a healthy baby.” That was the whole of my wish.

And here is a thing that came around lately, all these years on, that I have to set down because of that pink dress. Somebody in the family got to talking about a vow renewal — that you can do such a thing, stand up again after a whole lifetime and say the words over. The picture they painted was the whole picture: a pink dress for her at last, and a backyard, and me grabbing hold of a microphone and saying my piece, and everybody there to see it. Reclaim the day, was the idea of it. Take back the moments that got taken. I sat there and I could hardly take it in. I had never once in my life thought of such a thing. Not once. All such ideas — where do people even get them. But my wife, she heard it out, and she had one word for it. “Wonderful.” That was what she said. Wonderful. There is a couple we know who went and did that very thing, renewed their own vows years down the road. I don’t know that we ever will. But I know she wanted a nice wedding once and never got it, and I know that after sixty years of the after, the idea of standing her up in a pink dress and doing it right could still put the word wonderful in her mouth.

That is the after. That is the part that mattered. Not the dress she did not get to wear, not the tape my brother threw out, not the photos nobody can stand to look at. The forty-eight flats of raspberries. The hundred-and-fifteen-dollar basement. The groceries her brother bought us when the cupboard was bare. The girl in the flip flops who became the happiest woman in Canada. You build it from there, out of nothing, the two of you, and one day you turn around and there is a whole life standing behind you. The wedding does not matter. What comes after is everything.