by Kate Whitsby
The endless jiggling and squeaking of the wagon lulled them all into a dreamy doze in which the hours passed unnoticed. Alma closed her eyes for a second to rest them from the sun, and the next thing she knew, the wagon rattled into the dusty streets of Eagle Pass.
The town consisted almost entirely of low adobe hovels like their own house. All of them looked as though the next good rain would wash them into the nearest mud puddle. No one would guess they’d stood torrential downpours and floods for more than two hundred years. The adobe houses of the Texas-Mexico border were among the oldest permanent structures on the North American continent.
Alma took a firmer hold on the horses’ reins as they entered the town and steered the wagon to the church. Only the curved portico on the church’s roof, topped with a handmade wooden cross, distinguished the church from every other building in town. It sat on a corner of what would have been, in a larger town, the central plaza. In Eagle Pass, the plaza—what the townspeople referred to as the plaza—was nothing more than a big square of beaten dust with the church on one side and the General Store on the other.
Alma stopped the wagon in front of the church and looked around. A few men slept against the wall underneath their sombreros while others examined the family with interest.
Allegra jumped down from the wagon and cast a glance toward the General Store. “How are you supposed to find this husband of yours?”
Alma looked around again. “You would think a stranger in town would stand out like a sore thumb. If he’s here waiting for me, half the men in town should be shoving him toward me right now. That’s how weddings usually happen in this town.”
“Maybe he isn’t here,” Amelia suggested.
“If he isn’t here,” Alma replied, “we’ll just get our supplies and go home. Nothing lost.”
“Except a day of work,” Allegra told them.
“What do you want to do?” Amelia asked.
“Maybe we should ask around town,” Allegra suggested. “I’m sure everyone knows if a strange man came into town recently. Benito over at the store is the resident town crier house. I could go and ask him.”
“Why don’t you take your dress into the church and change your clothes?” Amelia added. “There’s the cloak room off to the side of the pulpit. Allegra can go over to the store and ask Benito if he knows about Jude, and I’ll wait here, just in case he shows up asking about you.”
Alma breathed a sigh of relief. “Good idea.” She took her bundle out of the wagon and headed for the door of the church. As she swung it open, she saw Amelia helping her father out of the wagon.
The cool darkness of the church hit Alma in the face as soon as the door closed behind her. She shivered after the pounding heat outside. She waited for a minute in the doorway until her eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior. Then she made her way down the aisle to the cloak room.
What people called the cloak room looked more like a shed, and no one kept their coats or cloaks or anything else in there. Even in driving rain, local people kept their coats on in church. In all her life, Alma knew of only one instance when someone used the cloak room, and that was when Hidalgo Hernandez bought a dog from Alberto Rodriguez in front of the church on a Sunday and tied the animal up in the cloak room until the end of service before he took it home.
Alma halted in the door of the cloak room, looking for a place to put her dress down. Cobwebs and piles of dust decorated the little enclosure. Only a few streams of daylight peeked through the loose boards on the side of the room. Not a single shelf or hook adorned its walls or rafters.
In the end, she hung the dress on the remnant of a tree branch sticking out of one of the peeled beams in the ceiling. She sighed once. How many women in this country got married like this?
She heard about high society women Back East with attendants to dress them and fix up their hair before they took a coach to the church. When they arrived there, they found it decorated with flowers and filled with gaily-dressed friends and relatives.
In south Texas, nearly everyone got married this way. Only local girls could change their clothes at home instead of in the cloak room of the church. Most of them didn’t even change their clothes. They met their men at the altar in their regular everyday dresses, got married, and went home to cook supper without so much as a ten minute break.
Alma slipped out of her clothes. She dropped her pants and shirt onto the floor along with her boots and hat before she realized she hadn’t brought anything else to wear home. After the service, Jude McCann would see her for the first time in her work clothes. What would he think about his new wife wearing pants and a gun belt?
Alma didn’t even own a dress. Neither of her sisters did, either. They’d worked the ranch for so long that they no longer bothered keeping any clothing other than their work clothes. Maybe that would change with a man around.
But she couldn’t think about it now. She pulled her mother’s wedding dress over her head and straightened the skirts. It really was a magnificent dress. Then Alma realized she hadn’t brought anything to wear on her feet. She should have some silk slippers to match the dress. She had no choice but to put her boots back on or go barefoot to the altar. Alma pulled her boots back on. The ruffled hem of the dress just brushed the red clay of the floor, hiding the boots from view.
Chapter 8
