Lowell climbed out of the golf cart and went up the church steps one at a time, with his cane in one hand and the marshmallow bucket in the other.
Kenna's father started to follow him. Lowell held up the cane without looking back.
"Y'all stay out here," he said. "Not one of you. You'll spook him."
The crowd on the sidewalk stopped. The FFA boys lowered their show sticks. Even the Shriners went quiet.
Lowell stepped through the church doors.
The First Methodist Church of Linnville had been built in 1889, and it had never seen anything like it.
The pews were full. A hundred and fifty wedding guests in their summer best were standing on the pews, mostly, or pressed against the walls.
Up at the altar, a young minister in a robe was backed against the pulpit holding his Bible in front of him like a shield. The groom, a skinny young man in a gray tuxedo, was standing on a chair.
The bride was not standing on anything. She was a tall, sturdy young woman with dark curls and a lot of white lace, standing in the middle of the center aisle with her bouquet of sunflowers in one hand and her train gathered up in the other. And she was laughing so hard she was crying.
Halfway down the aisle, right between the bride and the altar, stood Waylon.
He was panting. His purple ribbon was hanging off one ear.
He'd knocked over a big brass candlestick, and there was white satin runner wrapped around one of his back legs. He was swinging his big head from side to side, looking at all the people, and every time someone moved, he took a nervous step.
The bride's father, a big man in a brown suit, was edging toward the pig from the side pews with his arms spread out wide.
"Sir," Lowell said quietly. "Don't."
The man stopped.
"You don't chase a hog," Lowell said, very low and calm, the way you'd talk in a barn at night. "You chase a hog, you get a faster hog. Y'all hold still. Please."
The church went quiet.
Lowell walked slowly down the side aisle until he was about ten feet from Waylon. Then he did something that made a hundred and fifty people catch their breath.
He sat down. Right on the church floor, in the middle of the aisle, with his back against the end of a pew. It took him a while.
His knees made a sound like a screen door. He laid his cane down beside him on the red carpet.
Then he took the lid off the bucket, and he took out one big white marshmallow, and he held it out on the flat of his palm.
"Waylon," he said. "Come here, son."
Waylon's head came around. His ears went forward.
"That's right," Lowell said softly. "You know what this is. Kenna gives you one every night before bed. Don't she."
The pig took a step toward him. Then another. Then he forgot all about the people on the pews, and the candlestick, and the satin runner tangled around his leg, and he trotted right up the aisle and took the marshmallow off Lowell's hand as gently as a kitten.
Lowell gave him another one. Then another.
Then Waylon let out a long, contented grunt, and sighed, and lay down on the red carpet in the middle of the church aisle with his big head in Lowell's lap.
Lowell scratched him behind the ears. Waylon closed his eyes.
A hundred and fifty wedding guests let their breath out at once.
"That," said the bride, wiping her eyes with the back of her bouquet hand, "is the best thing that has ever happened at a wedding."
Her name was Shelby. She'd grown up on a cattle farm four miles out of town. She'd shown steers at the Osage Valley Fair herself, she said, for nine years.
"I'm so sorry, ma'am," Lowell said from the floor. "He got loose. My great-granddaughter's pig. He's the grand champion. We'll get him out of your way."
"Grand champion?" Shelby said. She looked at the ribbon hanging off Waylon's ear. Then she turned around to the groom on his chair. "Tyler. We're getting a picture with him."
"Shelby, the photographer's already packing up."
"Tyler. A picture."
The photographer came down the side aisle. Kenna came in through the door, very slowly, with her hand over her mouth. Lowell held out his hand, and she came and knelt beside him and put her arms around Waylon's big white neck.
The photographer took the picture in the church doorway, with the evening light coming in behind them. A bride in white lace with sunflowers. A groom finally off his chair.
An eighty-year-old hog farmer leaning on his cane. An eleven-year-old girl in a green 4-H shirt with a tear-streaked face. And a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound grand champion Yorkshire with a purple ribbon over one ear and a marshmallow in his mouth.
They got Waylon to the sale ring at 7:29 with one minute to spare. He walked the whole way behind Lowell's bucket, through town, with a crowd of a few hundred people following at a respectful distance.
Dub Harrell took one look at the size of the crowd and grinned.
The bidding started at three dollars a pound. It went to five, and seven, and ten, and the bank dropped out, and the co-op dropped out, and it came down to Hank Ostermann of Ostermann Feed and Seed against the bride's father, who had followed the pig all the way from the church still in his brown suit.
Hank won at fourteen dollars a pound. Almost four thousand dollars, for a girl's college fund.
Kenna walked Waylon out of the ring after the bid, the way you're supposed to. Then she stood at the gate with her hand on his back, and her face crumpled, and she started to cry again, quietly, the way kids do at every county fair auction in America when they realize what selling means.
Hank Ostermann walked over to her. He was seventy, with a big belly and a seed cap, and he'd known Lowell Pickens for fifty years.
"Young lady," he said. "Does that pig have a name?"
"Waylon," Kenna whispered.
"Well, Waylon's mine now," Hank said. "And I don't know a thing about keeping a pig. My wife'd kill me." He looked over at Lowell. "I'd have to find somebody to look after him. Somebody who'd feed him a marshmallow every night."
Kenna stared at him.
"I'm paying the bid," Hank said. "The money's yours, for school. But I'd sure appreciate it if you took my pig home."
Kenna threw her arms around Hank Ostermann's big belly and held on.
The wedding photo ran on the front page of the Linnville Ledger that Thursday. Shelby and Tyler had it framed for their living room.
Lowell has a copy too. It hangs on his kitchen wall, right above the bucket of marshmallows.