Those Across the River

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ONE MORNING IN October, not long before our furtive, planned nuptials, Dora found a wedding dress in the secondhand shop behind the butcher’s. She could not believe it was really there, even when she put its scratchy fabric against her cheek and smelled its smell of hot summers boxed up in cedar. It looked as though it might fit her, but she tried not to hope too much. The gift was too sweet and too unlikely.

When she asked about it she found out it had belonged to the widow Miller, who had cast it from her house with all the other trappings of her long marriage before they enfolded her and dragged her to the next world. The great and concave mattress bearing the stamp of Paul Miller’s form slouched just outside the back door.

Yes, it looked as if it might fit.

When she brought it to the butcher’s shop up front, Hal said, smiling, “You sure you want that? Bad luck to wear a widow’s dress that ain’t kin.”

“And why would a Christian man like you sell bad luck?”

“Worse luck not to pay the ice man. And ain’t you already married?”

He winked.

She said, winking back, “I get married every year.”

I FOUND OUT about this later, of course. Dora kept the dress hidden from me until the day of our wedding. She folded it neatly into a suitcase and went to change in the ladies’ room of the courthouse where other women came and went, some of them smiling at her; but she remembered one woman stared at her in the mirror while she fixed her hair. Dora in her white dress and lace. The courthouse was not a place for virgin brides. She stared back so hard the other woman left without even shaking her head the way she had planned to.

My fiery love.

When I saw Eudora floating towards me in the lobby of the courthouse I thought of Actaeon and how he must have felt to see the goddess Artemis naked in her bath, all light and the petals of every white flower on the water. Every face in the courthouse turned to see her where she passed. It seemed for one drunk moment that the gentlemen might begin to applaud and they must have felt it, too, because that was what they did. It started with a mustachioed youth getting his shoes shined in a wrought iron chair and it was mimicked by the black boy shining; then two suited men, probably lawyers, took it up, clapping around the hats they held in their hands; then a farmer put his hat in his teeth so he could clap more freely. It was genuine and good and when Eudora got to me, she was blushing hard behind the little bunch of flowers she held to her mouth and her eyes were wet and shining.

Several of the men waved at me and one yelled “Congratulations!” and another “Good luck!” and I waved back smiling and I walked with my bride into the courthouse.

We did it.

We said the words and did it.

When we left, we all but ran to the car through the warmth of the afternoon. Her suitcase came open and we squatted to gather up Dora’s clothes from the morning, and since our faces came close together we stayed there frog style and kissed as though we had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

When I got behind the wheel of the car and started it, it occurred to me that the moment of the applause when I saw my wife coming towards me was the best moment of my life, that there never had been nor would be a better one. I wanted to slow everything down. I wanted to remember every lake-grey- and shallows-green-eyed glance she threw at me, pregnant as they were with what had happened before and what we had now won through to. I wanted a camera when she climbed out of the car in her wedding dress to change in the washroom of the filling station.

As I drove home, I looked at her so often in the bronze light of late afternoon that she chided me to keep my eyes on the road, but she was laughing.

It was good.

I have never forgotten how good that day was.