Here comes the bride,
All fat and wide!
And then she was standing at the rear of the church, her father beside her, taking her arm, and Dorothy Carrico was walking toward the candles and flowers and the blazing music and the bright reds and blues of the round church window; and now, without feeling, as weightless as the cloud passing over the mountain (out the window to her right, beyond the maples), she, Callie, was walking slowly, her father hopping twice on one foot to get in step. She thought, oblivious to the roar of the organ:
Soames is her second name,
Second name, second name. …
Henry Soames was watching her, dignified and comically beautiful, as all her own family was beautiful, and she walked slowly, having all eternity to taste the strange new sensation of freedom, knowing that she too was beautiful now, yes, more beautiful than the wedding gown, lighter, purer, immutable as the gown was not, as even the ceremony was not. Their faces surrounded her, looking up, shining as if reflecting the secret radiance thinly veiled, her total and untouchable, virginal freedom. In a moment, she would feel her weight again, her mere humanness, the child inside, but not yet. The church window said, All will be well. The white of the cloth on the pulpit said, Go slow. She watched Henry, more solemn and splendid even than her Uncle Earle when he won the election for Mayor, more beautiful than Duncan, looking up, tossing a child in his arms, or Bill with his hand poised over the chessboard, or Aunt Anna paring apples with speckled, swift fingers. Then suddenly the room was real again, full of organ music, the lead mullions of the stained glass window as solid as earth, the rich colors deep and heavy as stone, even the professional simper of the Preacher solidly real, as heavy and solid as iron chains and as heavy as the golden burning bodies and faces of the people around her — the people she knew and those she didn’t. Only she herself was weightless, and in a moment she too would be real again. Go slow, said the room. Be patient, said the trees. She could feel weight coming, a murderous solidity, hunting her.
III. THE EDGE OF THE WOODS
1
At 5:00 A.M. when his wife woke him up Henry Soames opened his eyes at once, and he kept them open, unblinking, as he moved to the telephone table in the living room. He let himself down into the overstuffed chair, his long, thick upper lip lifted slightly from his teeth, and picked up the receiver. The wire hummed. Old Prince appeared in the bedroom doorway, ears raised, head cocked, seeing what he was doing. Then he turned and went back to his place on the floor beside the bed, next to Callie.
It was neither dark nor light in the room. The bloom of snow outside dimly lighted the wallpaper, bringing out silver glints and blue-gray lines — a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress standing on a path under a willow tree near a bridge, their two children, a boy and a girl, running up the path toward a man and a woman in old-fashioned dress, a willow tree, a bridge, two children, a man and a woman. Snowlight sharpened the angles and curves of the furniture so that each piece stood distinct and detached. In the entry room where there were no windows the wallpaper design blurred to shadows and then darkness. He sat looking straight into it, but he felt the entry room more than saw it. There was the old roller piano they never used except for putting photographs on — it had belonged to his mother once — and the oval rug, the nicked old shelf table with hymn-books and magazines underneath and a limp runner over the top, and on the runner, waiting to be hung up again, the wall lamp. In the entry room things seemed settled in, permanent, but not here. The furniture here was like furniture that had just been moved into a new house or is just about to be moved out of a house where nobody lives. In the half-light, the carved oval frame high on the wall above the davenport — it was an old picture of Henry Soames’ father holding a book — seemed to have nothing in it.
“Number, please,” the operator said. He gave the number and waited again while she rang it.
Over the phone the doctor sounded half-asleep. He said, “Well, sometimes it’s two or three hours after the sac breaks before contractions begin. When they do, you run her in to the hospital and have them phone me.”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said. He started to say more, but the doctor said goodbye and hung up. Henry sat in the darkness pulling at his left hand with his right. The skin was loose. He’d been getting his weight down lately.
It had snowed some more during the night, and the snow was sharp blue under the neon sign up front. This was the new part of the house, and he thought again how it was good they’d put the house where they had after all, with the Stop-Off right handy. It was Callie that had decided it, not Henry. He’d have thought she’d want something nicer, more like a home, a place with a lawn and trees and a view of the mountains. So had her folks. (“Now wouldn’t you rather have the old Kelsey place, or maybe a new house up on the hill next to our place?” her father had asked, and she’d said “No.” Henry had said, “The Kelsey place’d be real pretty with a coat of paint and some fixing up, and—” but she hadn’t let him finish. “Henry, be practical,” she’d said. She’d snapped it out. George Loomis and Lou and Jim Millet and Nick Blue the Indian and neighbors from here to Athensville and New Carthage had pitched in and helped him lay up the cinder-block house behind the diner and right next to the lean-to room where he, Henry, had lived all those years by himself — and they’d done it all by fall, had just finished up in time for them to pull down the scaffolding and sweep up the yard and go take over the work at George Loomis’s place when George had his arm torn off in his corn binder. Callie’d been six months pregnant by then, but she still ran the diner alone while he painted outside and inside, wheezing, oozing sweat, knocking together windowboxes and planting zinnias and laying yellow-painted rocks out along the driveway. When it was done they’d stood at this same window looking out at the neon sign where it jutted out from the corner of the diner, watching the semis roll by on the dark highway past the diner — and now house — and Callie had said, “It’s real nice.” She had stood with her elbows close to her sides and hadn’t looked at him, or not until he’d put one finger under her chin and turned her face around. She’d looked past him even then.) The snow lay smooth, sharp blue right out to the highway. Beyond the highway more snow, luminous white in the darkness, stretched away to the trees. The edge of the woods was vague, ghostly this early in the morning. The woods were over a mile deep — they came out over by Freund’s place — and though they never had in the old days, they made Henry uneasy now. It was as if there was somebody in there moving around. He dreamed about him sometimes, and sometimes when he was wide awake he wondered how it would be if Willard came back. They never talked about him.