My smile disarmed her. It had been a good idea, coming here to an unbroken town. The moving company had said they would come Monday, October fourteenth. We went to the courthouse and made an appointment with the justice of the peace for Saturday, the twelfth. It felt good. It felt right. If we took nothing else away from this place, at least we would leave it as legal man and wife.
We sat in the town square. Across from us, various posters adorned the brick wall of the boarded-up hosiery mill; the largest featured an enormous Little Orphan Annie staring out at the world with her dead, white eyes, holding up a mug of Ovaltine. “Here’s Health!” the legend read. In the foreground, a bronze angel lamented Confederate dead, unconcerned with its veil of pigeon droppings. Dora fed sandwich crusts to the pigeons, which, she remarked, were smaller and meaner than the ones up north, who always seemed to make out, even when they had to compete with people for scraps.
OLD MAN GORDEAU spent the first days of October driving to other small towns in the county to buy dogs back from those he had sold dogs to before. The cousins and sons and daughters of the dogs he had lost, but the same muttish, red breed with the same unerring nose. He rebuilt his kennel closer to the house, easy shooting distance from his bedroom window, and he started in training the new dogs. It would not take him long with his sure hand to get the animals ready to track and hunt. He would have work for them soon.
Lester kept the feed shop running while Saul and the hired boys saw to the farm and the goats and horses. Saul was not well, but he was not talking about it. Old Man Gordeau let it be known around town that he wasn’t going to wait forever to go back into those woods, alone if he had to, and when he did he was bringing dogs and a fiery sword.
Dora and I started packing. It was a strangely joyful task, even more joyful than the unpacking had been. It didn’t feel like defeat. It felt like a setting right of something that had spun horribly wrong. It felt like we had been pardoned by the governor just before some fatal hand yanked the switch. I didn’t even mind that Paul Miller’s jerk brother charged us too much for the cardboard boxes he reluctantly parted with.
Estel Blake spent a lot of time in the general store since it was within earshot of the bell on the door to his hardware shop. He sat with those who gathered there even though the place was quiet and sad now and there were always enough seats by the stove. He talked about how the men would go into the woods again, and other men talked about it, too, but they were all tired of hearing themselves.
Estel knew that the town needed a captain, but since he had no idea how to help things, he tried to better himself by spending the hour before dark practicing with his revolver. As the moon waxed pale and chalky rising later and later in the daytime sky, he made the copse of trees behind his house shiver with gunshots. He got better than he ever had been at hitting small blocks of wood thirty paces off, until one day a neighbor showed him a bullet hole near the baseboards of his house.
The sheriff argued that the man’s house was at a safe angle from the targets he shot at, but the man just closed his eyes and shook his head. It was probably the same way he shook his head when he had been asked to help bury the dead, and again when he was asked to go into the woods.
“Cain’t no man tell which-a-way a bullet’s gonna rick-a-shore.”
Estel Blake fixed the board in the man’s house; I can see him walking away with black soil on the knees of his trousers. And he never did shoot behind his house again.
So now he sat in the general store with the rest of us, playing checkers sometimes, but mostly just sitting, smelling summer dying on the breeze that came through the screen door. He did not know that he was waiting for the full moon to come, but that was what the whole town was doing. For the next few days, Whitbrow lay as still as a bride waiting to meet her husband.
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.