Nickel Mountain (8 page)

She said, “Mother, we're going to be married.”

Her mother's face squeezed into a grimace and she started crying with a great whoop, splashing up her hands and running to her, falling on her, hugging her tightly and sobbing. “Oh, Callie! My poor baby! We've
failed
you!” Immediately Callie was crying too, sobbing her heart out. It must have been two minutes they cried like that. Then it came to her that Henry was there, and that they didn't understand at all.

“Mother,” she said, “I
love
Henry. I'm
happy.”

“Child. My child!” her mother said, and a new burst of sobbing overwhelmed her.

She felt a strange sensation: as if the floor were moving, shifting gently, carrying her somewhere, as in the old story, and telling her something. She accepted her mother's tight embrace but felt unresponsive, separated in a way that in a moment there would be no repairing. Her mother felt it too, or realized that Callie was not crying now, that something had changed.

“Mother,” she said again, “I love him.”

After a moment her mother drew back to look at her, trying to read her face like a word left by Indians. She said, “Love, Callie! You're only seventeen years old.”

Callie said nothing.

Her mother was baffled; grieved and frightened, but more than that, filled with an emotion too deep for separation into grief and fear: as though Callie had gone down to a small boat at night, and her mother stood on a towering ship that was drawing away and could never turn back. Without words, Callie knew—with a sinking feeling—that her mother could never know for sure—anymore than she could know of her mother—that she was happy. For the first time now, her eyes still baffled, Callie's mother turned to look at Henry. She stared as if she'd never really noticed, in all her years, that he was grotesque. He endured the look in patience like an elephant's, an enormous hulk of misery, his hands folded behind his back, huge belly thrown forward, his head slightly tipped and drawn back a little. (Could she see that, inside that suit like a mortician's, he was a gentle man, and a good man besides?)

Her father said, “This calls for a drink!”

Everything called for a drink, to her father. Her mother said, “I'll put some coffee on.”

“Hell,” her father said, “it don't call for coffee. Damn coffee, that's what
I
say. Is that what you say, Henry?”

Henry smiled, showing his overbite. “Mmm,” he said, noncommittal.

“Don't curse, Frank,” her mother said.

“Right,” her father said. “Fuck cursing!” He got out the Jim Beam and two of the painted glasses from the gas station and some ice. He was so nervous he could hardly get the cubes from the metal tray. He waved Henry to a chair and opened the bottle.

Her mother went over to the stove. When she'd turned on the butane under the pot she looked around, horrified, weeping again. “I forgot to say congratulations!” She came back to Callie and hugged her as tightly as before, and now once more both of them were sobbing, but happily this time, Callie anyway, her mother still undecided.

“Congratulations, you two!” her father said, exactly like someone on television. He stood up and reached over to shake Henry's hand, his other hand clutching the pajama bottoms.

They'd sat up all night after that, talking, her father and Henry drinking whiskey, she telling her mother how happy she was, and looking fondly at Henry (growing more and more erect and dignified as the drinking wore on, smiling more and more foolishly, his speech increasingly labored and solemn—her father's, too). She had wanted to shout,
Oh Mother, look at him, look at him!
And every glinting glass and dish in the cupboards understood. But how could her parents understand it? What was important was unspeakable, both on her side and on her mother's. And so instead they had talked about plans, and she had wondered, Is that what everybody does, in every marriage. She and Henry had meant to be married by a justice of the peace, but her mother insisted on a wedding in church. You only get married once, she said; a church wedding was a sacred thing; the relatives would be hurt. Aunt Anna would be the organist, because it wouldn't do for her own mother to be organist at her own daughter's wedding. Callie would wear white. “Mother, I'm
pregnant,”
Callie said, “I'm already beginning to show.” “People expect it,” her mother said. She'd given in to everything. It didn't matter. In fact, she was secretly glad she'd be married in church. She'd said, “Henry, what do you think?” “Ver-y good,” he said, nodding, judgmental. “A ver-y Solomon cajun.” When dawn came and the robins started singing, Henry and her father were fast asleep, her father lying on his arms on the table, Henry sitting erect and placid, mouth open, like a sleeping child.

From that day to this she'd been running every minute. When they'd told Aunt Anna it was to be in two weeks, she'd looked instantly at Callie's belly, her old eyes as sharp as when she threaded a needle, and she'd said, “Well, well, well, well.” Callie's mother had cried as though the sin were her own. (Sin was the only word for it in Aunt Anna's house, pictures of Jesus on every wall, sequin and purple velvet signs reading
Jesus Saves
and
I Am the Way.)
Then, to Callie's astonishment, Aunt Anna's wrinkled-up leathery face broke into a witchly grin.

But all the preparations were over, finally—the rushed-out wedding invitations, the fittings, the telephone calls, the far-into-the-night planning of housing arrangements for relatives and transportation to the church. All the relatives were assembled, mostly from her mother's side, more Joneses and Thomases and Griffiths than she'd seen in one place in all her life. It was like an Eisteddfodd or a Gymanfa Ganu. Her father said you couldn't spit without knocking down fourteen Welshmen. (Great-uncle Hugh had liked that. He'd slapped his knee and rolled it over and over on his tongue, getting it wronger every time he said it. Her father would be quoting it for the next fifty years, the way he'd been quoting for the last twenty-five, “Fool Ahpril, Bill Jones! Fly-horse on door-barn! Fool Ahpril!)

And so at last she could be alone. In half an hour Uncle John would drive her to the church, and there would be the last-minute bustle, the anxious fuss, the fear that every minute detail might not go perfectly, according to proper ritual. She thought: We should have gone to a JP and told them afterward.

In the old Welsh wedding gown she felt unnatural—false. It would be different if you were pretty, she thought. She'd been shocked when she'd seen herself in the mirror the first time, trying it on. The gown was scratchy and tighter than she'd expected. It was yellowed by time, yet, in spite of that, mysteriously pure, she thought; serene. But at the lace cuffs her wrists were bony, and her hands were like a man's. With the veil lifted up her face showed angular and grim: She looked neither innocent nor gentle and wise, merely callow. She had said, “It doesn't fit.”

“Don't be silly, Callie,” her mother had said. “We just need to alter it a little, that's all.”

She'd said frantically, “I mean, it isn't
right
for me.”

Aunt Anna said, “Breathe in.”

When they had it pinned up, her mother stepped back to study her, and she smiled, teary, blind to how terrible Callie looked. And now her own tears came gushing. “Mother,” she said, “my
feet
are too big.”

“One wedding I played at, the girl tripped and broke her wrist,” Aunt Anna said.

“Mother,
listen
to me,” Callie said.
“Look
at me once.”

“Hush,” her mother said. “Callie, you look lovely.”

She had clenched her teeth. But she had given in, to the gown as to the rest. Soon it would be over.

It was a beautiful day. She stood as still as the glass of the window, with her hands folded, the veil drawn over her face. Across the road lay golden stubble where Mr. Cook's wheat had been, a few weeks ago. Off to her right the land dropped sharply, falling away toward Mr. Soames' diner and the lower valley, at the end of the valley gray-blue mountains rounding up into blue-white sky. It was pleasantly warm, a light breeze moving the leaves of the maples on the lawn. She watched the bakery truck slow down at the mailbox and turn in.
A beautiful day for a wedding,
she thought. She meant it to be a happy thought, but she couldn't tell whether she was happy or not. Children were singing, around the corner of the house, out of sight.

Karen is her first name,
First name, first name,
Karen is her first name,
Among the little white daisies.

The song made her remember something. She had whispered to her friend that her boyfriend's name was David Parks—knowing perfectly well the rules of the game, that all of them would now find out that Callie Wells liked David Parks—but when her friend turned and told the others, and when the whole ring of children began to sing it, their voices gleeful and merciless, she felt sick with shame and believed she would never dare look at him again. The memory brought a sudden, fierce nostalgia, a hunger to be once again and forever the child she could now see with fond detachment, loving and pitying her, laughing at her sorrow as once her mother must have laughed. For some reason the memory triggered another, one that was intimately related with the first, but she couldn't think how:

Poor Howard's dead and gone,
Left me here to sing his song. …

Panic filled her chest.
It's a mistake,
she thought.
I don't love him.
He was ugly.

2

All around the room—everywhere but in front of the closed doors and the window where Callie stood—the wedding presents were laid out for show on borrowed card tables covered with linen cloths. With the sunlight streaming in (burning in the great, red, antique bowl from Cousin-Aunt Mary, gleaming on all the silver plate, the silver candlesticks, the cut-glass napkin holders, lacework, china salt and pepper shakers, glass and china bowls, mugs, painted vases, popcorn poppers, TV trays, steak knives, wooden salad forks), the presents seemed too beautiful to be real. Like the gown, they had, to Callie's mind, a serenity and elegance she could not match. They overwhelmed her—the hours that had gone into the crocheted antimacassars from Aunt Mae, the expense of the candlesticks from Uncle Earle, who had bought them, she knew, without an instant's hesitation or so much as a fleeting thought of the expense: In all her life she would never crochet as Aunt Mae could, not if she worked at it week in, week out, and she'd never be as rich as Uncle Earle, or as calmly, beamingly confident of all she did. Why had they done it all? Over and over that question had come to her; not a question, really, an exclamation of despair, because she knew the answer, no answer at all: They had sent the presents—hardly knowing her, hardly even knowing her parents any more—because it was her wedding. She thought:
Because brides are beautiful, and marriage is holy.
Again and again she had watched them come down the aisle, transfigured, radiating beauty like Christ on the mountain, lifted out of mere humanness into their perfect eternal instant, the flowers they carried mere feeble decoration, the needless gilding of a lily too beautiful for Nature; and again and again she had seen them later, making their first formal visits as wives, the lines of their faces softened, their eyes grown shrewish or merry. How she had envied them, she the poor virgin, novice, barred from their mystery! She knew well enough what it was, though not in words. She knew it was not the marriage bed, was only feebly symbolized by the bed. They went up the aisle white forms, insubstantial as air, poised in the instant of total freedom like the freedom of angels, between child and adult, between daughter and wife, and they came down transformed to reality, married: in one split second, in a way, grown-up. It was that that the relatives lifted up their offerings to: the common holy ground in all their lives. But that common beauty would not be for her. Her marrying Henry Soames was almost vicious, an act of pure selfishness: she was pregnant, and he—obese and weak, flaccid in his vast, sentimental compassion—he had merely been available.

I'll run away,
she thought, standing motionless, knowing she would not run away. Tears filled her eyes.
I'll
run away somewhere
—
to New York City, yes
—
and I'll write to Henry later and explain. It's the only honest thing to do.
She closed her eyes, hurriedly composing.

Dear, Good Henry:
    Forgive me for leaving you and causing you so much embarrassment and expense. Please ask all my friends and relatives to forgive me too. I hope I have not hurt anyone, and I know how disappointed. …

Dear Mr. Soames:
    Miss Calliope Wells has asked me to tell you (since she is unwell. …

Because of the presents she couldn't run away. And because Uncle Russel and Aunt Kate had come from Ohio, and Aunt Anna had altered the dress and was going to play the church organ, which she loved doing more than anything (and had once done beautifully, so people said), and Robert Wilkes had come all the way from the Eastman School of Music to sing “Because.” She slipped her hands up inside the veil and covered her face. In fifteen minutes Uncle John would be here.

She remembered sitting in the grass as a child, watching Uncle John at work. He was a carpenter, and the tools were like extensions of himself: He was one with the plane that glided down the pineboard, lifting a long, light curl of white; one with the quick, steady saw, the hammer that sent nails in cleanly at two blows, the wooden rule, the chalk, the brace and bit. When she tried, the nails would bend over cruelly, and Uncle John would smile. She'd fly into a temper, and he would laugh as though he and the old claw hammer knew a secret, and then he'd say kindly, “Be calm. Be patient.” She thought:
Uncle John.
He was old now, retired. His hands were twisted with arthritis. It was Uncle John who had brought her Prince when she was eleven. He was still just a puppy. He didn't look at all like a police dog then. Furry as a bear that had not yet been licked.