I supposed it was time I got into motion a little, too. So my champagne and I took a stroll around the outside of the throng, nodding when nodded to, sizing people up without being over-obvious about it. Everybody was dressed to the hilt, gabbing in knots of relatives or friends. I wouldn’t have predicted so, but the young men displayed higher fashion than the young women. A number of groomsmen had those porcupine styles of hair they fuss together with gel someway. Highly interesting. As to the other hair situation among the males, a few mustaches besides Riley’s could be counted but mine was the only beard in evidence. He and I were safely in the spectrum with our formal apparel, though; starting with the groom, every man there was tuxedoed up in some shade between maroon and purple like ours. I wondered whether Althea Frew knew of this current color scheme. Doubtless she already had the matter planned out, me in a plum-colored bib and tucker, she in exquisite mauve tulle, tweeting out vows to each other in the flower-arched foyer of the Medicine Lodge.
Uneasily I shook off the thought of Althea, and checked around to see how my Montanian companions were progressing here.
Riley, the damn chameleon, appeared to be utterly in his element at this event, cruising through the crowd as if personally fond of every cummerbund and pleat. Leona, too, with her freshly done-up silver hair and a blending dress looked classily in place.
Mariah, though. Mariah was in—well, I believe the term for what she was in is hot pink.
Against the general maroon of the tuxedo populace and, for that matter, the similar rich tone of the atrium rug, she looked like something that had ignited. At the formalwear rental shop that morning I hadn’t paid any real attention to the women’s end of things, the prospect of myself in soup-and-fish duds already plenty on my mind, but I did notice Leona a couple of times open her mouth as if to say something and then not. At the time I figured she was just running Russian through her head. But I now knew that those unvoiced remarks had to do with Mariah’s selection—too strong a word, honestly, because shopping was nowhere on Mariah’s list of priorities and she had simply grabbed out a dress and tried it on enough to be sure it wouldn’t fall off her and said “Okay, this’ll do, let’s go”—of an eye-stinging pink outfit. I wonder, what is the Moscow phrase for If that color was any louder it’d be audible.
Nor for that matter was any other woman at the wedding carrying an Appaloosa camera bag the size of a satchel as an accessory to her outfit. Really, to capture the main sensation of these nuptials Mariah should have been shooting herself, for in those high heels and her pink number and her deeper-than-red hair she stalked among the wedding-going youngsters trailing every kind of reaction behind her. Multiply Kevin Frew’s calfish gape at her atop the rodeo arena fence, back there on the Fourth of July, by about twenty and you have the general expression of the groom corps. The bride’s maidens on the other hand seemed divided between disgust at such electric fashion and wishing they’d thought of it themselves.
After Mariah had parted the crowd waters all the way across the room and ended up at the revolving Elvi, I felt so sorry for her I sifted over to try and hearten her.
“I haven’t seen you so dolled up since your high school prom, petunia.”
“This get-up.” She kicked off a high heel and massaged that foot against the other one. “I feel like a pink flamingo on stilts.”
“Well, you look like society to me.”
She fired a glance to the far end where a particular regal silver head and complementing aquamarine dress stood out resplendent against the atrium’s cascade, as if Leona had magically enclouded there out of the sprays of blues and silvers off the spilling wall of water.
Mariah said with more rue than she probably wanted to admit to, “Not nearly as much as some. How did she manage to coordinate her dress with that goddamn waterfall, I ask you.”
“Leona would look dressed to the teeth with nothing on but her birthday suit,” I attested, which drew Mariah’s eyes immediately back to me.
Well, I had given words a try. “How about a snifter of this seasoned water?” I offered her my champagne glass.
She considered it longingly, but shook her head. “Thanks, but not until I figure out some kind of a picture of this circus. Then I’ll be ready for a swimming pool of that stuff.”
“So,” strolled up a swank specimen of plummy tuxedo which of course was Riley. “Quite a shindig, hmm?”
Mariah put her hand on his elegant shoulder to steady herself while she shed her other high heel shoe and massaged that foot. “My God, this is a tough sucker of a shoot,” she let out along with her breath. “Everybody keeps looking right at me, right down the old lens hole. It’s all going to come out like driver’s license photos.”
“Maybe you should have worn blue suede and a guitar and blended in as Elvis Number Four,” I suggested to her.
“Come on, shooter, you can do it,” Riley dismissed her photographic fret with the world’s most unworried smile and leaned in and gave her a smoochy kiss alongside one ear. At first I figured he’d been too deep into the champagne, but no, this beamy kissy version was merely Riley rediscovering wedded bliss, even when it wasn’t his own, quite yet.
I yearned for the old days of Moiese and Virginia City when Mariah would have handed him his head for that kind of canoodling. The worst she could summon currently was to cock a look at him and ask with just enough of a point on it, “How’re you coming with your part of the piece?”
“Got it writ,” Riley said to her surprise and mine too. “I’ve turned Biblical.”
. . . Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth . . .
She wanted him ever since Algebra. Alphabetized beside each other there in third period desks, x and y doing their things on the blackboard, maybe it simply was a case of possibilities put side by side. From day one she knew he spent that class hour peeking sideways at her results—not just the paper kind—but she didn’t quite know why she one day was fond of that angle of gaze on her and wanted it forever.
He wanted her in every one of the eternal ways of the Song of Solomon. But along other Bible lines too, of course. Those that say things like dwell. Abide, which seems to be a little bit different but no less awesome. Esteem. Worship. Beget. Words that send you a little dizzy, thinking about all they promise and ask.
. . . Honey and milk are under thy tongue . . .
Her favorite is anticipation. All her life she has liked to plan, imagine ahead, see how it turns out. It has just always seemed to her that’s the way to make matters come out right, especially the big steps. Like getting married.
His is the avalanche approach. Now is timelier than later, you gain a lot of ground if you don’t put off and put off but just up and do it. That way, you’re sure you aren’t wasting life on the small stuff but are honed in on what counts. Like getting married.
. . . His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me . . .
He’s a little spoiled, she grants that, coming from the mother he does. And she wishes the little thinning place in his crownhair didn’t mark the spot where his father is as bald as a dead lightbulb. But genes aren’t everything. (Are they?) She still feels right, too, about deciding to keep her own name, even though his mother told her she’ll give up on that after the first time of having to do Christmas cards with their two separate names. (Will she?)
She’s swifter than he is, he knows that much, and there’s always been a breath-catching little lag between when she says something funny and when he gets it. But women are like that. Okay, okay, he realizes you can get the pud beat out of you for saying stuff like that these days. But isn’t it some kind of biological fact? That girls, women that is, grow up faster and all of a sudden—well, develop into Amazonian princesses?
. . . There will I give thee my loves . . .
They don’t give a fig, this wedding couple, about odds or obstacles or second thoughts or a million possible frets, is what it always comes down to. Not this day, not at this altar, which is a
n old, old word for a place of fire.
. . . For love is strong as death.
Riley still had something monumental on his mind as Mariah balanced against him to grimly work her feet back into high heelery. The moment she was shod again, he gave out another big goofy smile and said:
“You know, we could make this a doubleheader.”
Witless witness though I was to Riley’s sudden new shenanigan, I caught his drift before Mariah did, her photographic attention already focused back into the wedding throng like a riverjack trying to figure out just where to dynamite a logjam. Doubleheader, hell, the recognition hit my dismayed brain, there went the ballgame.
The object of Riley’s intentions tumbled rapidly enough, however, to what had just been put to her. Her head jerked around, eyelids fanning, as she a little wildly sought verification in his face. “Get married, you mean? Here and now?”
“Yup, now and here,” he corroborated with utmost good cheer. “All we’d have to do is arrange for the minister to hang around until Darcy and Jason scoot off to their honeymoon. Why, we’ve even got dear loving family on hand,” he dispensed along with a generous wag of his head toward me and then one in the general direction of wherever his mother was mingling. “How about it, Mariah Montana?”
I honest to God had the impression, right then, that even Elvis in triplicate stopped spinning, for that longest of moments, to watch whether Mariah was going to endorse Riley’s inspiration to hightail to the altar. So much for my campaign against. No, reason and history and minimum common sense never stand much chance against the human impulse to dart off and do it.
“N-No, no I don’t think this is the time and place,” Mariah declined nervously, to my surprise, not to mention Riley’s. “Getting married in this”—her eyes did a loop-the-loop to indicate the infinite reaches of the Holiday Inn lobby—“while we’re doing a piece here would seem kind of, mmm, tacked on, don’t you think?”
What I thought, not that anybody was running a poll for my opinion, was that now they could derive a sample of what they were letting themselves in for by remarrying. Blow up at her, left, right, and sideways, I mentally urged goddamn Riley: insist it’s now or never, matrimonially, because that way you’ll come in for a nice reminder of the spikes that spring out when Mariah stiffens her back. Jump him, the dressed-up motel romeo, for treating marriage like the decision to go get an ice cream cone, I similarly brainwaved Mariah. Get out the big augur, each of you, and remind the other of how you caused the wind to whistle through the holes of that first marriage.
But see how Riley can’t even be trusted to be his normal aggravating self? He fixed his two-tone gaze on Mariah and, in the same soapy mood as when he’d strolled up, grandly allowed: “A woman who knows her own mind, just what I’ve always wanted. California is fine by me, for us to get official.” And off he went to sop up some more mood of the occasion, humming a little Mendelssohn.
For her part, Mariah threw me a don’t-think-this-changes-anything-just-because-I-don’t-want-to-get-married-wearing-hot-pink-in-a-glorified-blimp-hangar look, shouldered her camera bag purposefully, and headed out to do lens war with the weddinggoers again.
With the help of a sip of champagne I assessed where I had come out at from this Riley-Mariah close call: gained nothing, but lost none either. Could have been worse. Probably would be.
“Sir, would you care for some?” a waitress made a courtesy stop at me with a platter of hors d’oeuvre tidbits.
“No thanks,” I explained, “I prefer big food.”
I still can’t account for the next event. I mean, there I was, dutifully keeping my nose out of Darcy and Jason’s event, trying to blend my plum-tuxed self into the maroon backdrop of the atrium rug, when the bald guy emerged from the crowd and came straight at me as if he was being led by a dowsing stick.
Actually, the guiding instrument sat on his shoulder. The videocam in fact might have been mounted permanently there, the way it led the guy shoulder-first as if he was doing some kind of walking tango across the floor.
“Hi, I’m Jason’s uncle, Jim Foraker. You must be from Darcy’s side of the family.”
“Just mildly acquainted, is all.”
“I’m making a video for the kids,” he said, bombardiering through the camera eyepiece onto my visage. “When Jason and Darcy get up into the years a little, it’ll be kind of a kick for them to look back and see who all was at their wedding, don’t you think?”
Especially when they try to figure out who the hell I am. Before I could retrieve my tuxedoed bearded self from posterity’s lens, however, Jason’s videoing uncle let drop: “I’ve got the sound package on this machine too, so how about saying something? Just act real natural. Tell the kids maybe what it was like at your own wedding?”
Which one? tore through my mind first. Shirley, when our young blood was on perk day and night. Marcella, everlasting but lost to me now too. My God, it gets to be a lot, to have to publicly pick and choose among sorrows. Darcy and Jason replaying on their golden anniversary in the year 2039 will have to be the ones to report whether I flinched, tottered, trembled, or just what. But whatever was registered by the videotape constituted only an emotional fraction. I felt as if I was coming apart, the pieces of my life I most prized—Marcella, the ranch, our life there together, our astonishing offspring Mariah and Lexa—cracking from me like streambanks being gashed away by rising water: yet at the same time I needed to hold, to not buckle under even to those heaviest thoughts, to somehow maintain myself in the here and now. Atrium extravaganza or not, other people’s occasions deserve their sorrowless chance.
So. I had it to do, didn’t I. Squaring myself in Jim Foraker’s frame of lens to the extent I could, I began.
“Every wedding is the first one ever invented, for the couple involved. So I won’t go into any comparison of this one with my own. But I can tell you a little something about after. I don’t know whether a shivaree is still the custom”—some manner of mischief was; out in the parking lot I could see young guys tying a clatter of tin cans on behind a car with JUST MARRIED! DARCY ??? JASON soaped all over it—“but after Marcella and I got hitched, everybody in the Two Medicine country who was mobile poured in to the ranch that night.”
Cars and pickups all with horns honking, it was like a convoy from the loony bin. People climbed out pounding on dishpans and wash-tubs and hooting and hollering; you could have heard them all the way onto the other side of Breed Butte. Of course the men laid hands on me and the women on Marcella, and we each got wheelbarrowed around the outside of the house clockwise and tipped out ceremoniously at the front door. Then it was incumbent on us to invite everybody in for the drinking and dancing, all the furniture in the living room pushed along one wall to make enough floor for people to foot to the music.
Luckily there is no limit to the congratulations that can be absorbed, and Marce and I were kept giddily happy by all the well-wishers delivering us handshakes and kisses on the cheek. Leave it to our fathers, though, to carry matters considerably beyond that. Lambing was just starting, and under the inspiration of enough wallops of scotch, Dode Withrow and Varick McCaskill formed the notion to go check on the drop band for me; as Dode declared, “Mac and me all but invented the sonofabitching sheep business.” It was a mark of the occasion that Midge Withrow and my mother did not forthwith veto that foray, but just gave their spouses glances that told them to come back in somewhat more sober than they were going out. First Dode and my father had to flip a coin as to which of them got my working pair of overshoes to wear to the shed and who got stuck with two left ones from the discards in the corner of the mud porch, and then there was considerable general razzing from the rest of us about how duded up they were to be lamb lickers, but eventually the two of them clopped off, unbuckled but resolute, toward the lambing shed. Busy as we were with our houseful, Marce and I lost track of the fact of our sires traipsing around out there in the Noon Creek night, until we heard the worried blats of a ewe. Coming
nearer and nearer. Then the front door flung open and there stood the volunteer overshoe brigade, muck and worse shed-stuff up the front of both of them to their chins—Dode had been the one who drew the two left overshoes, and it had been that awkward footwear that sent him sprawling face-first; my father, it developed, simply fell down laughing at Dode—and a highly upset mother sheep skittishly trailing them and stamping a front hoof while they wobbled in the doorway declaring, “By God, Jick and Marce, you can’t afford not to hire us,” each man with a lamb held high, little tykes still yellow and astonished from birth: the first twins of that lambing season.
Finishing that telling, I sought how to say next what it still meant to me, that shivaree of almost forty years before.
“I suppose there must have been a total of a couple of thousand years of friends under our roof, Marcella’s and mine, that shivaree night. A lot has happened since; the toughest part being that Marcella isn’t in this life with me, any more. But that shouldn’t rob what was good at the time. Our shivaree was utmost fun, and by Christ,” I nodded emphatically to make sure the lens picked up this part, “so is the remembering of it. Darcy, Jason,” I lifted my champagne glass, just a hummingbird sip left in it by now but any was plenty to wish on, “here’s to all you’ll store up together, starting now.”
• • •
Jason’s uncle thanked me for my videocam soliloquy and I told him it’d been my pleasure, and next thing, it was ceremony time. I found where Leona and Riley were saving a seat for me. No sooner was I sat than Riley said, “Here you go,” and proffered me a little packet of the sort I saw everybody had.
“What’ve we got here?”
“Birdseed,” he defined. “You throw it at the bride and groom when they head out the door to their honeymoon these days—it’s better for the birds than rice is.”
Take progress any time you can find it, I guess, so I tucked away the birdseed for later flinging and sat back to watch matrimony happen. The waterfall had been switched off so that it wouldn’t drown out the minister’s performance. For that matter, the entire huge cube of the atrium had quieted down. Arriving guests and the desk clerks stopped in midtransaction to watch. Waitresses paused lest a swinging door emit a sound. By the time the groom was escorted by his best man down the ramp past the glass elevator and the bride made her entrance from the videogames area, you could have heard a Bible page drop.