The Son Who Did Not Marry

The family were ordinary people, the kind who are remembered in a tale only because one winter broke their hearts. They had one son, and they had raised him carefully, and they had meant to see him married before the new year. He did not live to see it.

He took the fever in the eleventh month. The doctors came and went, and the women of the house sat with him night after night, and the boy was brave about it, which made it worse. He died on the longest night of the year, holding his mother's hand, and the house went quiet around him.

His father buried him in the family ground, and put his tablet in the hall, and the house settled into the particular quiet of a house that has lost its only child. There was nothing to be done. There is never very much to be done, in such houses, but the doing of it takes the rest of a man's life.

It was the mother, in the end, who raised the matter. She did not raise it as a comfort, exactly; she raised it as a worry. He has no one, she said, to his father, on the fortieth day. No wife to light his lamp, no one to speak to him in the dark. He was a good boy. He should not be alone.

Her husband knew what she meant. The old custom, as old as the country itself, allowed for this: a dead son might be given a dead bride, that the two might keep one another company under the earth, and neither be lonely in the long night. It was called a ghost marriage. It was not spoken of lightly, but it was not forbidden either.

They had hesitated, as all such families hesitate. To marry a living daughter to a dead son is to condemn a living girl, and no decent family would do it. But to marry a dead girl to a dead boy, that was different. That was two lonely children who had been unlucky, given one another.

So they asked. They did not advertise. They spoke quietly, as families speak of such things, and in the course of the winter they heard of a family, two villages off, who had lost a daughter in the same season, a girl of good name, who had not been promised to anyone and who, by all accounts, had been as gentle as their own son had been.

The two families met, as such families meet, not with feast-days but with gravity. They asked after the dead, and found that the dead had in common the two things that matter: they had been young, and they had been good. The fathers agreed. The mothers cried together, and the crying was its own understanding.

They fixed a day. The bride's bones, which had not yet been moved to any family ground, were to be brought, with ceremony, to the family hill. There, beside the boy's grave, a second grave would be opened, and she would lie at his side, and the two tablets would stand together on the altar, as man and wife. It was a small, quiet thing. It was the whole of what two grieving families could do for their dead.

They did not expect it to change anything. They were not, after all, superstitious people. They did it because the custom allowed it, and because it was the kindest thing they could think of, and because a house that has lost its only son will do almost anything that looks, for an hour, like kindness.

What they did not know, on the morning they carried the girl's coffin up the family hill, was that the girl inside it had been waiting. She had been waiting since the fever took her, alone, in her own narrow room, for someone to say her name aloud to someone who would listen. On that morning, someone did.