The Quiet Wedding

The wedding was held at dusk, on the family hill, with no guests but the two families and the priest who knew the rites. There was no feast, no music, no procession of living friends. The ceremony for the dead is shorter than the ceremony for the living, because the dead have less to say.

They laid the girl's coffin beside the boy's grave, and they set the two tablets side by side, and the priest spoke the words that bind two households in grief and in hope. He was an old man, and he had done this before, and he did it without haste, because haste in such a rite is an insult to the dead.

The mothers did not weep through it. They had done their weeping, the month before, in their own houses. Here, on the hill, they stood straight, and they held one another by the hand, and they looked at the two graves as a woman looks at two small beds she has made for children who will not come to them.

When it was done, the fathers bowed, and the mothers bowed, and they came down the hill in the twilight, leaving the two dead children to their first night together. There was nothing more to be done. They had, as they thought, finished.

That night, the boy's mother dreamed. She was not, as a rule, a dreamer. She had not dreamed of her son since the week after he died. But on this night she dreamed of him, and he was not alone.

He was standing in the door of her own kitchen, just as he had stood a thousand times when he came in from the fields. And he was not alone. A young woman stood a little behind him, in a plain dress, with her hands folded, and she was looking at the mother with a look that was not a plea. It was a courtesy.

The boy spoke first. He was as she remembered him: quiet, a little awkward, glad to be home. Mother, he said, this is she. I brought her to thank you. She has no mother of her own here, and she did not want to go through this night without saying it.

The woman stepped forward then, and bowed as a young woman bows to her mother-in-law, and the mother in the dream felt, to her own astonishment, that she was expected to bow back. She did. She had never in her life bowed to a ghost, and she did not know why she did it now, except that the girl was so plainly expecting it.

You are very good to us, the girl said. Her voice was soft, and it did not sound like a ghost voice. It sounded like a girl who has been taught all her life to be careful of other people. We did not expect it. We had not, either of us, any family that would think to do such a thing.

Then the mother woke, and the kitchen was empty, and the dawn was not yet. She lay in the dark and thought about the dream, and she did not tell herself it was a dream. She had been a housekeeper all her life, and she knew the difference between a house that has had a guest and a house that has not. This house, that night, had had a guest. The guest had been polite. The guest had thanked her.

She rose before the others, and she lit the kitchen fire, and she set out two bowls on the table instead of one, out of an old, unthinking courtesy to the dead. Her husband came down and saw them, and said nothing. He had been the boy's father, and he understood, and he sat down at the table as though the second place had always been laid.