I haven’t brought a diary to the beach with me today. I wrote nothing while I was at the Ark, but the memories are acid-etched. I’ve been trying to tell Stephen about my wedding, which is difficult, since he doesn’t entirely understand the concept of marriage. But he understands religious ceremonies. He endures enough of them.
“It was a lovely, clear, fall day, Stephen, although I don’t suppose even a drenching rain would’ve dampened my spirits.”
He’s sitting sideways on the log, one leg propped up to support his elbow. On this sunny day he wears pants cut above his knees, and he’s taken off his moccasins. “It might’ve dampened you,” he says, laughing.
“So it would. Anyway, just after noon, Enid and a gaggle of women came to my room to dress me. The way the bride dressed was part of the wedding tradition. Brides always wore white. The women decked me out in a long skirt, a blouse with full sleeves gathered at the wrists, and a scarf that fell to my waist, all made of fine, white wool. Then Bernadette presented me a bouquet of lavender asters and white pearly everlasting, and Nehemiah came to take me to the church. He was to give me away, and he seemed as proud as if I really were his daughter.”
“He was to give… you away?”
“A bride was traditionally given to the groom by her father. Nehemiah served as my surrogate father. Oh, those were ancient and densely patriarchal traditions, Stephen.” I give him an oblique smile, but his answering smile is tentative. “Then with Nehemiah at my side, surrounded by those chirping women, I walked to the church, and everyone told me how beautiful I was. Well, I wasn’t beautiful then and never had been. Yet later, when I met Luke at the altar, I looked into his eyes and…”
And saw there all my hope, all my future, and he looked back as if he saw his hope and future in me.
“I saw that I was, at that moment, beautiful. At least, to Luke. I remember Sister Leah—she was Rebecca’s mother—sang ‘Amazing Grace,’ then Luke and I exchanged our vows of love and faith and obedience. Till death us do part. And Luke gave me his mother’s gold wedding band.” I look down at my left hand, wrinkled, disfigured with arthritis, and remember the hand, still smooth and straight, on which Luke placed that gold band. “And the Doctor smiled on Luke and me like a lesser sun and prayed that the lord should also smile on us, that out of our love would come the fruit of the lord’s mercy and wisdom.”
Stephen doesn’t seem to hear the hollowness in that. He says wistfully, “It must’ve been wonderful. I wish…”
“What, Stephen?”
He turns seaward. “We’ll never have weddings here, I guess.”
“Probably not unless other people come here. Maybe then there’ll be weddings.” And I hope there will be weddings and not wars.
He only nods, and I go on. “After the wedding there was a feast on tables set up outside the church. No music or dancing or spirits, of course, but there was a great deal of conviviality. The array of food was astounding. It was as if every woman were entering her dish in a contest. And there were gifts for Luke and me. Handwoven cloth, baby clothes, a crib, a down quilt. At dusk the tables were put away, and we went to the church for evening service, which, as I remember, was mercifully short. Then Luke and I walked together to our household. Our household, finally…”
And the air was crackling with the first frost, the stars so clear, it was dizzying. By candlelight Luke led me to the room where I had slept alone for two long nights, and he ceremoniously divested me of my white scarf and blouse and skirt and made love to me with sweet, furious vigor, and it was a homecoming we celebrated until dawn.
“It was a golden autumn, Stephen, warm days and frosty nights, and the harvest was good. Halcyon days, that September and October.”
He studies me a moment. “What does halcyon mean?”
“Oh, peaceful and happy. Not that those were easy days. They were working days, from dawn to dusk. I was astounded at how much the Flock accomplished, and it all seemed to happen without conscious organization. At least, that’s what I thought, until I realized the organizational decisions emanated from the church—from that room behind the altar where the Doctor lived. He not only lived behind the church, but he’d set up his clinic there. Well, it was only an examination room and another room with three beds in it. But it seemed fitting that he should live and work there at the center of the Ark.”
“Did you get to be Bernadette’s apprentice at nursing?”
“No. I didn’t have the nerve to ask. I knew that before I asked any favors, I had to prove myself as a working member of the Flock.” I give that a short laugh. “And I was indeed a working member.”
“What kind of work did you do?”
“Almost anything, Stephen. Fall was an especially busy time of year—just as it is here. There’s so much to do to prepare for winter. At the Ark we had grain to scythe, thresh, and winnow, and our methods weren’t far removed from those used in the Fertile Crescent five thousand years ago, even though the barley was a space-age hybrid adapted to cool climates. Unfortunately it wasn’t adaptable enough to grow here on the ocean front. And there were fruits and vegetables to can, animals to butcher, meat to salt or smoke, wood to cut, split, and stack. Plus the usual chores of laundry, ironing, mending, cooking, soap making, candle making, and cleaning, not only the household, but the privies, the bathhouse, even—or especially—the church.”
And I offered myself for any task, drove myself to the limits of endurance under the goad of my compulsion to prove myself. Luke was solicitous and proud, and that was my reward. He was with me, morning and evening, at the church services, and that made them bearable. I never ceased to be enthralled by the music nor appalled at the sermons, at the Doctor’s brutal eloquence, at the sheer nonsense of his messages. His recurrent themes were sin—and its consequences, told in Dantean detail—and the second coming of Christ. He hammered at those themes day after day, and I could understand why after all these years the Flock still expected Jesus to come and waft them to the heaven described by John the Divine, with its abundance of worldly treasures, where a man-shaped god sat on a throne as grand as any mortal king’s.
Stephen breaks my reverie. “It must’ve been hard for you at the Ark.”
“What? Oh. Yes, the work was exhausting, but that wasn’t the hardest part of my adjustment to the Ark.”
“What was the hardest?”
I look into his night-deep eyes. “The Doctor,” I answer. “Rather, his philosophy. The trouble was, I couldn’t agree with it, but neither could I express my disagreement, not if I hoped to stay at the Ark, and that was the only hope for any children I might bear. I wasn’t raised in his kind of religion, Stephen, and I think you have to be to accept it.”
That brings a long, thoughtful pause. “What kind of religion were you raised in?” he asks finally.
I doubt Stephen is ready to accept even agnosticism, and certainly nothing beyond that. Not yet. So I hedge. “My mother belonged to another Christian denomination. I was raised in the philosophy that people should decide for themselves what to believe, that no mere human being should tell them what to believe. And I was raised in the philosophy that the concept of god can’t be made in the image of man.”