The Bride's Farewell Read Free Page B

ailments. There was one oak chair passed to Mam from her parents, and a wedding clock given by an aunt, now dead, which no longer lent support to the desired illusion of gentility.
    “The only hours requiring our attention,” roared a drunk Joe Ridley one night early in the couple’s marriage, as he swept the clock from its place of pride above the hearth, “are those given to man that he may heed the Lord’s bidding!”
    The glass clock face smashed with a sickening crack, and Mam hurried to sweep the poor broken thing up and hide it away.
    One room downstairs with a fire and a pantry, and one room upstairs were all Pa had managed to build twenty years ago when money and drink were in short supply and he still hoped to convert the world to his faith and Pell’s mam to the view that she hadn’t made the direst mistake of her life in marrying him. The hints had all been there if only she’d paid attention: the low ceilings, the walls not straight enough to support proper windows, the chimney built of straw and mud so it caught fire on windy nights. And no shortage of windy nights.
    Upstairs there was no fire, but the chimney breast passed through Mam’s side of the room, and on freezing winter nights with the wind and filthy rain seeping in through the thatch and Pa fallen down drunk at the inn, the little girls would sneak one at a time into the marital bed. If Pa snored at home, they’d wrap themselves in blankets on the floor and huddle up together against the warmth of the chimney till morning.
    Beside the fire stood a table of hewn oak carved all around with roses, Ridley’s wedding present to the young wife whose parents already hated him for his views without any need of discovering precisely what they were. They recognized the few types of marriageable men at a glance, and knew that a passion for God and a meager glimmer of charm were all that disguised the catastrophic weakness within.
    The wedding table was big enough for eight, and rocked—because the floor was not flat or the legs not square, either of which condemned him.
    Within a decade, his wife had presented him with enough children to fill the table, stifling the cries of the first time, and thereafter squeezing them out with silent resignation. The preacher was proud of his wife and her resistance to death by childbirth, despite the many practical problems her productivity raised. Her forbearance was something to lay claim to, like a hen that laid three seasons out of four, and he took his God-given marital rights without guilt, and occasionally with force. George, James, John, and Edward followed Pell and Lou, and after them came Sally, Fran, and Ellen. Nine children plus Bean. Four now buried in the churchyard at Lover.
    The children went to work as soon as they could walk, according to capacity and inclination: Lou, Sally, and Ellen at home with Mam, and Pell up on the heath with Birdie, later followed about by Frannie on a pony no bigger than a dog. In appearance the two sets of girls couldn’t have been more different: three always tidy, with hair tied up each night in rag curls; the other two dressed like banshees in torn skirts, with brown legs, and hair thick and tangled as a hawthorn hedge.
    Edward might have been a scholar had he possessed the foresight to be born into a different family, and was often to be found half hidden in a stand of grass, reading or practicing his letters. The girls laughed at him without malice.
    “Come for a ride,” Pell would call from the back of her horse, looking for all the world like a centaurine, with her bare legs and tangled mane.
    Edward gazed up at her admiringly, squinting slightly, and begging her silence with a warning finger pressed against his lips. But he needn’t have bothered. She would not give him away to Mam or Pa or Lou or anyone else who might want him for work.
    The older Ridley boys showed signs of having inherited their father’s appetites, and Nomansland parents guarded their