Marrying Stone (42 page)

"Not so fast, Pastor Jay," Roe said quickly. "I won't have you retiring from your pulpit before you marry me officially."

The preacher was momentarily startled and looked at Roe questioningly. "Who is it that you want to marry, son?"

"Why, Meggie," he answered.

The pastor's jaw dropped open and he looked plainly scandalized. "Young widows usually do marry quickly, but during the funeral is highly unusual."

It took several minutes of explanations to convince Pastor Jay of the rightness of Roe's request.

Roe wanted Onery or Jesse to stand up with him, but the preacher insisted that Gid Weston was a better choice. Wanting to get married more than he wanted to argue, Roe acceded to the old man's wishes.

The bride, dressed forlornly in black, and the groom, travel-dusty and with two days' growth of beard, followed Pastor Jay out the church door, up the small incline in the clearing to the summit of the Marrying Stone.

The sun shone down on the remaining traces of the first snow of the year causing it to glimmer brightly against the clear blue sky. The air was clean and fresh and new as if time itself were just beginning. And the young couple who stood together on the ancient stone that had seen so many lives eternally joined together was very much in love.

"Do you take this woman to be yourn, for better or worse, rich or poor, for this life ever, forsaking all?" the preacher asked.

"I do," Roe answered.

"And do you take this man as husband, obeying and keeping, for this life ever, forsaking all?"

"I do," Meggie said.

They turned to look at each other, eyes dazed with loving disbelief. They were together. They were here. And heaven itself was watching.

"Before God and this company," Pastor Jay bellowed out, "I declare ye according to the Word to be Mister and Missus…" The old man hesitated. "What was your name again, son?" he asked.

"Monroe Farley."

Pastor Jay nodded and began again. "Mister and Missus Monroefarley Weston."

Meggie opened her mouth to protest, but she didn't get the chance. Roe accepted the pronouncement given for its intent and laughed.

Possessively he grabbed her hand.

"There is not a skunk in sight this morning, Mrs. Farley," he told her.

Meggie smiled. They didn't need one. In an instant, before God and the good people of the mountain, Meggie and Roe Farley jumped the Marrying Stone.

The sun had barely disappeared behind the mountain when Meggie and Roe made their way through the doorway to the new cabin room. The wedding infare had been set up makeshift and haphazard, but it had worked. The company had eaten the funeral fare, Jesse had played his fiddle for the dancers, and Gid Weston had even hung around to provide a little imbibement for the less saintly of the congregation.

Roe and Meggie were tired and weary, but they were happy. Happier than either of them had ever before hoped to be. Together they hung a patchwork quilt across the opening to the main room to afford them some privacy.

"I think I'll make us a door tomorrow," Roe said.

"That might be a good idea," Meggie agreed.

He turned to the woman who was his bride and ran his hand around her waist, pulling her body up close to his.

"Are you glad that I came back?" he asked.

She feigned coyness for only a minute and then replied, "How can you doubt it?"

Roe grinned. "I don't, but it's good to hear you say it all the same."

She grinned back at him and he placed a tiny kiss on the end of her nose. They embraced warmly, both sighing with the warm, welcome fulfillment of holding the other half of their life so close. He breathed in her scent deeply. And his strength held her fast.

"I'm so glad that you love me," she whispered.

He pulled away to look at her. "Not as glad as I am that you love me."

They stood silently together grinning like a couple of well-fed whistle pigs for long moments.

"You ready to go to bed?" Roe asked.

Meggie blushed. "Yes, well, of course."

The two waited a little uncomfortably in the middle of the room for one of them to make the first move.

"Why don't you take your hair down?" Roe asked.

Immediately Meggie's hands flew to her head and she released the braided coronet that adorned her head with such undue haste she spilled hairpins to the floor.

"I'll get them," Roe said, but when he squatted down, she was right beside him.

They were close, very close, and he brought his mouth to hers, reveling in the sweet taste of her, so well remembered and so much desired.

As the kiss lingered they rose to their feet, the pins completely forgotten.

They finally parted but continued to stand very close, both of them breathing with exaggerated effort.

"You want to help me get down to my josie?" Meggie asked.

Roe swallowed any apprehension he might have felt and nodded. He turned her back to him and dutifully worked the buttons of her jet-black gown as she held her hair up and out of the way.

Meggie closed her eyes in near rapture at the gentle touch of his hands upon her. Determinedly she found her voice and tried to speak offhand.

"I've been sleeping in this room since you've been gone," she said.

Roe pressed his lips to the pale nape of her neck that he had exposed. "I was hoping that you had," he said. "I dreamed about it, you know. In my lonely nights in Cambridge I imagined you asleep on these quilt coverlets."

Meggie felt the warmth of his breath on her skin. It raised gooseflesh all up and down her back and a fluttering in the depths of her chest.

"I imagined you in these quilt coverlets, too," she confessed. "I imagined you here with me. But not sleeping."

He ignored his own shaking hands as he undid the final button at her waist and chuckled. "Meggie, Meggie, Meggie," he said with deliberate teasing. "You talk with the brazenness of a woman who would lay in the grass with a drunken frog gigger."

Not to be outdone by his teasing, Meggie gazed back at him over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow speculatively. "It depends, Mr. Farley, upon just who that frog gigger might be."

He gave her a nod of appreciation and then pulled the bodice of her gown away from her body. Eagerly he helped her lift it over her head and then allowed himself the pleasure once more of viewing his woman in a thin covering of homespun cotton.

"You are beautiful, Meggie," he whispered. After a moment he looked down at the crow-black dress that he still held in his hand.

"But this thing isn't. I think you should burn it," he said. "I'm not overly fond of the color black."

"It's my best dress," Meggie protested. "I'll have to wear it until it's a rag of threads."

"Oh? You're going to be a very practical wife, are you?"

"I have no choice," she answered. "I just got married, you see, and my new husband has given up his job as a scholar to be an Ozarker at leisure. He doesn't have his own farm. We don't have a corn bottom, a pack of dogs, a milk cow, or a hog to our name."

"Guess we'll have to live on love," he said.

"That makes pretty poor eating," she declared.

"Oh, I don't know," Roe said, moving in close. "I'm actually quite fond of nibbling on it from time to time."

He proved the truth of his statement by catching the lobe of her ear between his teeth.

The sensation made Meggie gasp a meaningful "Oh!" as the heat of desire sizzled through her. The new sensation was more than a little frightening. This was no girlish fantasy of love. What happened now between them was real and would have meaning and would be a part of the fabric woven of their lives. Meggie Best was really married to a man whom she really loved and this was really their bedroom where they would really conceive their own children. It scared her. Nervously, she pulled away from him.

"Meggie?" It was a whispered question.

"Let's get into the bed under the covers," she said, hurrying to climb up onto the rope-supported tick. "And douse that light."

He watched her scamper under the quilts and he smiled. "Marriage is all new to me, too, Meggie," he said quietly.

"It's not something that I know anything about. It's not something that I can learn in books."

She nodded in agreement. "We will just have to catch on about it together," she said.

It was obvious that she was trying to be very brave. Still she bit her lip with concern. "Do put out the light, Roe. I think we ought to start out in the dark."

Roe looked at her a long moment and then grinned. "In a minute," he said. "First I've brought something for you."

"For me?"

Roe handed her a parcel wrapped in soft brown flannel.

"Open it," he said.

Nervously Meggie unfolded the cloth. Inside it was a shiny silver spoon tooled with a design very similar to the one of wood she'd given him all those months ago.

"It's beautiful!" she exclaimed.

He pulled the wood one out of his pocket. "I've carried this one with me since the day that I left here."

"I thought you just forgot to return it when you left."

"I couldn't leave it behind. Just like I couldn't leave you behind either," he said. "When I knew I must return to your arms, I asked the jeweler to make this one especially for you. So that you would carry it always and never leave me either."

"Never," she said with solemn sincerity. "I love you, Roe Farley. I could be unselfish once and send you away, but I'll never have the courage to make that mistake again."

He kissed her then, long, lovingly, passionately. When their lips parted, she smoothed the cool metal of the spoon along the softness of her cheek.

"You like it," he said.

"It's a wonderful present. The kind of gift that a prince would bring."

Roe smiled. "You like
princely
gifts. I brought you one of those, too."

"Another gift?"

He nodded. "Do you want it now?"

"Oh, yes," she answered with the excitement of a child.

"I'll get it for you."

Meggie sat up in the bed bright-eyed.

From the inside of his satchel Roe retrieved a fancy blue silk jewel case. The sides were beaded with delicate freshwater pearls and the tiny gold latch at the front was heart-shaped and locked with a delicate filigree key.

When he handed it to Meggie, she gasped.

"For me?"

"The box was my mother's," he said. "My father gave it to her on their wedding day. It's one of the few things of hers that I have."

"It's beautiful," she whispered in awe.

"I always intended it for my bride on her wedding night. Even before I had any idea who that bride might be."

Meggie nodded and swallowed a little self-consciously as she gazed at the beautiful piece of jeweled art so out of place in the primitive Ozark cabin. "It's something that even a very fancy city woman could appreciate as a gift," she said.

"Yes," Roe answered. "I guess that it is. That's why my father bought it for Mother, I suppose. I could have given that box to nearly any woman." Slowly a grin spread across his face. "But what I've put inside the box is something that I would only give to my Meggie."

Her eyes widening, Meggie's heart soared with joy at his words.

"May I open it?"

"Oh, yes, Meggie. I want you to."

Eagerly, but with great care she turned the tiny key in the lock and raised the delicate little latch.

She opened the lid with joyous expectation. Then she hollered like bloody murder. A small green tree frog, at least as surprised as Meggie herself, hopped out of the satin box and onto the quilt coverlet.

"Varmint!" she screamed, scrambling out from beneath the covers of the bed.

Her new husband hooted with laughter.

"Roe Farley! You promised!"

"I didn't promise. Jesse promised."

She jumped to her knees in the middle of the bed and delivered a blow, worthy of a pugilist, to his midsection.

"You… you… you…" she sputtered, unable to think of things bad enough to call him. "You—"

"Husband." He provided the word for her.

With a cry of fury, she began pounding him in angry earnestness. Roe only managed to stop the rain of blows by wrapping his arms around her and falling back upon her on the bed.

The new position offered more pleasurable pursuits and as the fight went out of her, he grinned down into her face.

"I love you, Meggie," he said simply.

"I should beat you senseless," she replied. "But I love you, too."

She wrapped her arms around his neck and slid the galluses off his shoulder and showed him that she meant every word that she said.

As the footboard began to rock and the bedcord whined with strain, the confused little tree frog used his long hind legs to lower himself off the end of the bed. He waited nervously on the floor, sure that at any moment a new calamity might overtake him. After several minutes, when no one tried to catch him or step on him, he began hopping toward the doorway searching for the exit. It wouldn't do to spend the night with two people who had no more sense than to go to bed with the light on.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF

J. MONROE FARLEY

January 5, 1907

Marrying Stone, Arkansas

Have just this morning heard from a gentleman at the Library of Congress in the Columbia District concerning my collection of Ozark songs and tunes. The institution is actively seeking to preserve American folkways and has already contracted with at least two other music collectors in other parts of the country. He was quite interested in my premise of the perpetuation of Middle English in an isolated zone and assured me that a similar finding has been made concurrently in the Appalachians. Although he apologizes for the low sum of money he is offering (he obviously does not understand the value of actual currency in the Ozarks), he is interested in acquiring my recordings to keep for posterity. He tells me that by making gold impressions of the wax cylinders the actual sounds themselves can be saved for time in memoriam. That offers me great comfort and encourages me to continue in my efforts.