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By Root 1404 0

at what was in his hands and got even redder in the face than Sarah. For a long time they just stood there stiff and glowing like a pair of branding irons. Finally Jacob’s brother Noah got up from his bed and came to see what it was all about. He stood there and stared back and forth at the two of them. Probably he didn’t grasp the significance of the cornbread, because, being not just afraid of but uninterested in Indians, he had never been told about the customs of Fanshaw’s people. But he was very concerned to see these two human beings standing in front of one another with downcast but red-hot faces. “S—tfire!” he exclaimed, and snatched the cedar water bucket off the wall and, first removing the cornbread from Jacob’s hands so it wouldn’t get hit, doused the heads of both of them. It is very difficult to blush with a wet head, so, since they could no longer blush, they laughed, which is also a nervous reflex. They laughed until the water on their faces was joined by their tears, and Noah looked at them like they were both crazy, and kept mumbling his favorite expletive, which, however, was somewhat cleaned up for Sarah’s benefit, so that it sounded more like “shoot fair” or “sheet far.”

And that was it. That was all there was to it. Jacob never said “I do,” or “I will” or even “Thanks for the cornbread” or even “Aw, gosh dawg and shucks.” Even today, in some of the big weddings in the Ozarks, people do not shower the bride and groom with rice but with water. At that time, of course, there was no church anywhere near Stay More, nor even a circuit rider or “saddlebag preacher,” and even if there had been, he could not legitimately have married an infidel like Jacob Ingledew. So, hand in hand, Jacob and Sarah simply returned to Lizzie’s house, Jacob gathering sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law right and left along the way. At Lizzie’s house, Sarah announced to her mother, “Maw, we’re spliced.”

The month, come to think of it, was June.

“Already?” Lizzie Swain exclaimed. “What didje do, jist jump over a broomstick together?”

“No. Noah, Noah…he dumped a bucket of water on us.”

“Wal, bless yore hearts, I’m so happy fer yuns,” Lizzie said and embraced and kissed them both, and began sniffling. After she got control of her emotions, she said to Jacob, “But if it wouldn’t be too much bother, could ye read us a little from the Bible fer the occasion?”

Elizabeth Swain, like all of her children, like, in fact, everybody in Stay More for years and years, except Jacob, was unable to read. (One must never say “illiterate” since it is so easily confused with “illegitimate,” a fighting word.) In later years, when he began teaching school, Jacob wondered if his unique peculiarity, his ability to read, was perhaps a curse upon him, and for at least the length of his tenure as schoolmaster, reading was not one of the subjects in the curriculum. Lizzie did, however, have a Bible, an old heirloom, which she often touched, and whose wood-engraving illustrations she often “read,” because she was a very Godfearing person. Jacob, although ungodly, did not mind reading from the Bible on this occasion of their marriage; it was the least he could do as a substitute for going hundreds of miles in search of a preacher, and maybe having to pay the man cash money, at that.

But the trouble was, he didn’t know where to look, in the Bible, for an appropriate passage. He let the book fall open at random, and began reading aloud at random in the Book of Second Kings, “But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?” Jacob slammed the Bible shut, grumbling, “Blackguardy book. I don’t know how to use it.”

But then he remembered a passage from Genesis that he had read when debating Fanshaw on the origin of man, having to do with the marriage of Adam and Eve. He read this. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,