The Wedding Vow

I did not stand at the altar, I stood at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved, and the minister stood on the top step holding the open Bible. The church was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God's stable perfectly cleaned. It was night, spring—outside, a moat of mud, and inside, from the rafters, flies fell onto the open Bible, and the minister tilted it and brushed them off. We stood beside each other, crying slightly with fear and awe. In truth, we had married that first night, in bed, we had been married by our bodies, but now we stood in history—what our bodies had said, mouth to mouth, we now said publicly, gathered together, death. We stood holding each other by the hand, yet I also stood as if alone, for a moment, just before the vow, though taken years before, took. It was a vow of the present and the future, and yet I felt it to have some touch on the distant past or the distant past on it, I felt the silent, dry, crying ghost of my parents' marriage there, somewhere in the bright space—perhaps one of the plummeting flies, bouncing slightly as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed away. I felt as if I had come to claim a promise—the sweetness I'd inferred from their sourness; and at the same time that I had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg. And yet, I had been working toward this hour all my life. And then it was time to speak—he was offering me, no matter what, his life. That is all I had to do, that evening, to accept the gift I had longed for—to say I had accepted it, as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take? I do. I take as he takes—we have been practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.