Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

fourteen Welshmen. (Great-uncle Hugh had liked that. He’d slapped his knee and rolled it over and over on his tongue, getting it wronger every time he said it. Her father would be quoting it for the next fifty years, the way he’d been quoting for the last twenty-five, “Fool Ahpril, Bill Jones! Fly-horse on door-barn! Fool Ahpril!)
    And so at last she could be alone. In half an hour Uncle John would drive her to the church, and there would be the last-minute bustle, the anxious fuss, the fear that every minute detail might not go perfectly, according to proper ritual. She thought: We should have gone to a JP and told them afterward.
    In the old Welsh wedding gown she felt unnatural—false. It would be different if you were pretty, she thought. She’d been shocked when she’d seen herself in the mirror the first time, trying it on. The gown was scratchy and tighter than she’d expected. It was yellowed by time, yet, in spite of that, mysteriously pure, she thought; serene. But at the lace cuffs her wrists were bony, and her hands were like a man’s. With the veil lifted up her face showed angular and grim: She looked neither innocent nor gentle and wise, merely callow. She had said, “It doesn’t fit.”
    â€œDon’t be silly, Callie,” her mother had said. “We just need to alter it a little, that’s all.”
    She’d said frantically, “I mean, it isn’t right for me.”
    Aunt Anna said, “Breathe in.”
    When they had it pinned up, her mother stepped back to study her, and she smiled, teary, blind to how terrible Callie looked. And now her own tears came gushing. “Mother,” she said, “my feet are too big.”
    â€œOne wedding I played at, the girl tripped and broke her wrist,” Aunt Anna said.
    â€œMother, listen to me,” Callie said. “Look at me once.”
    â€œHush,” her mother said. “Callie, you look lovely.”
    She had clenched her teeth. But she had given in, to the gown as to the rest. Soon it would be over.
    It was a beautiful day. She stood as still as the glass of the window, with her hands folded, the veil drawn over her face. Across the road lay golden stubble where Mr. Cook’s wheat had been, a few weeks ago. Off to her right the land dropped sharply, falling away toward Mr. Soames’ diner and the lower valley, at the end of the valley gray-blue mountains rounding up into blue-white sky. It was pleasantly warm, a light breeze moving the leaves of the maples on the lawn. She watched the bakery truck slow down at the mailbox and turn in. A beautiful day for a wedding, she thought. She meant it to be a happy thought, but she couldn’t tell whether she was happy or not. Children were singing, around the corner of the house, out of sight.
    Karen is her first name,
First name, first name,
Karen is her first name,
Among the little white daisies.
    The song made her remember something. She had whispered to her friend that her boyfriend’s name was David Parks—knowing perfectly well the rules of the game, that all of them would now find out that Callie Wells liked David Parks—but when her friend turned and told the others, and when the whole ring of children began to sing it, their voices gleeful and merciless, she felt sick with shame and believed she would never dare look at him again. The memory brought a sudden, fierce nostalgia, a hunger to be once again and forever the child she could now see with fond detachment, loving and pitying her, laughing at her sorrow as once her mother must have laughed. For some reason the memory triggered another, one that was intimately related with the first, but she couldn’t think how:
    Poor Howard’s dead and gone,
Left me here to sing his song. …
    Panic filled her chest. It’s a mistake, she thought. I don’t love him. He was ugly.

2
    All around the room—everywhere but in front of the closed doors