convinced Ledford to put everything he had on Busher in the mile race. Both men emptied their wallets, and both men cashed in fourfigure tickets. They walked out of the racetrack feeling as good as two medical discharges living on military pensions could feel.
They hit a nightclub, then Erm’s mother’s place for a meal. In the driveway was an Olds Touring and a red Packard sedan with suicide doors. After she had kissed him six times, called him “country handsome,” and complimented his appetite, Ledford asked Erm’s mother how much she wanted for the Packard. Without missing a beat, she answered, “Five hundred cash for a marrying man.” It was a done deal. Instead of taking the train back to Huntington to be married, Ledford would ride in style.
Before he left the next morning, he phoned Rachel. She sounded tired. “Well, we’re in the money,” he told her. Said he’d be home earlier than planned, and that he had a surprise.
“Me too,” Rachel said. “I’m pregnant.”
Ledford didn’t know whether to howl or have a heart attack. But he smiled, and told her he was doing so. Then he told her he loved her. He meant it.
“A springtime baby,” she said.
“Nice time of year.”
He fired up the Packard and waved goodbye to Mrs. Bacigalupo. In the passenger seat, Erm nodded off within three city blocks. He was coming to West Virginia to be Ledford’s best man.
Crossing the flat expanse of Indiana, there was peace inside the car. Neither of them knew that across the world, the city of Hiroshima had already been erased by the atom bomb. Gone, all of it. One hundred thousand men, women, and children had been evaporated.
The war was nearly over.
* * *
THE RECEPTION’S BUFFET table was as long as a limousine. Folks who’d grown accustomed to rationing during the war lined up to get their fingers greasy. Here was a spread not grown in any victory garden. There was an apple and salami porcupine, chicken livers and bacon, cocktail sausages, dried beef logs, bacon-stuffed olives swimming in dressing, salami sandwiches, shrimp with horseradish, pineapple rounds with bleu cheese pecan centers, roast salmon on the bone, and anchovies with garlic butter. Ledford bit into the last of these and winced. This was partly on account of his toothache, but it was more than that. The little anchovies called to mind those long-forgotten fish-and-rice rations, stolen from the dead hands of the enemy. Ledford swallowed and smiled to a skinny old woman he knew to be Rachel’s kin. He turned from the buffet table and bumped into Lucius Ball, his new father-in-law.
“How do you find the spread?” Lucius asked. His neck fat quivered as he hollered over the trumpet’s blare.
“Plentiful,” Ledford said.
The man had spared little expense to host his only child’s wedding in his own backyard, and he wanted it acknowledged.
Lucius tried to be friendly. He was nervous about the money Eli Mann had left to Mary in his will. Money she’d be doling out in short order. “How’s the leg?” he asked. The band finished a fast Harry James number. They’d only played three songs, but already they pulled their silk handkerchiefs as if choreographed, mopping sweat before the bride and groom’s dance.
“It’s just fine.” Ledford answered. “Excuse me.” He’d spotted Erm talking up a curvy brunette he knew to be fifteen, if that.
Ledford walked away. He didn’t care if it was rude. His father-inlaw was fishing for gratitude, and he wasn’t going to get it. Not so long as he was the way he was. Lucius Ball had never been able to keep his pecker in his pants, not even with a dying wife. Such things had kept right up. Everybody knew of his transgressions, and Lucius didn’t give a damn. And now, the house on the hill was done up in grand fashion for the reception. If the church was dark and humble, this was whitelinen and bulb-light flashy. Ledford had seen too much of nothing to be impressed by so much everything. He looked up at the tent’s ceiling as he walked. There was a rust-colored water stain at the center post. A blemish amidst all that white. It called to mind the hole in his tent at Guadalcanal. That drip against his Adam’s apple. McDonough.
He came up quiet behind Erm and kneed him in the leg. “I see you met Rachel’s cousin Bertie,” Ledford said. “Bertie’s a freshman in high school.”
Erm didn’t care how old she was. He started to say so when the bandleader came over the PA. “About one minute now, if we could gather up the bride and groom.”
Erm’s dress blues had been in a box for three years. It showed. Ledford wore a store-bought black tuxedo, and that morning, when he’d asked his best man why he didn’t do the same, Erm pointed to his brass belt buckle and grabbed his crotch. “Eagles and anchors,” he’d said. “She spreads eagle, I drop anchor.”
Ledford stepped from the crowded tent and looked up at the bedroom window. A light was on.
He nodded hellos and fake-smiled his way through the strangers on the porch, climbed the stairs inside and knocked before opening the door.
Rachel sat on the bed beside her mother, whose complexion was not unlike the white of her old hobnail bedspread. There was a coughedblood stain on the hem of her bedsheet. Underneath, her shoulder and hip bones stuck out like stones.
Both women smiled at him.
In the glow of the table lamp, Rachel looked so tan and young next to her mother. Rachel pulled pins from the bun in her hair. Her veil sat next to a red glass bottle of codeine.
“Crowded down there?” Mary Ball’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper, but Ledford listened to her every syllable. He’d come to love and respect his new mother-in-law. Once, when he’d come up short on tuition money, she’d stuck a hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket and told him, “Any man who takes a degree in history needs a little help.” Then she’d laughed.
There was none of that now. Laughing always brought up the blood.
“Yes ma’am. It’s packed to the tent poles,” he answered. He sat down next to Rachel and took her hand. “They’re calling us for our first dance.”
“Open the window wider,” Mary Ball told them, lifting a bony finger. “I want to hear your song.” Ledford did as she said. She called him back over to the bedside. Looked him in the eye and squeezed his hand. “You do right by Rachel,” she said.
“I will.”
“You don’t ever forget what you’ve promised in marriage.”
“I won’t.”
It worried the old woman that Ledford had no people there, no kin to speak of at all.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rachel wiped her tears before they went back out. She blew her nose and breathed in deep and kissed her man. “I almost told her I was pregnant,” she said.
He nodded. “I think she might know it anyhow.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” She laughed a little. Dusk had gone to dark outside the French doors behind her. Her gown looked almost silver against it. “Still as hot out there?”
He nodded again. Stared at her.
“What?” she said. “Are you drunk?”
“No.” Seeing her in the dress made him nearly as clumsy as the first time he’d gone to her apartment and knocked over picture frames. “Can you dance in those?” He pointed to her high-heeled shoes.
“If I can’t, I’ll take em off.”
Though it wasn’t as good as Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, the band did a nice rendition of “Snowfall,” and Rachel laid her head against Ledford’s chest, and she knew they’d do what they’d pledged to do earlier that day. Richer or poorer. Sickness and health. This was forever. And Ledford looked down at the length of her and smiled at how the wedding gown could just as soon be the nurse’s