Elizabeth looked at her bent father, where he glared at the furniture of Christianity because it insulted what he was calling his intelligence. There was no blessing in the leather fingers of her father. She glanced quickly at the man beside her who was becoming her husband second by second. Joseph’s face was set and hard. She could see how his jaw muscles quivered tensely. And suddenly Elizabeth was sorry for Joseph. She thought with a little frantic sadness, “If my mother were here, she could say to him, ‘Here is Elizabeth and she is a good girl because I love her, Joseph. And she will be a good wife when she learns how to be. I hope you will get outside the hard husk you’re wearing, Joseph, so you may feel tenderly for Elizabeth. That’s all she wants and it’s not an impossible thing.’”
Elizabeth’s eyes glittered suddenly with bright tears. “I will,” she said aloud, and, silently, “I must pray a little. Lord Jesus, make things easy for me because I am afraid. In all the time I’ve had to learn about myself, I have learned nothing. Be kind to me, Lord Jesus, at least until I learn what kind of thing I am.” She wished there were a crucifix some place in the church, but it was a Protestant church, and when she drew a picture of the Christ in her mind, He had the face, the youthful beard, the piercing puzzled eyes of Joseph, who stood beside her.
Joseph’s brain was tight with a curious fear. “There’s a foulness here,” he thought. “Why must we go through this to find our marriage? Here in the church I’ve thought there lay a beauty if a man could find it, but this is only a doddering kind of devil worship.” He was disappointed for himself and for Elizabeth. He was embarrassed that Elizabeth must witness the maculate entrance to the marriage.
Elizabeth tugged at his arm and whispered, “It’s over now. We must walk out. Turn toward me slowly.” She helped him to turn, and as they took the first step down the aisle, the bells broke forth in the belfry above them. Joseph sighed shudderingly. “Here’s God come late to the wedding. Here’s the iron god at last.” He felt that he would pray if he knew some powerful way to do it. “This ties in. This is the marriage—the good iron voice!” And he thought, “This is my own thing and I know it. Beloved bells, pounding your bodies with your frantic hearts! It is the sun sticks, striking the bell of the sky in the morning; and it’s the hollow beating of rain on the earth’s full belly—of course, I know—the thing that whips the tortured air with lightning. And sometimes the hot sweet wind plucks at the treetops in a yellow afternoon.”
He looked sidewise and down and whispered, “The bells are good, Elizabeth. The bells are holy.”
She started and peered up at him in wonder, for her vision had not changed; the Christ’s face was still the face of Joseph. She laughed uneasily and confessed to herself, “I’m praying to my own husband.”
McGreggor, the saddler, was wistful when they went away. He kissed Elizabeth clumsily on the forehead.
“Don’t forget your father,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be an unusual thing if you did. It’s almost a custom in these days.”
“You’ll come to the ranch to see us, won’t you, father?”
“I visit no one,” he replied angrily. “A man takes only weakness and a little pleasure from an obligation.”
“We’ll be glad to see you if you come,” said Joseph. ‘Well, you’ll wait a long time, you and your thousand acre ranches. I’ll see you both in Hell before I’d visit you.”
After a time he drew Joseph aside, out of hearing of Elizabeth, and he said plaintively, “It’s because you’re stronger than I am that I hate you. Here I’m wanting to like you, and I can’t because I’m a weak man. And it’s the same about Elizabeth and about her crazy mother. Both of them knew I was a weak man, and I hated both of them.”
Joseph smiled on the saddler and felt pity and love for him. “It’s not a weak thing you’re doing now,” he observed.
“No,” McGreggor cried, “it’s a good strong thing. Oh, I know in my head how to be strong, but I can’t learn to do it.
Joseph patted him roughly on the arm. “We’ll be glad to see you when you come to visit.” And instantly McGreggor’s lip stiffened in anger.
They went by train from Monterey and down the long Salinas Valley, a grey-and-gold lane between two muscular mountain lines. From the train they could see how the wind blew down the valley, toward the sea, how its dry force bent the grain against the ground until it lay like the coat of a sleek-haired dog, how it drove the herds of rolling tumbleweeds toward the valley mouth and how it blew the trees lopsided and streaming until they grew that way. At the little stations, Chualar, Gonzales and Greenfield, they saw the grain teams standing in the road, waiting to store their fat sacks in the warehouses. The train moved beside the dry Salinas river with its broad yellow bed where blue herons stalked disconsolately over the hot sand, searching for water to fish in, and where now and then a grey coyote trotted nervously away, looking back apprehensively at the train; and the mountains continued on with them on either side like huge rough outer tracks for a tremendous juggernaut.
In King City, a small railroad town, Joseph and Elizabeth left the train and walked to the livery barn where Joseph’s horses had been stabled while they were gone. They felt new and shiny and curiously young as they drove out of King City on the road to the valley of Our Lady. New clothes were in the traveling baskets in the wagon box. Over their clothes they wore long linen dusters to protect them from the road dirt, and Elizabeth’s face was covered with a dark blue veil, behind which her eyes darted about, collecting data for memory. Joseph and Elizabeth were embarrassed, sitting shoulder to shoulder and looking ahead at the tan road, for it seemed a presumptuous game they were playing. The horses, four days rested and full of fat barley, flung their heads and tried to run, but Joseph tightened the brake a little and held them down, saying, “Steady, Blue. Steady, Pigeon. You’ll be tired enough before we get home.”
A few miles ahead they could see the willow boundary of their own home stream where it strode out to meet the broad Salinas river. The willows were yellow in this season, and the poison-oak that climbed into the branches had turned scarlet and menacing. Where the rivers joined, Joseph pulled up to watch how the glittering water from Nuestra Señora sank tiredly and disappeared into the white sand of its new bed. It was said the river ran pure and sweet under the ground, and this could be proved by digging a few feet into the sand. Even within sight of the juncture there were broad holes dug in the river bed so the cattle might drink.
Joseph unbuttoned his duster, for the afternoon was very hot, and he loosened the neckerchief designed to keep his collar free from dust, and removing his black hat he wiped the leather head-band with a bandana. “Would you like to get down, Elizabeth?” he asked. “You could bathe your wrists in the water and that would make you cool.”
But Elizabeth shook her head. It was strange to see the swathed head shake. “No, I am comfortable, dear. It will be very late when we get home. I am anxious to go on.”
He slapped the flat lines on the horses’ buttocks and they moved on beside the river. The tall willows along the road whipped at their heads and sometimes drew a long pliant switch caressingly over their shoulders. The crickets in the hot brush sang their head-piercing notes, and flying grasshoppers leaped up with a flash of white or yellow wings, rattled a moment through the air and dropped to safety in the dry grass. Now and then some little blue brush rabbit skittered in panic off the road, and once safe, perched on his haunches and peeked at the wagon. There was a smell of toasting grass-stems in the air, and the bitter of willow bark, and the perfume of river bay trees.
Joseph and Elizabeth leaned loosely back against the leather seat, caught in the rhythm of the day and drowsed by the pounding hoofs. Their backs and shoulders supplely absorbed the vibrations of the buckboard. Theirs was a state close to sleep but more withdrawn to thoughtlessness, more profound than sleep. The road and the river pointed straight at the mountains now. The dark sage covered the higher ridges like a coarse fur, except in the water scars, which were grey and bare like healed saddle sores on a horse’s back. The sun was quartering to the westward and the road and the river pointed the place of its setting. For the two riding behind the plodding horses, clock time dissolved into the inconstant interval between thought and thought. The hills and the river pass swept toward them grandly, and then the road began to ascend and the horses hunched along stiffly, pounding the air with heads that swung up and down like hammers. Up a long slope they went. The wheels grated on shattered flakes of limestone, of which the hills were made. The iron tires ground harshly on the rock.