The night of the wedding there was a full moon and Ruth’s dress, painstakingly made by her mother, had shells and abalone buttons and other things that shine sewn on it. It looked like the reflections of moonlight on the ocean itself. Ruth wrapped herself with a shawl that was also shining. She looked as if she were a spirit that could walk the ocean pathway made by the moon on water, like the woman in one of their stories. In this story, the woman and moon together created the cycles of growing plants, the movement of tides, and the falling rain.

That night, barefoot, Ruth was not only shining with her dress of shell and bead and white ribbon, but she was glowing from inside. The happiness of the two, who were always meant to be together, was visible to all, especially to Ruth’s father, who married them with words in their own language. All noted how much Ruth and her father resembled one another, their bony good looks, their golden skin tanned from sun, their long fingers. They even fished together, and it was hard work. Their muscled arms showed it. All day they fished and their long fingers and hands had calluses. They would have fished into the night except for the collision they once had with a fisherman named Vince Only. At the wedding, Vince, always a fisherman, watched the sea.

“What a smart man you are,” someone said to Thomas after the wedding. Thomas smiled at his new wife. “I know it.”

Linda, Ruth’s friend, her hair curled for the first time, said, “You two have always been married anyway.”

It did seem that way. Ruth and Thomas were, even as infants, two people who had grown together, who were meant for one another, who sat together as infants in their cradleboards watching the adults fishing, gazing at the world around them, and at each other, talking in their own language. Ruth’s stitches had been removed and she could breathe. Yet she did, even then, long for the water at times. Together they had watched his father carve masks for the dances, frightening ones, raven masks, ones that made the children laugh. At night the older people danced, sang, and played old gambling games for stones while the babies watched, the ocean shining in moonlight. They saw all this from the time they were children and they saw one another as if they were one person sharing the same world, the same thoughts.

After the marriage, they moved into a small place by the river and painted it green from top to bottom because it had been the only paint available. They called it “Fruit Box imported from California.” It was where they began their life as a married couple. It was over by the Salmon River. Naked they lay together in the breeze from the windows. Outside was what had once been a fence made of willows, but the posts miraculously took on life and now, in spite of being cut and buried, they bloomed and leafed out, light green, held by wire that Ruth, with her long black hair, set about clipping, calling out, “The liberation of the trees!”