He was Mrs. Mellon’s idea.

The bride and groom were attended by two uniformed park rangers (one a female), three big ugly river guides from Lee’s Ferry and six members of the North Rim fire-fighting crew wearing their yellow hard hats and orange fire-resistant shirts. (Two females.) A pumper unit mounted on a government Dodge three-quarter-ton four-by-four stood by, available for action in case, as the boys said, the nuptial embraces became overheated.

Music for the occasion was supplied by Slim Randles and The Dusty Chaps, an amateur jug band of cooks, dishwashers and mule wranglers from the North Rim Lodge. The band performed a honky-tonk version of Wagner’s “Wedding March,” a medley of tunes by Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, Johnny Paycheck, Marty Robbins, Willie Nelson, Ernest Tubb, Kinky Friedman, Hank Williams, Bob Wills (“still the King”) and Claude “Curly” Debussy (Claire de Lune).

Henry’s idea.

The groom wore formal attire, a traditional gangster suit of blue serge with mighty padded shoulders, rented for the occasion from McCabe’s Funeral Home, Kanab, Utah. Since the pants were six inches too short for his legs he tucked the cuffs into the top of his machine-tooled dude boots and looked fairly presentable.

The bride wore virgin white, a filmy diaphanous ankle-length multilayered froth of lace, gauze, vapor, satin and soo forth, with a coronet of silverleaf lupine, scarlet gilia and white campion at rest on the crown of her yellow hair. Like the groom (but as only he knew) she wore no undies. Excepting, in her case, the requested black lace garter high on the left thigh. She carried a bouquet of mountain wild flowers matching the coronet. When she tossed the bouquet to her maids an errant gust of wind carried it over the edge of the cliff. One of the river guides leaped after it, caught it in midair and disappeared. The band played on—Ernie Ford’s “Tennessee Waltz”—without missing a beat. Mrs. Mellon’s sister fainted. Father Cheswick looked concerned, hiked up his gown and pulled a sterling-silver flask from his hip pocket. The firefighters danced with the ladies from Denver. One of the rangers tossed a coil of purple Perlon line over the rimrock and hoisted up the gnarly, scratched but grinning river guide, the bride’s bouquet still clutched in his bloody right hand.

The bride’s mother smiled at Henry when they danced but the glint in her eyes was not the light of love. Nor of charity.

The sun went down. The music got louder. Violet-green swallows jetted through the air. The music got faster. The bride and groom slipped off through the dusk to Henry’s pickup truck, fell into the cab and sank from view. Henry sat up a minute later with a moist nose and the torn garter clenched in his teeth. The bride rearranged her skirts, Henry stepped on the starter and nothing happened. Laughter burst from the nearby shrubbery. Henry rolled out cursing, waddled awkwardly to the front of his truck, uncinched the hood and looked inside. He reattached a battery cable, got back in the cab, started the engine, geared down and engaged clutch. Nothing happened. He gunned the motor to a furious roar—wheels spinning—but the truck did not move. He slid out, found the rear axle chained to a tree. More laughter. He unhooked the chain, returned to the wheel, shifted into low, raced the engine and popped the clutch. The rear wheels spun and fishtailed in the dirt, blasting the nearby scrub oak with a spray of heavy shot. Somebody yelled. The wheels dug in, found hard ground, the truck leaped forward like a prod-stung bull and vanished into the timber, dragging a ten-foot tail of beer cans.