‘You ain’t got no right to judge us, boy.’

‘Carma’ – Jonathan turned aside and addressed himself to her alone – ‘I want to know what you want. I won’t conduct a wedding unless you want me to.’

Carma dropped abruptly to her knees in front of him. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I do – I—’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘I got to – I mean, all the others is married – Cassa and Levada and Lynn. There’s only me. And if something happens – We ain’t got no money. None at all – Oh, I do. I do. I do.’

Jonathan explained that she didn’t really know the man, that there would be other opportunities; Carma grabbed at his hands and wept over them. The wedding was set for four o’clock the following afternoon.

There were eight families living in Hannaville; all of them pitched in to help. Eliza herself made coffee from dried carrots. Jonathan fetched the sheet from the bed he and Sarah had slept on the night before; under Eliza’s directions he hung it in one corner of the downstairs room and placed a bench so the engaged couple could sit behind it until the right moment. At a quarter to four he went upstairs to dress. When he came down again, he found the eight families and their baskets of food squeezed onto a couple of makeshift pews: men, women, children, all piled atop one another, basket atop child atop adult lap. Carma’s feet and the feet and knees of Elias Johannsen, the groom, poked out from beneath the sheet. The eight families sang ‘Here comes the bride’. Carma timidly lifted the sheet aside. Elias turned out to be a man of about seventy, bent and gray but a tough object still, and Jonathan, moved despite himself, performed for the first time the ceremony that seemed to him – three weeks into his own marriage – the most sacred and the most terrifying of all the ceremonies in the world.

When he had spoken the final words, the newlyweds went out to Elias’s wagon only to find that his horse had dropped a shoe. They would have to wait until the following morning to leave. Over Eliza’s protests, Jonathan offered them his and Sarah’s tiny upstairs room for the night. There was a feast of fried pork and plum sauce; the party lasted into the evening. At ten the newlyweds retired upstairs. Jonathan and Sarah made up a bed for themselves on the downstairs floor. But just as they were wrapping themselves around each other in front of the pot-bellied stove, Elias Johannsen’s voice echoed throughout the house.

‘Gawddamn! You filthy – Jesus Christ! Hey, Preacher! You get your ass up here! Get away from me, filth! Go! Scat! Preacher!’

Jonathan leapt up from his bedclothes. Elias stood at the doorway to his tiny room, red flannel nightgown over thin calves, face purple in the light of the oil lamp. Carma lay crumpled into the narrow alleyway between the bed and the wall opposite the door, her beautiful long hair hanging loose down over her gown.