The Marriage Ceremony
image credit to internetWilly, Cassie father’s face had a grey pallor to it as he braced the handlebars of the bike against the side of the Church careful not to mark the fresh white cement. He stopped outside the arched wooden chapel door to draw his breath.
The grass in the chapel grounds wore a light coat of April frost. Across the road a low hanging mist clung to St Patrick’s newly opened National School.
Willy lit up a Woodbine and coughed as he drew the tar into his lungs. “Remember when I used to bring you to oul school school on the bar of me bike,” he smiled at Cassie.
She had been discharged from Lifford Infirmary with the news she could be threatening TB.His heart stilled, remembering the icy cold fear that had washed over him.. He was sure they were going to lose her to the grave in Ballybogan as they’d lost her brother and sister.
Cassie turned soft amber eyes on him. So like her mother’s eyes that it made him think of his own wedding 30 years before. “You made Liza and Maggie jealous because they had to walk all the way from the Backlands, down the Tober Road and over the Murlog road,”Cassie said.
Her father nodded. Liza and Maggie had started school at four and walked the five miles there and back. Cassie’s legs or chest hadn’t been strong enough for that.
Her mother Katie kept her at home and taught Cassie how to shape her letters, count and sew and knit before she let her started school at six.
“I remember Miss Hannah. She was very kind to me.”
“Aye, she was,” Willy said. He nicked the butt of the fag between his fingers and thumb brown with nicotine and put it behind his ear.” Aye, she always said you started’ later than the rest but you were the smarter than the rest of them. She put ye straight into High Infants.” Willy couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. To his shame he had only ever been able to make his mark. He could neither read nor write. He depended on the wife Kate for that.
He sighed. Kate had big plans for her youngest living daughter. Cassie was going to be the one in the family that would ‘make something’ of herself and not be minding the big farmers’ wains when she left school. Willy knew Kate’s secret dream was that Cassie would get smart enough to train as a milliner or a dressmaker and get a job in a high fashion shop in the town of Strabane. She even took in the priest’s washing, saved the money and bought an old singer sewing machine so Cassie could get a head start.. But Cassie’s health had let her down. She’d missed too much school and had left Murlog School at end of sixth year. She never made it to the Master’ class, he thought.
He sighed again. It went against her mother’s grain to see Cassie working in a bag apron as a servant girl in Gormley’s farm house and shepherding the children up and down the road.
He stamped his feet in his work boots to keep warm. Oddily enough, Cassie liked it there. She was sad to leave it to get married.
Thomas had set his cap at her when she was fifteen against her mother’s wishes and here she is the day, he thought. Shivering at seven O’clock in the morning waiting for the priest to finish his breakfast and come and marry her.
“We should go in, daughter,” he said lifting the latch on the door and putting her in front of him.
Cassie stopped in her step and peered through the gloom. The old chapel was familiar to her. She had been christened, made her First confession in the dark Confessional box to her left, receivedFirst Communion and knocking at the knees had kissed the Bishop’s ring as he bestowed the Sacrament of Confirmation on her.
All the familiar trappings of the inside of the church including the huge scary paintings of theStations of the Cross that adorned the walls faded away as she strained her eyes in the gloom of the early morning light and focused on the far side of the altar and the men’s aisle.
Sensing her unease her father tucked her arm into his elbow and whispered. “It’s alright,” he’s here.”
A sense of relief washed over Cassie.. Why she thought he wouldn’t come she couldn’t say. Hadn’t he been asking her to marry him every time he came home from Glasgow?
The clatter of her new boots on the bare wooden floor echoed through the empty chapel as she made up the aisle and ascended the three steps to the altar and as the priest had instructed on her last visit to him, she stood with her back to the rail that fronted the seats beneath the Gallery facing the altar. For once there was no chatter out of Eliza who was going to be her bridesmaid.
She watched, dazed, as the sexton took a long taper and lit the candles on the altar. Beside her she could hear a chesty wheeze deep in her father’s chest and then a dry spluttering cough as he tried to hold it in.
Behind the altar rails the door to the Sacristy open and the stout robed figure of Father O Neill ushering an altar boy in front of him stepped onto the altar and without looking their way genuflected in the centre of the altat beneath the red glowing light of the golden box that held the Blessed Sacrament. That done, he turned and indicated they should kneel at the altar rails.
As Cassie made to step forward she felt the pressure of her father’s arm releasedher from his grip. “You sure this is what you want, Cassie,” he said under his breath his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously.
Cassie had the urge to reach out and trace the worried, workworn lines etched in his face.
“I’m sure,” Da,” she said her voice trembling. In her head she could hear her mother’s voice earlier that day.
Too anxious to sleep she had slipped out of bed from between Liza and Maggie and pulling her heavy coat from the back of the door she had slipped her feet into her boots and pulling the coat over her long flannel nightdress she’d slipped out into the early dawn hardly believing this was her wedding day.
In the distance a purple haze rising over Croghan Hill was meeting the cold moon in retreat as night made way for day.
When she went back in her mother was on her knees in front of the open hearth blowing the sleeping turf embers into a red glow. She turned her head as Cassie made to pass her and go back to bed. “Your blouse and skirt for yer weddin’ is ready and hanging up in the picture of the Sacred Heart,” she said softly.“I’ll not be coming to the chapel. I’m goin’ down to your Uncle Ned’s to tidy up the cottage a bit…in case Mary Bridget Callachan puts him and you out after the weddin’ breakfast and you need a place to sleep.”She rose from her knees and cleaned her hands on the edge of her long black apron. “Maggie is lendin’ Eliza her Sunday best suit and coat to wear as your bridesmaid …she’ll not be goin’ either.”
The silence in the chapel grew deeper as the priest ceased praying the Mass in Latin jolting Cassie back to the present. “Who gives this woman to be married,” he asked turning towards them.
“I do,” Cassie heard her father say as a fit of coughing overtook him.
Kneeling side by side at the altar rails with Thomas suddenly Cassie more aware of him. They had walked the roads when he was home and talked of the day they’d be married. Now that it was here, Cassie suddenly felt frightened. Thomas had seen more of the world, or at least Scotland and England. She had never been further than Castlefin. She had only been in Strabane once or twice to the pictures with Maggie and Liza. She hadn’t like it. She’d been glad to get back to the quiet back roads and her work in Gormley’s farm. What if Thomas was …expecting more from her than she knew what to give?
Father O Neill was smiling at her. She blushed hoping he couldn’t read her thoughts. “Do you enter into this marriage freely and of your own volition – choosing,” he said as he saw the confused look on her face.
“I do,” she and Thomas almost said as one.
“Ifanyone herepresent know of any impediment why Catherine and Thomas cannot be married please speak now.” Father O Neil knew it was a redundant question to ask since apart from the bestman, the bridesmaid, William, Cassie’s father, the only other person at this early Mass was old Miss Doherty who came to every wedding and was so deaf she often prayer out loud over him or rattled her wooden rosary bead so loud that the clanging rose up, circled the Galleries and the organists corner and drowned out any pertinent answer to his questions anybody might wish to make.
Cassie heard Jimmy the bestman fumbling in his pocket for the wedding ring and the resounded rattle as it fell on to the silver-platter for the priest to bless it.
And then the register was signed, the priest and the altar boy passed silver and they were walking down the aisle arm in arm as man and wife and an old shriveled up woman was offering them her blessing and her congratulations.
Cassie could hardly take it in. She was now Mrs. Thomas Cannon.
Gemma Hill 2021
Gemma Hill Writeyou Writeme 