Biblical by Christopher Galt

everyone was, as Joe’s family was of biblical proportions: four sisters, two brothers, countless aunts, uncles, cousins … At the wedding, they had spilled over onto her side of the church, bolstering what now seemed to be her underrepresented lineage. Of course, growing up in the same small New England town, Joe and Mary had known each other’s families, but the sheer scale of the Dechaud clan meant that there was kin, scattered across Rutland County and beyond, whom Mary had never encountered. Like the sad old lady in the photograph. Something about her resolved Mary to ask Joe exactly which of his relations she was.
    Mary finished dusting the photographs and was about to go through to the kitchen to make some coffee when she noticed a speck on the silver candlestick that sat on the dining-room table. Joe’s Aunt May had given them it as a wedding present and everyone had been amazed at her unaccustomed display of generosity. Joe’s Aunt May was certainly not the sad old lady in the photograph on the dresser; she was a notoriously difficult woman, tall and lean with cold, pale green eyes that glittered argumentatively beneath what seemed a perpetual frown. Aunt May, with her sharp tongue and embittered views, was the focus of discord that every family seemed to have – seemed to need, almost. The navigation of uncharted familial waters was the one thing that Mary found difficult about being a new bride: finding herself adrift on the turbulent sea of generations-long established relationships, rifts, allegiances and history for which she had no compass. No, that wasn’t true: Joe was her compass. Her lighthouse.
    Joe, with his thick, auburn hair, large soft-brown eyes that were more boy than man, his deep, quiet voice and calming, gentle smile. When Joe smiled that way, Mary forgot all about the stresses of newly wedded life. Now, as she absent-mindedlyrubbed at the candlestick to remove the tarnish, she was aware of the bright sparkle of their lives together, of the thousand promises their future held.
    Theirs had been a truly traditional, even old-fashioned love story. Joe and Mary, whose birthdays fell within a week of each other, had known each other since elementary school, had been sweethearts since fifteen, had married at twenty, as soon as Joe had come back from overseas. It had been one of those things that everyone had expected to happen, the most natural thing in the world. As far as everyone in town was concerned, there was no Joe, no Mary … it was always Joe-and-Mary and it always would be. Together they were singular, not plural.
    After the formality of a honeymoon in a Burlington hotel looking out over Lake Champlain, they had returned to what they really both wanted: to start their married lives together in the home they’d bought from Joe’s uncle. Out of the Army, Joe had started work as a shift super at the marble quarry and Mary had set about making their new house their lasting home.
    Mary frowned at the candlestick: she would have to use a silver cloth on it. Maybe it wasn’t new as Aunt May had claimed, but second-hand. New or old, Mary didn’t much care for the piece, but it was odd that the tarnished spot looked established and was so difficult to shift.
    Shrugging, she replaced the candlestick, turning it so the tarnish faced away from the window’s daylight. Before heading into the kitchen, she called through to Joe – it being a weekend morning, he would be in his study, hunched over the newspaper – and told him she was going to make coffee. As Mary filled the pot from the faucet, she looked out through the window above the sink. The house was elevated on a hill and from this window she could see out over the gentle humps of forest and field with nothing to shade the house from the spring sun. It was her favorite place to stand and contemplate her contentment. As she was happy to admit, Mary was a young woman of modestambition and had here everything she could ever want. She