White Coal City by Robert Boschman

Author:Robert Boschman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2020-12-10T19:38:26+00:00

53 One night in 1932 John has a dream about Margaret. It presses on his mind all the next day. When he arrives home from Normal School, he checks the bannister for a letter. There isn’t one. So he bolts upstairs and writes a letter in which he recounts his dream: “I dreamt I was at Aberdeen and you were at home. There was a party or some gathering at your place. I was rather shy and so were you, neither speaking to the other, but all the time we wanted to talk. I suppose you thought at last everybody was gone and you went to sleep. I knew where you were and I slowly crept up in the dark to see if you were sleeping. There was a side frame on your bed like on a child’s bed and I came up and peered through between the bars. As I looked, you stretched your hand through the bars and stroked my hair.”

***

They were married in Aberdeen on July 12, 1934. Reverend J.J. Nickel, father to their late friend Justina, officiated. That the bride wore white made a few tongues wag because a Mennonite girl should really wear black on her wedding day. Only the Bride of Christ wears white, as stated clearly in Revelation. Margaret is standing in her mother’s garden in a couple of candids with John. In these, the younger Peters children stand close to their sister, the eldest, her brown eyes large and liquid. She wears an artificial wreath of small white budding flowers clasping a long veil that descends to her heels. This John left in the box along with fragments of real flowers. Also a four-inch kewpie doll adorned in wedding garb, an avatar with eyes looking off to the side and slightly down. One can see on closer inspection that her neck is broken just below her chin and to the right, so that the head tilts with her eyes cast to the side. There are no cards with wedding wishes but instead tiny signed slips of paper that read, “With Best Wishes,” “Glückwunsch,” “Wishing you the best of happiness,” and so on. Around Margaret’s wreath the top of the veil protrudes like a crown. One thinks of Song of Solomon, “My sweetheart, my bride, is a secret garden, a walled garden, a private spring.”

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