I lifted it out and carried it up into the daylight, and I had to sit right down on the ground, because it was a wedding dress.
A whole wedding dress, on a dressmaker form, wrapped over in muslin that fell to pieces when I touched it. That was the shape I had seen standing in the dark, the thing that had put my heart clean up in my throat. Just a dress on a form. But it was the most beautiful old dress I ever laid eyes on, ivory gone soft with the years, hand-stitched, tiny buttons all down the back, a veil folded careful over the shoulder. Never worn. You can tell. A worn dress and a never-worn dress are two different things, and this one had been waiting sixty years for a wedding day that plainly never came.
Set at the foot of the form was a small wooden box, and inside it a photograph of a young woman and a young man, a folded paper, and a wedding suit for a man, pressed and perfect, never worn either.
The old potato man I bought this land from, the widower with no children who worked this ground sixty years, was the young man in the photograph. Young, in love, grinning like the whole world was his. And the young woman beside him was the one the dress was made for. Her name, the paper said, was Marguerite. They were to be married in the June of nineteen sixty-two. And she took sick that spring, fast, the way things took people back then, and she died a week before the wedding, with her dress already hung and waiting and every last button already sewn.
He never married. Never courted another soul. He farmed this hard cold ground alone for sixty years, one week short of a whole different life, and he could not wear that suit and he could not give that dress away and he could not stand to have either one where he would lay eyes on it every day. So he built a dry-stone wall in the back of his root cellar, deep in the cold and the dark, and he sealed their wedding away behind it, the two of them dressed and waiting forever for a June that never got to come.
Marguerite. Sixty years and I never once stopped. Bury the suit with me, if there is anybody left to do it. Let some kind girl wear the dress, if she will have it. It was made to be worn. One of us ought to get our wedding day.
I sat on that cold ground and cried for a man I never met and a girl dead before my own mother was ever born. Then I did what he asked. We found the family of Marguerite, a grand-niece over in Caribou who never knew the whole of it, only that a great-aunt had died young and sad a long time back. She wept over that dress. And this coming June, her own daughter, the great-grand-niece of a girl named Marguerite, is getting married in it. Sixty-three years late, that dress is finally going to get its wedding day, and go down an aisle, and be a bride, the way it was sewn to be. And somewhere, I have to believe, that lonely old potato farmer and his Marguerite finally get to stand up together too.