The question appeared carved into the oak at the edge of the churchyard in lettering old enough to send the vicar searching through reference books. Wouldst me marry thee? was the closest translation anyone agreed upon. Nobody knew who had carved it. The bark had healed smoothly around the letters, and an arborist estimated from the growth that the words must have been cut while the tree was still young, despite parish records making no mention of them.
For a while, the inscription became harmless local folklore. Couples posed beneath it. Ribbons appeared around the trunk. Teenagers dared one another to answer yes after dark. The amusement faded when a groom collapsed during a wedding in the adjoining field on the same afternoon every leaf on the oak turned brown and fell at once.
His bride later admitted she had answered the carved question when she was sixteen.
She remarried within a year. That marriage has lasted.
The vicar began examining older parish records and discovered a pattern he preferred not to discuss publicly. Weddings conducted within sight of the tree often failed quickly, sometimes through infidelity or simple incompatibility, sometimes through accidents that left no marriage to preserve. Couples in which one partner had previously answered the oak aloud remained together with extraordinary consistency. Some were miserable. A few lived separately for decades. None divorced.
The distinction troubled him enough that he started redirecting wedding photographs to the far side of the church.
Last spring I stood beneath the oak alone and answered yes. I had no partner and no romantic prospects. It was curiosity, perhaps loneliness, perhaps the kind of foolish impulse that feels safest precisely because nobody is there to witness it.
Three months later I met the person I am marrying this June.
Everything about the relationship has unfolded with unnerving ease. Our preferences align where they should and differ where difference remains interesting. Our families get along. Even arguments resolve with suspicious efficiency. Sometimes my future spouse wakes from dreams about the churchyard despite never having visited it.
Last week, while sorting through old photographs, I found one taken at a parish picnic decades before either of us was born. The oak stands in the background, smaller then, its inscription already visible. Beneath it are two blurred figures whose faces cannot be made out. One is wearing the ring currently on my hand.
I have stopped wondering whether the tree predicts marriages. I am more interested now in when the proposal actually occurred, and how many generations we have spent making our way toward an answer already given.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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