Tiger head on the inner wrist

I am writing this at the kitchen table because your mother has taken over the front room with forty metres of ivory ribbon and says I am under her feet. You will be married by the time you read this, so I will be brief, which you know I never am.

You asked me once about Samson, the tiger who travelled with Pollard's fair the summer I was fourteen. You thought I had made him up. I had not. He lived in a cage on wheels painted with gold lettering that had worn to grey, and every evening he sat with his great head turned toward the lamps as if he were listening for a train that never came. The keeper, a woman called Edie Marr with forearms like rope, told me the stripes are not painted on the skin but run all the way through, so that a tiger in the dark is still a tiger underneath.

I thought about that when your young man stood up at the registry office and his voice cracked on the vows. Everyone else was looking at the ceiling. You were looking straight at him, steady as Samson in his lamplight.

Enclosed is the small pencil drawing I made of him that summer, which I have kept in my Bible for sixty years. Take it. Keep it somewhere you can see when the house is loud.

Your loving aunt, Ruth