The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  The man smiled broadly, past the bounds of flirtation into genuine pleasure. “I surely hoped you’d come back for it. That boy you had—he deserves it.”

  “It’s not a present.”

  “No, of course. Except in some sense.”

  “Not in any sense.” Felix’s hood didn’t cover his face, and having to periodically swipe at his eyes put him at a disadvantage. He placed six shillings in the man’s palm, taking care to prevent his fingers from sensing the other’s skin.

  “If it’s Prisca’s indeed, I’m glad to see it going home.” Wrapping the fishhook in cheesecloth, the vendor asked if Felix enjoyed the monastery, if God was a kind lord.

  “It’s my greatest joy,” he said truthfully. “I’ve been saved into a life of love.”

  The vendor tossed the wrapped hook from hand to hand, then took off his hat and shook the rain from it. He handed the package to Felix. “You mean you’ve been saved from a life of love.”

  Felix’s hand was subjected to the shock of lingered touch. “I mean both things,” he said.

  The man turned to drape the tarp over his trinkets again, and Felix hurried home without stopping to see how the river leapt up at the rain.

  The hill was usually good for not thinking—one had to concentrate on the long strides, the twanging thigh muscles—but he couldn’t help his pilgrim brain. It went like a moth to Tomaso, wondering how his lands were faring, and if his crops ever brought him in trade to Rome, and what sort of hat the grown version of him might wear. Tomaso had not been the strongest or the handsomest in the village, but something about his ordinary limbs—they nursed a tenderness out of Felix. There are bodies to which one unconsciously attaches, that seem extensions of the self, but golden versions, more marvelously worked. It’s not their perfection, but their nearness that enchants. Listen to him! Focus on the legs, one at a time. These are his legs; they are sufficient.

  In the nave, the boy was polishing the brass candlesticks. Did Mino have Tomaso’s shoulders and Felix’s round crown, or was the old man hallucinating a future that never happened? [In the lover’s absence, we invent stories. As a youth, I’d fall asleep dreaming God’s strong arms around me; He’d show up at the gates of hell with sulfur tears scarring His face—it had come to Him all of a sudden, how empty He was in my banishment, and He’d ask not for forgiveness but the chance to hold me once more, and I’d blushing relent. Because I, like you, my cousin, am weak. Is this boy the son you could’ve had? Does it matter if he’s not?]

  “Did you find anything? Was our fellow there? It was rude for Father not to let me go, I don’t know what kind of rowdiness he thinks I get up to, but you know I can be as quiet as the rest of you, though God gave us tongues.”

  “Along with lips to close around them, and little houses to keep them quiet in. Our fellow was there and asked after you.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the rain anyway. You smell like a wet sheep.”

  “I’ll come as a rose to my friends below.” And he left the boy going over the wax stains with an old rag.

  He showed the fishhook first to Benedictus, as an apology for not paying him sufficient attention, but Benedictus showed no interest; if anything, his tight jaw seemed to disapprove. The muscles there hadn’t lost their grip, but as the weather warmed, his juices would flow around a bit more and he’d become a cheerier presence in the putridarium. He took the hook next to Bernardo, who slapped his knee (with the help of Felix) and marveled that a smart boy could be snookered by a piece of iron that was so obviously dug up from a Roman trash heap. They joked about the miracles it must have performed, turning the amphorae around it into broken amphorae, transforming a rifling beggar’s hand into a beggar’s hand with a mild abrasion. But Felix secretly wondered if the hook really had belonged to a martyr, was once a symbol of faith to a believer who saw Jesus as a man who would wrest her from the river of sin into the bright light of salvation. And that this was once treasured by somebody—by anybody—was enough to endear it to Felix. In the morning, he’d hide it in one of the side chapels and wait for Mino to stumble across it while idly dragging a cloth over random surfaces.

  See, he too could’ve been a father.

  It wasn’t that Felix was scared of ghosts or the dark or dead folks or odd noises or musty smells or narrow spaces or even the possibility that his elbow might scrape the side of a niche-resting skeleton and a set of arm bones might clatter out—he had a stern constitution—but the logic that convinced him no spirits would attack also alerted him that it wouldn’t be too hard, in the deep and winding catacombs, to get lost. As he descended, a candle in his left hand, he dragged his right hand against the dirt wall and where there was a space, a path branching off he didn’t take, he dug his foot in the ground to make a hole, with a short tail indicating the direction of travel. He wasn’t pleased with the whims of Father Peter, who must’ve grown up on quite a fine estate to be so comfortable with commanding people to do unseemly things. That Felix had come home from the market with only a shard of iron (“You think twelve-year-old Christian girls play around with fishhooks? What snake charmer sold you this?”) didn’t sit well with an abbot insistent on hair and bone.

  The dark made him whisper. “What are the chances we take home the body of another grave robber by accident?”

  “St. Hereticus,” Sixtus said. “He’ll cure the pickpockets of awkward fingering.”

  “What exactly are we saving this martyr from? Obscurity? Raiders?”

  “Father says it’s a service.”

  “And what business have we with Eupernia? Oughtn’t we to find Prisca?”

  “I thought you said she was in the Alps.”

  Felix’s candle swung to illuminate a chamber on their left where Jesus sat in a fishing boat with two other men; there were no rods, or even a lake. Three men and their boat on a waterless landscape of beige plaster. In the rounded corner where the wall met the ceiling, an angel with wings of fire puckered her mouth. They passed through a large room where the coffins were grander, more imposing, where the popes were buried.

  Felix felt at the carving on one wall. “Read it for me.”

  “A little poem, et cetera, something about Pope Sixtus—my namesake!—confessors from Greece, young boys, ah, and Damasus, pope. Hic fateor Damasus . . . ‘Here I, Damasus, confess that I wished to bury my limbs, but I feared to disturb the holy ashes of the saints.’”

  “Bless the unworthy,” Felix said. His ticklish crypt keeper’s fingers wanted to pry into the tombs, find out what happened to holy bodies left for centuries in the dry dark.

  After tunneling deeper into the earth’s stomach, the main path ended in a T; to the left, the candle showed another hallway honeycombed with niches, stacked five high, and to the right, a larger room opened into an inscrutable blankness.

  “Is that her?” Felix asked. His candle was half-eaten, and he began to sweat.

  On the room’s back wall, three women overlapped in a willowy dance. Yellow dress, red dress, blue dress. Their hair was tied in knots atop their heads, and their hands moved identically up and to the left, fingers opened into fans, as if they were repelling invaders from the east while looking back to the flaming west in despair.

  “Or else they’re doing the old graveside shuffle,” Sixtus said.

  Nestled in the wall was one of the few marble sarcophagi that had found its way to these depths. Sixtus ran his fingers across the Latin. “Sancta Eupernia,” he said.

  Felix felt the worm of wrongdoing squiggle in his upper arms and groin. “You don’t think she’s at peace?”

  “It’s just a body; that’s what you always say. Nothing sentient to be disturbed.”

  “I do say that.” He pulled the iron bar and the cloth sheet from his pack. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, handing the bar to Sixtus, “if there are two chains of command. One issuing down from God and one coming up from the darker place, and whether the orders ever get tangled.”

  “And when your a
bbot tells you to steal a skeleton, you wonder how your final master will judge you.” The bar slid under the lid of the sarcophagus with little effort, and Sixtus levered it up and inched it back.

  “Is that what I’m worrying about? Judgment? That sounds self-involved.”

  “Give me a hand.”

  Felix left the corner where he’d been admiring the bluebirds carrying olive branches; they’d been painted some five hundred years earlier, and so he could not fault them for looking more like starfish, thrown against the wall and stuck. He and Sixtus pushed the lid back far enough to snake their hands down, but what they felt in St. Eupernia’s resting home was not dry bones but something soft.

  Felix jerked his hand out.

  “She’s a holy!” Sixtus said.

  “I hereby forswear my allegiances and announce myself to be a vain and superstitious old pagan who will have nightmares.”

  Sixtus laughed. “He fondles the dead all day and can’t stand to grab a saint! What an errand for this fool. Bless our Lord for having deemed us worthy of the touch.”

  “Bless us, Lord,” Felix said, “and know we rob only because we believe, and if this damns us, let our ignorance redeem us. It’s remarkable hard to tell your servants from your enemies, and we are loving idiots.”

  The two men, on their tiptoes, cradled their arms into the coffin. At the bottom was the softness, which was neither human nor animal but almost vegetable, as if they were lifting a dense colony of mushrooms that had formed a pillow in the forest: spongy, irregular, pliant, with the faint scent of smoke. Father Peter, who’d been appointed by a bishop who sat at the right hand of a pope who’d (theoretically) been given the blessing of the supreme creator, had asked Felix and Sixtus to save the body of St. Eupernia from despoliation and to bring her miracle-making shape to a church in need of the holy touch, whose relics were scampering out the door faster than they could be replaced.

  They lifted her, or it, out of the dark sarcophagus and up into the dim yellowish glow and laid her, or it, down on the sheet that Felix had spread on the dirt floor. Sixtus pulled his candle closer. It was a woman, a blessed fungal bundle of a woman, with skin softly shriveled and hair long and golden and a snowy robe that covered her modesty in artful tatters and feet that bent inward as if she’d been drawn to heaven so fast the wind had blown them into a curl. Her face had been reduced to mere smudges on a shroud of skin.

  The men crossed themselves again.

  “How did she die?” Felix asked, seeing no evidence.

  “Willingly,” Sixtus said.

  They wrapped the sheet across her in quadrants, like girls making a pastry, and Felix took both candles while Sixtus carried her in his arms. He felt for his directional signs at each passageway. The candles were nubs, but now they were in the popes’ chamber again; the passage became dim rather than dark, and finally the stairs rose before them, up and up into a night that was bright in comparison to the invisible black wash of the underworld. The few other travelers on the Via Appia carried incriminating bundles of their own. No one spoke. The sound of their leather-shod feet scuffling along the great stones of the road reminded Felix of the stables’ spring cleaning, when his father would drive out the cozy cows, their hooves shushing on the packed earth, and Felix would come with a broom and a shovel and not just the manure would go but the straw and the hay and the top inch of dirt, peeled back like a skin, and for the next week before the dirt settled again, the cows wandered to and from the fields with knee-length brown socks. That’s what they sounded like on the stones in the dark, like men with hooves.

  As the two old men climbed into the city Felix offered to take the burden, but he was relieved when Sixtus said no, it was hardly a weight at all. History, though people ran about it like roaches, was made up of thick coats of things in situ. The catacombs had been dug just there, an artist had brushed the women on that particular wall, a body had been laid to rest over yonder, one day a church might be constructed over that site, and even farther in the future, a grand cathedral to which pilgrims from as far as China could flock, with stores to feed them, so it might eventually become a new capital of the earth, all because it was the right distance from the center of the city that once was ruled by pagan emperors. And now they’d loosed that body from that space, she was in situ no more, and the history of the saints had been shuffled.

  At Santa Prisca, Sixtus rested their cargo on the font. “The crypt makes the most sense.”

  “All those men,” Felix said. “I don’t like the thought of her there.”

  “As opposed to where? Shall I take her to the nearest nunnery?”

  “We could leave her in one of the chapels.”

  “With the relic bandit still at large?”

  “Oh, Mother Mary. Prop her at the abbot’s door and call it a job well done.” He stroked the saint’s tattered robe, feeling the smallest of human superstitions: that this one touch might ease his unhappiness. If you’d asked him in daylight if he harbored any melancholy, he’d have laughed. That’s the trick of consciousness: there’s a seed at the very core even the owner will deny.

  “Let’s put her in the Mithraeum—no fellows there—and see if the bull god sports stigmata by morning.”

  The hook was a delight. Felix felt it press into the small of his back as Mino wrapped him in a hopping embrace.

  “It stays in the chapel, you know.”

  “But just for now, seeing as I’m the one who saved it—and you, of course—let me hold it, would you, just for the day? I still feel her in it, and if anything could forgive—” He stopped, but his half smile didn’t melt. “Please. It’s like it could show me things.”

  In the afternoon, the boy laid his head on the desk, just where the sun ladled in, brushing the point of the hook against his thumb. They’d had a buttery lunch, and the monks were sleepy. He seemed mesmerized by the dancing quill in Sixtus’s hand. Watching a boy grow drowsy was like watching a palm leaf unfurl.

  “Give him his sheet,” Felix said. “He’s not here to dawdle.”

  Sixtus pushed over a blank piece of vellum, freshly scraped and stretched, and the metal pen. Before Mino learned to write, he’d have to master the drawing of lines. The scribe would use these lined sheets to ensure the letters danced in regular formation; no patron wanted to look at a psalter and know Sixtus had written it, or some monk with whimsical Gs. Doodles had their place, but the words themselves were the word of God. No, his own son was the Word. So to better mimic the Lord, little Mino was making his lines, the metal pen steady in his hand. (This was a favor from Sixtus to Felix. Sixtus could’ve done it faster himself.)

  “Did you come here from a farm, like Felix?” the boy asked.

  “I was the slave of a priest here in Rome, if you can believe it.”

  “At Santa Prisca?”

  “Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. He said he’d set me loose if I learned my letters. Quite an incentive.”

  “But you fell into this old trap again. Why didn’t you become a soldier? And were your parents slaves?”

  “Look at me, well fed and smarter than you. Don’t have to kill anyone; will probably make it to heaven.”

  “But you came from free folk.” Mino looked up at Felix, the pen paused.

  Sixtus kicked him. “No stopping. We’ve got to finish this before I’m dead.”

  Whatever moved outside the window—new leaves or a squirrel or a robin on the hunt—was like a circus to Mino, who couldn’t keep his eyes on the vellum. The boy needed to pay attention. Ignorant people only got as far as those who raised them. Look at Felix, whose greatest skills were feeding chickens and sitting quietly with dead things.

  “But you’re so happy,” Mino said.

  “He’s asking for a lesson in contentment, Brother Felix.”

  The pen dragging across the vellum sounded like a field being peeled open by the plow. Felix’s father had assumed his children would furrow the same land, and their children, because holding steady was almost as go
od as gaining ground. “I miss things, certain. But wishing is a kind of superstition and doesn’t belong in the Christian mind. God chooses what comes true.”

  “So there’s nothing you ever saw that you wish you hadn’t seen or nothing that got taken away from you that you’d like back or no kind of doings that you once could do but you can’t do here?” When he’d first arrived, Mino’d been such a quiet boy.

  “You’re talking about want,” Felix said.

  “Is that wrong?”

  “There’s men here who’d give their crucifix for a gold coin,” Sixtus said. “Or steal the coin and crucifix both.”

  “No, wanting’s no sin, though it’s a hindrance. You’ve only so much space, and wanting is hungry, it takes it all up.”

  “You’re thinking of something specific?” Sixtus asked the boy.

  Mino handed over the vellum wearily, the drawing of a dozen lines having sapped him of strength.

  Sixtus pushed it back across the desk. “I need a dozen more. Haven’t you ever seen a book?”

  “It’s a secret,” Mino said, rubbing the hook against his mouth. “I was promised not to tell.”

  The older men were silent. It’s the downfall of secrets, how much they want to be told.

  “I’d say, but I don’t want him to come for me.”

  “No one will come for you.”

  “Except Jesus on your deathbed,” Sixtus added. “And then Felix, who’ll prop you up on a toilet and stare at you while your eyeballs turn to juice.”

  Mino laughed and had to smudge out the line he’d spoiled. “It’s my mam. Who loved me more than anything,” he said. “Some of the others had died and it was just boys, but I was her favorite.”

  “May the Lord hold her close,” Felix said.

  “She’d dress me up.”

  “Capes and hats?” Sixtus asked.

  “Big fishermen’s boots?”

  “Pretty things,” Mino said. “You know. It was fun, us playing.”

  “Dresses?”

  “Silly things. And her girdle. She said I had small features.”