by Brian Hodge
He doesn’t give you any trouble at all.
And soon after you stumble away from them, the rain begins, disgorged by swollen black clouds, falling to rinse you clean, and to wash away the worst of the slick you’ve left in the street for rats and other eaters of the dead.
*
There’s no longer any need to scan the windows for a glimpse of she who has been luring you for longer than you even realize. You know just where you’ll find her, where she’s waiting, and if you don’t quite yet understand why, you’ve learned that everything comes to you in time.
What a life you’ve led. What a life you’ve been liberated from. What a life into which you’ve been sent, not like a lamb to the slaughter, but the one who holds the knife.
The universe, after all, creates what it needs.
The immense building stands as solid as a fortress, its stone walls gleaming black in the rain. Her window is vacant, but that’s all right. You have faith, and so must she. Your only welcome comes from the gargoyles, watching as you near this one place in the world where you belong.
Does the rain fall harder just before you enter? Maybe. Maybe it does.
At the last moment you cross a weed-choked lawn to the corner of the building, where three floors up a squatting gargoyle serves as a downspout. From its mouth vomits a continual deluge of water, and for a timeless respite you stand beneath the flow, to let it wash clean the last of whatever clings to you from what you used to be. There you stay, until the final tears are rinsed from your eyes, and you can no longer grieve for a lost love whose only purpose was to teach you those things that truly begin tonight.
And then you turn for the door, to join the fellowship of gargoyles, to confront your reason for being, to assume your place in the scheme of all things in heaven and on earth.
A Loaf Of Bread, A Jug Of Wine
The only great figures among men are the poet,
the priest and the soldier.
The man who sings, the man who sacrifices and
the one who is sacrificed.
All the rest are good for the whip.
— Baudelaire
She thought of him as a secret friend, or in more fanciful moments when she dared risk the sin of impure thoughts, a secret admirer. Theirs was so far a relationship conducted via place, not proximity. Perhaps he’d heard her voice, but Sister Giselle had never heard his; and likely he knew her face, while his was a mystery that she found easy to dream of in idle moments. Which was improper, of course. She was the bride of Christ, and there was room for no other.
Were it not for the stable, doubtless they would have had no relationship at all … whoever he was.
She had been born to the farming life in a countryside still healing from the scars of the Great War, and as a girl she’d known much toil. Now, given her youth and experience with beasts of burden and her farmgirl’s strength, care of the horses fell to her. Certainly, Father Guillaume had more pressing obligations in the village and the surrounding countryside, and Sister Anna-Marie was growing too feeble.
Giselle didn’t mind. Horses belonged to God’s flock too, and the scents of hay and oats took her home again, if only in her imagination. She could talk to the four horses while currying them, while drawing them fresh water, while feeding them, talk to them as she might friends who stood patiently by and absorbed every word. They seemed wise and caring, with gentle souls beneath their muscular flanks, and placid brown eyes that seemed nothing if not protective.
Pity, then, that they could never speak in return.
Who has been caring for all of you before I can get to you? she would ask. And is he as kind and gentle as I believe he must be? For you never raise a fuss.
It began three weeks ago, Giselle leaving the cottage that served as their priory and realizing the horses were already well cared for and lacking for nothing. One day, and the next, then a third. Asking around did nothing to assuage her curiosity, and served only to whet it. Father Guillaume had been distractedly amused, had smiled and chuckled with vague superiority. “Perhaps the Lord has seen fit to send an angel.”
She hadn’t thought it nearly as funny as he had.
The next day, this unseen angel began to leave loads of fresh-cut firewood, as well. Giselle’s first explanation was that it had been one of the villagers of Château-sur-Lac, slipping about to perform Christian duty in absolute anonymity. But then, how to account for the fact that someone had been spending nights in the stable? More than one morning she had found a nest of matted hay along the far, rough-hewn wall, and when she lay a hand upon it she fancied it to still be warm from his slumbers. From then on, each night she coaxed Sister Anna-Marie into preparing a plate heaped with whatever remained from the evening meal, and she would set it on a tack shelf in the stable, out of reach of equine muzzles. And mornings she would set out a small loaf of fresh baked bread, perhaps a wedge of cheese, and a small crockery jug filled with wine drawn from the casks in the cellar below their cottage.
The food never went untouched, and not once had she seen whoever came to claim it.
How mysterious. And how thrilling.
“Could it be that your secret friend is a refugee, mmmm?” Anna-Marie smiled impishly at her suggestion, then went back to preparing another evening plate with stewed chicken and vegetables and grapes. She never had to be coaxed anymore. The old nun was likely enjoying the intrigue almost as much as Giselle. “Perhaps he fled one of the coasts.”
Giselle hadn’t thought of that, though it made sense. It was a time of war, but so far Château-sur-Lac had seen little of it. To them the war was planes, far overhead. More than two years ago, France had fallen and Hitler had danced his little jig of victory. Marshal Pétain had signed his armistice with Germany, and only France’s north and west coasts had been occupied, the interior spared. Father Guillaume had been furious, had called the man a traitor to his people. Giselle had, at the time, only just taken her vows, and tried to deal with it more philosophically. Tried to look at it as she might, say, a drastic measure in medicine … say, cutting off an infected limb to save the rest of the body.
As ones who followed a man who had died upon a cross for no fault of his own, surely they could live with sacrifice.
And so she fell to wondering: What sacrifices had been demanded of her mysterious ward, whom she’d never even seen? Had he been forced to forfeit love and the creature comforts of home and hearth, to rely on the bounty of nature and the kindness of strangers for each meal? Had he been forced to trade the company of his fellow human beings for that of animals, or none at all?
Perhaps he’d been a soldier, separated or deserted from his unit in the confusion of Dunkerque, with no choice but to now live and travel by stealth. Or maybe he’d been an artist, living in some garret on the Left Bank of Paris until he gave it up for life in one of the more peaceful coastal cities — Cherbourg, or Brest — and since the coming of the Germans, had submerged his disillusion with humanity in the countryside.
Oh, she felt she knew him already, knew his story. She had to — she’d come up with so many, it had to be one among them.
And probably she would have been content to continue on his own terms, providing the meals until the inevitable day when he moved on and she found the food cold, untouched … were it not for the gift.
On a chilled November morning in the fourth week since his arrival, an hour past dawn, Giselle wrapped her frayed cloak about her and left the cottage. Behind her, Sister Anna-Marie groaned of stiff knees and wrestled fresh logs onto glowing embers. The heavy door thudded shut and she was alone with the world. On the rear stoop sat bottles of milk and cream, left by one of the villagers. She glanced around, like a wary cat, then dipped her finger in the cream and quickly licked it clean.
Giselle scurried along the path back to the stable. In the distance, a late-rising rooster called. The morning stillness was a fresh and living thing, the air full of mist that clung to the skin and brought a shiver. As far as the eye cou
ld see, a pastoral tableau of rolling hills and flat fields, the distant lake that had given the village its name, and woodland that encroached upon it all with the patience of aeons. She would die here someday, Giselle knew, and be grateful for the life spent here.
The path curved back, halfway toward the church and the stone rectory that sat behind it. At one of Father Guillaume’s windows she saw the yellowish gleam of an oil lamp.
In the stable, the horses stood placidly, each with a heavy blanket draped across its back as they breathed out soft moist clouds. She spoke to them, called them by name, then crossed over the earthen floor to the shelf for the empty plate.
Beside it, positioned with such care that it sat perfectly straight, was a doll. With winsome painted eyes, it gazed out somewhere just over her head. For a moment, Giselle dared not violate it, then reached to gather it in her arms. It looked and even smelled of age, with thin, limp clothes that nevertheless retained a certain grandeur of pre-revolutionary court gaiety. Its head and limbs were porcelain, its complexion milk white but for a rosy blush upon each delicate cheek.
A gift? It must be. For her. For her.
“Are you still here?” she called out, and went running around the stalls for the far wall. As she passed, one of the horses whuffled noisily. “Have you stayed this time?”
The nest was empty. Just a shadowed bed of hay, nothing more. And was he even now crouched outside, within some sylvan hideaway, spying for a glimpse of her when she emerged with the doll in her arms?
She fingered her rosary and prayed for a moment. This was coming perilously close to courtship. Worse, in some hidden cleft within, she wanted it to be so.
Giselle knelt beside the matted hay, lay a hand upon it, felt the fading, radiant warmth. His, and may God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Blessed Virgin forgive her, but she did long to feel it from the source itself. If only once, just once.
She counted, as she might measure a horse, hand-widths down along the matted area where his back and shoulders would have lain, then the tapering length of his legs. She had thought it before, but it occurred to her once again:
He must be enormous.
When she left the stable, doll in hand, it was with the taste of delicious fear that she was about to surrender to forbidden curiosity.
*
Night, barely a moon, the entire countryside dipped in black that seemed to run and pool.
Giselle had kept herself awake for an hour by pinching a spot on her thigh, and for another hour beyond that simply by lying in the darkness, contemplating her faltering courage, and wondering where it might lead if she really did creep out the door and dare look her refugee in the face. Perhaps he’d entertained similar thoughts, was right now lying out there with a deliciously miserable heart and hoping to hear the sound of her feet.
A few feet away, Sister Anna-Marie snorted in her sleep and stirred, then fell silent.
The back door might wake her — there was this to consider. And maybe tonight would be better spent sleeping. There was always tomorrow night…
Oh, enough. There would always be another tomorrow night. Of what good was trepidation? He was but a man, no doubt a shy one, certainly kind at heart. No harm would come from their speaking, and meeting one another face to face so that she could at least know what he looked like. The advantage was his, there.
Giselle eased from her bed, drew her cloak about her and, creeping barefoot across the cold floor, carried her shoes to the back door. From a kitchen shelf she took a lamp and matches.
Out the door, quickly, quietly as she could shut it, and then she was hurrying along the path. The stable loomed ahead of her, a sagging black square punched into the night. At its door she stopped to light the lamp, then slipped inside.
A muted glow surrounded her and cast a tilting shadowplay on the walls, and she eased across the hard-packed earth. The deep bellows breath of sleeping horses was the only sound as she passed them in their stalls. To the far wall, then…
She stopped.
He was there, lying on one side with his broad back to her, curled beneath a heavy horse blanket that rose and fell with his own steady breath. She could see little of the man himself, just a great head of shaggy black hair.
In a young life whose course had run slowly, so straight and free of genuine surprise, this was new: that the risk of change came down to a single moment. She had but to take the step into the next, or turn around and retreat and forever wonder.
Giselle cleared her throat, loudly: “Excuse me? Sir?” And louder still, “Sir? Are you awake?”
A sluggish flex of his shoulders, a stirring of his legs. The moment crawled by, a slow eternity, then whipped ahead in sudden flurry. She thought she saw his face, half turning back her way as he opened one sleepy eye—
And could she trust the lantern’s glow, the peculiar shades of color that it sometimes cast? Was that grimacing cheek indeed a sallow yellow? She saw but a glimpse of it, and there was no time to decide. A groan of terrible anguish came scraping forth from the cavern of his chest as he threw the blanket about his own head and scuttled back against the stable wall. He drew his knees in toward his chest and, with head lowered beneath its makeshift veil, held himself together like some trembling fortress.
“Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my world, and go back to your own. If you wish to do me one last kindness, then let that be it. Please.”
Giselle took a step forward without even intending to. She was drawn to misery like moths to candles. It was more than her calling, it was the reason for her being. This man spoke in a voice so lashed with agonies, his words were almost secondary, and she could no more leave him than she could deny Christ.
“I mean you no harm,” she said. “I’ve tried to show you nothing but goodwill. Surely you know that by now, don’t you?”
“I know it, yes.” His voice seemed near to breaking. “But this was when I was a stranger to you, who moved by night. There have been others, whose hearts have been kind enough … until they see me for what I am … and at once their hearts turn murderous.”
“Then they’ve missed what’s obvious to me. That your heart is far kinder than theirs.” Giselle took another step closer, and another, and knelt just a metre away. “What could change them so?”
Beneath the blanket, he seemed to recoil. “My countenance … it is more hideous than you could possibly imagine.”
“I’ve seen and tended to faces afflicted by disease, and all the injuries that can happen on farms. I never once quit loving the person behind such a face. So I promise I’ll not turn away from yours.” When she got no reply, she tried another route. “I don’t even know your name.”
Again, a heavy stirring beneath the blanket. “I was never given one. So, in time, I gave one to myself, the only name that would suit me: Nomad.”
Had he been so abandoned as a child, no one had even bothered to grant him the simple gift of a name? This was more than sorrowful, this was a moral crime. She told him her own, then said, “Let me see you, Nomad. Please, let me see you.”
He seemed to consider it awhile, like a king weighed down by ponderous burdens of the heart. Then the lowered head rose, the blanket with it. “Move back a few paces, then, if you really mean to see me for what I am.”
And he stood.
It was one thing to contemplate his enormity of stature in impressions left in a bed of hay, quite another to behold it in person. He seemed to simply keep uncoiling from the stable floor, taller, and taller still. She’d always thought herself big-boned, born to robust farming stock … yet here was someone who stood nearly three heads taller than she.
One brutish hand rose from within the blanket, to pull it slowly away, and for the first time she met his dull and watery eyes. Saw his yellowed skin, his blackened lips, the tangled cascade of coarse hair whose locks bunched about his shoulders like throttled snakes. His face was like none she had seen, ever, more total in its noble ruin than any ravaged by disease or wound.
And her heart shattered for the sufferings others must have heaped upon him, for no matter how powerful his shoulders or broad his back, both must surely have broken under the strain.
Giselle groped inside for words, but there were none. We are all beautiful in the eyes of the Lord? How easy to say, with her own complexion like milk. The last thing Nomad needed was to hear sanctimonious platitudes.
So, instead, she stepped forward to where he stood atremble, reached up, and touched his face. Which soon dampened with his tears.
“There are hours yet before dawn,” she said. “Please share with me where you’ve come from.”
*
In the hour past dawn, Nomad refused to leave the stable with her, and no amount of coaxing would draw him out to join her in a walk to the rectory. Father Guillaume should be told, but moreover should be introduced to this wandering soul. Such conversations the two of them might have. What endless lifetimes of humanity had Nomad witnessed, as an outsider. If anything, humanity could learn from him, and benefit. Let it begin with her, and with the Church. Let it begin here.
“But why?” he pleaded with her. “You have your hopes and your optimisms, but these are born of your naivety. You have seen so little of the world, you have no way of knowing how much it can hate. Of hope and optimism I have none … because instead I have experience. I know the reception I’ll meet with.”
“For everything and everyone, a place,” she told him. “This is what I believe and I believe because this is what I’ve seen. No one can be truly happy until they find that place. I am, because I have. I belong to God, and to the Church, and to Château-sur-Lac. And if I can help you find that place for your life, then it will prove that mine has fulfilled some of its purpose as well. Don’t you see?”
He said he did, and that he dared not turn his back on her before she had her chance to try.
Giselle ran from the stable with her cloak billowing behind her, into the fresh damp chill of morning. She raced along the path to the rectory, whose window was filled with the jaundiced glow of a lamp.