“Cleric,” the doctor said as she bundled her medical tools together and dumped them inside her leather bag. “It has been some time.”
His father bowed, and Samuel followed suit.
“Miss Elizabeth.”
The doctor gave her condolences to the butcher’s daughter, apologizing that she couldn’t do more to make him comfortable. She then went to the sheriff. “Are you going to be a gentleman, or am I going to have to walk home in this storm?”
“I’m not a chauffeur,” the sheriff said in annoyance, but he gave a nod, nonetheless.
The sheriff and the doctor exited the bedroom quietly, closing the door shut behind them. The butcher’s daughter peered with anticipation as Samuel’s father went over to the old butcher’s bed. He got down on his knees. He removed the scriptures from his jacket pocket and propped them against his legs. Samuel inched up beside his father. The old butcher moaned, forcing out nonsensical sounds. It made Samuel uncomfortable. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen death. He’d seen it several times before: a logger who’d taken a nasty fall and punctured his own lungs, a baby who’d caught the bumps, and the tailor who’d gone septic after suffering for years under some chronic ailment. For the most part, Samuel’s father performed the rites for those who were already dead. But occasionally, the dying would make a request for a cleric. This act was permissible by law.
His father carefully removed his coat, folding it together and placing it on the dresser near the door. He adjusted the sleeves of his shirt around his muscular arms, pulling them back and exposing his skin. Black lines of ink curled from his wrist down to the end of his forearm like the limbs of an old sycamore. A few of the thicker, longer lines branched out past his elbow up to his bicep, with smaller lines protruding out at the ends. It was a visual representation of Azhuel’s holy roots, and the required mark of the clergy.
“I’m here,” Samuel’s father said. He stretched his leg back, passing the scriptures to Samuel.
Samuel held the book, clumsily shuffling through the pages as his father removed his gloves. He forced himself to pick a passage, knowing it wouldn’t be long before he’d be ordained. His father would eventually take him to the high council, where the bishops would say a prayer of commission before he received the mark of the clergy. He’d be sixteen in a couple of months, a man nearly grown. He did not feel like a man.
“‘We are dirt,’” Samuel read softly. His voice lacked conviction, even though he tried to force it. He pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his cold nose. “‘And to dirt we return. For Azhuel will draw out your flesh and pain, and in Him you will grow again, connected to the roots. In Him, there is always life.’”
Samuel exhaled and gave his father the knife. His father drew the blade out from its sheath and sliced it across his own palm, making a cut that would bleed but not scar. When Samuel was younger, he’d asked his father why a cleric had to cut himself to perform the rites. Because nothing good is free, his father had told him. If you want to reach a power greater than yourself, to connect yourself or others to Azhuel’s roots, then there must be a sacrifice. The price is always blood.
Samuel’s father squeezed into his palm, and red drops splattered from his hand over the butcher’s face. The old man groaned as Samuel’s father wrapped the wound with a thin strip of gauze the doctor must have left behind on the nightstand. The doctor did that on occasion. She never said much to Samuel or his father, but a part of him felt like they had more in common than most. Who else, besides clergymen and medical practitioners, spent so much time interacting with the dead or near-dead?
His father laid the knife down. He folded his hands together and prayed for the man’s soul, praying that Azhuel would purge his sins and embrace him with His roots. The butcher’s breathing worsened, his chest convulsing as if it was being crushed from the inside. Without warning, the old man’s bony fingers shot up and latched onto his father’s forearm.
The Litten woman ran toward the bed in a panic.
“Don’t touch him!” she yelled as she wrenched away the butcher’s wild hand.
Samuel’s father stepped back, his prayers silenced. The old man spewed nonsensical mutterings, his head bobbing back and forth like a thrashing toddler. The Litten woman tried restraining his arms, but she wasn’t strong enough. The butcher pushed her back, savagely clawing out for Samuel’s father.
Samuel was petrified, unsure what to do. The Litten woman persevered nonetheless, trying to cajole the old man back into lying down. “Father. Calm yourself. Please. Enough.”
The old man ignored his daughter’s pleas and thrashed his torso upward in blatant defiance.
“It’s all right,” Samuel’s father said firmly. He stepped forward and allowed the dying butcher to once again take hold of his marked arm. “Here.”
The old man’s grip instantly softened, and his breathing calmed. The Litten woman relaxed her hands, her lips quivering. She slowly retracted herself to the back wall.
“There is goodness in this world,” his father said as he allowed the old man to cling to his arm. “I’ve seen what can come out of darkness and pain. Sometimes the branches must be pruned in order for the tree to sprout again. Do not be afraid. Azhuel sees all. And tonight. You will find comfort in the embrace of His roots. You will be connected to Him for eternity. You will find peace. Peace.”
Samuel waited as the butcher’s tongue drooped out of his open mouth, waited for what seemed hours until the old man’s breathing stopped altogether. His father lowered the old man’s arm back to the bed. How had the butcher’s desperate fingers felt against his father’s arm? He could still see the red marks where the man had squeezed.
His father seemed unbothered by the whole affair. He wiped the bloodied blade across his jeans before slipping it back into its sheath. The butcher’s daughter held her cheeks, her shaking slight but apparent. She looked to Samuel’s father, no longer able to hide her confusion and fear.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “He wasn’t in his right mind. I know he wouldn’t have … what will they do to him? To his body? What will they do to us, cleric?”
Samuel held tight to the scriptures as his father walked to the door. He reached for the door handle but stopped.
“Tell no one.”
A fresh fire had been lit in the center fireplace, helping to illuminate some of the shadows. Samuel sat beside his father on the Littens’ large sofa, waiting for the sheriff’s return. He bounced his heels against the pine floor, unable to stop seeing the decrepit butcher grabbing his father’s marked arm.
“Thirsty?” his father asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Something has been prepared for us.”
Samuel straightened his back and looked up. A thin tray with two porcelain cups hovered above his knees, both filled to the brim with some sort of steaming brown liquid. A girl around his age stood in front of him, delicately holding the tray. She wore a gray woolly dress, similar in style to her mother’s. Her chestnut hair had been braided into two separate strands that came down on opposite ends of her collarbone, exposing and elongating her neck.
“My mother asked me to bring this,” the girl said.
His father nodded solemnly. “Might I ask your name?”
She kept her eyes on the tray. “Claudette.”
“Thank you, Claudette.” Samuel’s father took both cups and gave one to him. “I pray that Azhuel gives you and your family comfort in this time.”
“Yes,” the girl said.
The brown liquid smelled like tree bark and dirt. Samuel put it to his mouth and drank. It was bitter; he had expected as much, but it somehow had a soothing effect. His lips puckered. “What is this?”
“It’s coffee.” The girl grinned. “Have you never had it before?”
Samuel shook his head. He took another sip before shoving his glasses farther up. Coffee was a delicacy that had to be imported from the greenlands. He wo
ndered how many coins it cost the Litten family to brew a single cup.
“It’s really good,” Samuel said sheepishly.
He couldn’t help but notice the girl’s fingers. They were thin and long like the old butcher’s but free of wrinkles and bulging veins. He wondered what they would feel like on his arm. The girl must’ve noticed him staring. She clutched the tray tightly, bowing slightly before walking down the hallway like she’d done something terrible.
Samuel breathed deeply. Although he wasn’t a cleric yet, most treated him like he was. It wasn’t against the law to touch the bastard of a cleric, as far as Samuel knew, but he understood why the citizens avoided him. His arm had not been inked with holy roots, but it may as well have been. What future could the bastard child of a cleric hope for besides the mark of the clergy?
About halfway through his cup of coffee, the sheriff returned. The ride back home seemed far less eventful to Samuel. When he and his father went inside their cabin, he tossed off his boots and put his father’s knife under the bed. The fire from several hours before had cooled to nothing more than glowing coals. His father lit a candle, laying the scriptures beside the picture of Samuel’s mother.
Samuel gazed at the tattered photograph. His mother had left him her smooth black hair, petite height, thin figure, and bad vision. He wore her old pair of glasses. His father had saved them in case Samuel’s sight worsened with age, which was a wise choice. By the time Samuel turned seven, he could hardly see a thing without them. Even with them, certain shapes and colors, like the speckled patterns of yellow and green on the pine leaves surrounding the log cabin, were hard to decipher. He told his father he needed lenses made specifically for him, but eyeglasses were expensive and hard to come by. All specialized goods needed to be brought up by train carts from the greenlands, which was always costly. And it wasn’t as if his father was in a high-paying profession.
“Father?”
“What is it?”
“Why’d the butcher touch you?”
Samuel had been too scared to ask before, and the Littens’ house didn’t seem like the right place to bring it up.
His father glanced at the photograph of his mother. He’d said her name only once before, but Samuel had never forgotten it. Atia. It was a southern name, and to him it sounded warm and free.
“Death often supersedes the worries of the living and can break the hardest of men. What is another day on this earth in comparison to eternity?”
His father often spoke this way, incorporating the scriptures into daily dialogue.
“Do you think the butcher’s daughter will report you?”
“No,” his father said calmly. “She is grateful that her father passed in peace. I know that much. If she reports the incident, she and her family might be the ones who suffer the consequences. As a public citizen, she welcomed a cleric into her home. To perform the rites, yes. But this wasn’t a ceremony. Our combined stories together may still leave much for speculation. My word would be of little help.”
“The sheriff would defend you, right? He could speak on your behalf.”
“Perhaps. But only Azhuel knows the hearts of men.”
His father moseyed through the cabin, readying himself for bed.
Samuel grabbed fresh firewood and rekindled the fireplace. He extended his palms to the cackling flame. He pictured his father working in a different profession, like logging or smithing. He had the muscles for it, unlike Samuel, whose frame and body seemed more designed to reflect his mother. His thoughts often came back to her, especially recently. If his father had been something else, would his mother still be alive? Would Samuel have despised his future so much, the inevitability of religious piety and isolation? Like many orphans who’d been abandoned by their families, his father had been selected by the high council to be raised and trained in the faith by a lead cleric. Many impoverished citizens would try to voluntarily give their sons over to the cloth, if not merely to guarantee that their children would be fed on a regular basis.
“Do you ever regret it?” Samuel asked. “Being made a cleric, I mean. Do you ever wish you weren’t?”
Samuel’s father blew out the candle near the nightstand. “I’m honored to serve. That’s the beauty of Azhuel’s mercy. In the end, we all have a choice to be cleansed by the roots. To be forgiven our faults. To be made whole again. All men need this.”
Samuel glanced at the photograph of his mother, imagining how the warmth of his mother’s skin must’ve felt when she held him as a baby.
“Do you think she regretted it?”
His father, as he often did, ignored him.
“It’s late. Come to bed.”
The storm ended early the next morning. Samuel’s father left at sunrise to examine the fishing lines by the iced-over lake. To busy himself, Samuel chopped firewood and checked the ground snares near the left end of their cabin. The snares were empty, but one of the bushes nearby had begun sprouting blackberries. He picked all the ripe berries and put them inside his pockets, eating a few along the way back.
After an hour of shoveling snow away from the doorway, he decided to take a break from his daily chores. He got the hunting knife and chose a large pine behind the cabin as the target, carving an X into the bark. He stepped back ten paces, angled his body, and threw the knife with all his might. He missed the target on the first attempt but landed near the mark every time afterward. He dug the blade out from the wood and decided to test his range from twenty paces back. This proved far more difficult, and he could hardly hit the tree at all, let alone the X. His father had once told him about a redlands soldier who had struck a scorpion nearly fifty feet away with his dagger. Samuel wished he could be that accurate throwing. But he had trouble judging depth, and that was something no amount of practice could fix. He blamed his mother’s lenses.
By midday, his father had returned with several more bluefish. They cooked them right away, eating their fill. Samuel was surprised by his own hunger. After an early dinner, he showed his father the ripening blackberries, taking him to the bush. His father decided it was best to set up a ground snare near the front of it. Samuel dug a hole about a foot deep as his father hammered six stakes into the nearly frozen ground, aligning them into a perfect circle. They tied a rope around the nearest pine, set the snare on top of the stakes, and covered it with snow and dirt. Hopefully some four-legged creature would find the blackberries as enticing as they did.
Returning home, Samuel pointed to the red jeep parked beside their shed.
“Has someone else passed?”
His father scratched his beard as they walked.
“No. That’s not the sheriff.”
Samuel didn’t understand until he got closer to the cabin. The red jeep sparkled in the sunlight, its metallic-style paint glistening. The sheriff drove his vehicle everywhere all throughout the day, and it was always covered in filth and grime, but this jeep looked as if it had been loaded off a trans-state train car hours before. Stacks of bundled papers and manila folders were scattered across the passenger seats. The documentation looked official.
It wasn’t the sheriff’s jeep.
Opening the front door, Samuel and his father were greeted by a nervous young man. He was dressed in a fine dark suit, wooly peacoat, and leather loafers. His blue eyes had a dazed look, like Samuel and his father and the cabin around were all part of some exotic world. He combed his slick blond hair to the side with his fingers and stood up from the chair.
“Cleric,” he said a little too loudly. “I am here on official assignment from the mayor of Haid.”
His father bowed. Samuel followed suit, his throat swelling.
“Do you know who I am?” the boy asked.
“I do not. I apologize for my ignorance.”
“Charles Thompson. I’m the mayor’s son.”
It wasn’t until he said his name that Samuel recognized him. The young man looked nearly the same as he had back wh
en he and Samuel were boys. Six or seven years prior, the mayor’s wife fell ill, and a high fever took her. All the shops in town closed, and even the loggers were given the day off, so everyone could attend the funeral and pay their respects. His father, as was custom, performed the holy rites. Samuel could recall the largeness of the crowd, the elaborate decorations that adorned the town square, and the lanky yellow-haired boy clenching onto Mayor Thompson’s fine suit and wailing like an infant as Samuel’s father sprinkled blood on his mother’s corpse. The mayor had to restrain the boy and eventually had the sheriff drive him back to the estate, because his raucous outbursts were delaying the ceremony. A week after the funeral, the boy was sent away to live with one of his relatives down in the greenlands. Last thing Samuel overheard from a blabbering citizen was that the mayor’s son was attending an elite boarding school getting a proper education. The greenlands had a reputation for expensive and prestigious schools, as well as lavish crops and agreeable climate.
“Of course,” Samuel’s father said. He bowed once more. Samuel did the same. “There is no reason to stand on my behalf, young sir. Would you like some tea?”
Charles nodded. “Yes. Please. It’s so cold in here.”
Samuel wanted to tell him better socks and shoes would make the cold much more bearable, but he decided against it. He poured a dash of tealeaves into a pot, and noticed his fingers were stiff and shaky. Had the butcher’s daughter talked to anyone about that night? Why else would a politician be inside his father’s cabin? What sort of pleasant business could Mayor Thompson have with the cleric?
Samuel’s father took off his gloves and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He took a seat across from Charles, keeping his arms stiffly by his side.
“Don’t know if you’ve heard, but my father has been the victim of a petty thief,” Charles said emphatically. He cocked his head, perhaps marveling at the mark of the clergy. “He had the sheriff set up some animal traps in the woods, and he now has at least six patrolmen stationed outside the estate at all times.”
Demon in the Whitelands Page 2