Among the Lilies

by Daniel Mills

  The howling had ceased. The earth opened into a deep shaft with slick sides like a burial pit and meltwater pooling at bottom to reflect my features, pinched and pale, and the shape of the man behind me. His arm snapped across my throat. The blow burst on my Adam’s Apple, bruising the windpipe and causing my vision to flicker. He kicked at the backs of my knees, and I crumpled. He caught me by the armpits and with one white hand took hold of the cartridge box. His strength was incredible: he snapped the leather strap in two across my chest then ripped the box free. His voice was in my ear, low and spitting.

  “Take my coat too, will you.”

  He relaxed his grip. I dropped to my knees, coughing after air. I could not remain upright: he cuffed me about the ears, drawing blood from the scalp, and hammered at my ribs with his fists til I slumped forward with my face in the muck. His boot was on my neck, a crushing weight. I was drowning, pinned as was the serpent, unable to breathe for the weight which held me fixed. He cursed me with a voice like broken glass and wrestled with the coat I wore, twisting my arms round in their sockets til the garment slid free of the shoulders, a skin shed.

  He called me a thief and worse. He said I meant to steal from him his very life, which I could not understand, and then the weight was gone from my neck. Air exploded into my mouth and lungs. I gagged and sputtered and turned my head to see my assailant stalking away.

  He was tall, at least six feet in height, broad-shouldered and strong. In age he appeared around thirty, though I could not see his face, and for clothing he wore boots and gaiters paired with blue trousers, suspenders, a linen undershirt with sleeves rolled back. He carried my coat and cartridge box together in a bundle under his arm with the rifle resting across his shoulders.

  Judah was beside him, limping. I could not call to him, had not the breath for it, and there were open wounds down his side, thin gashes made by a blade or willow-whip. His gait was slow and shuffling like that of a man to the gallows and the two of them were nearly out of sight when Judah looked back. His eyes met mine but he did not see me, somehow, and his face appeared human in its hopelessness with an emptiness like mine on the morning two years ago when the worst of the nightmare was past and I woke within the pine-grove.

  Such things I felt in that moment:

  I was like the Elder Job, perhaps, when he had gambled all, and lost, and the black waters opened before him, but no angel’s voice to call me back. Christ was dead and crucified, his bloodied face written on my bones like scrimshaw.

  I closed my eyes, though just awake, and the image of His broken body appeared from out the darkness, nailed to the cross of my transgressions and Mother weeping at His feet, grieving what was gone and gone forever. For I had given my soul, and given it gladly, though months had to pass before I understood what I had lost.

  All this was two years ago. I was more a boy than a man, and I stood up, shaking, and stumbled to the river. The surface had frozen in the night and the earth was hard with frost and slippery as I scuttled down the bank. With the hatchet I smashed a circle into the ice and plunged in my hands, scrubbing them raw, sopping off blood and grave-dust.

  A moaning came from behind me, a low sound, and empty, like the wind in November. I looked down toward the water and glimpsed within it a face like death, which was my face: a skull with all flesh and feeling stripped away and eyes left open to look on everything, nothing, a world of winter.

  The same face I saw today in the pit-trap, a ghost’s image in mud. The gaze vacant, unblinking to watch me cough and choke and regain my feet. I touched my fingers to my scalp. They came away warm, wet, and my ribs throbbed with every step to carry me back toward the house, this house, and the chair at which I write—and sleep.

  Another morning. The day is mild with the sun in squares upon the floor and soft wind in the trees, shaking leaves out of the buds.

  Rising, I brewed coffee for the first time in months and fried bacon and potatoes together in a pan for breakfast. I spent the day by the window, watching the woods as Judah did in the days after we found the drowned body.

  That was where it began, with the wet slip of his hair between my fingers. With the stench of mud from his ribcage, sealing the gaps between, and the organs inside rotting. But if that was the beginning I find I cannot imagine an ending or guess at the fate which awaits us all: the living, the dead, or those halfway between.

  Even spring is a place halfway, as was that summer of three years ago, when the fierce heat lingered into September and the wind set whorls in the yellowed grass. Mornings, the sun beat down from the south, warding off rain for weeks, so the fall, we thought, would never come.

  How little I understood. I was naïve, a child in soul if not in body. With Eden blooming all round I became like Man in the days before Woman was made and all of the wonders of the earth were brought to him, each in turn, and all for him to name. Or the first disciples when Christ made wine from water or cured the blind or herded demons into the driven swine. Of course they believed. With such evidence before them they could scarce have done otherwise and my faith, too, came easily, if only for a time.

  One morning in July the Elder Job sought me before the breakfast bell. The meaning of my Gift was revealed to him, he said, and ushered me toward the library where we could be alone. He closed the doors and paced the room and finally halted to withdraw from his jacket a folded sheet of brown paper.

  “The dreams of our sister Jerusha,” he said.

  He unfolded the page and smoothed it over his chest before handing it to me. The paper was plain butcher’s paper covered front-to-back with angular script unlike any I had encountered. Plainly it was written in haste for the paper was often torn in chevrons where her quill had moved over the page and through it, cutting.

  “The Gift of interpretation is yours,” said Job. “And your hand is accounted a fine one. Therefore, Brother David, you will take the day to study Sister Jerusha’s words and transcribe them as you have done the songs of the spirits. When this is done, you must give yourself to pray upon their meaning and shape your thoughts to the form of the Gift within you. Then you will tell me all you have learned. Beyond this I will say nothing more lest I cloud them, the eyes which have been given you.”

  He departed. The page was before me, the lines of her cramped handwriting which I strained to read as the mist boiled off and breakfast ended and my brothers and sisters went about their labors. The sun breached the tree-line to south and east and I turned my attention to my work, transcribing her words in my own hand and on white vellum as the dreamer’s words demanded.

  She dreamt of the days of Creation and saw the beasts of the earth emerge from a fog, formless and void. Goats and birds and cattle all appeared in the same order as in Genesis but they were white and flat, unmoving til she named the colors as she was bid and the whole of the Garden burst into flower. This was but the first of her dreams.

  The weeks passed. When next she dreamt she bore witness to the Fall. August: the rot which is in life surfaced and with Mother beside her she watched the animals breeding, one with another, moving in rhythm to birth a broken world. Trees sagged with the weight of fruit on their branches, the hedgerows forming snarls of thorn and berry which went unpicked though the animals were more numerous than before. Of fruit they had no need for they feasted now on the flesh of one another even as they coupled, male with female and wolf with ewe.

  Time’s glass was fractured, the grains of it poured out so the wild corn sprouted and shot from the ground to attain a man’s height: red in stalk and leaf and overtopped with crimson blooms the color of heart’s blood. The color lingered in her mind, she wrote, even after she woke with summer’s heat sitting on her chest and her nightgown soaked in sweat. She tasted the word like salt on her tongue. Red.

  I dwelt too long upon the image. I closed my eyes and saw her waking with the blankets sliding from her, the nightgown clinging: the shape of her breasts, the dark thatch of hair between her thighs. She struck a match to li
ght a tallow then sat by the window with the candle casting halos about her eyes and hair-ends and skin like pale syrup in its glow. She wrote as one does in the grip of mania, inclining herself over the slate and brown paper and the quill racing cross it, scratching through to stone. So quickly the dreams faded and were lost.

  Once in September I rose and dressed myself at the window and watched the fog descending on the stone house. It rolled from the surrounding hills, forming waves to hide the farm-fields and the mill. A door opened downstairs: Jerusha. She had woken with the bell and donned her apron to fetch the morning’s water. A footpath led from the house to the stream, a distance of fifty yards. She walked with the buckets slung from a beam across her shoulders, bent forward beneath it so she did not lift her head to see her way but entered the fog and was lost in it.

  The soul contains a memory of Eden, Job once told me, while the body holds within it the memory of its Fall. By this he meant we must be vigilant, faithful to the cross we bear, but in the quiet of the stone house with fog at the window and the others at their prayers or just awaking I watched Jerusha reappear from the mist, the water weighing heavy, and thought not of Eden but of the first sin and panted after it myself, though I could not know what it would mean. Even in my sin I was an innocent.

  Night has fallen. The windows are dark. I do not light the fire.

  I was asleep: I had no warning.

  The door shuddered with a blow which roused me and sent me stumbling cross the room, scrambling for the rifle which wasn’t there. The hammering came again, splintering the paneling. The bolt, drawn fast, rattled but would not yield though the cracks widened and joined to form an elongated oval like an eye turned on its side and faced outward to catch the flash of moon from the man’s eyes and rifle as he smashed in the damaged panel.

  I fumbled behind me. In the dark I swept the cold stove with my hands til the matches tumbled into them. I struck one. The flame-tip leapt up shimmering to reveal the bed and the stove and the long table toward which I lunged while the assault went on and on.

  The match went out in my hand and I struck the table hard. My lungs emptied. The table bucked with the impact of my body against it and skidded cross the room toward the door just as the cracked panel shattered and fell.

  A hand appeared, a man’s broad hand with tendons like steel wire. It snaked through the opening with fingers spread to grasp at the bolt, to pull it back.

  The moonlight swam, ribbed with shadows, but I kept my feet, somehow, and drove the table-end to the door, jamming it fast under the handle.

  The bolt shot back. His hand disappeared and he kicked at the door. The handle jumped but struck the table and would not turn though he redoubled his fury and ruptured the lower panel with his boot, heavy boots, like those worn by soldiers.

  He was panting, grunting like a beast in heat. My lungs, bruised, expanded painfully with the breath which filled them as I dropped to hands-and-knees. The hatchet I found in its place by the door, knew its weight in my hand. I crouched beside the table.

  The kicking subsided. I swallowed my breath and willed even my blood to silence as I watched for the hand to reappear, the fingers first, and then the whole of a milk-white forearm which was thickly muscled up and down its length.

  I swung. The hatchet struck him below the elbow, severing tendons, glancing off bone. He bellowed. I brought the hatchet back but the hand vanished and the body with it and the shattered door gave onto a slate stoop bathed in moonlight, shining and silver but for the shadow he cast behind him as he retreated out of sight.

  I listened for footsteps, heard splashing in the muck beyond the slate stair. Then a faint metallic scraping which was a hammer drawn back. I threw myself forward and was on the ground when the rifle discharged, punching a hole in the door. The ball struck the tabletop and lodged there, sawdust whirling up to catch the light through the door.

  He reloaded, and again he was in motion, boots striking like flints. He thrust the gun’s barrel through the broken door and drew back upon the hammer. I tasted sulfur, smoke. Silence, then, with him listening for me as I was for him and still the shot did not come.

  He withdrew the rifle. A scraping of boots, a rustle of fabric, and no other sound audible as the moon slipped out of the sky. Only the blood at my temple as it circled my skull, constricting to drum about my ears, an awful pressure. The air whistled in my nostrils.

  A crash from the backroom then a noise like rain on the boards as glass poured from a broken window frame. I was in motion, scuttling on hands and knees out from under the table then hurtling into the other room.

  Momentum alone sufficed. I barreled into the man as he clambered through the low window, off-balancing him so that he tumbled backward out of the frame. His legs went up, showing bare feet white as bones where he had removed his boots to steal away from the steps. He hit the grass and rolled into a crouch, swinging the rifle round to fire from the shoulder.

  My legs were numb, useless, but I scrabbled at the window-frame and contrived to pull myself forward, behind the wall, so the shot went wide through the window, passing close enough to rattle teeth, steal away hearing.

  I could not find the hatchet. I had lost it somehow and stood up near-blind in the dark and with ears only for the bells which deafened me with the retreat of lightning which was the rifle’s discharge and the thunder of its voice. He was reloading, I knew, and did not think, but plunged through the window head-first, striking him in the chest. He flew back with my body against him but threw me clear and straddled me about the center so we rolled together down the rise.

  We struck the ditch, the mud which pooled round the steps and the first weeds pushing through. We wrestled with our hands about the rifle, but he would not let go or loosen his grip for all I perched upon his chest and trapped the barrel with my weight. We were quiet, had breath only for the struggle. His legs flailed behind me, useless, but he pulled down on the rifle, dragging me with it til our faces were close, separated by no more than half-a-foot. His eyes were open, I saw, and very wide. I shifted position. I drove my knee up between his legs and leant into the blow to mash the soft tissue. He did not react but met my gaze with eyes showing black for the faint sheen of light on a raft of passing cloud above us.

  His head snapped up, pulping my nose. I stumbled back and struck the hillside, swallowing the iron taste of blood as my nose split and emptied itself down my face. The man rolled over onto his hands and knees and stood up, shaky, then staggered toward the wood with the rifle slung cross his back, favoring his right leg as he ran.

  Clouds were passing, flowing with the Milky Way across the sky. The moon re-emerged to light upon the man as he stumbled through the orchard to the forest’s margin where the trees like nets parted and closed round him.

  His boots he left beside the door. Pointed toes. Dark leather and light. They were the same as those I had buried with the dead man but appeared new. The insides stank of mold as though left for weeks with water standing in them. The soles. I turned over the boots to scrutinize their undersides, his initials carved upside-down in the bottom of the heel. A.F. rather than I.V. I brought them into the house and placed them near the stove to dry then turned the table upright to cover the door, nailing two boards across to secure it into place.

  I saw to the backroom. The window had shattered inward, showering down glass which winked and sparkled on the floor. One hound’s tooth bit deep, savaging the man’s ankle and spraying down the wall. I swept up the glass-shards from the ground and retrieved the blankets from my pack, untouched since my return.

  My nose was leaking. Warm blood filmed on my lips, painting them scarlet, like the color of the corn in Jerusha’s dream. I tore strips from a blanket and used these to wipe my mouth and staunch the flow and sop the blood from the wall. The other blanket I nailed to the frame to ward off the draft then blocked the window with a low shelf.

  Inside I lit the stove and breathed upon the coals. The spirit came into them. Sensation ret
urned, and pain. The bells of my ears ceased from striking and I heard soft footfalls overhead. Her voice from the nursery: no longer singing but weeping, wailing over the shattered crib where no baby slept.

  I stopped my ears with wadded cloth and stoked the fire high, making light enough to see the blood-flecks on my hands and spattered down the page, showing crimson where firelight fell across it. The color, like her grief, held within itself the whole of hell’s terror and desolation, as did the screaming which came from the woods in answer.

  Judah whimpering, beaten, howling in his pain. Red.

  Midday and the wind blows warm, the flue thrown wide to catch it so the fire wells up bright and hot. The man’s boots steam, releasing an odor of old rain. I wake with the stink, breathing in blood through my ruined nose. I ache. I lie upon the floor with the journal resting open on my breast and the pencil moving over the page, keeping pace with my mind, as the past weeks return in fragments. The memories twist in my hands, bending to one side and another in the manner of a blacksmith’s puzzle.

  Job made one for me. I was a child of seven or eight and the puzzle occupied my attention for hours upon a rainy Sabbath when I should have been at my prayers. The puzzle was fashioned from three black twists of metal which Job had forged himself and contrived to braid together with a delicacy which seemed impossible given the broadness of his hands. It was a thing of beauty, and of grace, inasmuch as it was made to be broken and the pieces separated with ease if one but knew the trick of it.