Month: August 2018

God will curse you, he told us when they took him away. God will curse you if you leave this place. Wait, and I’ll return for the faithful.

I wake to the first crow of the roosters, and his voice is the first thing in my mind. Sunlight is filtering through the curtains in my bedroom, and Wax is lying on the rug beside my bed, watching me. Waiting for me to wake. I roll over and smile at her, and her tail thumps the floor. She has mismatched eyes, this dog of mine. He said it was lucky, a blessing from God.

Emmanuel used to say things like that all the time. I never understood them.

God will curse you.

The rooms are empty when I rise, and the house is silent. I make my bed, folding the quilts, and watch the dust play in the light spilling through the window. Most of the others left immediately. They were ashamed to see him driven away in the back of a squad car. They left in the night, stealing away like thieves through the back pasture, and I wrote their names on the wall beside my bed and wondered every night if they were happy, or if God really had cursed them.

Maybe.

Maybe he did. I don’t know.

The rest left one by one. Some after the trial, after the sentencing. Others drifted away through the years, tired of waiting for a man that wasn’t going to come back. Only I stayed, reading the list of names beside my bed every morning and every night and praying that wherever they are, wherever they went, God really didn’t curse them.

Wax follows me downstairs. I feed her first, then the cats. The kitchen is clean, my plate from last night in the sink. Emmanuel used to tell us that leaving dirty dishes is a sin, that it made our house less holy. It took me years to wonder if that was really true or not. Three years. It’s been seven since they took him away, five since the papers said he died in prison. The last of the faithful left when that happened.

Only I’m still here.

The sun is already hot by the time I get out into the barnyard. Heat shimmers on the gravel drive, and the goats are waiting for me. They nibble at my faded sleeves as I let them out into the pasture, and I give them all the grain we have left. The chickens, too, get the last of what we have, although it’s much more than I usually give them. I leave the gates open when I go back to the house, and Wax follows me with her nose pressed against the back of my knee, as if she knows something is different about today.

I sweep the floor before I leave. Dust the mantle. Wash my dishes and put them away. Emmanuel watches me. The papers published an article about how he died. They really seemed to think he was gone, but I’ve always known better. He’s alive in this house. I still hear his deep voice, his persuasiveness, his gentle prodding.

I’ve waited a long time for his memory to fade. It still hasn’t.

I lock the door when I leave. Wax comes with me, and the backpack I was carrying when I first came, all those years ago. Nothing else. I couldn’t take anything else and still escape from him and his stupid curses.

God will curse you.

I bury the key in the garden, between the kale and the carrots. Wax follows me to the end of the lane, past the willow trees and the Black-eyed Susans growing in the ditch. I brush their heads with my fingers as I pass them, and they leave their pollen on my hands. The gate at the end of our property is open, and Wax is the first out on the road beyond. I follow more slowly, leaving the gate to swing wide behind me, and wait for God to strike me dead for leaving this place when I swore I wouldn’t.

He doesn’t. A soft breeze floats through the willows, toying with my hair, smelling of fresh hay and dust, and the gate swings shut on its own. As if God himself were closing it behind me, as relieved as I am to see the last of that house. And of Emmanuel.

Single file while the wind blows, he tells us. One in front of the other. Sometimes I’m so afraid I’ll lose the person ahead of me that I keep my hand on their shoulder. Dust storms are hard to travel in, but it won’t be bad enough to stop until we can’t see the road under our feet, and I can still see the white lines between my boots. So we’ll have to keep moving. Socket doesn’t like to stop until we’ve made our miles for the day.

By the time we do make camp, the wind has died down again, and the air is so still that I can hear my own heart beating. Our tribe has grown in the last few weeks, and there’s near thirty of us camping on the road beneath the stars. We sort ourselves out, five or six to each fire, and the night swallows the bare hills and floods the valley below us.

I kick off my boots and toss them out of the firelight. They smell now, the leather as dirty and patched as if I dug them out of a trash bin, but they were brand new when I found them. We’ve been walking a long time. Four years, I think, although I haven’t counted. Maizie counts. She joined the tribe before I did, a dirty little redhead with a smudged nose and a black eye that’s never healed. She sleeps by my fire nowadays, and when the stars are wheeling overhead, bright as silver against black velvet, she’ll show me the book she carries.

She’s got everything in that book. Where we’ve been. What we’ve seen. In four years, I’ve forgotten most of the places we’ve seen, although we walked so far to see them. But Mazie always remembers, and she reminds me of them all. The big pine forests to the south, where the trees grew over top of the road and the ground was so thick with pine needles that we had to dig near a foot down to find real soil. Or the mountains in the west, where the air was thin and so cold that I thought we’d freeze in our sleeping bags. I can’t read her writing, but she flips through the pages with me, lying on her stomach with her chin propped up on her elbows, and tells me the stories that she likes most to remember.

I like listening to her read about them, although I don’t tell her so. She’s shy, shyer than almost anyone else I’ve ever met, and I have to pretend not to look at her while she chews on a strand of her red hair and reads by the firelight. When she reads about the deserted cities we’ve walked through, describing the cracked pavement and the dirty water, the shattered neon signs and the abandoned cars in the road, I can almost see them again. Like most drifters, we don’t stay long in the cities, preferring to keep to the road and continue on our way, but I’ve always liked passing through the empty streets. There’s always a chance of finding something in the dumpsters or the neglected stores. Most of them have been raided by now, probably many times, but I know where to look, and sometimes I find things.

But we never stay long. Socket leads us, not me, and he’s a drifter to his soul. He’s looking for something, I think, although I don’t know what that something is. Maybe he doesn’t either. So we keep to the road, roaming from shoreline to desert, from rolling plain to craggy mountain ranges. People join us sometimes, and people leave too, when they find the place they’ve been looking for. Everyone has somewhere, a place where a bit of their soul has always rested. When they find it, they stay, and we go on. Still searching. I’ve been looking for four years, but I haven’t found it yet.

Maizie is digging through her bag, looking for a pen that still works. I roll over on my stomach, watching her flip through the pages of her book and mark the date at the top of the page. She’s writing about the dust storm today, I think. About the bare hills and the shriveled, wizened trees we passed and the rocks that have been scorched red by the sun. About the stars that blaze so brightly that they almost light the sky for us.

Her writing is too small to read, but she catches me looking and smiles, reading along as she writes. I rest my chin on my arms, listening to her and watching the firelight play about her red hair until it’s nearly gold. I’m nearly asleep before I catch myself wondering if that bit of soul I’ve been searching for might be in person, not a place.

If so, it would explain why I’m still searching, even after all this time.

Wounded men leave blood on the floor. That’s the greatest difficulty. The nuns who work in the outer nave have scrubbed the tiles a thousand times, but we’re always afraid they’ll miss something. A spot of blood. A smear of filth that we can’t explain away by talking about the rains and our kitchen garden. We take the men to the crypts, hide them behind the gravestones and the tombs while the nuns tend their wounds, but they bring the stench of the battlefields with them, and it’s nearly impossible to hide.

Abbeys are not supposed to smell like blood.

I’m ready when a novice comes to tell me that there are men here to see me. We’ve lit scented candles in the halls, in the nave, even in my office to hide the scent of death, and the nuns have taken the men deep into the vaults where the dead rest and the air is still. We’ve done what we could, and more than many would have advised. We are ready.

The man waiting in my office has medals pinned to his chest and silver braid on his shoulders. The uniform is a familiar one by now, although it doesn’t belong to my country, or any that I would have sworn friendship with. He is lingering at my shelves, his fingers stroking the thick tomes, the leather bindings of the books I’ve spent years collecting. He smiles when I enter, but his eyes never leave the books, as if he’d found something in them to use against me. “Are you aware, Father, what the penalty for harboring the enemy is?”

The very bluntness of the accusation was, I suppose, intended to unnerve me. When I say nothing, he looks up from the shelves to search my face and smiles. “You admit guilt then?”

I shrug. “I’m not admitting anything. You’ve come here before, Captain. You found nothing then. You’ll find nothing now.”

His smile remains, his eyes growing as cold as the fog that rolls in over the barrows. “So you claim, Father. But the third time is the charm, they say.” He skirts my desk, his gaze wandering over the papers, the letter I’ve been writing, the Bible open on the corner. “Remind me, Father,” he says softly, “it was Jesus who told his disciples to ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ . . . correct?”

I have to resist the urge to laugh. “It was.”

“Well?”

“Are you implying that I don’t pay my taxes?”

His smile disappears, and he slams a hand on the desk. “I know those men are here, Father. You might have some form of protection from the general because he’s a religious man, but if I find them here, even he won’t be able to help you.”

The silence that falls between us is poisonous. He’s searched our abbey twice now, looking for men off the battlefront. I’ve seen executions he holds in the streets, the prison camps where he sends the few he doesn’t kill. Every life we take within our walls escapes hell.

I meet his eyes, saying softly, “You have my permission to search, Captain. I’ve told you before. You won’t find anyone.”

We both know I’m not lying. This abbey is too old, too large for him to search properly, and the vaults beneath the floor are not on any map. No one outside the brothers and sisters living here know of its existence. He and his men will never find it.

At last, he straightens up, retrieving the gloves he’s left on my desk. “Very well, Father,” he says, low. “But remember this. Those robes aren’t bulletproof. Men of the cloth can be casualties of war as well.”