by John Gardner
“Mab!” she whispered, or perhaps she said mad. Her toothless gums left the word uncertain.
I nodded, merely thoughtful, not necessarily indicating agreement.
She whispered something like, “My sister’s baby was mad, over thar in Missoura.” She dabbed with a wrinkled gray hanky at her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My mind was still on the case, not her words. The old woman smelled of cabbage and crabbed age. They can’t help these things, the elderly. But I was eager enough to be rid of her, and shut of her opinions.
“Cured it,” she said, and beamed at me.
Again, meaning nothing, I nodded. I glanced back over my shoulder at the children. They lay as before, motionless as corpses beneath the frayed gray sheet, their red-rimmed eyes staring, full of terror. The old woman said something more to me, snatching at my sleeve as a child would, but I did not catch the exact words. “Yes, good,” I said impatiently.
I took a small vial of pills from my medicine bag on the chair. Sedatives. It was the souls of those three lost children that were unquiet, not their bodies, but I had no medicine for the human soul; a doctor must treat what he can get to. I gave the pills to the widow, along with instructions, then nodded, said good-day to her, along with a word to the children—“Obey Mrs. J—, I’ll be dropping in again,” or some such—and I left.
I said nothing whatever to Shakespeare, riding home. I drove to the barn, unharnessed him and fed him, gave him a solemn pat on the neck and nodded as I’d done to the old woman, then walked back over to the house, reaching in my pocket for my key as I went. It was not in the pocket I expected, and I reached inside my coat, pausing on the porch now and gazing absently over the hills, bright green—a thousand shades of green. My groping hand came to the picture I’d gotten that night from Professor Hunter, and alarm shogged through me before I even recognized what it was my fingertips had brushed. “Klones!” I whispered. The hills were suddenly a mockery—joyfully, meaninglessly green, an ironic comment on the dreadful abandonment of those awful creatures in the bed. I didn’t need to think to perceive their situation, or lack of it: They were, all three of them, John Hunter cruelly resurrected.
I should of course have known it at once, from the instant I first laid eyes on them. But remember, to me they were not words on a page, as they must be to my reader, who sees all this more rationally, from a distance; they were children—flesh-and-blood lambs of God. My spirit shrank back with every particle of Christianity in it, and I fumbled through the rest of my pockets, sick with anxiety, as if, if I could not find that key to my door…
I found it, of course. Was it merely my imagination that the sky had gone darker, lost luster, as if …
No matter. I was not put on earth to be physician to skies. I understood perfectly well now the terror in those unnatural, hunted eyes; understood it and was impotent to deal with it. How he’d done it was unimportant to me. Let scientists deal with the mechanics of it, if any there be who care so little for their immortal souls.
Like any man in a daze, I groped to the chair where normally I spend my evening with poets, with philosophers, occasionally with my father’s beloved theologians, long-dead creatures exactly like myself—or dead, nonexistent till my eye revives them—and I charged my pipe, took my shoes off … He had spoken of memories, phantoms of his own former life. She’d wrung her hands, I remembered. No wonder.
For there was no mistaking the cold evidence of the daguerreotype. The short, neat beard of the original John Hunter and the wild streaming chaos on the second one’s chin, the dimpled white chins of the three small children—they did not hide that unspeakable identity of eyes, nose, teeth. Gruesome outcasts, fiends in human shape!
The night was sullen and overcast, a night, I’d have said, to furbish the unhealthy souls of Mr. Poe or the author of Macbeth. My horse was irritable, indignant, but I drove him cruelly, forgetting all former good will, never permitting him to slack, old and weary as he was. His hooves rang out in the bandoned darkness. He got his second wind; his mane and tail streamed out like those of a younger or infinitely older horse, the terrible black the Devil drives. Where the road went under trees, the night was so dark I had nothing to tell me the horse was still there but the clatter of the gig that stiffly, clumsily connected us. And so, near midnight, we came to the widow’s house.
There were no lights, no sounds of life. I hesitated, getting down from the gig, checked, it may be, by something deeper in my soul than mere justice or charity. But I overcame the debate going on, unheard, in whatever must pass for the heart of man, and, snatching my whip from its rack (I have no idea why), I hurried to the old woman’s door. I knocked twice, loudly, with the butt of the whip, then paused, listening, then knocked twice again. (I did not relish that terrible silence. We weren’t yet shut of tornado season.) Again I knocked, and this time, the third, a voice called out, and soon I heard the creaking of a door, within, and her shuffling, slippered feet. It was a sound like hard, irregular breathing. She fumbled with the latch, got the wooden bolt back, and with a little whimper tugged the door inward. She looked up at me in alarm, knotty hand on her bosom. In her other hand she had a candle.
“I’ve come for the children,” I said.
“Oh, it’s you, Doctor!”
“Whom on earth did you expect?”
She seemed to try to remember, then shot me a cunning look. I looked past her, searching the dim and flickering room. I knew, suddenly, that something had happened. I’d stood here before, peering over the old woman’s shoulder, sweeping my gaze over kitchen pump, crockery, table, wired-up chairs … There was some object on the table, a ghastly gray thing like a shriveled head, and there was string, a butcher knife, several pieces of damp cloth. I pushed past her and stepped to the table, my boots loud as thunder on the hollow floor. It was a root, a mandrake. I turned in rage. “What have you done with them?”
Her gnarled hand trembled like a tree in high wind, and her cracked face was yellowish-green in the candlelight. She gave a moan, a kind of wail with words in it, jumbled, anile, helplessly tumbling. I stalked past her, making sure the three children were not in their beds (though I knew they were not; I’d been through this before). The bedroom window was open, screenless. I leaned out, trying to remember what to do, and in the almost-perfect darkness—no moon, no stars— I found a center, a patch so dark it had to be an object—yet I knew there was no tree in that place. My heart thudded at the walls of my chest with such force that I couldn’t stand upright. And then the black thing whinnied—Shakespeare, much closer than I’d guessed, standing next to the wellhouse. Suddenly I remembered what had lain there struggling in the back of my mind—the old woman’s mumble on my earlier visit; the Indian mandrake cure.
“Witch!” I whispered, turning from the window. I was angry enough to have struck her with my whip, but no time for that now. I stormed past her and out into the darkness and over to the well’s stone wall. After a moment my groping hand found the crank, and, slowly, as carefully as you’d handle a scalpel, I brought up what hung below. The old woman stood at my shoulder with the candle, whimpering for forgiveness, as they came in sight. Three staring children, all mad as the moon, fiercely gagged and tied in the copper washing tub that was to support their difficult journey from the world of demons to the world of men. I swiftly untied first one, then another, and started on the third when my hand paused, swifter than my mind. He was dead. I felt the same shock I’d have felt if he were human. I looked up at the widow. She too had seen it. Her mouth gaped, and the fist at her bosom opened and closed convulsively. It was not my savage wrath she was afraid of. I carried the children, the living and the dead, to the kitchen, and laid them on the table.
“I need more light,” I said.
She went weeping and quaking away to some dark recess and emerged a moment later with a lamp. She placed it on the table and lit it. As the flame leaped up, I reached toward the two who were living, to move them away, a little, from the
corpse. As my hands drew near, their tiny mad eyes snapped suddenly into focus and their hands reached out to catch hold of me. I jerked back as I would if those wrinkled white hands were snakeheads. The old woman bent close— watching me, not the children—and though tears ran down her cheeks like rain, the evil, toothless mouth seemed to be smiling. Shakespeare had his head in the open door, silently urging me to hurry, there was very little time. A tingle of fear came over me, one that I remembered. I glanced around the table as if to see what I’d spilled or disturbed, but there was nothing, which faintly puzzled me. I concentrated again on the pitiful creatures. Their hands were raised, waiting, and their eyes had me nailed as a cat’s eyes nail a mouse before she strikes. My mind was full of wind, reeling and shrieking, but the whole world outside was calm, waiting without hope or plan, with the vast and sorrowful gentleness of a deathly sick horse.
Then, very slowly, I lowered my hands toward the children. Their fingers closed around my wrists—fingers weirdly unawkward for their age—and when I’d gotten my hands around their backs and raised them to my chest, they clung to my ears, my glasses, my nostrils, as if no tornado on earth would shake them free. When the leering old woman reached out to them, joyful, they shrank, sucked in air, and screamed. They were out of the woods.
The widow helped me to bury the dead one in a grove behind the house, with whippoorwills for preacher and only the sunken place in the ground as memorial. Then I loaded the living ones, wrapped in old blankets, in the back of the gig, and we started home. It was dawn, deathly calm. All the birds had stopped singing, and the sky was green. I spoke with old Shakespeare, as he guided us along, of animals, and monsters, and the nature of things.
THE
TEMPTATION OF ST. IVO
1
God forgive me, I hate Brother Nicholas. I hoe in silence, sweat pouring down my forehead, catching in my gristly eyebrows, dripping from my nose, washing down my neck inside my cassock, and down my shoulders and belly, my legs … My feet grow slippery in my sandals. My arms ache, my heart pounds, and despite my labors I can’t stay ahead of him. Without raising my head, since I know he’s watching, I roll up my eyes for a glimpse of the village, still half a mile away, beyond the wall—stone houses, slate roofs, here and there at the edges of the village, thatched huts; above the rooftops, lindens and maples and great dark plane trees, and above the trees the three-pronged local church, like Satan’s pitchfork reared against the clouds—and I see my helplessness, whatever the issue of my senseless flight. I know his hoe must surely overtake me before I can reach the monastery wall, and if it doesn’t, I must turn down the next row of beans and must face him, pass him, and as I pass hear his whisper, shrink from his trawling, ferreting smile. Where we meet, where he attacks me, will be his decision. He’s younger than I am, and stronger, for though we weigh the same (he’s nearly two feet taller), his weight is all in his muscular thighs, his chest, his shoulders. I am old. Fifty. My weight’s in my miserable belly. My arms and legs are like a sickly old woman’s, as white as potato sprouts under the cassock, and as flabby, as jiggly, as buttocks. I spent all my years—until lately, when Brother Nicholas made that life intolerable—at books, serving God with my hand and eyes. I drew, as he did, zoomorphic capitals—beasts eating beasts in the universal war of raging will against raging will: dragons, bears, birds, rabbits, bucks, all coiled, unwitting, in the larger design of an A or an O. Decorations for sacred manuscripts. I was said to be a genius along that line. All the glory be to God. But then one day there was Brother Nicholas, long-nosed, eagle-eyed, his flowing hair more black than a raven’s, and he was whispering, brazenly defying the rule—whispering and whispering, and glancing at me slyly from time to time as if daring me to respond to his whisper or report him to the keeper of the cell. I’d do neither. The scheme of providence demands of us all that each man humbly perform his part, sing his own line in the terrestrial hymn, as the planets are singing, unheard, above us, and with charity forgive those to left and right when they falter. That may sound pompous, simpleminded, but it’s true, or anyway I hope it’s true. A man can go mad, discarding all tradition, reasoning out for himself the precise details of celestial and terrestrial law. I’ve been there. Live by rule, as all Nature does, illuminating the divine limits exactly as ink fills invisible lines. Put strife aside. Shall blue contend with gold, or gold with crimson? We are merely instruments, and he who denies his condition will suffer. The world is a river, and he who resists the pressure of Time and Space will be overwhelmed by it. Surely I am right and Brother Nicholas wrong! I could not answer him in words—the rule of silence forbade it—but I told him in every way I could that I had no wish to contend with him. I gave him gifts, touched his shoulder gently as I passed. He hissed at me, eyebrows lifted, “Ha! Homosexual!” I changed to a carrel far removed from his, smiling meekly to let him understand I intended no offense. He smiled, jaw thrown forward like a billygoat’s, and moved to the carrel directly behind my new one. I prayed for peace of mind. I put all my energy into my work. But I can hardly deny it, that endless, malevolent whisper was distracting. Malevolent. Why should I shrink from the charge? He meant me to hear it, meant my soul to be offended by it. I can see him now, tall, his long hair black as midnight, his careless, undisciplined brush moving swiftly, making swoops and arcs, his tiny pig’s eyes rolled to watch me, his thin mouth wickedly smiling as he whispers. But I would not break the rule of silence, not for any provocation, and after a moment his eyes would slide back to his work. He’s a fiend, I would tell myself. I tried to believe, and to some extent succeeded, that it was not Brother Nicholas himself I hated, but the devil within him. For there is a devil within him: So both doctrine and common sense maintain. He willfully, pointlessly strikes out at me. He scorns all rule, defies all order for mere anarchy’s sake. I will not deny that I begin to be alarmed. There’s no question now: He’s pursuing me. Though his craft is mediocre, he had a position many brothers might envy, in sinful secret. He sat in comfort in the cool of the high-arched sunlit hall, merely filling in lines with his weightless brush, while out where rain makes a cassock hang heavy and sun burns the forehead and nose to a crisp, men less gifted—lay brothers of the order—were pitching manure behind the monastery stables, or hauling, shaping, and emplanting stone, or throwing their weight on the blunt iron plow and stumbling along after oxen. You’ve no idea till you’ve tried it what that means. They don’t dawdle, those beasts. Even Brother Molin, whose father was a giant, can’t muster the power it would take both to hammer the plowshare in and jerk back the rein that would slow the lead ox to a walk. So we see on every side that he who pursues his individual will, in defiance of providence and common profit, will be dragged, will-he, nill-he, where the oxen choose, but he who will put all his back into plowing, merely guiding direction, and will let oxen run as the Lord inspires, can carve out furrows that feed not only the monastery but passing knights and the prisoners in town as well. When I asked to be transferred to the fields, pleading that God had called me there, to serve with the humblest of our lay brothers, mortifying my puffed-up heart—for I had no wish to put the blame on Brother Nicholas; it was not his mysterious hostility toward me but my own infernal inclination to wrath that endangered my soul—Brother Nicholas at once asked for similar transfer. I think I need not set it down to sinful pride that I interpret his transfer as pursuit of me. He does not whisper, at least not noticeably, when others are nearby. In fact, when I mentioned his eternal whispering in confessional, and spoke of my unholy reaction to it, my confessor was unable to believe me. He’s new, this confessor, and doesn’t know me well. I was not much surprised or disappointed. As one grows older, one sees with increasing clarity, and no great sadness, that finally one cannot take one’s troubles to other men. They have troubles, limitations, of their own. Gently, kindly, the voice behind the dark curtain said: “Brother Ivo, pray for perception in this matter. Open your heart to God, and consider in your mind, with the freedom and pure objectivity
God’s grace can give, that the situation may not be as you think. You work at a pitch very few maintain. You do not sleep as many hours as the rest of us. All your brothers have noticed and have worried about it, and have prayed for you. Meditate on this: that the mind and body are interdependent, so long as corruptible flesh enfolds us. The strain on the body which heightens your gifts may heighten, also, your soul’s susceptibilities to influences darker than those which illuminate your art. As we grow older, my son, we become increasingly prey to the powers that begrudge us our celestial destination.” Ah, how rich with self-satisfaction that sleepy, maternal voice! It’s not easy to believe he was ever shocked awake with an image burning to be realized, an image so fierce in its holiness and beauty that it lifts you, as if by the hairs of your head, and condemns you to pace from wall to wall in your room, stalling its terrible energy, until at last, praise God, you hear Vigil ring and can plunge, after prayers, into diligence. But it was not my place to condemn my confessor. He too is God’s instrument, unless all Brother Nicholas whispers is true. If my case is special, not because I’m nobler than other men but because my endowment is in certain ways freakish, not easily understood by confessors created to treat more usual ills, I must suffer in charity the measure of loneliness involved in my call. “Thank you, Father,” I said, resisting the anger of frustration. And in the days that followed I made an honest effort to believe it might be as my confessor, and all who observed us, supposed. Most widespread errors, I have come to see, contain an element of truth. I prayed for sleep, and I slept. But the whispering continued. And watching my brothers shrewdly—pretending to struggle with an interlace figure round a serpent’s head—I discovered with a shock that, in point of fact, they knew. They’d glance up, startled, from four great sunlit windows away when Brother Nicholas’ whispering began; and then, quickly, they’d look down again, denying the knowledge. They were far enough away that they might be mistaken (though they knew they were not). Also, he was not whispering to them. So I fled to the fields. He followed me, smiling, tall and hollow-eyed, his affected meekness sinister. And now his hoe is some six feet behind me, swiftly, casually tearing up the earth, still gaining on me, and I begin to imagine already that I can hear his whisper. Brother Ivo, your rules are absurd! The order of the world is an accident. We could change it in an instant, simply by opening our throats and speaking. Brother Ivo, listen! The sound is so distina I glance back past my shoulder without meaning to, and I see I’m not wrong. His eyes meet mine, sharp blue cones of fire beneath his coal-black brows. He smiles, shows his teeth. Brother Ivo, I’ve decided to murder the Phoenix. I’ve discovered where it lives. I jerk my head around, continue hoeing, stabbing fiercely, resisting the temptation to work sloppily and escape him again. You don’t believe in the Phoenix, Brother Ivo? I give you my word, you’re the only man who can save the beast. “Fool!” I could tell him, “do you take me for a blear-eyed, bull-necked serf, who places his trust in mere outward signs, allegorical apparel—phoenixes, salamanders, fat-coiled dragons? I’ve been painting the shadows the truth casts all my life!” But my heart quickens and a tremor of fear runs through my veins. I almost spoke! I have underestimated my enemy again. Why is it so important to him that I break my vow and speak? What will he have proved? That one man can be corrupted? Surely he must know that any man can be corrupted! He continues to gain on me, whispering. The blade of his hoe strikes two inches from my foot, jerks backward, strikes again. He will soon come even with me. I leave tonight, Brother Ivo. As soon as they’re all asleep, after Compline. Up there on the mountain, that’s where it is. A cave just under the outcropping rocks. There’s a goatpath goes up to a hundred yards from the entrance. “You’re out of your mind,” I could say. “There is no Phoenix.” But it isn’t true, in any sense I understand, that Brother Nicholas is out of his mind. He comes even with me, his sleeve brushes against mine, mock-seductive. I jerk myself away. I pass no judgment on those of my brothers who are homosexual—except for their blatant hypocrisy. They furtively touch one another in the fields, exchange little glances while kneeling to receive Our Lord’s blood and flesh, stand closer together than necessary at the urinal; yet they claim, faces innocent, even dripping pretty tears, that they cherish the Church and all her laws and doctrines. I do not like to be confused with such men. Sin of pride, no doubt. The Lord knows what’s true and false about me; what matter what my brothers believe? And yet I’m enraged, tempted almost beyond resistance to turn on him with my hoe. (In a fight he could easily kill me.) I flash him a warning glance, struggling to do it with the dignity befitting a superior; he smiles, head tipped, flaps a womanish hand; and suddenly I see how grotesque I must look, head drawn back unnaturally, pursed lips pompous, a small fat man twisting his head around, manfully struggling to stare down his nose at a man who’s taller. Again, he’s made a fool of me. I turn, facing him, but swallow my shout. He studies me coolly, leaning forward over his hoe, as detached and cold-blooded as an alchemist studying iron, and I am certain (if ever I doubted it) that Brother Nicholas is no homosexual: He is merely shameless, cut free of all anchor, and will use whatever he can find to make me uncomfortable. I control myself. My rage turns to fear. The shadow of the forested mountain has reached the western edge of the village. All the valley to my left is in ominous shade. He leans toward me, whispering. Do not be too hasty in judging my project, Brother Ivo. Many notable authors have spoken of the Phoenix, and holy men among them. Cyril, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Tertullian. He hisses straight into my ear, spraying spittle. Ilium dico alitem orientis peculiarem, de singularitate famosum, de posteritate monstruosum; quem semetipsum libenter funerans renovat, natali fine decedens, atque succedens iterum Phoenix.—And what of the ninety-second psalm? He rolls up his steel-gray eyes, mock-pious. Despite all that, you deny the bird’s existence. Very well! But it exists, nonetheless, and I have found it, and I mean to murder it. Prevent me if you can! And now, without a backward glance, he strides forward, hoeing. I stand watching, baffled by the turmoil of my emotions, until he’s chopped his way nearly to the monastery wall. He’s like a monstrous crow, bent forward, black hair streaming down over his shoulders and the black of his borrowed habit. Dirt flies, bits of plants. I press my hand to my chest, calming the rush of my heart, and, after a moment, I look down again. A trickle of sweat runs down the handle of the hoe.
