I sat on the corner of the bed. “But what about your father? Did you abandon him to this potentially lethal dust storm?”
“I don’t know the exact details. All I remember is that he was a Corbin and the Corbins wanted to wait it out, they forced the whole community to wait it out. So she took off with me and another mom and her kid.”
I felt the oddest sensation in my limbs like an engine had turned on in my bones. “And the other child, he was a boy?”
“Yes,” she said, just like I knew she would.
“And he ended up in the orphanage like you?”
“Yes.” Her eyes met mine. “You have to help me.”
When I closed my eyes I could see a black ocean wave of dust rolling toward me. “Yes,” I said. I was that boy.
There was only one guide on duty, since everyone else was making merry at the hotel. Once I reiterated whom I was, he was relatively happy to let us in. I was, after all, nothing but a harmless scholar, pomposity my only defense.
Outside of the diner, as one might expect, I hesitated before subjecting myself to the morbid horror of the bodies. But once Sydney went in, I had to follow, keeping my gaze as well as I could away from their petrified faces, but every once in a while my eyes strayed. The half melted children were particularly disturbing. Sydney’s dissent was valid: the community’s bodies didn’t truly merit this sort of archaeological preservation. Once Chad had ascertained how they died, then they should have been interred, but these sort of hermetic sects provoked a gruesome fascination, as well I knew.
“Did you know any of them?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I broached the question as delicately as possible. “Your parents?”
She shook her head then pointed at the nearest body. “But that was my uncle, and the swimming instructor. I feel bad that I wasn’t a better student. I always gave the poor guy a hard time.”
“What happened to your mother? The mothers?”
“No one was supposed to open the bunker door once the dust storm started because the place would fill with sand and we’d be buried alive. I remember my mom repeating that nine or ten times. They’d just put us in sleeping bags and given us a pack of cards. It was fun—like we were on a camping trip, until we heard this banging that kept getting louder and louder. We kids begged to know what it was, but our mothers wouldn’t answer, they only exchanged looks. Then the hatch flew open and I saw my father’s head. At first, I thought he’d come to join us and I was happy, but pretty soon it was clear that he’d come to take us back. It was crazy—sand was whipping round the room, and outside the sky was howling. Our mothers rushed up the stairs and forced him out and when the hatch closed behind them, the bunker went dark.” She paused, swallowing until her voice came back to her.
“We waited and waited for our mothers. We waited until we couldn’t breathe. When we finally dared to open the hatch, there was no sign of anyone, the town, or any living thing.” She looked away from the bodies and at me.
I knew then why my childhood was so fragmented—the trauma of losing my mother, and in such a manner. To have her hands tucking me into a sleeping bag one moment and then vanishing the next. It was interesting to see how differently Sydney and I, two children of the same traumatic event, had turned out. Her reaction was to return to the site. Whereas I, by forgetting it, had sought to catalog the tragic flaw of other sects.
“It feels so true,” I said.
“It is true,” she said.
I was exquisitely light-headed, barely able to breathe let alone think. “What do we do now?”
“It’s a space that needs to be laid to rest. The land itself needs to heal, to be away from humans.”
I nodded. I’d never felt prompted to take part in anything approaching the sacred. I’d always admired the impulse, or at least been fascinated by it, but never belonged to it.
She opened her bag and showed me a hoard of lighter fluid and matches. “I’m sure we’re being filmed, so we’ll have to be quick, and of course, they’ll know it was us, which means we’ll have to hide out in the desert for a while. I have a place we can stay. But if you’re going to do this with me, you know your career will be over. Think about that.”
There was a profound strumming in my chest. “Perhaps I can be a sort of radical fugitive scholar,” I joked helplessly.
I reached in for a bottle of lighter fluid and solemnly doused the bodies while Sydney headed for the white house. When I threw the match, the flame spread faster than thought, fracturing the bodies’ delicate shells housing their bones. Momentarily blinded by the light, an unsubstantial thing thick as dream, I thought of how I loved and feared my mother’s audacity.
Then I heard a flare burst in the air and Sydney rushed back in out of breath. “We better get out of here,” she said. “I don’t trust that guide not to shoot at us.” She grabbed my hand and we ran up the stairs of the site and toward our jeep to head into the unspeakably vast desert like we had so many years before. Then I had been so afraid, but now when I heard the screech and roar of a convoy coming upon us, I felt enveloped by the purity of a true act.
Chad pulled in front of us with two of his adherents and hopped out waving a gun, his sombrero gone and his eyes more compellingly massive than I thought possible. “What have you done?” he screamed.
“Was I a Corbin?” I asked Sydney. Despite the mayhem, or because of it, I desperately needed to know.
“Calm down,” she said to Chad, putting her hands up. “What’s done is done.”
“Or an Ashe?” I asked.
She looked over at me. “What?”
“Was I an Ashe? Quick!”
She stared at me as if frightened. “What do you mean? Lee . . . you were never here.”
But the dark heat was so dreadfully familiar, especially when she tried to run, as was the suffocating silence after the bullets, from so many guns, at such close range, had ripped into her lovely face, and too my cry at the agony only a man-made death could give.
That We May Be All One Sheepefolde, or, O Saeculum Corruptissimum
Downstairs, do the floorboards creak. The servant boy bestirred from dream. The world that wast is a pernicious, noble dream. Sometime do I suspect I am its only dreamer. For all I love are gone. The world presently gray, black, cracked, brown.
Now when I wake always my body acheth: a noxious inflammation of the stomach; divers pangs gripeth under both mine arms; a disorder which produces a constriction about my breast; and am I oft visited by horrible vomitings. Verily, the reason for waking one scarce knows, for living is a prayer that hath yet to be answered. Though long have I been frail of health, I trow that in my green old age am I too disordered, my soured skin rivelled up.
“Jerome?”
Rising from my pallet, I find my jerkin bloody. Yet, it is not I who is bleeding—never is it I who hast bled. Mercifully though the blood is not dry, none stains the blanket.
“Jerome?”
I throw off my nightcap, strip, start a fire, pull a doublet over my smock, and once the water on the hearth begins to boil, drop in my jerkin, stirring and poking out the blood.
“Jerome, art thou awake?”
Lifting my dripping jerkin from the cauldron with the poker, I hang it out the window to dry whereupon I hear the boy on the steps.
“Peace!” I shout. “Go downstairs. I come.”
When I reach the bottom of the winding stair, I see that near the ware-bench, the boy is stacking books and eating a crust. He casts upon me blue eyes, free from wrangle.
“Good morrow,” saith he. “Art thou hungry?”
After the fire at St. Paul’s Cathedral, I moved the bookstore hither. Twas not long after that when the city met with plague, and this orphan boy, then a beggarly pickthank, began haunting my pages, though he knew not how to read. It is to me an irony that I should now sell that for which men have burned.
“I fear I have no appetite this morning,” I saith.
I guide him by
the shoulder, walking him past the great Chaucer, The Falls of Princes by Lydgate, The Passetyme of Pleasure, the Gesta Regum Anglorum and Historia Brittonum, shelves of Italianates: Petrarch and Boccaccio, the workes of our righteous Pagans: Quintilian, Aristotle, Pliny, Plato, the epistles of Tulle . . . and take down The Flour of Curtesye.
“Time,” quoth I, handing him the volume, “to become a lowly copyist.”
At this the boy smiles. How ready he is. Never does he lament the want of a printing press and thus revile the work of transcribing.
“Shall not I first clean the upstairs?” he asks.
“Nay, I wot it does not need it and is in proper order from thy previous good services.”
Upstairs, I sit heavy on my pallet and find blood creased between my fingers, dried at the hilt of my knife. Jerome he called, yet was my name once Uthred. And like the boy, was this old badger an orphan. If I could again fast knit my life to God—by God I would. For there be some mornings when I wake to bells that no longer ring, and I am returned to the days of my novitiate in the Year of Our Lord 1536 when I wast a black monk in Marston Abbey.
I did not know how I had come to be at Marston Abbey. I knew only that as a small lad I had been given unto the brothers who had taught me grammar, rhetoric, logic, liturgy, and to love God; a love which wast then as necessary and natural as breath. When tilling the fields, when collecting honey, when copying manuscripts sacred and profane, God wast with me. In this quietude did I glory.
Yet long had my lack of origins troubled me, and twas the day after our St. Swithin’s Day feast when I came upon the Abbott in the Lady’s Chapel, and mayhap made bold by the summer’s heat, did I solicit him upon this great matter.
“Abbott,” said I, “may I ask thee for counsel?”
He was sitting in a deep study under the chancel where sinners were painted falling into Hell. Around his tonsure, his hair grew grey with white and this same hair sprouted thick over his fingers. He stirred from his abstraction and did see me. “How now son Jerome?”
“Abbott, am I right thankful to offer up my service to the abbey, but is it not fitting that I know Uthred before I become Jerome?”
“What meanest thou?”
“I know not what wast my family. If it be their wish that I become a man of God—or even which of them brought me to the abbey when I wast a child. Wast my mother? My father?”
He patted the wooden pew. “Thy mother. Dost thou not remember?”
“Nay, though now my mind conjures images to accompany the story. What was she?”
“Wherefore dost thou inquirest with so stern a brow?”
At his sudden raillery, I could not but produce a smile. “In faith, Abbott, I trow not why I should when so seldom have I meditated upon my birth.”
“But now someone hast spoken words which leads thee to believe that thou hast something of which to be ashamed?”
I lowered my head in assent for too well he saw into my heart.
“Thy mother was a yeoman’s daughter who had alas come in the way of a bumptious man who did not take care of her innocence and youth.”
“A fallen woman?”
“We all are fallen from grace, Jerome. All of us banished from the Garden. Judge not those in need of thy compassion. She did not have the means to keep thee, nor the wish to bring ignominy on her family.”
I sat full heavy with this then asked, “What county wast she of?”
“Methinketh from the east, Middlesex.”
“Had she kinsfolk in our village? Is’t possible she still visits? Does she know that I am here as a novice?”
The Abbott gazed into the stained glass of Our Mother. “Thy mother is no longer among the living. She did take her life after thy birth. Her spirit sank and she could not abide the sin.”
Twas the loss of a thing I had never thought to imagine I had. Yet would this be a trifle against the loss which would follow the feast day of Saint Luke the Evangelist, as the leaves and the cold mists fell.
It were a morning as many a morning. I knelt on the cold stones in the new day’s blue light and prayed. When I heard the bells of Matins, I slipped on my sandals, put up my hood, and rustling from my cell, went through the dormitory across the yard towards the chapel. There by God’s strange glory saw I a man in a fur-trimmed jerkin, walking the arched tunnel which lined the square of the courtyard with the Subprior, followed by ten men dressed in fine livery. The man was tall with hair brownish-black. His boyhood looks could be guessed at by what remained in his face. Like the fog which had settled, I pressed my body to the walls, and none did spy me as they passed through the cloister. Much startled, I hurried onto the chapel, dipping my fingers in the holy water, taking my place at the end of the row with the other novices, waiting for the ringing bells, hastening footsteps, doors closing, to pass on unto silence.
Afterwards, I joined the other novices and met our novice master who must needs shew us how to arrange our habits, hold our hands and head, to walk with modest solemnity. None knew who the man in a fur-trimmed jerkin could be, though some had seen him enter the Abbott’s parlour. That day were we to practice verse in order to have fluency whence professing God’s Truth, but this was interrupted when we were told that a Royal Commissioner, carrying a list of Instructions and set of Injunctions, had come to visit with each of us.
“Thou art the last to be summoned to stand before the Royal Commissioner,” quoth the Subprior, a man of drooping eye and thick tongue, his tanned arms resting on the taut of his belly. Unlike the Abbott, all about him was pageant.
“What doth he ask of us, Brother?” I said meekly, though was I chafed by this allusion to my being not from a family of nobility or fortune.
“He is here to apply the law of God through the King. He shall have ye swear to the King’s Supremacy over our church and to no longer defend the power of the pope, now Bishop of Rome.”
I had heard rumor of some such thing, but hadst not believed it possible till now. “How should I answer?”
“Thou wilt do whatever is necessary for our abbey to please Master Cromwell,” quoth he, churlish. “Thou wilt not obstinately stand from the Crown.”
The Royal Commissioner gave a start when shyly did I enter. Behind him hung a tapestry of our Savior sitting on a Rainbow, His woundful eyes gilt with the grace of sacrifice.
“I am John Haskewell,” quoth he in a voice melodious rough. “Ye be Brother Jerome?”
“Ay sir,” quoth I, curious.
“And from what town comes thy family?” He examined my person with a discomfortable arrogance, then proceeded to pour himself wine.
“I know not, sir. I am an orphan. The Lord, who never forsakes, did take me up.”
“Better fare than the workhouse, ey? And how many years art thou?”
“Nineteen, sir.”
John Haskewell sipped from the Abbot’s gold plate cup in a manner indifferent. “What dost thou copy now?”
“Confessio Amantis by John Gower.”
He looked into the wine, reciting, “‘A book between the twaie,/Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore’?”
I flushed. “Yes, sir. Thou art familiar?”
“I?” He refilled the cup. “I got no further than ‘The Book of Constance.’ I verily believe thou art to be commended to journey on, Brother. Sit.” He indicated a stool.
He walked up to a tapestry figured in silver and fondled the cloth. “Dear Brother Jerome, I shall not tarry: I have heard report of laxity in this abbey.”
“Nay,” quoth I, vexed, “I assure you, sir, tis a false report.”
“Could it be that thou doth not believe a fellow monk speaks true? Would thee”—he turned back to me—“so famed within these walls for thy honesty, mark thy brother out as a liar? I profess it would displease me heartily to discover this man guilty of perjury. I so detest having to decide if a just punishment be a pillory or a hanging.”
Was I clean amazed. It was many moments before I could declare any thought by mouth. “Sir
, in faith, I have not known any of my brothers to ever utter an untruth.”
He set down his cup, stretched his arms, then flung himself down onto the Abbot’s high-backed oak chair. “I am glad to hear thee confirm his innocency, Brother.” He yawned. “Howbeit, it is a great shame that your Abbott allows some monks here to be so merry drunk after Compline that they snore through the Night Office, is it not?”
“Certainly sir, have I never witnessed such acts.”
“Nay? Yet thou didst tell me that none of thy brethren lie.” And thence, his frivolous aspect began to recede and his thievish eyes lit gravely upon me. “But for all that, Brother, dost thou believe Abbott Wendover art a good man?”
“The best of men. I wot of no heart more kind-conceived than the Abbott’s.”
“Yet he is friends with men of perverse minds, servile usurpers many of them, and thus in time may his mind be flattered into corruption. Yet thou, the chiefest bud of Marston Abbey, could guard him against such heretics.”
“I am naught but a novice.”
He sat up, leaning forward. “I would argue that thee art favored above others. Aye Jerome, this day have I heard it said thou art the Abbott’s best loved. Why is that so? Is’t thy pretty mouth?”
I looked at my sandals, vainly suppressing my complexion.
“Sweet modesty.” He stood. “If thou shalt keep me abreast of the Abbott’s conduct, I will write unto Master Cromwell that the Abbott is innocent. In this way we shall safeguard him and warn him of any maligners.”
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead Page 17
