Fool School

by James Comins

  When I emerge, clean in the face, I see the girl-boy step out of a room. I know which room is hers now. I consider speaking, asking her (or his?) name, but she hurries to the cafeteria. Not having anywhere else to go, I follow. Pottage would do me some good.

  An ear-splitting blast. Deafness and frigid numbness cloud my consciousness. Nuncle is at the top of the stairwell, holding a silver clarion. Dizziness washes past me and I nearly fall. Instead I sit on the stone floor and look up at him.

  "Sunday morning, my bright sunshines. Dress as well as you might, and assemble at the top of the stairs for Mass."

  Ugh. I want to throw up.

  The boy-girl holds herself--himself? I'm still uncertain, although I'm really not--around the waist, flapping soft hands against her flank, a big hug. I stand aside, wearing green and yellow and my sad puffy washed-out orange shoes. Nuncle unlocks the oak door.

  "Why do you keep it locked?" I ask.

  Nuncle observes me from the corner of his eye. I'm clearly still numerus nihil on his list. He won't even talk to me. A snake's head of pride uncurls in my belly, and angry shame flows through me, and I do nothing.

  Malcolm smiles at me sleepily. Hero bounds between us, a terrier pup. Perille, his head in a brown cloud of hair.

  Hard sunlight, something I'd hardly realized I'd needed, breaks into the landing on the spiral stairs. Hero braces a hand over his eyes. I feel like a troll, shriveling beneath the light. We march.

  Dew coats our shoes. Steam rises from distant bogs. The grass is surprisingly green in many low patches, while hillocks are brown with early autumn death. It's the Bath water, I realize, it soaks through, stays hot. I wonder if snow will melt where the hot springs meet the surface. I enjoy snow, but I tire of it easily. A week of joy followed by two months of misery. There will be enough misery without it.

  Nuncle leads us into the ways of the city of Bath; the cobbles are cold through my shoes. Here is a family, seemingly all women, bearing bouquets atop their felt hats. No, a merchant man is there, caught between the swishy dresses of a half-dozen wimpled or barenecked women. Perille's smile goes sideways and he throws some angular "hey rose of my heart" moves in the direction of the unwimpled girls, and he flashes some gapped buckteeth at them, and they seem uncertain whether he's a sweetheart or an untamed raptor moving in for the kill, for that matter I don't think he knows the difference between the two, and the merchant man hurries his family up the lane to the church.

  Bath Cathedral is a wooden cathedral, two words no Frenchman would have the gall to utter in his own country. We file inside.

  "Malcolm. Boy." Nuncle flicks a finger, and we follow. Plainsong resonates up through the inner doors.

  Pottering around with the blessed wine, nipping and looking flustered, is an old priest.

  "Father Bellows," says Nuncle, "our newest parishioners. Thomas," he glares at me, "and Malcolm of Atholl."

  I look up at the cassocked man. Cleanshaven, I don't know why all priests are cleanshaven, but he wears long scraggly muttons down to his jaw, has white wings of eyebrows, a full head of hair out of each nostril, and has a raw carrot in his hand, which he nibbles, having hidden his cup of wine speedily in his vestments by legerdemain.

  "Well," he says, and I don't hear guilt in his voice, "welcome to the parish." A quick elderly smile. His time on earth has been tall. He might be sixty. To Nuncle he asks: "Have they registered in the hundreds?"

  "After Mass," Nuncle replies.

  Pews. Bath has fine woodworkers, and there is comfort hiding in the smooth pews of Bath Cathedral.

  Yes, here comes incense. Swinging. My eyes water and annoysome pain amasses.

  Mass.

  After the litany is over, Malcolm and I kneel on the kneeler, and we take the body and blood. Priests and friars make their cells available for confessions, and the line is already twenty people long, and I imagine I could skip it, but Malcolm drives through the crowd to the back of the line, and I take my place beside him, where I belong.

  It's nearly an hour before we reach a cell. I usher Malcolm in, but he takes my hand. Bellows leads Malcolm, and he pulls me in with him.

  "Two of you?" Bellows says.

  "He's me man," Malcolm says, and despite my discomfort, the snake of pride presses to my breast.

  "Scottish. Well, the northerners probably keep a warm body against the cold at all times. How have you sinned, my son?"

  Green glass eyes focus on me in darkness.

  "Es et so much of a sin for one man to love another?" he says.

  Bellows takes a moment. "No," he says at last, "no, I shouldn't think so. It's written that our Lord Christ loved John the Bapst, and that was a holy love. Would you say your love is a holy love?"

  Malcolm licks his lips uncomfortably. "Aye," he says, "I would that."

  "Then there is no sin. What other questions do you have?"

  "I fought another boy," says Malcolm. "Me man fought hem, too, and gave hem a ripe knock."

  Bellows sentences us to prayers, and Malcolm can't think of any other sins, and he nudges my leg and says, "you go."

  "Pride," I say, simply.

  "Explain," says Father Bellows.

  "I . . . I'm French. From Anjou-Touraine," I begin. "It seems to me that the English . . . well, French wine is better--"

  "It certainly is!" exclaims Bellows, laughing.

  "And French fashion is superior, and, well, I know I'm not superior, but I often feel superior."

  Malcolm smiles at me and punches my shoulder.

  "It's always best to kill our pride, throttle it until it passes away and we find our humility before God," says Bellows, and he gives me more Aves and Our Fathers and we duck out of the booth.

  Together we find a shady bench along the aisle and sit together and say our prayers. It takes me rather longer, because I must be perfect. Malcolm waits, and I open my eyes to see his not so far away, watching mine. I know he loves me, but I'm still embarrassed. He licks his lips again, rubs his knee, then rubs the back of his hair with a palm.

  "D'ye thenk they'll feed us when we return?" he asks. Malcolm thinks with his stomach.

  Rising, we find Hero, or better to say Hero finds us, and when Hero finds you, you have Hero at your heel until Doomsday. Words tumble irregularly from his lips, he comments on everything in eyeshot, quite loudly, and I see Malcolm with his bruised eye wincing at the young onslaught. Poor Hero means well, he finally has people who don't terrorize him, but at the same time we have intentions other than humoring a nine-year-old in all things. How to rid ourselves of the pest? Malcolm and I share a look.

  Nuncle is led to a confession cell, and I have an urge to eavesdrop, but the church is crowded and I would never get away with it.

  Perille and the girl-boy pass us. For what may have been the first time, I hear her voice. It's deeper than you'd think, smoky, complex. It sets me to thinking of good wine. She spots me and loses her words, goes silent.

  I am plotting. I don't really fear losing Hero's friendship, but one mustn't crush joy, either. I spot a group of boys Hero's age and lead him to them, but he tells me he's frightened, he sees devils in them, and when I say that it's well to make friends with men high and low, he runs off, and I have succeeded.

  "What tithing had ye in Anjou?" Malcolm asks idly. I shake my head and say my father never went in for registering his presence, there were always too many people he owed money. Malcolm laughs and says he understands.

  When Nuncle emerges from confession some time later, he looks shaken. Pale. He takes me and Malcolm by the shoulder and we march out of the church, into the square, down the way to a row house with a clerk's quill on the sign.

  We press open the heavy dark door, ready to register as citizens of Bath.

  Dust fills our lungs; the sound of a scratchy quill; a pile of uneaten, desiccated pottage bowls line one wall in cheap pottery; there is a strange smell.

  Stairs lead down to a wooden paneled belowground floor and up the other side to a
clerk's bar flanked with wood shelves lined with ledgers. It doesn't smell the way the uppermost floor of the Fool School smells, that's for sure. It's not bookish or welcoming. It smells unhealthy in here, a wing of the inoffensive mad in a corrupted madhouse. Nuncle has disgust on his lips as he stirs the dusty floor, skipping down steps toward the sound of the quill. I sneeze, and the quill doesn't stop, it keeps scratching.

  We hear: "Yes, yes, lips, she opens her lips, they embrace, yes, yes," and Nuncle clears his throat, and the muttering doesn't stop, it intensifies, "buttocks, yes, she has buttocks, a pair of ripe apples," and the quill scratches its way across an unseen page.

  Lifting the countertop, we come behind the clerk's bar. He's hunched over a slate. There is no quill, although it sounded just like one from farther away; he scrapes a piece of Shaftesbury chalk across the slate, writing words at a frenzy, filling the dark slate with white letters until it's full and then sweeping his sleeve across it. His baggy blue sleeve is blocked out by white powder. Up and down go the man's legs, stomping the floor, a team of hammerers, and white foam builds up on the clerk's lips. I realize the man doesn't have a chair, he's just squatting, squatting at a truly improbably angle, it seems he's levitating. Nuncle comes within an ell of the man before recoiling.

  I tap the man on the shoulder, but Nuncle pulls me back.

  Turning, the clerk's face is revealed: a mouth of slavering bubbles, a trickle of blood from the nose, and eyes the color of bad cream. The man has wet himself, a crusted mess. Fingers have clawed ends. Teeth gleam.

  "He is rabid," says Nuncle, rubbing his nose bloom in consternation.

  I go numb.

  Snakelike, the man's head twists and his jaw strikes out at us, but Nuncle balls his fist and knocks the man in the temple, avoiding the teeth. It's known that the bite will spread the animalism.

  "I've nae seen a man fall so," Malcolm whispers. "He's a wolfman."

  "My pépère told me there was one cure," I say, staring at the white-eyed beast who had once been a clerk. "He must be buried alive under running water."

  At once the clerk loses his tiptoed-squat posture and scrabbles back. "No," he moans with a pitch indescribable. Curling up like an injured dog, his limbs herd off unseen threats, pushing us away, though we are far from him now.

  "It cannot be exorcised," Nuncle says quietly. "Thus there is no need for running water. It's enough to bury him. Run out and fetch six strong men."

  Outside, men leaving confession drift down the street in a slow parade. I call for them to come bury a rabid man. They come. Father Bellows comes. Perille and Hero come, though the girl-boy waits.

  Fifteen men and boys come. Rope and wood are brought. We surround the entrance to the clerk's shop, bracing strong rope as a barricade, in case the clerk runs.

  Bellows: "I will go in to him. Perhaps it can be exorcised."

  Nuncle: "Father. It cannot be."

  Bellows: "Under God, all things are possible."

  I stand outside the shop with the mob. Malcolm presses to my right side. Hero dances excitedly beside us. "Didja see him? What did he look like? Was he woad? What did he say?"

  Malcolm steadies the dancing little boy with a hand. "It was ungodly, Hero. Dinna speak of it."

  The boy squirms.

  The day is clear. There's no sound from the interior of the shop. The waiting is excruciating.

  Finally the door slaps outward and the team of men steady the ropes. The man with the soul of an animal doesn't emerge.

  Instead, kindly Father Bellows emerges, at top speed, catching himself in half over the ropes. Quite winded, he skids and falls to the ground. Panic fills his eyes, and he holds up a shaking arm bleeding with the split, rutted oval of a man's teethbite.

  Nuncle says: "Tie him." He sounds worn, an old shoe of a headmaster.

  Eyes of men meet. Wordlessly the men of Bath press their ropes over the city's priest and bind his hands. Bellows protests, but the men don't answer him, they resign themselves to losing their ropes and their priest.

  Nuncle kneels beside the priest and speaks: "The devil has constructed one madness in all the world that cannot be defeated by any act of God, Father. The bite of the mad animal does not yield to God. It is a room in the devil's own house. You have entered that room, for what reason I know not."

  Bellows whimpers.

  Nuncle: "Bring a cup of water. I'll bring the wolfman out."

  A cup of water comes down a nearby set of stairs and Nuncle takes it and enters the shop with it. Hero runs up and kicks the priest with red shoes, but Malcolm and I wrestle him away. I don't know what the boy's thinking.

  Again ropes are braced. Through the door the wolfman flees the cup. Men tackle him, and leather strips wrap his swollen mouth, and I see dribbles of thick urine running down the man's leg. The urine seeps through; it's white, as if full of mucus. The rabid man is caught and bound. The men choose to follow Nuncle, who leads them past the church to the fields.

  The Fool School rises in the distance. I dislike the idea that the good priest and the wolfman will be buried alive so close to my home, but it's perfectly true that the ground here is very wet, almost as if it's filled by running water. Shovels arrive, and ten men dig a pit several ells deep. The bottom fills with water immediately, and the wolfman convulses as he's lowered in. Bellows calls out as he's lowered on top, and is not answered.

  Memories of Liza and her mother rise in me, and I see that Malcolm is hurting, but I think we both see the virtue in preventing the animalism from spreading. Our eyes meet. "Ef the priest couldna heal him . . ." Malcolm says.

  "He was a good man," I reply, quiet, into Malcolm's ear. "The priest."

  "Where's the sense en et?" he asks.

  I shake my head.

  Wet soil becomes a mound, and the mound becomes a grave. The men set a man to watch until past nightfall, to ensure that neither madman wriggles up through the soil. A lanthorn is brought, and now I and the fools must truncate what might have been a longer visit to the city and return, dancing once again within sight of Death's scythe, to our own hole in the ground.

  * * *

  Dag returns the next day. But that is later, and I'll speak of his return later. First I will discourse on the act of literacy.

  Here I am, my hair tucked inside my liripipe, hunched over a roll of vellum, smelling the slight odor of onions emanating from Hamlin, feeling the body heat of his belly and his wine breath, as he recites a letter of the alphabet. I dip a poorly cut quill--I certainly don't have Weatherford to cut them for me, Hamlin tells me I'm not to come by Classics class today, he says he will speak privily to the professor and arrange for me to rejoin the class--and I fill a whole line with the letter, forming the shape. The Latin alphabet in modern hand is circles and brief lines and the rare diamond dot for i. Trying not to cut into the parchment or damage the quill is my obsession now.

  Then he has me sound out each letter I've written. When all twenty-three rows of letters plus the ligatures X, & and Æ have filled the page--it takes an hour--I begin on pairs of letters, with an ear for their sound. Then I am told a set of letters--A B L E, for example, or A R R O W, and begin to uncover the blends of sound. But now it's recorder time--Nuncle has said I'm not to miss recorder lessons, but that I can return to Hamlin halfway through, during the mid-afternoon weariness. I can afford to miss Stan's performance.

  No lunch, but perhaps that'll sharpen me for music. Hamlin sends me off and I trip down the stairs to pick up my recorder case from my room. The other students join me, they've all got their recorders, even Malcolm has a borrowed recorder case with him as he leaves the cafeteria.

  "Learning to read?" he asks me.

  "I can recognize the letters, all but p and q," I say, and he smiles through the bruises, which have largely decayed to brown ovals today, the swelling's gone.

  We sit together, and I speculate that while things are always going amiss for me, and perfectly for Malcolm, I'm the one who won the fight with Dag. Pride has
dripping teeth.

  Recorder segments leap together and the class tries out a quick scale. Always the advantage with recorders and flutes, no reeds to warm up and soften. The seats are hard, the sunlight is low, and a warm muzziness rises, something atmospheric. I await the arrival of fine sounds in this grid of hard surfaces.

  Nuncle drifts over. I look up at him. Reaching, his fingers lie like lovers over my recorder. A thoughtful look.

  "Acacia, you said?" he murmurs. I nod. He nods and drifts away.

  I feel good about life. I've quietly impressed the headmaster, although he's too proud to admit it.

  Since Malcolm and, to some extent, Hero are both new to the instrument, Nuncle spends the afternoon on scales and fingering. There is little for him to say once he has got us going up and down the scales, sometimes skipping notes, very rudimentary. It's good practice, but dull.

  Now Stan will give the late-afternoon demonstration. I find myself curious as to what he'll do to show off, but he dismisses me and I air out my recorder and take it with me upstairs to literacy lessons.

  I'm spelling bear and bare and bruin and nu when Dag returns.

  Actually it's the thump on the door downstairs I hear. It's locked, and I imagine I hear Nuncle slipping out of Stan's recital--which I hear only as a mosquito through the heavy door at the bottom of the stairs--and perhaps I hear a conversation between them, the headmaster and the boy with the head of a goat. That is how I choose to think of Dag.

  After a slow approach of cloth shoes, Nuncle's face rises up in the stairwell and he says, with unaccustomed deference, "Hamlin?"

  The hexagonal hat rises--the chamberlain had been nodding--and Hamlin makes shapes with his fat lips. "Speak to Nuncle, will you, Tom? I shall get no rest until his desires are met." I pretend I see no flicker of a wink from his eye.

  Nuncle: "Tom? Dag has returned from the surgeons."

  I: "Yessir."

  Nuncle: "Tom. It's my desire to maintain both of you in my school."

  He isn't threatening me at all now. He sounds quite humble, culpable, dare I admit frightened? No. I will call him penitent.