by Daniel Mills
X X X X X
Five days of nothing, no words, and only these marks to show the time.
Judah is sick. His wounds have turned bad, his coat thinned into patches. His joints swell so the pain keeps him from sleeping. He lies awake moaning through the night and will not eat but lifts his head only to drink from his bowl and sop the bottom dry. Otherwise he is listless, unmoving, and does not move from his place beside the stove where he pants and shivers though the weather is changing and I build the fire high.
He is unrecognizable or near to it, eyes sunken and muzzle swollen. The lash-wounds scab and suppurate. Pus runs from his chin, mingling with a crimson fluid redder than any blood. I wipe it away. For the second time in my life I am become as a nursemaid, gentle as the mother I never knew. With such tenderness I wash away the blood and filth and afterward wring out the soiled dressings. Then I walk outside and vomit into the bushes.
Spring is come. The white blossoms wither and drop from the trees. Buds explode into green sheaves like waving hands which turn with the wind passing by them. The air outside is balmy, perfumed, but the stench indoors is unbearable, fetid and sweet like fresh decay.
I am conscious of a quickening, unfelt these many years since those September days when Jerusha and I contrived our meetings beyond the fields when the others were at their work. The corn grew high enough to overtop the fieldstones, and we were well concealed, hidden from human eyes though the whole of the world opened to us like a flower.
The flesh had ceased to drag on us. We felt instead a sensation of lightening. The realms of the spirit were at hand, descending from heaven like the New Jerusalem to enfold the flesh within itself and join us together, body and spirit, even as we were joined in that moment with the stone wall at her back and her single shuddering cry of ecstasy or pain.
We were made new. Our bodies were as resurrection bodies, not crosses to carry but vessels to fill. The heat of the spirit over-brimmed us, pouring forth like an anointing oil heady with the smells of wet soil, churned earth: the dead garden of her dreaming which we seeded with new growth til we were exhausted and panting and summer’s glory spent.
September into October. The corn was cut and carried in. The first frost settled into the ground and the dreams they came no longer. In truth, we had no need of them for our waking life was become one dreaming, but the Elder Job grew anxious. The weeks passed and he sought out Rose of a morning and begged her for news she could not give. By October he believed himself abandoned. His sleep became restless, broken, and he took to pacing the brethren’s halls by night, meditating on such Gifts as are given and taken away.
The Eldress Rose, by contrast, was pragmatic. The dreams, she said, were plainly false visions, sent to tempt the fellowship of believers into the sin of spiritual pride. The two quarreled fiercely over this point. One evening, after supper, I heard them in the library. The door they shut behind them, but I listened at the keyhole.
“You yourself feared the devil’s snare,” she said. “You forbade us speaking of the visions lest the whole of the fellowship come to share in your affliction.”
“My affliction,” he repeated. “You liken it to a sickness.”
“A sickness, yes. And in the same way, Job, it will pass.”
He laughed, hollowly. “I am all bitterness. All hell.”
“You disgrace yourself,” Rose replied, furious. “Your despair is ill-suited to your place within the Church. Your self-pity! It is that of a drunkard when the spell of intoxication has passed and he finds the bottle is dry. Or have you forgotten what you used to be?”
She left him. Her great bulk passed over the keyhole and I flattened myself to the wall as the door opened and closed and she hurried away up the sisters’ stair, long skirts swishing.
I lingered at the door. I listened for the rise and fall of his breath behind the door then thrust my eye to the keyhole.
The Elder stood at the window with spine erect and a world of falling night before him. He did not move though the minutes passed but stood and stared into the glass which showed only his reflection. I watched and did not go to him, though I yearned to give comfort as he had once comforted me, to tell him what I had learned.
If only he might understand, I thought. The Gift had not been stolen away as he believed. Rather we had taken it into ourselves where it had bound us spirit and flesh, joining us together in the heart we made between us.
“Listen,” Jerusha said and lowered my ear to her belly.
Hear it now. Judah’s blood beats fast for the sickness which has him in its vise, which will not let him go. Sweat pours from his paws like drool from his ruined mouth and the end it must come soon lest I be forced to make of things an ending.
Already I have lingered too long. He is nearly blind, eyes vanished into the swelling about his skull and snout. The purple scabbing rips open with every movement of his head, releasing gouts of fluid which splash between his paws, forming clots where they pool in the cracks between the boards. He cannot sleep or eat or partake of water though I force it on him.
This afternoon I knelt before him and took his muzzle into my hands, easing his jaws apart and wedging them open with a pencil. He made no protest, and did not stir, though I brought the canteen to his lips and tipped the water down his throat, and all to no purpose, for he could not swallow. The liquid dribbled from his teeth, mingled with bile and spattering the floor.
An hour or more was spent in this way till the canteen was empty and Judah, moaning, dropped off to sleep in a puddle of water flecked red with blood and white with his sputum. He woke up screaming. That was an hour ago and still he has not ceased from it, though his cry is hoarse and ragged as a wildcat’s.
The wolves, emboldened, draw near at the sounds of his agony. They pace beyond the orchard with the maple trees behind them, moonlight on the apple-blossoms as they fall. Their voices they lift with the rising crescent to attain an unearthly pitch, high as that of the sisters in the ecstasy of their dancing but with such sorrow in it, such pain, a lamentation.
Judah moans. The voice fails in his throat, his tongue near-to-shredded. Outside the wolves continue their baying while upstairs she stomps and screams and bangs through the ceiling with her fists upon the floor. I stop my ears with wadding and shout myself hoarse then slip through the window with the rifle in my hand. I fire toward the orchard, the wolves. I mean only to frighten them, but they do not move and the howling does not cease.
They are as watchers at a deathbed. They sense his end as Judah does, watching me through slits in the scabbing as I return inside and reload the rifle.
I sit at this stove with the gun barrel laid cross my legs and my eyes on the window, the room’s reflection swimming there. I close my eyes, unstop my ears. The wolves depart and the house lapses into silence: his wheezing breath and no sounds from upstairs, the eastern sky still silver with the moon in its descending—
I carried him outside. He weighed little more than a child where the muscle and fat had sloughed off the bones and he was half-bald besides, the fur coming away clumps, his face made tumorous with swelling. I cradled him in my arms. I pressed him to my body, hoping to still the shivers which racked him despite the warmth of the morning and the sun shining from a sky of lapis lazuli. His breath was shallow and rapid: blood-warm, reeking of fever. He whined.
We entered the orchard, where I laid him down amidst the crush of fallen blossoms. Sunlight flashed from the rifle’s barrel then green where it streamed through branches surrounding, the layering of leaf on shadow. Judah heaved onto his side, collapsing, a house tumbled into its foundations. The swelling blinded him so he could not see me but listened as I saw to my labors with the rifle on the ground and the dull spade in hand.
Birds flitted between the orchard-branches. Their songs formed rings about us, moving outward in concentric circles toward the woods to echo in the trees with a sound of distant church-bells, fast-running water. His ears twitched, listening, and the fl
owers drifted about him.
My footsteps thudded, spade cutting sod. Two years of exile, three graves dug. I have become a tiller of soil as Adam was, and Cain, and only crosses to show for it. The hole I dug narrow but deep, its sides shored with pine planks, deeper by far than the pit in which I had found him two years ago.
I could delay no longer. I knelt before him and gathered him into my arms. Then walked with him to the grave and placed him within it as tenderly as I could manage. He settled to the bottom, all sinew and bone and his chest heaving with the effort of breathing. I brought the rifle to my shoulders and pulled back the hammer.
His head twitched, raised. He gazed up, blindly, eyes like slits in that gash of earth. The muzzle dropped, exposing the bald crown of his head, an invitation. I depressed the trigger.
A thunderclap and all the birds were quiet. The wind dragged itself through the orchard and across the grave’s opening, raining down blossoms. White petals filled the hole I had dug, the wound I had made. They clung to the gray flesh of his brain, which was visible for a moment where it sat within the ruptured skull before the blood boiled out of the wound, hiding all save the floating blossoms which turned upon the flow til they were red and sodden, sinking.
He did not fall. His shattered head lifted to show the sightless eyes, red fluid pouring from behind them. His mouth dropped open, the tongue dry and twitching. The voice rattled in his throat as with a dying breath but the noise went on and his head did not drop. From the grave he watched me through eyes which showed nothing. He pleaded for death, a second shot from the rifle which did not come. The gun was discharged and I had brought no cartridges.
I panicked. I took hold of the gun by the barrel, jabbing downward at the open bullet-wound. The skull splintered at the impact, collapsing inward. The brain, exposed, pulsed in its casing, woven throughout with red wires which seemed to resist the blows somehow though I swung at the head with the rifle til all else was reduced to shapeless tissue, chipped bone: red and gray and the apple-blossoms falling, covering all.
But still his suffering went on and knew no end even as the awful rattling continued and would not cease though my hands and arms grew numb with exhaustion and I dropped the rifle. It cratered the mud and glistened where it lay, greasy with brain-matter.
I was sick with horror, guilt. I could do nothing though Judah watched without eyes, the tongue clicking in his throat.
He exhaled. A strangely human sound, heavy with defeat.
I ran.
Hours later—
The dusk is here, and I am still running. I light candles downstairs and fire the stove and sing to myself in the words of the angels as I pace the upper hall shutting the windows which were left open this morning to vent the smells of illness.
The night-sounds vanish—peepers, songbirds—but the hell of his anguish roils in my brain: the clicking of his tongue, the thin strains of his moaning. Silence breaks over me like the waves of shaking which seized the Eldress Rose when the angel was upon her.
The shadows lengthened, spreading to blacken the walls and I turned my face from the shapes which swam within them, glimpsed in a mirror dimly. Judah’s snout all ruins and the shattered teeth thrusting through. The brain pulsing inside its red net. Pine-roots over-spilling a drowned man’s grave. I cannot bear it, cannot sleep.
The puzzle is unraveled, its pattern revealed, but there is nothing for it now and nothing to do until daybreak. I sit beside the cold stove and keep this vigil though the candles sputter and go out till only one is left burning. The wick gutters and spits to give the lambent glow by which I write, conjuring the past and its ghosts.
Autumn’s end. The end of her dreaming and the days which followed. Jerusha was often sick of a morning and given to oversleeping so her work was affected though she took pains to conceal her illness. But she could not hide her pallor or diminishing appetite any more than she could extinguish the light which glowed within her.
One or two among the sisters were heard to remark on Jerusha’s sickness and what they termed “her changeable temperament,” but they were as naïve as I was. They were raised within the Village and knew of no other life. Only the Eldress Rose suspected. Though she did not speak of it, she had come late to the faith and left behind her a brute of a husband who had killed her infant son. Late in October the Eldress took to watching Jerusha when the younger woman was at her work or at worship and noticed the way her hand strayed toward her stomach to speak the name of the Lord. Like a spider, then, the Eldress lay in wait while frost formed up and down the windows, turning the stone house cold and dim.
Then pounced. The Eldress cornered Jerusha in her retiring room after breakfast when the others were long ago risen and about their work. Jerusha denied nothing. She did not speak at all but only bared her belly to the Eldress to show the rounded flesh and God’s heart beating behind it, ripples spreading on the skin.
Mid-morning: the Elder Job was at the forge. Rose shouted for him from the house and her tone was such that he came at a run while still in his apron. He feared a kitchen-fire, perhaps, or some other disaster but little guessed at the nature. He found Rose in the meeting hall and Jerusha beside her with her breasts plainly showing through her nightgown and both hands cupped over her belly.
The Eldress said: “We must send for Brother David.”
Job called to the orphan boy Aaron who was raking the garden. Aaron found me at work in the mill fitting bolts to the lathes. The boy was nervous and given to stuttering but said I must come with him. I entered the meeting hall and found Jerusha seated on the floor with back straight and eyes forward and the Elders to either side of her, their faces somber, stripped.
Job dismissed the boy. He paced with his back to me. He said nothing, waiting, while Rose stared ahead unblinking with fingers like claws where they hooked in her skirts. Jerusha’s eyes found mine and she smiled through the hair which fell about her face and with a glow like August sun about her so I knew we were found out.
“Tell them,” she said, softly, and I did.
I was passionate, eloquent. I was a man on trial with the Judge in robes and glory crowned and seated silent before me as I pled my case. I told of my abandonment at the Village gate and of the girl who found me and brought me in though the storm raged all about. We were joined together even then, I said, though we knew it naught, and I endured years of anguish and doubt til the Gift of Interpretation was granted me that I might understand the Gifts which were sent to Jerusha, the dreams which carried in themselves the weight of prophecy, its awful import.
“Inventions,” Rose said. “False visions. They ceased as suddenly as they came.”
“They did not,” I said and addressed myself to Job. I told him of the Final Dream and of the promise of the New Jerusalem, speaking to his back while Rose gazed on in fury.
“You often spoke of the cross,” I said, “the long shadow it casts. You said I must recognize it for itself so I might take comfort in its burden. This I have done. Only this. The cross is our sin, as you said. In our ignorance we murdered the living God and nailed His body to it. But through death was our redemption and the cross we made became the instrument of our salvation. It stands on Calvary as it has always done but its roots are in Eden, the same as those that feed the Tree of Life. The Garden, then, is immanent in the cross and we carry it with us all our lives just as Jerusha carries inside herself the seed of a new spring, a flourishing without end. She is to be mother to a world as Mary was and Ann. But have you eyes to see?”
With these same words Job had sought to console me when I was young and afflicted with doubt. But he found no comfort in them himself and merely shook his head slowly, without understanding, his broad hands hanging at his sides. His voice failed. The words cracked and dropped from his mouth like pebbles. “No more,” he said.
“Please,” I said. “Look at me.”
He turned. Our eyes met and I beheld in him the black gulfs of his despair, the depths toward which he had
plunged himself all those years ago. He survived his fall, but the river’s blackness remained and appeared wider now for the reflection which swam within it, my reflection, and I did not look away till the dark in him eclipsed the lights of his eyes and he turned from me to hide his weeping.
The Eldress took him by the arm and spoke some soothing words into his ear, though I could not make them out. Then she turned her gaze on me and it was venomous and black as a serpent’s with undisguised hatred. I was shamed by it, and looked away, but Jerusha was unaffected. She smiled at Rose or perhaps at no one and did not cease from smiling with her hands folded over her belly as though to catch between them the sound of a heart beating.
We were punished. We were orphans alike with nowhere to go and exiled to nowhere in our un-repentance. Others before us had been found out in their sin and separated man from woman and sent to east and west, never again to meet. This was the custom within the Church but Jerusha and I would not be divided. We refused all inducements to atone and pledged ourselves to leave together with the babe she carried though it meant our condemnation. When the appointed day came we were allowed nothing save the clothes we wore and a little money, enough to see us to the next town.
The money was Job’s doing. Of this I feel certain though he would not speak to me or to anyone and withdrew deeper into himself—his true self, as he saw it—which was the flesh he had left behind. From a peddler he acquired a bottle of gin or whiskey, something foul, and drank it down himself on the eve of our leaving. Later that night with the lamps all extinguished I heard him from the sickroom, his heavy tread up and down the brethren’s stair. He sang bawdy songs then hymns and all with such desperation, such longing.
Ash lach in
bi mor na, o
da rim a, e
o
His shattered voice like the tongues of angels, singing the first of the songs I had transcribed. I heard Jerusha too. Her voice drifted down to me from the sisters’ sickroom where she was prisoned. The same room where I had seen her so many years ago when I was a child and my mind held only music: the song she sang, which was Mother’s.
