Lapvona(29)

Marek wished he could be more like Villiam, dumb and numb to other people’s sorrow.



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Lapvonians had not taken kindly to Klim while he’d been alive. They thought he was a jinx. He had lived alone in a hovel in the corner of the village and came out once in a while to pick through the trash on the road for scraps of food. He had looked sickly even before the famine. His dead hands flapped like fish against Jude’s back as he plodded through the woods.

Jude knew that his hunger had driven him to madness, otherwise he would never have picked the blind man up in the first place. He would have just shouted at the villagers to respect the dead. But his reasoning had left him. Klim’s body felt like an effigy, something that could be put down and looked at, a sculpture of a man, like Jesus on the Cross. Maybe Jude could take Klim as his own personal Jesus. Jude had never been inside the church in Lapvona. He had only smelled the burning myrrh on the rare Sunday morning he passed by during Mass. He never wanted to join, never felt that he would be welcome there. Ina had said that there was a cross on the wall with a wooden Jesus nailed to it.

Without intending to, Jude now found himself on his way through the trees toward her cabin. But now the shadows under the summer sun were not of swaying, lush branches but the stark, still stalks of dying cottonwoods. There were no grapes hanging from the vines that trellised across the boughs, not even a shriveled raisin. The dirt clouded up like smoke with each step through the woods. The last time Jude had visited Ina was shortly after Marek’s departure. Ina had understood what had happened, of course, and was sorry for Jude that he would have to live without his boy. But there was something strange in the way she had pulled her bosom out from her dress that day, something resentful about it. And although she had long since ceased her production of milk, there was a miserliness with which she held her nipple out for Jude to suck, as though she were doing it begrudgingly, sacrificially. Jude had held it against her. Now she owed him some actual generosity—a sympathetic ear, a nipple, and a place to rest. Maybe Ina would even have something for Jude to eat. It didn’t occur to Jude that the old woman might be struggling in the drought like everybody else. She had always seemed without needs. He had never watched her eat food, although each time he’d come he’d brought her a basket of vegetables and a bucket of lamb’s milk, unless the babes were still nursing. He had no idea how old Ina might be. Maybe a hundred years old, he would guess.

He found a bit of shade where Klim’s body could lie while he went in to see her. He knocked on her cabin door and pushed it open, expecting to see the old woman as she usually was, squatting on the floor examining herbs or mushrooms or picking mites out of a tiny grouse. But now Jude gasped at the sight of her as he looked inside. Ina was still alive but had been reduced to a crumpling of skin and bones in the corner of her bed. Her body had flattened, deflated. Only her skull had any volume. Her face hung on it like an old rag from a nail. Her blind eyes opened, spreading the wrinkles. Her mouth spoke.

‘I have nothing for you, Jude,’ she said.

Jude was quiet, stunned.

‘But if you would bring me something to eat, I might spare a suck, if you can find a nipple.’

Jude stepped into the dark of her cabin and looked around. Every vessel, usually filled with leaves and herbs and dried flowers, was empty. Even the ashes in the hearth had been swept out. There were teeth marks on the wooden bedframe. Tiny fragments of bones were littered on the floor—the bones of birds, Jude thought. Had she eaten the sacred animals who spoke to her? Jude overturned a bucket, shook out the dead spiders, collected them into his thin palm, and approached the bed.

‘Here, Ina,’ he said and fed the little spiders into her mouth—a cavern of white, bloodless flesh—one by one. She chewed. Jude sat and listened to the bones of her jaw creak, her teeth grind the stale legs of the insects, her dry tongue scrape the roof of her mouth.

‘Are you better now, Ina?’ he asked after she had swallowed and gagged and coughed, her head rolling back and forth on the bed, which was emptied of hay. It was a stupid question.

‘Bring the blind boy and cook him.’

‘You’re crazy, Ina. I saved him,’ Jude said.

‘He’s dead,’ Ina said to him. ‘And you’re dying. I can smell it on you.’

‘I won’t eat a man, no,’ Jude said.

‘Then cook him for me. I’m hungry.’ She was serious. ‘And then I can nurse you, I’m sure.’

‘What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.’

Jude paced, the mud and water in his stomach sloshing. He didn’t want to have to cook the man. He had taken the body for just that reason—to save Klim from being eaten.

‘There isn’t much meat on him,’ he said lamely, trying to deter her.

‘Go get him,’ Ina said, her head rolling like a fallen apple on the ground. ‘I’ll eat him raw, I’m so hungry. Do it. Now.’



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Lispeth had failed to hold her breath for very long. The huge gasps of air made her lightheaded, and she fainted a bit, then revived and held her breath again. Villiam had beaten Marek in the eating contest, of course. The score was 71 to 30, and Villiam could have kept going had Marek not forfeited the game by vomiting into his bucket.