Lapvona(31)

He caught his breath and started back down the hill to the manor. Lispeth followed.



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*

Jude had not eaten Klim yet. He had, however, chopped dead trees outside Ina’s cabin and built a fire in her hearth, then stood, sweating and licking the sweat off his arms from thirst as he waited for Ina to change her mind. He couldn’t bear to look at her, her body so mangled in its emaciation. Her head tilted blindly toward the floor. She raised her eyebrows as though she could see a fine meal spread before her. She smiled and sniffed at the sooted air. ‘Take off his clothes and burn them in the fire. Then chop him into pieces.’ Jude recognized her madness. It was the same insanity that he’d seen in Agata while she was in labor with Marek, a female power, evil, something he would never understand.

He should let her die, he thought. The old woman had lived too long already, prolonged by the tricks she played with nature. Every time she’d felt the slightest pang of illness, she’d gone outside and the birds had dropped herbs, shat seeds, sang her songs to cure her. She’s been spoiled enough, so let her die, he thought. She’s got no milk left anyway. All women were villains, users, he told himself, remembering the bloody baby in his arms and his rage at Agata, that cunt, that selfish child, what he wouldn’t give to have seen her die on the floor for real. Take the baby with you to hell, he would have said. And Ina had tried to help her. She was like all women: only concerned with their own comfort. He could be strong if he just kept his anger close. He had almost convinced himself to walk away. But then Ina started to gag and cough. It was too pitiful. He felt too sorry. Comfortable or not, the poor woman had nursed him. After his parents drowned, she took him in and healed him, fed him. She taught him how to gain strength from within himself. She gave him his life. God knew that. So Jude surrendered. Klim was already dead, he reasoned. Wouldn’t God favor a sacrifice to save the life of an old woman? Feed the blind to the blind. It had a certain logic to it.

Jude went back out into the woods, cooler in that heat than by the fire in Ina’s cabin. Smoke puffed out the chimney and hung in the air like dark clouds, the wind so slow, a cruel joke. He sat by Klim’s body and prayed and cried for himself and licked his tears from his palms and thought of Marek, the bastard who had brought on the drought, he was sure of it. This anger provided him with courage. He gently lifted the dead man’s legs and twisted the torso so that the body lay on its side. Now, squinting through his tears, he pulled the left arm out, lifted the ax, and brought it down on the wrist. It broke at the joint, and the dry, loose skin split, but not all the way. Jude had to hold the ax by the blade to cut the tendon and the rest of the skin clear through. He didn’t want to touch the hand. It didn’t bleed, but the hand seemed suddenly more particular to Klim now that it was separated from his arm, as though it had come back to life and could sense its detachment from Klim’s body. Jude blamed Marek for having forced him into such depravity. This was how he could weather the horror: blame Marek. He picked up Klim’s hand by the pinky, carried it inside and threw it on the fire. Jude listened to the skin hiss and cook.

‘Don’t leave it too long or it won’t taste good.’

Ina’s mouth seemed to chew the air, her dry tongue reaching to her lips as though she were tasting something already. She started gagging again. Her eyes—which were green and young looking, as though she’d plucked them from a little girl—glistened in the light from the fire. Jude reached into the flames and drew out Klim’s hand with a stick and set it on the bed next to Ina’s crumpled body.

‘Aaaah,’ she said.

‘It’s too hot, Ina.’

‘I don’t care about that,’ she said. ‘Put the thumb in.’ She opened her mouth wide.

Jude put Klim’s thumb in her mouth. Ina sucked it and chewed it. Jude watched. After a moment, she seemed to gain strength and could lift her arms—like broken twigs. She pulled Klim’s hand away, ripping off the flesh of the thumb with her teeth. She chewed the flesh and swallowed and sighed. Then she chewed the flesh of his palm.

‘I’m happy you feel better, Ina,’ Jude said, ‘but I have to go now.’

‘Oh no,’ Ina said, now sucking the meat voraciously. Her body was coming back to life. ‘I’ll need more right away.’



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*

How peaceful the boy was now, lying asleep with no shame, naked on his soft mattress that Lispeth stuffed and restuffed and batted every day, goose feathers fluttering up into the room and into her mouth and up her nose. She had wiped his arse with a rag wetted in a bit of warm milk before putting him to bed. There was shit in the chamber pot for her to cover with a cloth and carry downstairs. Of course Lispeth had no appetite for the food the family ate at the manor. The gardener used the shit to fertilize the food, to grow the hay to feed the animals. Villiam, Dibra, and Marek ate their own shit at every meal. And so did the priest. And maybe he was eating Villiam’s shit directly out of his arse, she wondered. Who knew what the two men did at night alone? They certainly weren’t praying. She imagined Villiam’s bed: blood smeared, shit smeared, semen shot on the canopy. Clod would never tell.

Lispeth watched Marek’s face as he slept, so spoiled and dumb, his top lip curling up and his bottom jaw hanging open, an oaf. He disgusted her. Poor Jacob, she thought. Even smashed and bloodied and dead, he was more attractive than Marek was alive. She didn’t know where Jude had buried him. That poor man, she thought. Everyone down in Lapvona, she knew, was doomed.