Lapvona(4)

To get to Agata’s grave, Jude and Marek passed into the woods. There were horse chestnuts on the ground. Swine were let to pannage there, and as Marek and Jude walked along they could hear some snorts and squeals. Past those woods was an orchard of apple trees, too old to bear fruit. The silver bark was thick as armor and laced high with the scars from years and years of villagers etching their names with Xs. Past the orchard, the grass was thin, the dirt pale and rocky, but as it had just rained, the ground gave in a pleasant way under Jude’s bare feet and Marek’s thin-soled shoes. Marek picked a handful of chamomile and cornflowers growing near a trail of runoff, then followed an ostrich fern off the path toward a patch of iris. He picked an iris in bloom and some young sprigs of freesia. Then they turned toward a grove of black poplars, where, under the largest tree, was Agata’s grave.

Marek was solemn as they walked, his stomach churning and his mind still darkened by the scene in the village square. Of course he had seen bandits hanged and disemboweled before, but there was something special about this man. He hadn’t looked scared as Villiam’s men dragged him to the gallows. Maybe he knew where he was going. Like Jesus on the Cross.

‘That bandit,’ Marek said. ‘Do you think he had a mother?’

‘Everybody’s got a mother,’ Jude replied.

‘Is that bandit’s mother sorry he’s dead?’

‘They aren’t like us. They have no hearts.’

‘Do you think he had a son of his own?’

‘A bastard, surely, if he did. Who cares?’

‘Did my mother love me?’

‘She died for you,’ Jude said. ‘That should be enough.’

‘Will I see her in heaven?’

‘Of course you will. As long as you get there.’

‘What about you?’

‘Don’t worry about me, Marek,’ Jude said.

But Marek did worry that his father wouldn’t get into heaven. The man had an unkind hand. And when he prayed, Marek had the sense that there was anger steaming off his father’s shoulders, the cruelty inside him escaping like a vapor. Not that the man was impious. But Jude’s piety was a kind of violent urge and not the love and peace it ought to be, Marek thought. Jude whipped himself every Friday and had taught Marek to do the same. But Marek thought Jude whipped himself a bit too passionately. He’d get sweaty, grunting, moving the whip across one shoulder, then the other, wincing and breathing so hard that spit drooled from his mouth, and then he sucked it in and spat it out violently, as though it pleased him, as though the pain felt good. This frightened Marek because he, too, enjoyed the pain, and he was ashamed of that. Since he was little, a scraped knee or a whipped back, anything to make his body hurt, felt like the hand of God upon him. He knew that wasn’t right. So he kept it private, which made his father’s shameless display of pain and pleasure seem all the more perverse. All Marek really wanted at this age was to go to heaven, where God and his mother would love him.

‘But what if something goes wrong?’ he asked Jude. ‘What if you don’t make it to heaven?’’

‘If God wills it, I will.’

Agata’s grave was marked with a plain, rounded rock from the stream. Jude had hammered a violent chip into the rock as though he really was broken by the girl’s death. Jude was illiterate, like everyone else in Lapvona, but he said that the chip in the rock had a meaningful shape.

It was Marek’s custom to lie down on his mother’s grave, placing his body crosswise as though he were a babe in her dead arms through the dirt. He had always felt that the ground below him was charged with a sense of belonging. He would lie there and gaze up at the swaying branches of the poplar tree and listen for a birdsong. A bee-eater or an oriole might tweet a few happy notes. Marek would take this as his mother singing down to him from heaven. Now, standing by the grave, he heard a magpie song. It was angry and harsh, raspy chatter like an old lady scolding him from her window.

‘Why don’t you lie down today?’ Jude asked, placing the flowers by the chipped stone.

‘Not today. The birds are singing too sad a song.’

Jude didn’t believe in birdsong. He didn’t trust birds. They weren’t of the land, and he was a man of the land. He loved his lambs because they were like him. They were drawn to the comfort of the pasture, following the edge of the sundrawn shadows to stay cool and warm according to the breeze. Jude was like that. He was a slave to the day as it rose and fell, and he felt this was his righteous duty—lamb herding was his God-given occupation. He ignored the church bells. He didn’t need to track his time. Nature did it for him. He was born in that pasture and felt he would die in it, too. Why had he not buried Agata in the pasture? Marek had asked a few times. Jude would never entertain such a question.

‘Let’s go then,’ Jude said, already turning back toward the woods.

The path they’d worn from Agata’s grave through the woods to the pasture was narrow because Jude and Marek never walked side by side. Jude always walked in front. Marek knew his father’s body from behind as well as he knew his hands or his face. Jude’s feet landed straight on the ground. Marek’s step was outward turning, like a duck’s, and if he didn’t concentrate, the line he’d walk would veer to the right, such was the turning of his body against nature. Jude’s ankles were fine, the joint bolted and smooth, and the thin of his leg below the calf as narrow as a wrist. Marek’s ankles were swollen and freckled, often scraped by briars and bleeding and itchy. His skin was thin and delicate. Ina rubbed salve on his feet from time to time to keep the skin from peeling or rotting and falling off, she said. ‘You’re like a snake,’ she told him. Jude’s calves were round and taut and tan, and the backs of his knees had lines from the tendons as fine as gut strings. His pants covered the rest of his legs, and were patched at the seat and between the thighs. His buttocks were high and strong. Marek knew his father’s body was beautiful. But he didn’t revere it. He simply respected Jude’s physique as a part of nature, the way he found a vulture beautiful, or a cow. He knew that he didn’t resemble his father. You couldn’t compare a plover to a chicken. They were different kinds of animals. No one who saw the two together would ever guess they were of blood relation.