Lapvona(55)

‘Can a savior bring the dead back to life?’ someone had asked the priest after Mass last week.

‘A savior can do anything. Anything you wish, He will grant. Jesus turned wine into roses, did he not?’

‘You said he turned fish into bread.’

‘Anything you want. Give Him a gold coin and He’ll turn it into a key that opens heaven’s gate.’

‘Is the Devil still free?’

‘Yes,’ the priest said gravely. ‘We must all be very careful. The gates of heaven are still shut, and the Devil may come back here if he gets restless roaming. We’ve got to get him back to hell. That’s what the savior is for.’

‘Get the Devil back to hell, yes,’ they all said, nodding, grateful that the savior was on the way. And they loved the nun for this, a holy mother, the deliverer of mercy. Thank God.

For the wedding, the guards had taken posts along the edges of the fields and were directed to execute any person attempting to enter the village. At any wedding, there was a threat that some nefarious party might intervene. But the priest had given specific warnings to Villiam that there were those nearby who would want to sabotage his union, evildoers who knew damn well that the baby in the nun’s belly was a savior, and they didn’t want anyone to be saved. Villiam played along, directing Klarek to increase security. He felt wise to do so. There was word on the wind that the bandits had heard of the nun’s pregnancy, that it was rumored among them that she was of bandit descent. If this were ever confirmed, surely they would storm the manor and take the Christ as their own.

Marek followed the priest’s horse on foot, taking the customary place of the groom’s parents. The villagers gasped and pointed as he passed. Not only was the boy alive, but his health was much improved. He wore red garments and walked sullenly, coolly, his mind ablur with rage. To him, the marriage was an act of theft. His mother had been returned to him, and now Villiam was stealing her away. He blamed Agata, however. To blame Villiam would have been to break his guilty promise of devotion. Was the death of a son equivalent to a stolen mother? Only God could judge.

It wasn’t until they reached the village, with all the Lapvonians in their ghastly red costumes, that the idea came to Marek. He picked a rock up off the ground as the crowds thickened, hid it in his hand, waited for the right moment, then threw it at Agata. The rock hit her in the back, and she tripped and fell, holding her belly, and landed facedown in the dirt. Villiam wasn’t paying attention. He simply kept walking and waving and nodding to the crowds. The priest pulled up on his horse, who neighed, astonishing Villiam, who laughed at what he thought was the priest’s incompetence on horseback. And before he could turn to look, a villager had helped Agata up off the ground, an old lady with huge, bulging eyes.

‘Welcome back,’ she said to the bride.

Agata recognized Ina despite her weird transformation. She was faint and stunned from the blow to her back, but she quickened her step away from the old lady to rejoin Villiam, brushing the dirt off the front of her dress. Ina knew the truth about her. Her name wasn’t Agata at all—that was only what Jude had named her, after his mother. Ina knew that Marek was Agata’s brother’s son, and she knew that her brother had been caught and pilloried and hanged and gutted last Easter, for all of the town to see. The birds had told her everything. Agata didn’t know that her brother had come looking for her last spring. All she knew was that she could never go home, and that Ina knew that. Agata was a prisoner wherever she went—at Jude’s, at the abbey, and now at the manor. All of this had passed between the two women in their small moment. Now the priest’s horse settled and clopped after Agata through the crowd.

Klarek ran ahead, dragging Marek with him, past a man standing slightly apart from the crowd. His clothes were rags, brown and black and caked with shit and mud. His face was so dirty, nobody but Marek could have recognized him. Marek moved in astonishment, as though he’d seen a ghost. Or perhaps the man that looked like his father was an emanation of his own conscience. That must be it, Marek thought: I have lost my mind. But Jude had looked exactly like a dead thing that had come back to life and unburied itself. Could it be? His father, risen from the dead, too? If Jude had returned to interfere with the wedding, he ought to be throwing rocks himself.

‘Never mind, never mind!’ the priest shouted back from his high horse.

Klarek pulled Marek back into the procession.



* * *




*

The ceremony was over as soon as it began, and Villiam was happy now as the villagers sang him songs of praise as he made his way back through the church, doling out zillins. Agata was a bit too slow down the aisle, so Villiam walked up ahead, flanked now by Klarek and the priest. The church steps were treacherous in the tight, leather shoes made especially for the nun for this occasion. The villagers had all touched the shoes at the shoemaker’s, had wondered over the measurements of her foot as though the numbers had some sacred meaning. ‘Did you really touch her foot?’ they asked the shoemaker. ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘And was it very beautiful?’ ‘Looked like any foot, a lady’s foot.’ ‘A lady’s foot, ah,’ the women said. The men wanted to know whether her toes were long or short, as long toes indicated great beauty. ‘I saw her face,’ the shoemaker told them all. ‘She looks like any nun from the abbey.’ This disappointed them. But Agata looked beautiful now, aglow with her pregnancy, and her eyes squinted with irritation and awe at the commotion around her. Her red hair poked out from under her veil. The village women caressed her arms and shoulders as she passed. ‘Should we touch her belly?’ one asked. Ina gave her assent. And then they were all upon her, kneeling at her feet, arms sneaking around her from behind, hands flat against the bulge as if they could suck the divinity out through the fabric of her dress. Agata surrendered. The men simply removed their tattered red hats as she passed and held them over their pubises, to shield the baby from any power that might offend it.