When We Were Animals(27)

I pick at the bark of my tree.

At home that evening, I listen to Jack speak of his day. I nod and hold my head at an angle while I’m listening, but I must not be doing it right, because he says, “What are you doing?”

I tell him that I’m just listening.

“You feeling all right?” he asks. “You’re acting funny again.”

I tell him nothing is the least bit wrong. I ask him if he would like more potatoes.

After dinner I wash the dishes in water so hot it scalds the skin of my hands. I think about Peter Meechum and the quarry. I think about the body of that little girl who was me, lying there in the tall grass. Someone knotted up in confusion, always.

*



The week after Peter Meechum took me to the quarry, the snow came, and I began to wonder if maybe I was a saint—one of those people whom badness slips right off of. People like to talk about ducks and water, about how the two repel each other. Really, it’s that ducks have oily feathers. So maybe my pores leaked holy oil. My father also told me that some places have competitions in which young men try to capture greased pigs. That’s me, a holy greased pig, slickering away out of the fumbling hands of evil.

Peter stopped coming to my house, and he didn’t look at me in school. He was angry at me for being too good to rape. Saints are nobody’s favorite people.

The first snow of the year came on a night when there was no moon at all. It was dark as anything, and so quiet all you could hear was the hum of your own thoughts. The snow came six minutes after two o’clock. It fell faintly in the cones of lamplight, descending like fleets of fairies through the cold sky. I was awake—the only one in town, I was sure—and I was sure that those miniature fallen sylphs were for me and my personal delectation. They came for me, because nature likes a saint. They settled on my windowsill, they collected on the dark grass of my lawn, they danced and whirled in the wind gusts before my eyes. I put my hand to the windowpane to greet it, that first snow. By the time I woke in the morning, I saw that after the snow had come to me, it had visited everyone.

That afternoon I stayed in the library after school reading about saints in order to know better what I was up against. A few saints got teamed up with the divines for some help—like Zita, who compelled the angels to bake bread for her. But as it turned out, the world was for the most part unkind to saints. Some of them were derided, including Saint Pyr, who, as far as I could tell, didn’t do much to deserve sainthood. The only thing he ever really did was fall down a well.

Then there was Alice, who suffered a life of agony because of physical ailments. She had leprosy, and she also went blind. The only comfort she received was in the form of communion. But even in that respect she suffered. She could eat the bread, but she was banned from drinking from the Eucharistic cup because of her contagious maladies. But she had visions, and in one of her visions, Jesus came and told her everything was okay.

Lucy had her eyes gouged out, and she carried them around on a tray. But she was honored with a feast, which used to take place on the shortest day of the year, but then got moved to December thirteenth. Girls cooked buns with raisins in the middle to look like eyes and carried them on trays. I promised myself to remember Saint Lucy and her dug-out eyes on the thirteenth of December.

Another saint, named Drogo, was so hideously deformed that no one could stand to look at him. He imprisoned himself in a cell and ate only grain and water. But there was something called bilocation, which meant that he could be in two places at once. Some people said they could see him harvesting the fields even though he was locked away in his jail. I wondered if his spectral self, the one doing the harvesting, looked any better.

I discovered that there was a saint named Illuminata, like Lumen, but I couldn’t find anything else about her other than that there was a church dedicated to her in Italy.

Apollonia was treated particularly brutally. The heathens bashed out all her teeth. They threatened to burn her alive, but she didn’t give them the chance to do it—she escaped from them long enough to throw herself into the fire of her own accord. She was a saint, though, so she didn’t burn. The flames had no effect on her. But the story doesn’t end there. Heathens, shown evidence of their wrongdoing, don’t fall to their knees to beg the Lord’s forgiveness. They remained undeterred. They dragged Apollonia out of the fire and decapitated her.

Here’s another interesting case—Saint Etheldreda. She was known, commonly, as Saint Audrey, which is where the word tawdry comes from. See, after she died, women took to selling lacy garments in her name. Tawdries were sanctified things, holy garments. Then the Puritans came along and started looking down on cheap indulgences such as lace, so the word changed its meaning. Which just goes to show how you can’t do anything to protect your reputation when Puritans get involved—or heathens, either, for that matter.

My favorite saint, however, must have been Osgyth. She was married to a king, even though she didn’t want to be. She bore him a son, as was her duty—but then when her husband was away hunting a white deer, she ran off to the convent to become a nun. The white deer. That was important. Whenever they specified the color of something, it was important. I wondered what the white deer symbolized. Something worthwhile, I hoped, because the king lost his wife in the pursuit of it.

Anyway, she was killed at the hands of Vikings, and at the place where she was killed a spring erupted from the earth and continues to give water to this day. The tears of a saint, flooding the land. You could drink them up.