When We Were Animals(28)

Like Apollonia, Osgyth had her head cut off. But a moment after she died, her body sprang back up (like her tears from the earth itself!). She picked up her own head and carried it to the nearby convent, where she finally collapsed.

This was not, so it seems, an uncommon occurrence among martyrs. There’s a whole category of saints who carried their own heads around after death. There’s even a name for them. They’re called cephalophoric martyrs.

Walking home through the drifts of new snow, I thought about that image. I thought about it over dinner, when my father asked me why I was being so tacit that evening. I couldn’t stop thinking about it that day or the day after that or the next day—or ever.

My virginity, my saintliness, like the new snow you hate yourself for tromping on. What saints do, I realized, is make everyone else aware of their lowliness. You were simply about the regular business of your day until the saint walks by and makes you reckon with your true state as a bristly animal wallowing in its own filth. That’s why everyone attacks the saints’ bodies—to prove they have them and are anchored by them. But what the stories tell us is that they’re not.

Peter Meechum had wanted to prove my frail, chafable, blisterable bodiedness. But there I lay under the afternoon sky—like a floating fairy or an ephemeral saint, smiling with her head removed and looking on from somewhere else entirely.

But what about the saint herself? Does she miss it—that puny tag of a body, with all its feeble, quaking pains and pleasures?

I still see it when I close my eyes—Osgyth, her neck a stump on her shoulders, feeling around blindly on the ground until she finds the toppled loaf of her own head, carrying it with effort across the fields to the convent.

What is a body without a mind? A slave to the feral instincts of ugly nature. An inelegant organ of gristle and stupid mechanics.

But also, what is a mind without a body?

It is a useless curd, lost in the mud. Or a pathetic piece of jetsam, bobbing in the spring-lake of its own tears.

*



Now it’s time to talk about Blackhat Roy Ruggle, who was no good.

I remember how he was in grade school, runty and dark, the teachers leaning away from him with sour expressions on their faces. I remember him cursing them under his breath, seeming very mature in his primal anger. It never occurred to me as strange, back then, that I equated obscenity with adulthood—as though we all grow inevitably toward the twisted and grotesque. Later, in high school, the administration tolerated him with weary resignation, because it was well known that his father had left when he was only two years old, that his mother was a drunk who survived on state aid, that the two of them lived in a shack with a sagging roof on the edge of town, and that he worked in a scrap yard in order to make money to buy things like cigarettes and booze—things that stank of angry manhood.

He came to school dirty, his clothes torn, his shoes tattered and repaired with duct tape, his hair unwashed. There was no fight he backed away from, no conflict he did not lick his lips at. It made no difference how big or small his opponents were—he gnashed his teeth and spit out vulgarities and burned himself bright and hot into a cindered black punk. Teachers avoided him because they knew their authority wouldn’t sway him. Younger kids avoided him because they knew their weakness wouldn’t, either.

No one was surprised when he breached early. No one was surprised that his breach lasted longer by far than anyone else’s. He had always been part animal, and he needed no moon to tell him that.

Me, I avoided him—which was not difficult. Our worlds had nothing to do with each other.

Until the day they did.

After the day in the woods with Peter, I had spent the next couple weeks mostly alone. I wore white as much as I could—because it was the color of sainthood and it was the color of the deer that Osgyth’s king hunted and it was the color of the snow descending everywhere around me.

In school I saw that Polly spent more time with the boys who had already gone breach. They would often have her pressed in a corner of the stairwell or against the lockers, their bodies flush with hers. Sometimes Polly seemed embarrassed to be squished between these boys and the lockers—but other times she gazed at the ceiling with half-lidded eyes, and I could see that she was lost to them.

“Do you have a boyfriend now?” I asked her in French class.

“Oui et non,” she said. “C’est compliqué.”

“Are you happy?”

“Personne n’est heureux.”

“Some people are. Some people are happy.”

My voice pleaded with her to be again the Polly I had known just a year or two before.

But that Polly seemed to be gone for good. This one, the one who got put into reveries by being pressed up against lockers, slammed her book closed and shrugged.

“Not everything is about white picket fences,” she said. “Portes blanches.”

“Cl?tures.”

Mrs. Farris, our French teacher, looked over at us. I looked down at the passage I was supposed to be translating. When it was safe again, I looked at Polly. I apologized with my eyes, but with her eyes she told me that I didn’t understand, that it was not the business of saints to stand too close to the vulgarity of real life. She told me with her eyes to stay wrapped in my white shrouds.

It was on that same day that I saw Blackhat Roy backed up against a wall in the alcove under the stairs by Peter and some of his friends. Such conflicts were never my concern—I was mostly concerned about avoiding Peter, who was facing Roy and not me. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw that Roy had fixed me in his gaze, as though I were more interesting than the group of boys threatening to assault him.