Lapvona(7)

And that was it. Agata was dead to Jude.



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*

Jude petted the newborn lambs now in the afternoon shade and tried not to think about Agata. ‘The poor creature,’ he told himself, fingering the ear of the runt of the last litter. He had sixteen babes and five ewes and one ram. The ram lived apart from the rest in a small pen at the southern end of the pasture, under an awning of pines. Jude didn’t care for him the way he cared for the females and the babes. When he fed the ram, he simply threw some hay over the fencing. Water was dumped once a day into a leaking trough. The ram seemed indestructible. And he was strangely complicit in his own imprisonment. He never tried to break through the fencing, although it was made of weathered branches and old wooden boards and was very near ready to collapse on its own. Marek wasn’t allowed to go inside the ram’s pen.

‘He will think you’re a sheep and try to fuck you or kill you,’ Jude said. ‘That’s all he knows how to do.’

‘Why does he not kill the ewes then?’ Marek asked.

‘What a stupid question,’ Jude said, sincerely appalled. ‘A man doesn’t kill his lady. How else will he live on but in his children?’

‘Will you live on in me?’

‘I hope I will. And you’d better have a son of your own someday soon.’

‘Soon?’

‘You’re thirteen years old. You’ve got hair on your pubis. You could be a father any time you like.’

‘But I want to be a son, not a father.’

‘Well then.’

Marek and Jude always watched the mating rituals. Jude liked to guess which of the ewes was in heat first. After so many years, he had grown sensitive to their smells. He was usually correct, which made him all the more upset when he’d watch the ram mount and fuck the ewe. She did not like the feeling. Jude knew that. It was an invasion and a penalty for her sex to be so brutalized, and then so burdened. Jude felt sorry for the ewes and fed them extra wheat when they were with child. But he hadn’t felt so sorry for Agata. He had felt proud of her swollen belly. He had loved her, had infused himself into her, unloaded so much into her womb, which was built for him by God. When he ejaculated, he groaned, and felt in that moment that this was the language of God Himself, the groan of creation. He remembered how Agata turned her head as he released his grip on her neck and moved her face to look back at him from where it had been pushed into the hay pillow. She was crying. And Jude thought, Good girl. That’s my good little girl. You are mine now. The white that dripped from his greasy penis smelled like a summer rain, iron in it, tangy. ‘I love you,’ Jude said, and sat back against the wall. Agata had cried—she was still a child, after all—and Jude took her by the arm so she could wash herself outside with water from the lambs’ trough. Later she fell asleep inside by the hearth, her feet bound by rope to the round rock that would later mark her false grave. This had been their nightly ritual. He discovered, not long into their love affair, that she was with child.



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*

When Marek returned from the stream, bruised and bleeding, toddling through the door with the broken pieces of bucket, Jude put down his work of darning a sock and picked up a shovel and threw it at the boy’s head. Marek felt the blow to his right ear, and his vision went white. He heard the singing of angels. The wooden pieces of the bucket silently clattered to the floor, and Marek lifted his hand to his ear, which was numb and hot to the touch, and then Jude started punching. Marek fell to his knees and bent his head low to protect his face while Jude hit. And then he took his hand away from his ear to allow Jude to deliver a few more blows. And then he lifted his face to Jude, and Jude hit him across the nose and again on each cheek, like a king with a sword on a knight’s shoulders, and then Jude kicked Marek’s left knee so that he fell to the side, and then Marek stretched his legs and rolled on his back so that Jude could kick him or stomp him wherever he liked. If my father kills me, Marek thought, I am sure to go to heaven. Another blow to his head made him turn and gag. A tooth skipped out of his mouth and landed in a little shard of light coming through the doorway, the last of the sun between the trees. He watched the light play on his glistening tooth. He’d seen a lot of blood today. That was all right. Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not? He licked his lips and sucked the blood back into his mouth, comforted with the knowledge that the damage Jude had done to him would warrant a whole night of praying, repenting, that his father would cry and beg God to forgive him, and Marek would become hypnotized by his father’s remorse.

And so it was. Once he had caught his breath and taken a sip of water, Jude calmed, then cried. He wiped the blood from his son’s face and held him in his arms, kissed his strange, swollen face, and told him the story of Agata’s sacrifice again. ‘She died for you,’ he said. ‘You see the blood?’

Marek was happy.



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*

Ina had lost her vision when she was only seventeen. She suffered a high fever due to a malady that had torn through the fiefdom. The entire family fell ill very quickly, one by one, mother, father, and her two little sisters. Ina fell asleep, shivering and sweating, and when she awoke, she came to nothing but the black light of her blindness and the stench of her family’s dead bodies in the bed around her. Such stories were not unusual at the time—illness spread very easily in the region, as it was only a day and night away on horseback from the coast, where all the pestilence came in on ships crossing the sea. They said it was the rats to blame. When Ina was little, before Villiam’s grandfather installed guards around the bounds of his province in an effort to keep out the bandits, traders and pilgrims passed through the village on their way to Iskria and Bordijn, bringing with them rashes and pneumonic contagions. Travelers often stopped in Lapvona to trade work for food and shelter, or simply to see how other people lived. Lapvona was a special place, known for its good soil and fine weather. And the villagers were kind and generous people, often taking in visitors and giving freely of their stores of food. They could afford to do so as their lord was fair and God-fearing. Taxes were low. There were only a few dozen families in Lapvona when Ina was a child, and they all worked and lived together peacefully until the plague took half of them to heaven. That changed everything. The houses were burned down with the dead inside for fear that burying the bodies would infect the ground. The survivors became infected with fear and greed. Guilt was extinct in Lapvona thereafter. Perhaps this was what allowed the village to move on after so much loss. Even their dear lord, Villiam’s great-grandfather, had perished, leaving his twelve-year-old son, Villiam’s grandfather, to manage the village.