Falling Idols (5 page)

She counted, as she might measure a horse, hand-widths down along the matted area where his back and shoulders would have lain, then the tapering length of his legs. She had thought it before, but it occurred to her once again:

He must be enormous.

When she left the stable, doll in hand, it was with the taste of delicious fear that she was about to surrender to forbidden curiosity.

*

Night, barely a moon, the entire countryside dipped in black that seemed to run and pool.

Giselle had kept herself awake for an hour by pinching a spot on her thigh, and for another hour beyond that simply by lying in the darkness, contemplating her faltering courage, and wondering where it might lead if she really did creep out the door and dare look her refugee in the face. Perhaps he’d entertained similar thoughts, was right now lying out there with a deliciously miserable heart and hoping to hear the sound of her feet.

A few feet away, Sister Anna-Marie snorted in her sleep and stirred, then fell silent.

The back door might wake her — there was this to consider. And maybe tonight
would
be better spent sleeping. There was always tomorrow night…

Oh, enough. There would
always
be another tomorrow night. Of what good was trepidation? He was but a man, no doubt a shy one, certainly kind at heart. No harm would come from their speaking, and meeting one another face to face so that she could at least know what he looked like. The advantage was his, there.

Giselle eased from her bed, drew her cloak about her and, creeping barefoot across the cold floor, carried her shoes to the back door. From a kitchen shelf she took a lamp and matches.

Out the door, quickly, quietly as she could shut it, and then she was hurrying along the path. The stable loomed ahead of her, a sagging black square punched into the night. At its door she stopped to light the lamp, then slipped inside.

A muted glow surrounded her and cast a tilting shadowplay on the walls, and she eased across the hard-packed earth. The deep bellows breath of sleeping horses was the only sound as she passed them in their stalls. To the far wall, then…

She stopped.

He was there, lying on one side with his broad back to her, curled beneath a heavy horse blanket that rose and fell with his own steady breath. She could see little of the man himself, just a great head of shaggy black hair.

In a young life whose course had run slowly, so straight and free of genuine surprise, this was new: that the risk of change came down to a single moment. She had but to take the step into the next, or turn around and retreat and forever wonder.

Giselle cleared her throat, loudly: “Excuse me? Sir?” And louder still, “Sir? Are you awake?”

A sluggish flex of his shoulders, a stirring of his legs. The moment crawled by, a slow eternity, then whipped ahead in sudden flurry. She thought she saw his face, half turning back her way as he opened one sleepy eye—

And could she trust the lantern’s glow, the peculiar shades of color that it sometimes cast? Was that grimacing cheek indeed a sallow yellow? She saw but a glimpse of it, and there was no time to decide. A groan of terrible anguish came scraping forth from the cavern of his chest as he threw the blanket about his own head and scuttled back against the stable wall. He drew his knees in toward his chest and, with head lowered beneath its makeshift veil, held himself together like some trembling fortress.

“Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my world, and go back to your own. If you wish to do me one last kindness, then let that be it. Please.”

Giselle took a step forward without even intending to. She was drawn to misery like moths to candles. It was more than her calling, it was the reason for her being. This man spoke in a voice so lashed with agonies, his words were almost secondary, and she could no more leave him than she could deny Christ.

“I mean you no harm,” she said. “I’ve tried to show you nothing but goodwill. Surely you know that by now, don’t you?”

“I know it, yes.” His voice seemed near to breaking. “But this was when I was a stranger to you, who moved by night. There have been others, whose hearts have been kind enough … until they see me for what I am … and at once their hearts turn murderous.”

“Then they’ve missed what’s obvious to me. That your heart is far kinder than theirs.” Giselle took another step closer, and another, and knelt just a metre away. “What could change them so?”

Beneath the blanket, he seemed to recoil. “My countenance … it is more hideous than you could possibly imagine.”

“I’ve seen and tended to faces afflicted by disease, and all the injuries that can happen on farms. I never once quit loving the person behind such a face. So I promise I’ll not turn away from yours.” When she got no reply, she tried another route. “I don’t even know your name.”

Again, a heavy stirring beneath the blanket. “I was never given one. So, in time, I gave one to myself, the only name that would suit me: Nomad.”

Had he been so abandoned as a child, no one had even bothered to grant him the simple gift of a
name
? This was more than sorrowful, this was a moral crime. She told him her own, then said, “Let me see you, Nomad. Please, let me see you.”

He seemed to consider it awhile, like a king weighed down by ponderous burdens of the heart. Then the lowered head rose, the blanket with it. “Move back a few paces, then, if you really mean to see me for what I am.”

And he stood.

It was one thing to contemplate his enormity of stature in impressions left in a bed of hay, quite another to behold it in person. He seemed to simply keep uncoiling from the stable floor, taller, and taller still. She’d always thought herself big-boned, born to robust farming stock … yet here was someone who stood nearly three heads taller than she.

One brutish hand rose from within the blanket, to pull it slowly away, and for the first time she met his dull and watery eyes. Saw his yellowed skin, his blackened lips, the tangled cascade of coarse hair whose locks bunched about his shoulders like throttled snakes. His face was like none she had seen, ever, more total in its noble ruin than any ravaged by disease or wound. And her heart shattered for the sufferings others must have heaped upon him, for no matter how powerful his shoulders or broad his back, both must surely have broken under the strain.

Giselle groped inside for words, but there were none. We are all beautiful in the eyes of the Lord? How easy to say, with her own complexion like milk. The last thing Nomad needed was to hear sanctimonious platitudes.

So, instead, she stepped forward to where he stood atremble, reached up, and touched his face. Which soon dampened with his tears.

“There are hours yet before dawn,” she said. “Please share with me where you’ve come from.”

*

In the hour past dawn, Nomad refused to leave the stable with her, and no amount of coaxing would draw him out to join her in a walk to the rectory. Father Guillaume should be told, but moreover should be introduced to this wandering soul. Such conversations the two of them might have. What endless lifetimes of humanity had Nomad witnessed, as an outsider. If anything, humanity could learn from him, and benefit. Let it begin with her, and with the Church. Let it begin here.

“But why?” he pleaded with her. “You have your hopes and your optimisms, but these are born of your naivety. You have seen so little of the world, you have no way of knowing how much it can hate. Of hope and optimism I have none … because instead I have experience. I know the reception I’ll meet with.”

“For everything and everyone, a place,” she told him. “This is what I believe and I believe because this is what I’ve seen. No one can be truly happy until they find that place. I am, because I have. I belong to God, and to the Church, and to Château-sur-Lac. And if I can help you find that place for your life, then it will prove that mine has fulfilled some of its purpose as well. Don’t you see?”

He said he did, and that he dared not turn his back on her before she had her chance to try.

Giselle ran from the stable with her cloak billowing behind her, into the fresh damp chill of morning. She raced along the path to the rectory, whose window was filled with the jaundiced glow of a lamp.

How unlikely she would be doing this if other circumstances had asserted themselves. That Nomad was nothing as she’d imagined was a blessed relief. His ugliness and profound misery were easy to contend with, compared to the handsome face and shy, seductive demeanor that might have been his. And had he possessed these, had he been that Parisian artist in self-imposed exile? Perhaps she would still be making this trip to the rectory, though to instead confess and mourn her broken vows.

She banged on the cottage door, and when it opened, Father Guillaume stood as she had never seen him. He’d already donned his cassock, but had yet to shave. His thin-jowled face seemed to sag, his graying hair was still mussed from the pillow. And behind his round spectacles…

“Have you been weeping?” she asked.

“Yes.” He peered at her as if only now realizing who it was. “You’re out of breath. You too have heard?”

Giselle frowned. “Heard what?”

Father Guillaume waved it aside briskly, almost gratefully, and wiped at his eyes. “You’re out of breath. There must be a reason. Come in.”

She crossed the threshold and they sat at the scarred old table where the Father took his meals when he preferred to dine alone, with his Bible or his meditations. A fresh log was beginning to blaze away in the fireplace, atop old embers.

“The man who’s been passing his nights in our stable,” she began, “the one who’s done so much with the horses, and left so much firewood behind for his keep … he’s no longer a stranger. I’ve just now left a conversation with him that lasted though half the night. Father, he’s more deserving of our pity and our help than anyone I’ve ever met.
Ever
.”

Giselle recounted the long and sorrowful story, of one man created by another, then rejected not only by his creator but the whole of humanity, as well. Condemned by fate to wander for nearly two centuries, as he neither aged nor died, as people and their reaction to him never changed, only the world around them. And she thought of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, of that immense paternal deity reaching out his muscular arm to touch the fingertip of Adam. What jealousy would Nomad feel were he to see that? And given paints and brushes, what would his own rendition look like: extended fingers become a clenched fist, with the back of the creator turned away in abhorrence?

When she finished, Father Guillaume slowly rose from the table, moved idly toward the fireplace where he warmed his hands and shook his downcast head.

“I’ve heard of … of
it
. I can’t bring myself to call it ‘him.’ And for years I thought the story itself was not much more than the product of a fevered mind.” He moved across the room to a cabinet of plain oak, very old. Here Father Guillaume kept his meager wealth of books: his Bibles and history, and old volumes by Aquinas and Spinoza and others. His finger glided over spines and he removed one aged volume and returned with it to the table.

“It’s a jumbled collection of letters and a journal and a recounting of much of that very story you just told, though in this case, from the pen of the supposed scientist, Victor Frankenstein. This part was written by an English sea captain named Walton who encountered the both of them on the frozen north seas. I found it not long after the end of the Great War, at a bookshop in London. I thought at the time I might send it along to Rome, so that it might be condemned for its blasphemies, its heresies, but I never did. I never in my most fantastic dreams believed it to be true.”

Father Guillaume lowered his head a moment, rubbing bunched fingers into his reddened eyes, then looked up. “You must drive it away, Sister. Tell it to leave.”

Surely her ears deceived her. Even so, not her eyes. The Father’s face was stern and unyielding. “Nomad is
not
an ‘it,’ Father, he’s a man. Maybe his beginnings were different than yours and mine, but he doesn’t feel any less. He doesn’t need love and mercy any less. On the contrary, he needs them even more.”