The Execution (22 page)

It was irrational, but it was a
contract of necessity to suit the moment. In truth, it was really
only a barter, pure and simple, and it gave her reason to come to
mass and speak to him again. This would allow her to look at his
face and breathe in the whole of him once more. That was what she
really desired, and recognition of this truth choked the breath
from her.

She wrung her gloved hands again. With
D’ata gone, she was immediately panic-stricken, totally absorbed
with the awful notion of never seeing him again. This was
unacceptable, and yet her rational mind grappled with her
irrational heart. She tried to fight back the tears, but they broke
and streamed like salty insults down her cheeks. Swallowing hard,
she tried to choke back her emotions. Everybody watched and no one
understood. Nobody extended pity or compassion—except
one.

Yvette sat at her side, silently, and
in her own small way grieving the loss of her lovely, pretend
suitor. She reached for Julianne’s hand and said with deep
sincerity, “I would have gladly been your chaperone.”

* * *

Northwest of Marseille, in Nimes,
D’ata served mass under a new Parish. He’d been sent to St.
Aloysius with Monsignor Leoceonne. He was numbed. His father, true
to his word, had forced him to the new parish, determined that his
ordainment would not be disturbed by his son’s foolish trifling
with a farm girl.

D’ata had argued bitterly with his
father while his mother wept uncontrollably, praying aloud that God
should right her son’s errant ways.

Steadfastly defiant, he refused to
accept that God would disallow love between he and Julianne. “No
God of mine would be so cruel,” he’d insisted, refusing to succumb
to his father’s beliefs.

In the end, the Baron had D’ata
beaten. It broke the Baron’s heart to do such a thing, but the
question of obedience remained a commandment of God. Children shall
honor and obey and be subject to their fathers. It is by such
obedience that they gain the favor of God and the favor of God must
be obtained at all costs, even if it is cruel. It was a sanctified
barter which would guarantee eternity. Monsieur Cezanne had
tolerated quite enough of his son’s outrage and would accept no
further insolence. It was for his own good.

Henri, unable to watch his young
friend suffer, had been uncharacteristically absent from the
stables as D’ata was held and beaten by four of the estate guards.
Brokenhearted, he returned only to dress the wounds. Raphael
brought soap and hot water from the house while Henri gently rubbed
horse salve into the open welts. “You’ve brought this upon
yourself, you know,” the crippled old man chided him
gently.

D’ata said nothing, but winced under
the ministerings. He remained mute and did not even look up when
his old friend said goodbye.

A great sadness fell over the estate
that day. Almost all were aggrieved to lose their favorite son, and
many watched secretly, with tearful eyes, as their beloved child
was sent away.

D’ata arrived at Nimes stiff and
bruised. His robes covered his wounds, but not his broken heart. It
was Monsignor Leoceonne who’d accompanied D’ata there. He was
instructed to maintain close scrutiny of the young priest-to-be,
and so he filled D’ata’s days with prayer, scripture and penance.
It was a daunting task, but he believed it would spiritually lift
D’ata from the incident and set him on the path of
righteousness.

He found D’ata terribly apathetic but
refreshingly honest. At times, it appeared that he seriously wished
to atone for his transgressions and worked very hard towards that.
At other times, however, he was gravely silent and sometimes went
for days at a time with scarcely a word. There was a brokenness to
him, a splintering of his soul. This deeply concerned the
monsignor. Such events were capable of enshrouding a priest with
dispassion. It would not do to have the young priest
insincere—would not do at all.

Monsignor
Leoceonne had lectured him gently on the conventional sins of
women. “Wherever beauty shows upon the face, there lurks much filth
beneath the skin.” The barrage continued, “St. Augustine himself
said that celibacy and virginity are the preferred states as they
permit the total love of God, allowing the soul of man to be
married to the soul of the trinity—Your mind has been corrupted, as
the serpent corrupted Adam, for beauty
can only be found in accepting and
suffering!”

D’ata nodded but endured the
ministering in silence.

The Monsignor wondered if his words
fell on deaf ears, but it was the confessions that disturbed the
elder the most.

“
Forgive me, Father, for I
have sinned. I have dreamed of her again and thrice satisfied the
desires of carnal flesh myself, wishing that I was with her. I wish
to purify my thoughts and actions, but I love Julianne—more than
anything,” D’ata confessed.

Statements like this were a grave
concern. The church was very strict concerning its stand on any
perversion of nature. Any autoerotic behaviors, especially those
resulting in the spilling of seed, were considered sodomy. Sexual
expression was forbidden except for the consecrated act of husband
and wife in an effort to procreate. True, few men fulfilled such a
doctrine, but it was the stand of the church, nonetheless. The
monsignor had a duty to try to instill it upon D’ata.

Any misdemeanor amongst men was
generally accepted as a result of woman’s wanton and sinful nature,
causing temptation in men. In this case however, it was hard to
blame a distant Julianne on D’ata’s continued transgressions.
Furthermore, the monsignor was genuinely taken aback by the sincere
honesty with which D’ata gave his confessions. By all counts, the
young man saw no true wrong in what he said and did. He seemed
mostly confused.

To complicate things further,
Monsignor Leoceonne knew Julianne, had known her since infancy. He
found the girl obedient and sincere. True, the girl was
strong-willed, perhaps from living without a mother, living only
amongst the men. Yvette did not count, for she was too young. This
had not been the perfect situation for Julianne, but in these
times, it was a blessing for her to even have a home. Many
struggled with death and loss, it was not at all uncommon.
Nevertheless, the Monsignor struggled with casting the weight of
blame on the girl. D’ata’s repeated lapses and blatant confessions
demonstrated rebellion against God and consequently were the most
serious of nature.

The Monsignor tempered the reports he
sent home to the Baron and Lady of Cezanne, but was specific in his
detail to the Archbishop in Marseille. Reports were sent to Milan.
D’ata, because of his honesty, tread on very unstable ground with
the church.

It would be easy to cast D’ata upon
the block, and the Monsignor worried about this. There was so much
to lose. If D’ata fell from favor he could be punished by the
church, perhaps even to excommunication, and it could affect the
Cezanne family and the entire Cezanne domain. The Baron held great
power and his knights were undivided. Their devotion to the Cezanne
coat of arms was undisputed and the church could jump at an
opportunity to dominate. A schism between the church and the
Cezanne power would be far reaching, could even plunge the domain
and surrounding township into war—it could devastate the
Marseille.

Monsignor Leoceonne tried to occupy
more and more of the young priest’s time with lessons, prayer, and
memorization of passages of the scripture. When there was little
else to occupy their time, the monsignor had D’ata polish the
church, inside and out. This was no small task as the cathedral was
daunting, with massive stained glass windows that pointed like
monumental, colored tombstones towards heaven. There was row on row
of pews, straight-backed and smoothed from patrons’ skirts and
tights sliding across them.

* * *

D’ata halfheartedly ran the soft cloth
over the pews. Polishing them was a redundant task, perhaps like
much of the doctrine that infected their faith. Of late, D’ata had
begun to have doubts.

The altar was granite and immense. The
Madonna, marbled white, and nearly ten feet tall, looked down on
the quiet efforts of the young man. D’ata was trapped, imprisoned,
and all he could think of was the flaxen-haired beauty with the
dark gray eyes. He believed he’d held for mere hours the most
precious moments of his life, and then just as suddenly lost them.
This was a difficult draught to swallow.

He broke communion bread for a new
congregation. They were predictably curious and offered
explanations to each other in stolen whispers. There were nods of
approval and hushed questions about their new acquisition, the
young and handsome D’ata. Someone suggested that he was the son of
the Baron of Cezanne and everyone knew of the Cezannes. Most had
even heard of the boy and the story of how he became a Cezanne. Why
he was now at St. Aloysius, however, was a mystery. The monsignor
simply answered questions with, “Because God has brought him to
us.”

As mass finished, D’ata mumbled
halfhearted greetings, “Very good to see you; yes, it is a lovely
parish.” He would eventually escape to his sparse quarters in the
rectory and, for perhaps the first time ever, genuinely collapse to
his knees. He begged God for guidance. He prayed as though he
finally knew God. ‘Please,’ he pleaded silently with his head
bowed, his lips pressed into his folded hands. ‘Please, let her be
a part of your plan for me. Do not take her from me.’

Falling forward, he pressed his palms
flat on a stone floor that offered no compassion, damp and gritty
beneath him. His face pressed against the backs of his hands. “As
you are my father, I promise you I will do anything—if you will
bring her back to me.”

It was a prayer of desperation and the
most sincere he had ever been.

* * *

It was four months before God answered
his prayers. September was hot, but this evening was gray and cool,
the rain whipping intermittently against the stained glass. It was
a gloomy Monday, and the church was empty and tomblike. D’ata was
cleaning the church again, each small task echoing through the
empty chamber. His mind was miles away.

Tired of the beating of his own heart
in his ears, he stopped and knelt to pray. His prayer was
unchanged. He bargained, lamented, and pleaded his case to God.
Kneeling on the steps of the pulpit itself, he bowed his head, bent
upon knees that were truly calloused from hours of prayer. He
looked to the heavens, up towards the Madonna and child that
towered over him. After several hours, he lapsed into a restless
and fatigued sleep, reclined right there on the stone
steps.

He was a long and lanky figure,
reposed as he was, and looked oddly like a sacrifice left at the
foot of an altar. D’ata had lost weight these last months. He
hadn’t meant to, but he could find no appetite. Time was the most
unkind partner of all, for even a minute seemed unbearably long.
D’ata wondered if he would lose his mind before all was said and
done.

D’ata lay still as he dreamed. It was
a black and white dream. There was no color except for the golden
hair of the Madonna, without eyes, giving birth in silence to the
holy child. The infant, white as snow, looked up at him with the
most startling gray eyes.

The Madonna, instead of reaching for
the child, reached for him, resting her holy hand on his shoulder.
Her tears dripped from empty sockets as she whispered his name,
“D’ata...D’ata.”

D’ata stirred, stiff from sleeping on
the steps, and turned to see who so gently shook his shoulder. ‘The
Madonna now has eyes,’ he mused. Her expression appeared so sublime
that he closed his eyes again, sure it was just another dream and
preferring the escape of dreams to the pain of reality, as of
late.

“
I love you,” she said
softly.

D’ata’s eyes opened suddenly. In all
of his dreams of Julianne, she had never spoken to him. He’d even
feared he would forget her voice. “Julianne?” Befuddled urgency
swept over him and he struggled to sit up, to take her hands in
his. Was he dreaming again, or had he finally gone entirely
mad?

She smiled at him. Her hair wild and
wet, her gown clinging to her, she was more beautiful than he could
ever remember.

“
I could not bear to be
away from you. I hope it is all right that I have come,” Julianne
said, her face radiant with happiness. D’ata thought her voice was
the sweetest music he’d ever heard.

The thunder outside was only a soft
breath compared to the pounding of D’ata’s heart. Without a word,
he pulled her to him, desperately clutching her. He was afraid that
if he let go, she would vanish forever. “Oh, Julianne!” Was all he
could manage in reply. It was exquisite to touch her, to hold her
and bury his face in her wet hair—to breathe the essence of
her.

She folded against him on the altar
steps, sighing softly.

They kissed and this time there was no
hesitation or objection, no end or argument—no words.

He kissed her as he had a million
times in his dreams, ran his fingers through her wet and tangled
hair as he had in his mind so many times while serving
communion.