Fool School Read online

  I dwell on my cowardice and my prayer to Neptune and I ask God for forgiveness and the ermine hat follows the boat like a whipped dog and my mouth forms words automatically and I lose count, which in my mind means I have to start over. This happens more than once, and after more than an hour of my muttering Malcolm says: "Aren't you done yet?"

  "I lost count," I say, and Malcolm smiles.

  Edward takes a red jewel on a gold chain and casts it into the sea. My heart stops and even Malcolm looks struck.

  "It's been two hundred eighty-three Our Fathers," Edward says quietly to me. "Begin the Hail Maries."

  And I do.

  I count on my fingers for the Hail Maries, but I still have to get each word exactly right fifty times in a row. If the words were French it would be easier. The ermine hat follows the boat no matter how fast the man Edward rows. I continue to try for fifty Hail Maries. I am up to thirty-seven this time when I miss a word and start over.

  After another hour or two, Malcolm says: "Why aim for perfection like that?"

  I don't have a clear answer, and I can't think up something witty or profound. I just wonder why other people aren't like me.

  Time passes. I wait to be exorcised, but it doesn't happen. Water ceases to fall, and I and Malcolm set to bailing the gathered rainwater out of the basin of the boat with his hat, which he has reluctantly retrieved from the wake of the longboat. I imagine that the souls of the ermines must be puzzled, and I conceive the ghosts of a dozen tiny weasel creatures stalking the deck, peering at their sodden skins. In my mind I christen the longboat the Immaculate Dead Ermines.

  We eat a blessedly dry meal of smoked pork. It tastes like blocks of salt, and I can taste the foreignness of the pigs, an aftereffect of being French. They are probably Welsh pigs. You can tell from the texture and flavor. It's the same with the wine we drink from a single bowl, tapped from one of the barrels weighing down the boat; it's a Spanish wine, and decidedly not of French quality. I don't speak of this. I've done enough harm already. I am a monster, a worshiper of Neptune.

  The man Edward rows for hours without tiring. Then he tires and says "Make both yourselves useful" and I switch places with the man and Malcolm sits beside me in the prow and each of us takes one oar and we start rowing. Being an inlander, I've never rowed, so my first stroke goes backwards while Malcolm pulls us forward, and we spin in a circle. The man says "Straighten yourselves out and don't lose track of our heading." The sun is directly overhead; the storm had been early in the morning.

  In the end Malcolm and I straighten the boat out and synchronize our rowing. In minutes I tire, but I've been told to row, and I row, feeling my arm muscles turn to berry preserves and petunia stems.

  The man speaks: "Faith isn't limited to believing we're saved. It's a matter of knowing the story of the man who died for us."

  Instantly I say: "Presumptuous of him, isn't it? Why shouldn't we be permitted to die for ourselves?" I shouldn't speak impulsively, trying to make jokes that aren't really funny, but I can't stop myself, ever. I just can't.

  Malcolm shakes his head.

  "You know the son of man is also the son of God, right, Tom?" says Edward. I must have told them my name at some point.

  "He had two fathers, then?" I say.

  "No," sighs Edward, although I imagine him to be amused. "The son of God and Mary."

  "Ah, you should call him the son of woman and the son of God. Specificity is important," I add. It's the sort of thing my Papa might say.

  "And you know Judas betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver, right?" says Edward.

  "So soon? Had God and Mary cut the umbilical cord yet?" I ask.

  Edward ignores me. I'm not funny, not yet. I'm eager to begin an education, so I don't cause such disappointment.

  "And you know that the Romans took him and nailed him to the crucifix?"

  "I've seen the pictures," I say.

  "Do you know why?" says Edward.

  I shake.

  "So that he could take upon himself all the sins in the world," the man finishes.

  "Very nice of him," I say. "What's that got to do with Neptune?"

  "If you believe in Christ, he'll take your sins away," says Edward, "including careless idolatry."

  "Good, he can have them."

  "You've missed the point," Malcolm tells Edward, still rowing tirelessly. "The point is not to commit idolatry in the first place. It's commitment to Christ that's important."

  "Oh. Right," I say. I add, inadvisably: "Then why did the storm stop?"

  Edward hits me across the back of my head, and I shut it.

  * * *

  Land comes into sight the third day. Actually, let me say a few words about the process of sleeping on a longboat. It involves unrolling a sodden cloth over the puddle between the ribs of the bottom of the boat, trying and failing to lay crosswise, and finally sliding under the benches, winding up three-in-a-row, side by side, my leg along Malcolm's, our heads propped up on the sharp edge of an accursed rib, our feet propped up on the next one down. Oh, and when you wake, your head is directly below a wooden bench.

  And let us not speak of the midden.

  In my heart I hope that another storm won't arise as we sleep, that the shuffling sea won't drive us off course.

  The second day we discourse further on the subject of religion. You'd be surprised how little of it the church explains to you. It's mostly smells. The nostril as the road to faith. That and ba bee boo mumbling. Wish they spoke French, I really do.

  And now it is now, and here is the muddy green line that is England. The Isle of the Mighty, as I've heard it called. Saxon Island. Bad wineries. I know almost nothing about it, except the language, and my Anglais is pretty bad. It will be difficult to invent japes and jokes in English. Hopefully that will improve with practice, as all things do.

  As Edward rows, I ask whether I'm to be exorcised before we set on land. Oars stop and Edward appraises me. "You prayed the Ave Maria six hundred ten times, lad." As if that answered my question somehow. The oars resume their swish, and Malcolm smiles in his damp sacrificed ermine hat. He is more than just an intense face, I am learning. There is humor underneath.

  Malcolm and I sit for our turn rowing, and Edward eats. Salt fish, barley cakes, a foul brown smear Edward calls mustard. The three foods, stacked, like a dry pie. "Keeps the hands clean," says Edward, although with clean white water a hand-dip away, I wonder why he cares. Perhaps he's particular about his nails, or dislikes the feel of dirt. Tidy man. I row.

  Land, not three days from the place The Immaculate turned aside. I say I don't understand how we came so far, the ferry takes a week each way, and Edward says there are currents. He says we'll reach our docking point at Poole before the ship returns to Cherbourg. He and Malcolm share a sly look, and I don't know what it means.

  The tide is coming out, and before you'd think, the boat scrapes the rocks at the rim of the cove. Bournemouth is to one side, but Poole is our destination. It's further. The cove continues coving and coving as we sweep around the sylvan coast and row within the shade of hanging trees called withies, rainfalls of branches touching the water and brushing our hair playfully. Briefly I believe myself to be an otter. Edward identifies the Isle of Brownsea, the only darkness in this watery garden. It's a place of mist and shadow at the farthest edge of sight. I don't like it, and neither do the birds.

  Exertion begins to wear on me, although Malcolm never tires. He's built for hardship. I'm not. I'm ready to throw my oar away and my cases after it and let the kelp have my future. Deep inside, that's what I want. I want to give up. I'm not ready for a new phase of my life. Nobody ever is. I want to hear my father throwing up again. I want to be stuffed up a chimney with Papa to hide from his creditors. I want to see France again. O homeland! O place of my birth! Why did I ever leave you, fair land of good wine and mild rains!

  Observe me. I am many things. I'm a poet, for example. I write poems about how much I hate participating in my own li
fe.

  I feel a presence like a spirit from some pagan realm, but it's just Poole, the first serious sign of life around the coast. From afar I have felt my first stop on the trip, and I fear it. Maybe I'm not meant to be a fool after all--why, here's a fisherman in a coracle, muttering filthy words as his nets tangle as we paddle over them--and here is his friend, standing up and peeing from a position of balance in his circular boat-chair. I could be a fisherman! I could abandon my life's goal of becoming a kingsfool and leap the side and beg these man to take me on as an apprentice, learning how to--but Edward has struck one of the fuming fishermen with an open hand, knocked me and Malcolm aside and taken the oars, rowing hard to outpace the two thick thugs who are chasing us in their wicker coracles. Water spills from the oar-ends as Edward strives to avoid a two-on-one fistfight. Perhaps the men have cudgels or knives. Who doesn't? And now I will not be a coracle fisherman. My shoes are too red, curly and waterlogged for that. I am still only a rude fool.

  Poole. A daisy-chain of thatched roofs overlooking a series of moorings in the water, the oceanic tree-trunk hitching posts a jaw of jagged teeth sticking out of the bay. We row through water clogged with cattails, around a series of tiny bobbing boats moored out in the musky water. The longboat is low enough in the keel to row right up to shore, where a rotting boardwalk squishes beneath the feet of men.

  English fashion is truly laughable. Men of the town wear tights and dresses in clashing colors, blue tights and a red dress, red tights and a green dress. They are flappy and poorly made. They show no fashion or invention. Their shoes are appalling. I repress my scorn, but it bubbles up as laughter. In France we embroider our outfits, coordinate our colors, contrast and maintain an awareness of the changing fashions. I'm willing to bet the price of my admission to the Fool School that these yeoman English have been wearing the same style of outfits for half a century. One almost feels sorry for them.

  It's Sunday afternoon, and Mass is over; the thick reek of rest lays over the bay. The trees are full of children, the marshy banks are fetid with mosquitos, and I'm eager to continue my journey from Poole to Bath, where the Fool School is. I have forgotten my pledge to Neptune. I really have. I'm not lying.

  Now that my feet have swung onto something like land, I want to confess to a real priest. I tell Edward so. He's lifting the barrels and my trunks onto shore, and I'm helping him. He asks whether my confessing to him isn't enough, and I tell him he isn't a priest, which as far as I can tell is perfectly true. The longboat is unloaded, and he sends me to the wooden bit of a church they have here. Its steeple isn't monastic, neither humble nor brave, just pointy.

  Here is a priest. Look at him. His face is leonine, fierce, snorty, barren. His vestments are of a green so dark they looks black, they're supposed to be black but the English don't know how to dye their clothes. Within the woodgrain of a church whose windows are shuttered against the southern coast mosquitos, it could be black. Black means guilt.

  His voice is an oboe, a trilling of two reeds together. His voice makes me angry. It makes me angry at myself, since there's nothing else to be angry about. Actually, I don't know where that anger comes from. Maybe I'm angry at the guilt.

  We face each other in chairs in the empty vestry. I speak, and my voice is still filled with guilt at my misstep. I tell him I pledged myself to Neptune, which is not exactly true. I speak in French, at length, about the boat trip and the storm. I speak on and on. At the end of my story he says:

  "Ig spekeÞ non Français, mine sonne," he says.

  Non Français, huh? My Anglais is even worse, I promise, père.

  I try my limited English. "Ig been Thomas. Ig gaveÞ mine self to the Roman godde Neptunus, ycause of a storm at sea," I manage.

  "So prickeÞéd by fere?" says the priest.

  Fere? Fear. I nod yes. I was afraid, I say. I don't know what "pricketh" is.

  "Ye gaveÞ yourself to Neptunus for all time, Thomas, or merely to his care till the surge's ende?" the priest asks.

  "I meanteÞ for the prayer to last only till the surge's ende," stealing his English expression, "but my friend Edward sayeÞ that I had pledged myself to Neptunus."

  "Ah, the memorie of our sinful words betrays us, does it not?" says the priest, smiling sympathetically, and I find that my few childhood lessons in English are returning and the words are becoming clearer and easier to understand. "If you desireth the Lord's forgiveness for a sin, that is no difficult matter. But to remove yourself from the power of one of the Lord's enemies? Well, no pardoner would take such a charge, and prayer will certainly not be enough. Idolatry is an unforgivable sin, you know," he says in his aggravating nosey guilt voice.

  "Then--" I say, wondering what he'll recommend. Money, I imagine. Priests usually want money.

  "Here in Poole we've taken up the Hebrew practice of the escaped goat," he says, and I don't know this foreign practice. I ask what it entails.

  "Ah, very simple. The Hebrews would take a goat, place their sins upon it, and drive it off a cliff. Of course, in our enlightened times we're not so barbaric. Nowadays we keep the ah goat alive, so it may be used more regularly."

  "Where do I find your goat?" I ask.

  "Oh, we don't keep goats here in Poole," the priest laughs. "The woman is kept in a pit. Come, I'll take you."

  * * *

  He and I travel inland, beyond the reaches of the bay, where the trees break off quickly into the green fields of Dorset, cliffs made of grass and wildflowers, the sort of moorland prominences where one might imagine the masque of Death appearing in his cloak and lantern to haunt the land at dusk, gazing out across the empty fields at distant doomed travelers passing. I find distaste lingering in this shire's end of England, this is a forbidden grassland, maybe where the Gorgons once grazed--

  Cries.

  The cries are not quite human. They're the cries of a frightened animal. Mews like a starving cat. The priest has a bread roll with him--at first I think maybe these English use different bread for Communion, but no, he tears off a corner and chews. Just food.

  The rattling of chains. A dirt trench with steep sides, like an antlion's den. It seems a tomb. Here is the escaped goat.

  The priest holds a hand up and motions for me to keep silent and stay back. Hunching over, he creeps up to the rim of the pit, holds the bread roll with two fingers and shakes it. A hiss and a scream like an eagle. From where I hide I see what looks like a wing of brass rise up above the edge of the pit and grapple with the priest, who drops the breadroll and throws himself back onto his elbows and scrabbles away. "Back, harlot!" he shrieks as brass pins catch his ankle and try to drag him in.

  I get my arms under his and pull him away from the slashing nails. A line of red soaks through his socks and a shoe pops off his foot and slides away. At first I think his whole foot has gone with it.

  "Submit, child of Satan!" his reedy voice calls. The sound of munching and crunching. I'm not sure if she's eating the breadroll or the shoe. Sobs. I'm not sure if they are cries of victory or pain. I don't know anything.

  Several implements lay nearby. I don't know what they're for, other than a pitchfork which the priest hefts and holds in front of him.

  "Teach me to be careless," he mutters to himself. "Now. Let's do this thing properly. Come forward, but for goodness sakes stay behind me, Tom." His English is now almost understandable to me.

  We move forward toward the edge of the pit. The priest thrusts the pitchfork at the scrabbling hands, and at last they draw back and we approach.

  She wears no clothes. Metal is bolted to her body with locks and rivets. Her fingers don't bend, and brass nails stick out from her fingertips at indeterminate lengths. A tongue, grotesque, long and swollen, sticks out like a--well, it sticks out from her mouth, held in place by a clot of brass needles. Her mouth is held shut around it by springs, making her look like she's always sticking her tongue out at you. A chain connects a collar of spikes around her neck to a post hammered deep into the bottom of the
pit. Scratches surround the post, but don't dig very deep in. Scars form a thousand red-pink crucifixes on her skin.

  "Trying to get out again, were we?" the priest says. "See, lad? The dirt and worm guts around her fingers? That's why we had to hammer these in." He holds up a nine-inch brass nail that matches the nubbins of claws that stick out from her fingertips. "Bang!" He imitates a hammer. "Straight through the bone. Quite sturdy, I assure you. Now. Speak what she has done."

  "I--" I look down at the cowering, filthy woman. "I don't know what she's done."

  "Now don't be slow, boy, she's pledged herself to Neptunus. Because she was afraid of a storm surge. Come come, speak it and be quick."

  I think back to what Edward said on the boat, that the way to expiate sins was to make a sacrifice for others. This woman is making a sacrifice for all of us. This woman is Christ-like. That's why she was put here on Earth. She is absorbing the sins of Poole. That's her purpose. It's very noble of her to make that sacrifice. I better hurry up.

  I say: "This woman committed the sin of--" and something catches in my throat and I look at the raw eyes of the woman and the words dry up like desert sands.

  "The sin of idolatry!" declares the priest. "Unforgivable!" And he has a lash, and he strikes the woman, strikes her, and screams emerge from the punished beast, and he strikes her, and he's driving my sins away, and he strikes her, scratching her stomach and shoulders, and you can see the holy healing, really you can, and I feel faint and I shout that I'm healed, because I begin to feel the lashes on my own skin, it's like when Papa would reach the heights of his drink and would fetch a belt and strike me with it, and you feel the need for comfort after pain, so you cling to the only human in arm's length, which is the drunk man who has beaten you, and you cling to your Papa like a monkey on his back, and his drink changes and he comforts you, and something about this process makes you feel sick like plague, and this woman's wounds are my wounds, and I beg the priest to stop, but he strikes her, faster now, a glow of deviant joy on his face, and her body quakes until she stops moving.