snorted. “In your family, any kind of freak can be respected.”
“Perhaps you’d best feed her,” said Prugne Martin. “She looks a sight too thin.”
But already Ruth was working at a strap across her chest, and when it sprung, it released the awful tumor to the ground with a resounding thud. Bartholomew said, “Mercy.” The crowd instinctively recoiled, but as a gasp escaped me my heart also rejoiced to see the long, gentle curve of her back reaching over the apparatus. Her black shirt fit snugly, and I saw the sweet bumps of an ordinary, bending spine.
“What do you call this?” Adelaïda asked, leaving my side to point one hesitant finger toward what had, a moment before, seemed too dreadful to name.
“My backpack.”
Adelaïda half frowned and sat down at a safe distance from her on the grass. Anya, from the back of the crowd, called, “Be careful, Adelaïda.” What a difference between the figure of my wife and that of the stranger—the one plump, golden, full of sweetness, the other dark and hard, despite her odd beauty, as the Reaper at his grim work.
Ruth worked open a fastener that made a strangely bright sound. Adelaïda startled slightly and drew farther away. Ruth, too, startled, and said, with a shy smile, “It’s only a zipper.” She worked it open and shut a few times. It sang.
An amazing array of objects left the sack—more slender pants, balls of woolly fabric, and many items wrapped in small parcels with a luminous sheen.
Adelaïda sang:
Oh, the stranger came bearing her Backpack,
’Twas the strangest sight I’d ever seen—
“Silence, sister, I pray you,” Mandrik urged her. He bent down reverently to touch a shiny package, his knees creaking though there was no sign of rain.
“That’s a Baggie,” Ruth said, “with granola.”
He leaned closer toward her, a gentle expression upon his lips. “You needn’t tell me the names of things.”
“Adelaïda,” she said, pronouncing it strangely, “asked me what the backpack was.”
“I am not Adelaïda.”
She colored slightly. “I can see that.”
“He’s like an anchorite,” Ydlbert offered, “only not locked up.”
“More like a freak, if you ask me,” Jungfrau interjected.
“I wouldn’t be wise with the holy man,” I warned him.
“What’s the difference between a holy man and a freak?”
“If I knock out your teeth, will that help you understand? Oh, but I forget me, you don’t have any teeth.”
Mandrik clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His cheeks were flushed. “Do you know nothing, Yves?” he called back to me over his shoulder. “As our sainted father would have told you, wasted breath is wasted breath, and a fool’s a fool.”
Ruth extracted a tightly folded paper and held it a moment in her hands. “I’m not sure I should show you this.”
Stanislaus said, “What do you seek to conceal from us?”
“Nothing, I—”
“For nothing is hidden from the eyes of the Lord.”
She paused, then opened her paper to an absurd breadth, which revealed blues, greens, and browns as vivid as any in God’s creation, and the names of fairy places in an even, minuscule hand. The crowd drew closer, pulled by its beauty as it fluttered in the ripening breeze. “Look. Here’s your island.” She tapped unceremoniously at the paper’s edge. “Here are the mountains, so somewhere in here must be your valley. And nothing.”
Mandrik and Stanislaus knelt over the map, drawing it in with their eyes. “This map is beautiful,” said Stanislaus, “but it is entirely wrong.”
“No,” Mandrik said, “not entirely.”
“Wrong about everything,” he persisted.
“At all events,” my brother concluded, “it is incomplete, and must be removed from public sight.”
“Is that,” I asked, “the sea?”
“And that,” Ydlbert said, pointing at a blob ten times greater than the one on which Ruth claimed we lived, “is that Scotland?”
Mandrik pushed us ever so slightly away. “I will not have you worry about these pictures. As I said, they are not complete.”
Ruth said, “Should I not have shown you the map? You demanded to see it.”
“What is incomplete,” said the priest, gathering what little pluck he had, “about a map which shows nothing of what is and a copious lot of what isn’t?” How we all missed old Father Icthyus.
“Forgive me, Father,” Mandrik said, with a slight bow of the head. “It was not my understanding that you had ever left this village.”
Two of Ydlbert’s younger sons, Manfred and Jowl, pounced on the map and ran with it crackling in the wind behind them to the Maypole. “Lords of the map!” one cried, pleased to be in possession of the prize. The other children followed to view the wonder. Another of Ydlbert’s sons cried, “All hail the Archduke Mappamondo!”3
My brother remained at the stranger’s feet. “Just as well,” he said, watching the fluttering object go.
Ruth leaned down toward him, saying, “I’ll probably need that back, eventually.”
“All things go to their appointed homes, by and by.”
Adelaïda, peering into the stranger’s eyes, said, “Prugne’s right, we should feed her. We are being most inhospitable.”
“Do you like oats?” Anya asked. “Because oats is what we’re eating.”
Ydlbert nudged Anya gently. “Bring her cheese and fruit.”
“Bring her meat,” Mandrik commanded. “She clearly requires sustenance.”
Anya hoisted her smallest child, whose name I also could never recall, in its sling, and went off muttering, “Crank.”
“Sheep fucker!” came the shrill voice of Friedl Vox, who had yet avoided the gathering, over the assembly. Her aged, disheveled form lumbered into view, and Ruth took a step back. “You can’t hide your sins before God!” Stanislaus blushed past his ears, because it was always him to whom she referred thus.
“Hello, Friedl,” he said.
The outlying villagers moved aside to let her stench pass.
“Death is coming to take you all—sooner or later, he comes! And you stand around listening to this cattle molester, listening to his blasphemy
