years if popular memory served—and had, in her time, borne six children to her husband. All but one had been taken by the same influenza that snatched my family from me nearly whole; her one remaining son, Jude, farmed quietly at the outskirts of town, but had never been able to marry because of her madness, and had therefore banished her from his house. Friedl had lived, then, in a dirt hut by the church as long as I could remember. When first my voice began to deepen its pitch, Friedl ceased to care for her widow’s weeds, until finally they hung about her, tattered and faded, dark gray. Then did she cease to wash, and her white hair hung about her body in fearsome snarls. Her right eye remained clear and blue, but the left, long since blind, turned upward until it shone like a boiled egg. She began to wander the countryside night and day, screaming maledictions and talking in tongues, and she no longer responded to ordinary gestures of kindness. Our spiritual leader then was Father Icthyus, himself quite aged, and one May he followed her about for two nights and two days., regaling her with questions and heaping prayers upon her. Come the third forenoon he grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “Friedl! Do you not remember who you are?” To which she replied, her voice crabbed and choked, “Vox Clamantis in Deserto!” Since that time my countrymen had called her Vox, and though they grumbled at the ever-inventive foulness of her tongue, they put out stale crusts when they heard her sharp cries coming up the lane. Some said her bad eye was the sure sign of the Devil’s mark upon her, but my brother spoke differently. “Rather,” said he, “has it turned to look inward—a skill the rest of us most sorely lack.”
“What is this harlotry?” she shrieked, one bony finger imagining it traced the wild line of Ruth’s hair. “Iulia Gansevöort, back from the grave? Do you accept a stranger amongst you?”
“It is a stranger,” Mandrik replied, “but not the one you think.”
“How could I forget the sea’s stench upon her, cursed witch? Banish! Banish! Why do you accept this vileness?”
“Because she’s our first visitor,” I said. “Our first since my grandmother’s time.”
“And it seems our duty as Christians,” said Stanislaus, “to treat her charitably, at least until she proves her thralldom to Darkness.”
“Please,” Ruth said. “I wouldn’t hurt you.” Her face did not remain composed.
Mandrik placed himself between her and Friedl’s pointing. “Friedl, haven’t you anyone else to curse today?”
“You think it’s easy, don’t you?”
Jude, as always, gave up hiding behind his neighbors and went forth to claim what once had been his mother. “Come on then, Mum,” he said. “I’ll give you a pudding if you’ll quit it.”
“Ever trying to distract me from the work of God with baubles and fruits.”
“Aye,” he said.
She looked at the ground, then cried:
Iulia Gansevöort, come from the sea,
Spare us your tricks, my poor family and me!
“Stop it, Mum. Iulia Gansevöort’s safe under her cairn.”
She sighed and followed him off, holding loosely to his sleeve as if it might be diseased.
Mandrik turned back to our visitor. “You’ll forgive us, I hope, the peculiarities of some of our neighbors. Particularly Friedl Vox.”
Ruth arched her mobile eyebrows, but did not otherwise reply.
“This is a great day for my village,” said Mandrik. “On all our behalf, I extend my warm welcome.”
“Thank you.”
“Provided,” Stanislaus interjected, his voice cracking, “you do not prove, as Friedl suggests, demonic in nature.”
“And,” my Uncle Frith added, his barley ale dripping into his beard, “that someone cover her naked body from sight.”
Stanislaus said, “We’ll keep our watch upon her, aye.”
“I’m not a spirit.” She looked down at herself. “And please excuse my clothes. I dressed for the hike; I wasn’t really thinking whom I might offend once I got here. I’ll try to do something about it. I promise you, though, I’m not naked.” No one would be the one to tell her she was wrong, so we scratched our ears, swallowed, and looked around. Stanislaus, against his nature, and as it seemed against his will, recovered enough to bow to her, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Ruth bestowed upon him a frank smile such as none of his parishioners ever offered him. He must have been disarmed, for his wan face glowed with pleasure. When she turned to Mandrik, he also bowed, and smiled at her warmly. “It will be,” he said, “such a pleasure to talk to you.”
She nodded. “And a pleasure to talk to you.” When Anya returned with chicken legs and bread, Ruth sat down cross-legged in the grass and ate with her hands as gracefully as another might eat with his spoon at table. Mandrik seemed pleased at her hearty appetite, and sat down with her to discuss whatever were their topics. The crowd dispersed to more frenzied merrymaking; I left my brother and this stranger in peaceful communion over their black bread. As I walked off, fear rose, unbidden, in my throat. I tried to swallow it or shoo it off, but it would not go. Behind me I heard my wife singing:
Oh, our stranger she knows
She looks strange in her clothes—
With that Backpack upon her
And Zippers that gleam—
Yet she seems to be kind
And to own a good mind,
And our menfolk do find her
As fair as new cream.
The sun set upon my drunken compatriots gorging and rollicking in the grove past Desvres’s field, but I retired home. Yoshu was waiting out by the road for me, and she barked happily, but I was not anxious to see her flea-bitten face. Vringle, the billy goat, and the lambs Squelcher and Norwald all bleated their hellos when I entered the barn, the one place a man is safe to collect his thoughts. I was lonely. It felt sad to know that Hammadi, without me, was still at the ball in her merriment, but I could smell the sweet, warm comfort of her, and I sat myself down in her clean straw. I heard the soft, lovely suck of the lambs nursing at their mothers, and Sophronia’s great, unhurried mouth at work on a parcel of hay. Ragan, our she-pig, snored, as her mate, Mauritius, scratched at the dirt floor. I looked at the writing box Mandrik had long ago given me, which I kept near Hammadi, my other treasure, and wished I knew what to do with it. Little did I know then how soon pen and paper would become my closest companions. When at last the night grew cold—how did the animals stand it without the fire I allowed them only in midwinter?—I retired to my house, built up the fire, and waited in the night’s uncustomary silence for my wife, daughter, and horse to return.
My brother belonged to no order, and worshipped—much to the priest’s annoyance—beyond the confines of Father Stanislaus’s church. He had taken, however, a vow of chastity, daily mortification, and prayer when he reached the flower of his manhood in his seventeenth year. Much had already befallen us—the deaths of our parents, two brothers, and a sister—and while I had taken a wife to ease my misery, he had resolved both
