Falling Idols

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 Chateau-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.”

“He, then,” said Guillaume, harshly. “He is an abomination in the eyes of God! He has no right to exist!”

“But he does. No matter how quick you are to turn away, he still will be there.”

“This abomination you’re so quick to defend … it deliberately murdered a child in Switzerland. Maybe more than one.”

“And here at home,” she explained, “Gilles de Rais murdered many dozens of them. He went to his trial and execution repentant. Would you be the one to judge him beyond forgiveness?”

Father Guillaume simply glared, would not answer.

“I thought not,” she said gently. “Then please … why not extend the same mercies to Nomad? He’s certainly had none of the advantages of an aristocrat who should have known better.”

“But his birth was more atrocious than that of the most lowly animal.” Father Guillaume pushed away from the table with a groan of misery, and despite the disappointment, she felt mostly pity for him. What had he endured to leave his mind and heart so closed on some topics? “Very well — he’s done no one any harm in the weeks since he first came to hide here. I suppose it would be unchristian to drive him away. But Giselle … please keep him out of my sight. And if he wishes to go, don’t discourage it.”