Falling Idols

The back door might wake her — there was this to consider. And maybe tonight would be better spent sleeping. There was always tomorrow night…

Oh, enough. There would always be another tomorrow night. Of what good was trepidation? He was but a man, no doubt a shy one, certainly kind at heart. No harm would come from their speaking, and meeting one another face to face so that she could at least know what he looked like. The advantage was his, there.

Giselle eased from her bed, drew her cloak about her and, creeping barefoot across the cold floor, carried her shoes to the back door. From a kitchen shelf she took a lamp and matches.

Out the door, quickly, quietly as she could shut it, and then she was hurrying along the path. The stable loomed ahead of her, a sagging black square punched into the night. At its door she stopped to light the lamp, then slipped inside.

A muted glow surrounded her and cast a tilting shadowplay on the walls, and she eased across the hard- packed earth. The deep bellows breath of sleeping horses was the only sound as she passed them in their stalls. To the far wall, then…

She stopped.

He was there, lying on one side with his broad back to her, curled beneath a heavy horse blanket that rose and fell with his own steady breath. She could see little of the man himself, just a great head of shaggy black hair.

In a young life whose course had run slowly, so straight and free of genuine surprise, this was new: that the risk of change came down to a single moment. She had but to take the step into the next, or turn around and retreat and forever wonder.

Giselle cleared her throat, loudly: “Excuse me? Sir?” And louder still, “Sir? Are you awake?”

A sluggish flex of his shoulders, a stirring of his legs. The moment crawled by, a slow eternity, then whipped ahead in sudden flurry. She thought she saw his face, half turning back her way as he opened one sleepy eye—

And could she trust the lantern’s glow, the peculiar shades of color that it sometimes cast? Was that grimacing cheek indeed a sallow yellow? She saw but a glimpse of it, and there was no time to decide. A groan of terrible anguish came scraping forth from the cavern of his chest as he threw the blanket about his own head and scuttled back against the stable wall. He drew his knees in toward his chest and, with head lowered beneath its makeshift veil, held himself together like some trembling fortress.

“Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my world, and go back to your own. If you wish to do me one last kindness, then let that be it. Please.”

Giselle took a step forward without even intending to. She was drawn to misery like moths to candles. It was more than her calling, it was the reason for her being. This man spoke in a voice so lashed with agonies, his words were almost secondary, and she could no more leave him than she could deny Christ.

“I mean you no harm,” she said. “I’ve tried to show you nothing but goodwill. Surely you know that by now, don’t you?”

“I know it, yes.” His voice seemed near to breaking. “But this was when I was a stranger to you, who moved by night. There have been others, whose hearts have been kind enough … until they see me for what I am … and at once their hearts turn murderous.”

“Then they’ve missed what’s obvious to me. That your heart is far kinder than theirs.” Giselle took another step closer, and another, and knelt just a metre away. “What could change them so?”

Beneath the blanket, he seemed to recoil. “My countenance … it is more hideous than you could possibly imagine.”

“I’ve seen and tended to faces afflicted by disease, and all the injuries that can happen on farms. I never once quit loving the person behind such a face. So I promise I’ll not turn away from yours.” When she got no reply, she tried another route. “I don’t even know your name.”

Again, a heavy stirring beneath the blanket. “I was never given one. So, in time, I gave one to myself, the only name that would suit me: Nomad.”

Had he been so abandoned as a child, no one had even bothered to grant him the simple gift of a name? This was more than sorrowful, this was a moral crime. She told him her own, then said, “Let me see you, Nomad. Please, let me see you.”

He seemed to consider it awhile, like a king weighed down by ponderous burdens of the heart. Then the lowered head rose, the blanket with it. “Move back a few paces, then, if you really mean to see me for what I am.”

And he stood.

It was one thing to contemplate his enormity of stature in impressions left in a bed of hay, quite another to behold it in person. He seemed to simply keep uncoiling from the stable floor, taller, and taller still. She’d always thought herself big-boned, born to robust farming stock … yet here was someone who stood nearly three heads taller than she.

One brutish hand rose from within the blanket, to pull it slowly away, and for the first time she met his dull and watery eyes. Saw his yellowed skin, his blackened lips, the tangled cascade of coarse hair whose locks bunched about his shoulders like throttled snakes. His face was like none she had seen, ever, more total in its noble ruin than any ravaged by disease or wound. And her heart shattered for the sufferings others must have heaped upon him, for no matter how powerful his shoulders or broad his back, both must surely have broken under the strain.

Giselle groped inside for words, but there were none. We are all beautiful in the eyes of the Lord? How easy to say, with her own complexion like milk. The last thing Nomad needed was to hear sanctimonious platitudes.

So, instead, she stepped forward to where he stood atremble, reached up, and touched his face. Which soon dampened with his tears.

“There are hours yet before dawn,” she said. “Please share with me where you’ve come from.”

*

In the hour past dawn, Nomad refused to leave the stable with her, and no amount of coaxing would draw him out to join her in a walk to the rectory. Father Guillaume should be told, but moreover should be introduced to this wandering soul. Such conversations the two of them might have. What