reach the foot with her lips. As it was, she had to go up on her toes. Her head bobbed forward to the relic, but it wasn’t a quick kiss she gave. Her head moved slightly forward and back, and Father Walter pictured her tongue passionately laving the rotten toes. It both gave him a thrill and made him queasy. He had a premonition that he’d be drinking hard into the night.
After the longest time, Mina suddenly turned away from the foot. Father Walter let the bamboo curtain slide back into place and waited to greet her. She exited the shrine, and he said, “How was that? Did you feel the spirit?” but she never slowed to answer. Walking right past him, she headed toward the outhouse. The sand blew fiercely, but she didn’t bother to hold her hat and it flew from her head. Mina walked as if in a trance. Father Walter was surprised when she didn’t go to the outhouse, but passed it and headed up out of the valley in the dunes. On the beach, the wind would have been ten times worse. As she ascended, he called to her to come back.
She passed over the rim, out of sight, and he was reluctant to follow her, knowing the ghost of the driver might be lurking in the blinding sandstorm. He turned back toward the church, his mind a knot of thoughts. Was she having a holy experience? Had he offended her? Was she poisoned by the old foot? He stopped to fetch her hat, which had blown up against the side of the outhouse.
That night, his premonition came true, and the whiskey flowed. He opened Mina GilCragson’s travel bag and went through her things. By candlelight, whiskey in one hand, he inspected each of her articles of clothing. When holding them up, he recognized the faint scent of wild violets. He wondered if she was a saint. While he was searching for evidence in the aroma of a pair of her underpants, Sister North appeared out of the shadows.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Sniffing out a holy bouquet. I believe our visitor today may have been a saint.”
“She was nothing of the sort,” said Sister North, who stepped forward and backhanded Father Walter hard across the face. His whiskey glass flew from his grasp and he dropped the underpants. Consciousness blinked off momentarily and then back on. He stared at her angry, yellow eyes as she reached out, grabbed his shirt, and pulled him to his feet. “Come with me,” she said.
Outside, the sandstorm had abated and the night was clear and cool and still. Not letting go, she pulled Father Walter toward the shrine. He stumbled once and almost fell, and for his trouble, she kicked him in the rear end. Candlelight shone out from the shrine’s one window, its bamboo curtain now rolled up. Sister North marched the father up to the altar and said to him, “Look at that.”
“Look at what?” he said, stunned by drink and surprise.
“What else?” she asked.
And, upon noticing, he became instantly sober, for the big toe of the holy foot was missing. “My God,” he said, moving closer to it. Where the toe had been was a knuckle-stump of sheered gristle. “I thought she was sucking on it, but in fact she was chewing off the toe,” he said, turning to face Sister North.
“You thought she was sucking on it . . .” she said. “Since when is sucking the holy toes allowed?”
“She was a scholar of Saint Ifritia. I never suspected she was a thief.”
Sister North took a seat and gave herself up to tears. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. They stayed in the shrine until the candles melted down and the dawn brought bird calls. Then they went to his bed. Before she fell asleep, the sister said to him, “It happened because you lied.”
He thought about it. “Nahh,” he said. “It was bound to happen someday.” He slept and dreamt of the driver’s wife and daughters. When he woke, Sister North was gone.
Father—By the time you find this, I’ll already be four miles inland, heading for the city. I mean to bring back the stolen toe and make amends to Saint Ifritia. She’s angry that we let this happen. You, of course, bear most of the responsibility, but I, too, own a piece of the guilt. It may take me a time to hunt down Mina GilCragson. I’ll try the university first, but if she’s not a scholar, I fear she might be a trader on the black market, trafficking in religious relics. If that’s the case, the toe could at this moment be packed on the back of a mule, climbing the northern road into the mountains and on through the clouds to the very beginning of the world. If so, I will follow it. If I fail, I won’t be back. One thing I’ve seen in my sleep is that at the exact halfway point of my journey, a man will visit the church and bring you news of me. If he tells you I am dead, then burn my shack and all my things and scatter the ashes over the sea, but if the last he’s seen of me I’m alive, then that means I will return. That, I’m sure of. Wake up and guard the foot with your very life. If I return after years with a toe and there is no foot, I’ll strangle you in your sleep. Think of me in bed, and in the morning, when you shovel sand, pray for me. There are four bottles of whiskey under the mattress in my shack. You can have three of them. I spent a week of solitude contemplating your sermon and realized that you didn’t lie. That you actually killed the driver of the hay wagon. Which is worse? May the sweet saint have mercy on you.
TWO DAYS LATER, Father Walter realized he’d taken Sister North for granted, and she was right, he had killed the driver just as he’d described in his sermon. Without her there, in her shack, in the shrine, in his bed, the loneliness crept into the sand dune valley and he couldn’t shake it. Time became a sermon, preaching itself. The sand and sun and sand and wind and sand and every now and then a visitor, whose presence seemed to last forever until vanishing into sand, a pilgrim with whom to fill the long hours, chatting.
Every one of the strangers, maybe four a year and one year only two, was asked if they brought word from Sister North. He served them whiskey and let them preach their sermons before blessing them on their journeys to the end of the world. Sometimes an old man, moving slowly, bent, mumbling, sometimes a young woman, once a child on the run. None of them had word from her. In between these occasional visits from strangers lay long stretches of days and seasons, full of silence and wind and shifting sand. To pass the long nights, he took to counting the stars.
One evening, he went to her shack to fetch the second bottle of her whiskey and fell asleep on her bed. In the morning, there was a visitor in the church when he went in to shovel. A young man sat in the first pew. He wore a bow tie and white shirt, and even though it was in the heart of the summer season, a jacket as well. His hair was perfectly combed. Father Walter showed him behind the altar and they sat sipping whiskey well into the afternoon as the young man spoke his sermon. The father had heard it all before, but one thing caught his interest. In the midst of a tale of sorrows, the boy spoke about a place he’d visited in the north where one of the attractions was a fish with a human face.
Father Walter halted the sermon and asked, “Lord Jon?”
“The same,” said the young man. “An enormous plum fish.”
“I’d heard he’d been killed, shot by the father of the girl whose leg he’d severed.”
“Nonsense. There are so many fanciful stories told of this remarkable fish. What is true, something I witnessed, the scientists are training Lord Jon to speak. I tipped my hat to him at the aquarium and he said, in a voice as clear as day, ‘How do you do?’ ”
“You’ve never heard of a connection between Saint Ifritia and the fish?” asked Father Walter.
The young man took a sip, cocked his head, and thought. “Well, if I may speak frankly . . .”
“You must, we’re in a church,” said the Father.
“What I remember of Saint Ifritia from Monday Afternoon Club, is that she was a prostitute who was impregnated by the Lord. As her time came to give birth, her foot darkened and fell off just above the ankle and the child came out through her leg, the head appearing where the foot had been. The miracle was recorded by Charles the Bald. The boy grew up to be some war hero, a colonel in the war for the country of rain.”
The young man left as the sun was going down and the sky was red. Father Walter had enjoyed talking to him, learning of the exploits of the real Lord Jon, but some hint of fear in the young man’s expression said the poor fellow was headed all the way to the end, and then one more step into oblivion. That night, the father sat in the churchyard near the bell and didn’t drink, but pictured Sister North, struggling upward through the clouds to the beginning of the world. He wished they were in his bed, listening to the wind and the cries of the beach owl. He’d tell her the young man’s version of the life of Saint Ifritia. They’d talk about it till dawn.
For the longest time, Father Walter gave up writing sermons. With the way everything had transpired, the theft of the toe, the absence of Sister North, he felt it would be better for the world if he held his tongue and simply listened. Then, deep in one autumn season, when snow had already fallen, he decided to leave the sand dune valley and go to see the ocean. He feared the ghost of the driver every step beyond the rim but slowly continued forward.
