Fool School (4 page)

We eat a blessedly dry meal of smoked pork. It tastes
like blocks of salt, and I can taste the foreignness of the pigs,
an aftereffect of being French. They are probably Welsh pigs. You
can tell from the texture and flavor. It's the same with the wine
we drink from a single bowl, tapped from one of the barrels
weighing down the boat; it's a Spanish wine, and decidedly not of
French quality. I don't speak of this. I've done enough harm
already. I am a monster, a worshiper of Neptune.

The man Edward rows for hours without tiring. Then he
tires and says "Make both yourselves useful" and I switch places
with the man and Malcolm sits beside me in the prow and each of us
takes one oar and we start rowing. Being an inlander, I've never
rowed, so my first stroke goes backwards while Malcolm pulls us
forward, and we spin in a circle. The man says "Straighten
yourselves out and don't lose track of our heading." The sun is
directly overhead; the storm had been early in the morning.

In the end Malcolm and I straighten the boat out and
synchronize our rowing. In minutes I tire, but I've been told to
row, and I row, feeling my arm muscles turn to berry preserves and
petunia stems.

The man speaks: "Faith isn't limited to believing
we're saved. It's a matter of knowing the story of the man who died
for us."

Instantly I say: "Presumptuous of him, isn't it? Why
shouldn't we be permitted to die for ourselves?" I shouldn't speak
impulsively, trying to make jokes that aren't really funny, but I
can't stop myself, ever. I just can't.

Malcolm shakes his head.

"You know the son of man is also the son of God,
right, Tom?" says Edward. I must have told them my name at some
point.

"He had two fathers, then?" I say.

"No," sighs Edward, although I imagine him to be
amused. "The son of God and Mary."

"Ah, you should call him the son of woman and the son
of God. Specificity is important," I add. It's the sort of thing my
Papa might say.

"And you know Judas betrayed him for thirty pieces of
silver, right?" says Edward.

"So soon? Had God and Mary cut the umbilical cord
yet?" I ask.

Edward ignores me. I'm not funny, not yet. I'm eager
to begin an education, so I don't cause such disappointment.

"And you know that the Romans took him and nailed him
to the crucifix?"

"I've seen the pictures," I say.

"Do you know why?" says Edward.

I shake.

"So that he could take upon himself all the sins in
the world," the man finishes.

"Very nice of him," I say. "What's that got to do
with Neptune?"

"If you believe in Christ, he'll take your sins
away," says Edward, "including careless idolatry."

"Good, he can have them."

"You've missed the point," Malcolm tells Edward,
still rowing tirelessly. "The point is not to commit idolatry in
the first place. It's commitment to Christ that's important."

"Oh. Right," I say. I add, inadvisably: "Then why did
the storm stop?"

Edward hits me across the back of my head, and I shut
it.

* * *

Land comes into sight the third day. Actually, let me
say a few words about the process of sleeping on a longboat. It
involves unrolling a sodden cloth over the puddle between the ribs
of the bottom of the boat, trying and failing to lay crosswise, and
finally sliding under the benches, winding up three-in-a-row, side
by side, my leg along Malcolm's, our heads propped up on the sharp
edge of an accursed rib, our feet propped up on the next one down.
Oh, and when you wake, your head is directly below a wooden
bench.

And let us not speak of the midden.

In my heart I hope that another storm won't arise as
we sleep, that the shuffling sea won't drive us off course.

The second day we discourse further on the subject of
religion. You'd be surprised how little of it the church explains
to you. It's mostly smells. The nostril as the road to faith. That
and ba bee boo mumbling. Wish they spoke French, I really do.

And now it is now, and here is the muddy green line
that is England. The Isle of the Mighty, as I've heard it called.
Saxon Island. Bad wineries. I know almost nothing about it, except
the language, and my
Anglais
is pretty bad. It will be
difficult to invent japes and jokes in English. Hopefully that will
improve with practice, as all things do.

As Edward rows, I ask whether I'm to be exorcised
before we set on land. Oars stop and Edward appraises me. "You
prayed the Ave Maria six hundred ten times, lad." As if that
answered my question somehow. The oars resume their swish, and
Malcolm smiles in his damp sacrificed ermine hat. He is more than
just an intense face, I am learning. There is humor underneath.

Malcolm and I sit for our turn rowing, and Edward
eats. Salt fish, barley cakes, a foul brown smear Edward calls
mustard. The three foods, stacked, like a dry pie. "Keeps the hands
clean," says Edward, although with clean white water a hand-dip
away, I wonder why he cares. Perhaps he's particular about his
nails, or dislikes the feel of dirt. Tidy man. I row.

Land, not three days from the place
The
Immaculate
turned aside. I say I don't understand how we came
so far, the ferry takes a week each way, and Edward says there are
currents. He says we'll reach our docking point at Poole before the
ship returns to Cherbourg. He and Malcolm share a sly look, and I
don't know what it means.

The tide is coming out, and before you'd think, the
boat scrapes the rocks at the rim of the cove. Bournemouth is to
one side, but Poole is our destination. It's further. The cove
continues coving and coving as we sweep around the sylvan coast and
row within the shade of hanging trees called withies, rainfalls of
branches touching the water and brushing our hair playfully.
Briefly I believe myself to be an otter. Edward identifies the Isle
of Brownsea, the only darkness in this watery garden. It's a place
of mist and shadow at the farthest edge of sight. I don't like it,
and neither do the birds.

Exertion begins to wear on me, although Malcolm never
tires. He's built for hardship. I'm not. I'm ready to throw my oar
away and my cases after it and let the kelp have my future. Deep
inside, that's what I want. I want to give up. I'm not ready for a
new phase of my life. Nobody ever is. I want to hear my father
throwing up again. I want to be stuffed up a chimney with Papa to
hide from his creditors. I want to see France again. O homeland! O
place of my birth! Why did I ever leave you, fair land of good wine
and mild rains!

Observe me. I am many things. I'm a poet, for
example. I write poems about how much I hate participating in my
own life.

I feel a presence like a spirit from some pagan
realm, but it's just Poole, the first serious sign of life around
the coast. From afar I have felt my first stop on the trip, and I
fear it. Maybe I'm not meant to be a fool after all--why, here's a
fisherman in a coracle, muttering filthy words as his nets tangle
as we paddle over them--and here is his friend, standing up and
peeing from a position of balance in his circular boat-chair. I
could be a fisherman! I could abandon my life's goal of becoming a
kingsfool and leap the side and beg these man to take me on as an
apprentice, learning how to--but Edward has struck one of the
fuming fishermen with an open hand, knocked me and Malcolm aside
and taken the oars, rowing hard to outpace the two thick thugs who
are chasing us in their wicker coracles. Water spills from the
oar-ends as Edward strives to avoid a two-on-one fistfight. Perhaps
the men have cudgels or knives. Who doesn't? And now I will not be
a coracle fisherman. My shoes are too red, curly and waterlogged
for that. I am still only a rude fool.

Poole. A daisy-chain of thatched roofs overlooking a
series of moorings in the water, the oceanic tree-trunk hitching
posts a jaw of jagged teeth sticking out of the bay. We row through
water clogged with cattails, around a series of tiny bobbing boats
moored out in the musky water. The longboat is low enough in the
keel to row right up to shore, where a rotting boardwalk squishes
beneath the feet of men.

English fashion is truly laughable. Men of the town
wear tights and dresses in clashing colors, blue tights and a red
dress, red tights and a green dress. They are flappy and poorly
made. They show no fashion or invention. Their shoes are appalling.
I repress my scorn, but it bubbles up as laughter. In France we
embroider our outfits, coordinate our colors, contrast and maintain
an awareness of the changing fashions. I'm willing to bet the price
of my admission to the Fool School that these yeoman English have
been wearing the same style of outfits for half a century. One
almost feels sorry for them.

It's Sunday afternoon, and Mass is over; the thick
reek of rest lays over the bay. The trees are full of children, the
marshy banks are fetid with mosquitos, and I'm eager to continue my
journey from Poole to Bath, where the Fool School is. I have
forgotten my pledge to Neptune. I really have. I'm not lying.

Now that my feet have swung onto something like land,
I want to confess to a real priest. I tell Edward so. He's lifting
the barrels and my trunks onto shore, and I'm helping him. He asks
whether my confessing to him isn't enough, and I tell him he isn't
a priest, which as far as I can tell is perfectly true. The
longboat is unloaded, and he sends me to the wooden bit of a church
they have here. Its steeple isn't monastic, neither humble nor
brave, just pointy.

Here is a priest. Look at him. His face is leonine,
fierce, snorty, barren. His vestments are of a green so dark they
looks black, they're supposed to be black but the English don't
know how to dye their clothes. Within the woodgrain of a church
whose windows are shuttered against the southern coast mosquitos,
it could be black. Black means guilt.

His voice is an oboe, a trilling of two reeds
together. His voice makes me angry. It makes me angry at myself,
since there's nothing else to be angry about. Actually, I don't
know where that anger comes from. Maybe I'm angry at the guilt.

We face each other in chairs in the empty vestry. I
speak, and my voice is still filled with guilt at my misstep. I
tell him I pledged myself to Neptune, which is not exactly true. I
speak in French, at length, about the boat trip and the storm. I
speak on and on. At the end of my story he says:

"Ig spekeÞ
non Français
, mine sonne," he
says.

Non Français
, huh? My
Anglais
is even
worse, I promise,
père
.

I try my limited English. "Ig been Thomas. Ig gaveÞ
mine self to the Roman godde Neptunus, ycause of a storm at sea," I
manage.

"So prickeÞéd by fere?" says the priest.

Fere? Fear. I nod yes. I was afraid, I say. I don't
know what "pricketh" is.

"Ye gaveÞ yourself to Neptunus for all time, Thomas,
or merely to his care till the surge's ende?" the priest asks.

"I meanteÞ for the prayer to last only till the
surge's ende," stealing his English expression, "but my friend
Edward sayeÞ that I had pledged myself to Neptunus."

"Ah, the memorie of our sinful words betrays us, does
it not?" says the priest, smiling sympathetically, and I find that
my few childhood lessons in English are returning and the words are
becoming clearer and easier to understand. "If you desireth the
Lord's forgiveness for a sin, that is no difficult matter. But to
remove yourself from the power of one of the Lord's enemies? Well,
no pardoner would take such a charge, and prayer will certainly not
be enough. Idolatry is an unforgivable sin, you know," he says in
his aggravating nosey guilt voice.

"Then--" I say, wondering what he'll recommend.
Money, I imagine. Priests usually want money.

"Here in Poole we've taken up the Hebrew practice of
the escaped goat," he says, and I don't know this foreign practice.
I ask what it entails.

"Ah, very simple. The Hebrews would take a goat,
place their sins upon it, and drive it off a cliff. Of course, in
our enlightened times we're not so barbaric. Nowadays we keep the
ah goat alive, so it may be used more regularly."

"Where do I find your goat?" I ask.

"Oh, we don't keep goats here in Poole," the priest
laughs. "The woman is kept in a pit. Come, I'll take you."

* * *

He and I travel inland, beyond the reaches of the
bay, where the trees break off quickly into the green fields of
Dorset, cliffs made of grass and wildflowers, the sort of moorland
prominences where one might imagine the masque of Death appearing
in his cloak and lantern to haunt the land at dusk, gazing out
across the empty fields at distant doomed travelers passing. I find
distaste lingering in this shire's end of England, this is a
forbidden grassland, maybe where the Gorgons once grazed--

Cries.

The cries are not quite human. They're the cries of a
frightened animal. Mews like a starving cat. The priest has a bread
roll with him--at first I think maybe these English use different
bread for Communion, but no, he tears off a corner and chews. Just
food.

The rattling of chains. A dirt trench with steep
sides, like an antlion's den. It seems a tomb. Here is the escaped
goat.

The priest holds a hand up and motions for me to keep
silent and stay back. Hunching over, he creeps up to the rim of the
pit, holds the bread roll with two fingers and shakes it. A hiss
and a scream like an eagle. From where I hide I see what looks like
a wing of brass rise up above the edge of the pit and grapple with
the priest, who drops the breadroll and throws himself back onto
his elbows and scrabbles away. "Back, harlot!" he shrieks as brass
pins catch his ankle and try to drag him in.