Caleb consulted his best friend Lincoln Waterford about Saint Joan of Arc.
Lincoln was as large and noisy as Caleb was small and quiet. Caleb loved him and considered him the last word on most things, and started a lot of his sentences with ‘Lincoln Waterford said …’ Lincoln was a tall child who had the look of a person who had been put together out of bits left over from other people. He had long, straight, shapely legs with enormous knobbly knees and thick ankles. He had a flat tummy and broad shoulders, but also a large round bottom that didn’t seem to belong to the rest of him. He had thin, elegant arms and wrists that supported enormous, square hands. He had a charming smile, flashing beautiful teeth, because his mum made him wear a wire mouth plate at night to keep them straight, but he also had three huge warty things on his chin. I allowed him to be in one of my plays once because he was quite theatrical, looked older than he was and could quickly imagine things. But he needed to be the centre of attention, which could be tiring, and he had a habit of changing my scripts to words he liked better.
Lincoln insisted that Caleb and a little girl called Janet get his milk bottle in the recess times and fetch his lunch from his locker and bring it to him in the schoolyard. Lincoln also expected Caleb and Janet to take turns finishing his homework. We told Caleb to stop, but he and Janet both seemed to like working for Lincoln. When Caleb heard the headmistress telling Lincoln he was a born leader, it reinforced his view of his nine-year-old hero.
Lincoln was unable to shed much light on Saint Joan because he said there were thousands and thousands of saints and there was no way he could keep up. He said his father’s favourite was Saint Brigid. She was a Catholic celebrity because she changed her dirty old bathwater into beer. She also changed bathwater from a whole pile of leprosy people into beer too, but why you would want to drink either beat me. Surely there would be bits of skin and scabs and even fingers and things in the leprosy beer? When we asked Lincoln about this, he said his dad just said, ‘Beer is beer, and all the better if it’s holy.’
Ruthy said the Catholic saints weren’t really able to do miracles, or they would be in the Bible. This resulted in an interesting conversation about the difference between magic and miracles. We concluded that anything magic that was about God or Jesus was a miracle, and everything else was just plain magic or a trick. As a result, the bathwater thing was either a hoax, like you saw at the circus sometimes, or it was magic.
Caleb developed a total fascination with Catholic saints. He said our church was very boring because no one could do anything special at all, except for Brother Steve Wilbur who had a puppet in a box called Brian he could bring out and make talk, even though we all knew it was really Brother Steve throwing his voice. Some of Caleb’s favourite saints included Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who could fly and used to sit in trees and tell people the view was nice; Father Paul of Moll, who could make birds come to sing to him and when they did their feathers changed colour; and Saint John Bosco who could make a dog called Grigio turn up out of nowhere to protect him when he was in danger.
Lincoln also offered to ask his mum about Saint Joan. Caleb asked him to do so as soon as possible because the matter was urgent.
Caleb nagged Ruthy to find out about Saint Joan too, and Ruthy agreed to have something for him by the weekend if he would just shut up and leave it alone for a few days. He agreed but didn’t keep his promise and asked her at least twice a night if she was reading anything important about the burnt soldier. If he asked too loudly, we shushed him quiet. It wouldn’t do for Mum to find out we were reading about a Catholic when she was already so down.
Now that Caleb was feeling a bit better, I convinced them to play a game of which I was particularly fond. We would put the record player on the kitchen table and open the window so we could hear the music in the garden. I would put on one of the few records we had, ‘Colonel Bogey March’ from the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and make the others line up and march behind me. I sent Ruthy to go down the street to see who else was at home and might be convinced to join my troupe, and before long we had seven children in our line-up. That gave me the chance to drill them rather than march myself, and I stood on the sidelines and yelled orders and criticism of their marching style, until I made Rose Partington from number 17 cry and she and her brother went home. Ruthy said I had to learn to be less bossy if I wanted kids to play with us, but I said that it was my job to get them all up to speed or we wouldn’t win marching competitions, and Ruthy said there weren’t any competitions to win, which means she missed the point.
Ruthy presented her research to my little brother. She had worked on it all week, asking the school librarian, Mrs Sandicock, to help her find books and references, and then sat at the little table in our room after tea to work on her report. She got up just as the light was creeping in under the little torn corner of the blind in our room on Saturday morning to copy out her notes on to her favourite lined pad that she used for homework. We took it into Caleb’s bedroom together and shook him awake. Ruthy handed it over. He was very excited in a nervous kind of way and sat straight up in bed to read it. Ruthy got in with him so she could see her writing and help him with any words that were hard for him. In the end, he handed it back and just asked her to read it out loud. I crawled in next to them and put my arms around Caleb so we could listen together, as though it was a story time with Mum or Dad, even though Ruthy and I hadn’t had one of those for quite a long time. Ruthy read her report in her best ABC newsreader voice.
‘Joan of Arc was a French girl who was born in 1412. She was called the Maid of Orleans. You don’t say Orleans the way we would say it, because it has a little dooverlacky over the letter ‘e’ and the French people know to make that sound a bit different, but it doesn’t matter really. And Maid of Orleans didn’t mean she did people’s cleaning but I am not sure why she was called that.
‘Her dad’s name was Jacques d’Arc, which Mrs Sandicock says you would say like “Jark da ark”, which sounds quite funny, but they probably didn’t think so. When she was only one year older than Daniel is now, that is eighteen years old, she led the French army into a battle that they won. There had been a prophecy that a girl like her would lead an army. I searched Dad’s Bible concordance and she is not mentioned so this was a made-up prophesy and not a proper one from God.
‘She claimed that when she was thirteen, she started to hear voices in the garden that told her what to do. She believed they were from God, but as we know, Maynard’s grandpa hears voices all the time and they are definitely in his head and not from God, who would not bother to ask the nurses to remove the frogs from his jelly. The voices said the English were bad people and she had to save France from them. This seems strange to us because Grandpa Wilson is from England and he is not a bad person, but this happened a long time ago so perhaps they were then. Her voices told her she would be struck in the chest by an arrow. That’s exactly what happened, so people believed her voices in the garden were from God. The French king was very happy with her and made up a coat of arms for her that he drew himself. It had a sword holding a crown with a picture of a flower on each side.
‘She got captured after a battle and someone sold her to the English for a lot of gold. They took her to an English court that was run by Catholic priests who put her on a bed and tied her down. They told her she had to say she didn’t really hear the voices, but she wouldn’t do it. After a time she gave up because torture is very terrible, but they still burned her to death anyway. Her last words were “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”.’
Both Ruthy and I were hoping this homework would be the end of Caleb’s obsession, but instead he let out a rip-roaring scream and we cuddled him hard to try to make him quiet before Mum got out of bed.
‘Caleb! Shhhhhh! Mum’s still in bed. And we have to be good or she’ll have a worse than usual head day,’ said Ruthy.
‘What’s that noise about?’ we heard Dad call out from the bedroom. ‘What’s going on? You all right, Caleb? Need your nebuliser?’
‘He’s fine, Dad. He just saw a spider,’ I called out. Ruthy had her hand over Caleb’s mouth trying to calm him down.
‘What’s wrong, Caleb?’ she said. ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it? I finished it this morning for you. What’s wrong?’
‘This proves that Dad is going to be sacrificed,’ he said, white with panic.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, tired of the game now. ‘Dad. Is. Not. Going. To. Be. Sacrificed.’ I thumped the bed next to him with each word.
‘Yes, he is, Dorcas. Yes, he is. Because yesterday you drew a picture of a crown and sword, like the army coat from the king, and Ruthy drew some flowers.’ His little bottom lip was trembling and his eyes were as wide as a full moon.
‘But Caleb, I am always drawing swords and armour and crowns, and Ruthy is always drawing flowers,’ I said, exasperated. Really, boys could drive me nuts. I made a mental note to be sure no boy knights came to live at Caramel.
‘But when I saw Dad tied up to the tree in my dream, he kept saying not to worry, and then he said, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”,’ insisted Caleb.
‘Caleb, that was just a dream,’ said Ruthy, patting his back now because he had started to hiccup between words.
‘But Joan Dark had dreams too, and they came true and they sacrificed her.’ His face was crumpling up in the way it did when he was about to lose it, so we were both patting him and stroking him, and I was holding his Ventolin ready to help him use it if he started to panic and wheeze.
‘Want me to come and get the spider?’ called out Dad.
‘No!’ Ruthy and I both called out at once.
‘Dorcas got it and squashed it with her shoe and it’s quite dead,’ called out Ruthy.
‘You’d better not have squashed a spider on my clean sheets,’ called out Mum.
At least we could call out one true thing when we sang back, ‘No.’