II
At supper, the mood is black. From her seat, as far from the head of the table as she can sit, Joan keeps her head down to escape the stream of oaths flying like an arc of sour piss out of her father’s mouth.
It is not the boy, Guillaume, he is grieving, though there may be a little of that, too, since he is also a father to sons. Mostly, however, it is anger. It is the indignity of knowing that Domrémy has lost a battle, even one between children. The humiliation is what he can’t stomach. If he were there, if he were only there, he keeps repeating, to face those tit-sucking whoresons drunk on their famous Burgundian wine, those curd-eating milksops who kill a man and then don’t take the credit for doing it; he closes his right fist in his left hand: what he would have done if only he were there…
“But that wouldn’t have been permitted, Father,” Jacquemin says practically. “You are too old.” His intent is to soothe, but its effect only makes his father’s skin jump, the blue vein like a swollen rivulet in the side of his neck throb. He has no need for words. He answers his eldest with a curled lip, eyes hard as splinters of bone. In war, what is not permitted? What tricks? What traps? What subterfuge? Tell me. In fact, I dare you to say it to my face again.
Jacquemin looks down, cowed. So, her father goes on. And on.
He is the only person Joan knows who can hold a conversation entirely with himself. No sooner does a thought enter his head than it travels to his lightning-quick tongue, and it is not always curses that come out. He is sometimes perceptive, occasionally eloquent. We have suffered, he says now, no raids from the companies of mercenaries that have ravaged the French countryside for longer than I have been alive. Heaven has looked kindly on our small village. Our cottages have not been burned. We’ve had no need to seek refuge within the fortified walls of cities. We’ve not had our livestock taken, our women defiled, our children killed, the corpses of grandmothers and godparents set alight before our eyes, if we could not give over our life’s savings for the right to bury them. These things, he continues, have happened to others, and there is no reason to believe that Domrémy, though we take our name from the blessed Saint Remigius, is better or worse than any other place in France that has suffered. You hear stories like this all the time: cloisters broken into, silver chalices pissed in, altar cloth used to wipe the stinking sweat of an Englishman’s brow. But this, what happened today, is to our shame. We cannot justify it, for it was no army, no company of Burgundian or English or even disgruntled French soldiers come to wreak havoc upon us. He pauses, and the silence holds the full weight of his displeasure. It is weakness, he concludes. Weakness.
For a moment, her father simply lets the word hang heavy in the air. Then he wets his lips, takes a drink, continues: It is the coddling of mothers that brings about such frailty in boys, for all women are weak and soft. They were born to be such. His eyes dart quickly to his wife and two daughters. Women, mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, they cannot help it. That boy, Guillaume—he spreads his hands flat against the table, on either side of the bowl containing his supper, for this is his final judgment—well, we shouldn’t be surprised he was felled. This is what happens when you don’t put a child to use as soon as he can pick up a stick or bend his back in the field. His father was always petting him, like that cat he carried around. An unnatural boy. Christ in heaven, he says. He carried the cat, and his father and mother carried him. They threw their arms around him every time he so much as scratched his nose because it itched.
She thinks he’s finished, but he isn’t. It is never enough for Jacques d’Arc to simply insult the dead and abase the bereaved. So, it’s weakness of boys, this much is established. But it’s also France. It’s weakness that drips, like rain from the eaves, above to below. The weakness of our rulers, the King and the Dauphin. Joan moves her mouth, mimicking his expressions, her head turned away as she pulls faces. Her mother and sister see what she is doing, but her mother looks down, while her sister looks up, as if aiming a prayer at their wood-beamed ceiling. Neither of them smile.
But Jacques d’Arc, it seems, cannot escape weakness. Here, too, is the very weakness he hates, at his own table.
As she tries to get her sister to look at her and laugh, Joan feels her hand slip and the bowl in front of her teeter on the edge of the table before fate intervenes, brushing ghostly fingers across the rim and coaxing it over. She watches the bowl, as if in a slow dream, wobble and fall with a crash.
An accident—only an accident. But she knows a miracle must be performed. And quickly.
In the time before her father reaches out and thrashes her, she must somehow make whole the bowl that has been ruined. The serving of pottage the bowl contained must be scooped back inside, as though it had never been touched or disturbed. And her father has already risen from his chair.
So, she is on all fours, her hands working frantically, lumping the clay pieces together in a small and, she hopes, neat little mound that will satisfy the high standards of Jacques d’Arc. She is using her palm to ladle as much stew as she can into her mouth, so that she can’t be accused of wasting food, not in such uncertain times as these, when there are consecutive bad harvests throughout the country. Also, she is eating from the floor because, in spite of her grief or owing to it, she is starving. In her haste, she has swallowed a bit of the bowl itself, a hard and tiny crumb, so the bowl will never be whole again, even if all of the pieces are carefully put back together. Fresh rushes are spread on the floor, and somehow she has chewed a bit of them, too. There’s the taste of grass in her mouth, along with everything else she has gulped down already.
The room has turned sideways. It takes her a moment to understand why, until she pins down the source of her pain: her ear, her left ear, is inside her father’s fist. He’s pulling it, dragging that tender scrap of flesh until she’s sure all the tiny bones inside must be squeezed to a useless mush, like the pottage she’s spilled. If ever he lets her go, she will probably be deaf on the one side, which she wouldn’t mind, not so much, because he is always shouting and usually at her.
From this position, as her father is trying to separate her ear from her head and she is nearly weeping with pain, she can see the rest of her family at the table: her three brothers, Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre; her sister, Catherine; her mother, Isabelle Romée. She knows, from experience, that she won’t get any help from them. Standing up to Jacques d’Arc and saying, “It’s just a bowl and a bit of stew and your daughter a child,” throwing yourself between his fists and the small person he is beating, these will only prolong the episode. And there will be more black-and-blue eyes to go around, more swollen heads and bruised hips to rub and moan over the next morning. Let no one say the family of Jacques d’Arc does not learn from its mistakes. Better to sit still and pretend the beating is happening somewhere far, far away, to just wait it out and hum a pleasant song in your head to drown out the cries while you finish your supper—and keep your bowl on the table.
When he releases her, the room spins about Joan’s head, and she trips, arms flapping, into the closest wall. Her ear is hot to the touch; it feels as if he’s set the whole side of her head on fire with a candle. She can’t tell if that ear is still working, but she can hear her father’s shouting. He’s taken a page from the Maxey captain’s book of insults and is calling her names: little bitch, mangy cur, thankless, whining pup that should be put in a sack and drowned in the nearest stream, if only he had a sack big enough to stuff her body in. Why are all of these images about dogs, she wonders. Doesn’t he know that dogs are God’s best gift to man? Her own dog, a muddy stray she found shaking and wet under a bush one morning, is her closest friend. She’s named the dog Salaud, or “Bastard.” It isn’t meant to be an insult. To her, the name signals their closeness, that the two of them are of the same stock: unwanted, the wretches of the world, easy to kick around.
Near the door, Salaud is barking. She wills him, with every taut and leaping nerve in her body, to please, please shut up, or there’s every chance Jacques d’Arc will take a knife from the table, stamp across the room, and slit his throat.
But, happily, Salaud will live another day. Her father is still swatting at her head, like it’s a fly he’s trying to smudge out of existence, and the most she can do is cover her face with her arms to dampen the blows.
Tomorrow, there will be bruises. She can feel them already, planted beneath the film of her skin and primed to sprout blooms of indigo and cornflower blue. He takes a swipe at her chin, and the punch knocks her, as she hopes, straight into the door. He lunges, charging like a whole mountain range on legs. But she quick-steps around the door—she is in such a rush to leave that she almost rolls into the fresh air—and her dog slips out between her feet, as though they had planned this escape together. She doesn’t stop, not for anything, not even to crow in triumph. Though her jaw feels loose (possibly it is broken), she’s giggling over her shoulder, spit dribbling down the length of her chin as she runs, and Salaud catches up in a few bounds. He’s nipping at her shoes, as if it were all a game and he’s annoyed that until now, he’s been left out of the excitement. She looks down, he looks up, and without pausing, she ruffles the mud-colored fur sticking up on his head. Behind them, a trail of dust rises up as dense as a layer of fog. When they reach the dirt road that winds through the village, Joan lets out a whoop, a victorious wolf-cry, and her dog’s tongue flaps out, like a flesh-pink flag heralding their tiny victory. If these are not moments to live for, she wonders, then what are? For the moment, she has forgotten about Guillaume, about the dress her sister washed for her, which, when it was rinsed, leaked blood and stained Catherine’s palms as if she had been eating fresh berries. Her body is throbbing with pain, but she is never more alive than when she slips like an eel out of Jacques d’Arc’s grasp.
She doesn’t stop running until Hauviette’s cottage, at the other end of Domrémy, is in sight. Hauviette is always laughing, always bright like a moving sunbeam. Like Joan, ten years of age. Unlike Joan, who is serious, with an angular jawline, and constantly grinding her teeth, she is marked by the village as a beauty. She is auburn-haired and hazel-eyed, a child made in the glorious colors of autumn.
It is almost worth it—the ear mashing, the hair pulling, the backhand slap of the mouth—if this is what is waiting for you at the other end: Hauviette’s mother, Jehanne, smoothing your hair and rubbing your shoulder, calling you poor lamb, poor babe, her breath sweet as fennel, her dress giving off the scent of crushed herbs; Hauviette herself, giggling, treating the visit like a happy distraction and cleaning the crescent-shaped cut on your hand, where a piece of the bowl managed to slice through your skin, a little too enthusiastically; Salaud, who snuck in before the door could shut him out, and who has fallen asleep beneath the table, snoring; and your own heart quickening, for once, not from dread of new pain about to be visited upon your body but something else—from goodness, from the shock of charity and kindness.
Not that this is anything new. Jehanne and Hauviette are used to her visits. They have an old strip of linen—called Joan’s linen—set aside for her wounds. They have a bowl—called Joan’s bowl—to wash her face of blood so they can see just what Jacques has done to her this time.
What surprises her is that they don’t mention Guillaume. She expects they will want her to relate to them what she witnessed, though she can’t remember much about the fight itself, only the boy’s dying moments, which are vivid. But they are quiet. They don’t speak except to make comforting noises as they fuss over cuts and her badly knotted hair. Jehanne says, when the silence stretches on, “I thank God and His angels nothing happened to you, Joan.” And it thrills her that there are people in the world, though few in number, who care that she is alive and would feel an absence, even an ache, were she to fall ill or be found dead.
For her, Guillaume’s death is like a scrape or a bruise. Touch it, and it will hurt. So, she doesn’t touch the memory; she tries not to think about what happened, because thinking makes her stomach churn and she knows she needs to hold down her food. One should never waste food. Yet every time she closes her eyes, the sight returns. Sunlight pools across the dead boy’s cheeks like melted gold, and when the light dims, his face is white as polished bone. She imagines words the boy never said. She reaches into her pocket and pricks her finger against the sharp edge of Guillaume’s rock.
Before she leaves, for she must eventually leave, she is slipped two pieces of dark bread. Salaud follows her out into the night, his small rib cage pushing against her ankle.
Someone is standing in the lane, waiting for them not far from the cottage door. A glimpse tells her it’s Catherine. In a village this small, it is hard not to be a creature of habit. Her sister knows where she would run to for help.
When she takes Catherine’s hand, the joints of her sister’s fingers are stiff from cold. How long has she been standing here? It is summer, but the nights when the skies are starless and black as pitch can still make one shiver.
Tonight, there is a moon, like a perfect Eucharist wafer, pressed into the sky. It seems almost reachable, as though if you stuck your tongue out far enough, you might taste the body of Christ in the air. What would He taste like? Joan guesses: whatever the opposite of pottage is, that boiled, viscous mush, sometimes brown, sometimes gray, that makes up nearly every meal. Whatever the opposite of dry black bread and curdling milk is. She has heard, from her uncle Durand, of a spice called cinnamon. He says no one knows where cinnamon comes from. But a merchant once told him there is a creature—adept, despite its great size, at hiding itself—called the cinnamon bird that builds its nests from cinnamon sticks. People have disappeared off the face of the earth trying to follow these birds. The cinnamon the merchant sells passes through many hands, nameless and secret, before it finally comes to him, and there is never a great quantity to be sold; he must fight and argue for the honor of transporting it and showing it off among his wares. So, Joan thinks, perhaps the body of Christ has the flavor of this spice, rare and desired among men: of cinnamon.
They can’t go home, at least not tonight. This is understood between them, for if she is a fugitive, flying from her father’s justice, then Catherine, too, has betrayed him by slipping out in the darkness to find her.
Instead they walk, silent, to their usual spot, beneath the great tree of Domrémy, known in the village as the Faerie Tree. The elders say tiny winged creatures live in the branches, and they may do mischief or they may grant wishes, depending on their mood, which one should never take for granted.
Joan settles against Catherine’s body, exhales, and recalls the two pieces of bread Jehanne gave her. She offers one to her sister, who shakes her head, so Salaud gets both.
Catherine, third-born of Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée, will turn thirteen later this year. She is the only beautiful one in the family; others in Domrémy say Joan and her brothers are nothing to look at, and Joan, in this instance, is inclined to agree. Catherine is so beautiful, even their father, who people say could knock Satan on his back in a fair fight, won’t dare to hit her face, for fear of misshaping her nose or chipping a tooth. Just like cinnamon, how did Catherine come into this world? No one can tell, not with parents such as theirs. It seems both a lucky and an unlucky accident: lucky for Jacques and Isabelle, unlucky for Catherine. If she were a noblewoman, knights would compose verses to honor her; they would bankrupt their households buying chests of rubies and gold for a glimpse of her enigmatic smile and white neck.
Yet it is her goodness, not her beauty, that makes Joan love her. How long would Catherine have stood alone in the lane, if Joan had not left Hauviette’s cottage when she did? How many times have they sat, just so, beneath the Faerie Tree, Catherine’s arms draped around Joan’s shoulders to warm her, as they waited for sleep to come or for first light to dawn?
As for Joan, no one in the whole village wonders from whom she springs. First to be thrashed and beaten by Jacques d’Arc when he is in a bad temper, she is also her father’s daughter: ugly, dark-eyed, large. Put them side by side, and her unwieldy shoulders are simply a miniature of his, her thick ankles a girlish copy of his ox-bull legs. They are alike in other ways, too: always thinking, aware of what is happening, what has just happened, and what might happen next. They are constantly ready for a quarrel and a challenge.
The truth is Jacques d’Arc has done well for himself. He’s not a native of Domrémy but moved here to marry her mother, a woman of property, whose uncle was the prior of a monastery—this impressed him. His house, which he owns, is the only one built of stone in the entire village. It is whitewashed and square, with a sloping roof, and located next to the church, which may be an accident or may be intentional; she can imagine her father saying, See my house, it is second only to God’s in importance. He owns nearly fifty acres altogether: cropland, pastureland, land in the woods known as the Bois Chenu, where he charges others in the village a hefty price for allowing their pigs to forage. In every delegation sent to speak with town officials from nearby Vaucouleurs, he is at the head and ready with his speech. Though he can’t read or write or properly hold a pen, he is a natural negotiator, an easy talker. He’s not like some who bow their heads and direct their words at their shoes. He will look his betters in the eye. He has a brain for figures, a cleverness with money, which has caused many to speculate how much he has saved over the years. Most say it must be at least two or three hundred livres, possibly four, though his friends, of whom he has several, claim it is nearly a thousand. He is an expert at what he knows and has an instinct for his work: the crops, their rotation, the quality of soil, how to use the earth without exhausting it, how to portion out acres for pasture so that one’s oxen don’t keel over from hunger in the wintertime. It is impossible to cheat him. Try, and he will give you a fist of reasons not to do it again.
He is a hard father to his sons and demands that they—Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre—work as much and with the same vigor as he does. But he is harder still on Joan. There is a rumor that in the month before she was born, Jacques d’Arc lost his wits in a way that was unusual for him. Drinking with friends and neighbors, he boasted the child to come would be another son. Catherine, though pretty, was a fluke, he claimed. He could have only sons, and this next one would be strong as Saint Christopher. Someone, whose name is now lost in the telling, took him up on the promise, and, at her father’s insistence, a not-insignificant sum of money was laid down as a wager. A pledge was made that, upon the child’s birth, Jacques would bring it, whatever it was, to be shown to everyone.
Joan arrived. Imagine his dismay at this red-faced, kicking infant. A girl. For an hour after her birth, he walked around baffled, as if God had forsaken him.
“What a set of lungs,” the man who won the bet said to him good-naturedly before he took Jacques’s money.
“What fists! Look how she beats the air as if she hates it,” another added.
It quickly became a game. “What eyes, as beautiful as her father’s,” an old man cooed nearby. “What feet, or are those hooves?” others called. “What hair as black as devil’s spit.” “What arms as thick as the mooring rope for ships.”
And all the while, she was passed among the hands of the drinkers to be peered at like she was some oddity. But they were gentle with her; they knew how Jacques d’Arc held grudges, how he’d never forget either the money he had lost this night or this early betrayal, the blow Joan had, as a babe, already dealt his pride.
Then someone who’d drunk too much of her father’s ale, who slurred his words and could barely stand up without slouching right down again, shouted, “You haven’t really lost, Jacques. She’s a little bull, she is. Just the bull is a girl.”
His friends told the man to shut his mouth or they would shut it for him. But no one denied it. “Is there a female equivalent of Saint Christopher?” one man asked, genuinely curious. She, Joan, was a healthy child—and strong. Just a pity she wasn’t a boy. Even Jacquemin, when they cast their minds back, had really been a beanpole of an infant, hadn’t he? And Jean a stubby mite of a thing.
Now Joan wonders if every time her father looks at her, he thinks of the money he lost. How much was the bet, she wants to know. Two livres? Three? Though it’s probably not about money in the end. It’s about Jacques d’Arc being made to appear the fool. It’s about losing, which a man as proud as he is never likes to do. It’s about the definition of children being sons.
Above the Faerie Tree, Joan hears the susurration of wings, and a bird glides like a restless piece of night that won’t settle against the sky. She thinks of Guillaume. The soul is supposed to take flight when the body expires, only this, she has recently learned, isn’t in fact true. The soul doesn’t rise but, rather, sinks to a place called Purgatory, where the sins committed on earth are atoned for, and the soul is cleansed in purifying flames, both hot and cold. Guillaume is there now. She pictures him crouched in a cave, the floor engulfed in blue-and-white fire, all alone.
Though what has Guillaume done to deserve this? The priest of Domrémy claims even love can be a sin. If you love something too much, if you feel you can never part with it—say, money, or jewels, or your cat—this is also wrong. Everything in the world is merely temporal. Only God endures. Your greatest passion must be for Him alone.
She has been instructed by the priest, by Catherine and her mother, that the prayers of the living can alleviate the suffering of those whose souls must dwell for a time in Purgatory. So, she decides she will pray for Guillaume. She will pray for him at least once every day. And she will do more than pray. She will sneak a bowl of milk and a piece of cheese from the cupboard for the cat who has lost his master and friend.
Soon, the dead boy’s body will be rolled into a white shroud. It will be placed on a bier of wood, the only covering a black pall. His final resting place is a plot in a churchyard. But death is not the end. There is the matter of reparation, of costing out the total price of his family’s loss against his value, both real and projected: the man Guillaume would have become, the labor he would have performed, the wife he would have married, the children he would have had, the litter of cats he would have raised. She imagines each limb of the boy being measured, each hand and foot weighed, his naked body, now washed and clean, searched for disfigurements or scars. She sees, with her mind’s eye, numbers being scratched across a vellum scroll, then added, several calculations checked and cross-checked. The result may be something like this: for each ankle, two chickens; each thigh, a pig; for his arms, which when grown would have worked his family’s land, an ox; for his head and his heart, a horse of good age and a shiny new plow.
But how is love weighed? She has heard Guillaume was born late to his parents and there is a difference of seven years between his elder sister and the son they wished for. From her pocket, she pulls out the smooth rock and runs her thumb along the edge. It is so dark she cannot see her own hand, but the rock is there. She feels it, how light it is in her palm. What has happened makes her sad. Not for the first time today, she is in danger of crying, when she thinks how what is warm and good isn’t enough to save a boy’s life—not a father’s protection or a mother’s tenderness—but beatings, a body hardened to pain, the ease with which one rolls a stick, like a club, into one’s hand and is willing to hurt another, might. Love, possibly, isn’t enough either, not in this world where nearly all the stories she hears from her uncle are about wars both past and present. Who has lost. Who has won. Who is maimed and how many are dead. She makes a promise, whispers it into the dark, imprinting it in the night sky as the boy’s face is imprinted in her memory. The promise is this: If she, Joan, has a choice, then she will choose to be a thrower of rocks. She will live.