From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
Joan of Arc’s execution took place on the morning of May 31st, 1431. She was, most historians agree, probably nineteen years old. She had been sold by the Duke of Burgundy and judged guilty by a room full of terrified theologians for, long story short, dressing as a man.
As English mercenaries watched over her day and night, leering and suggestive and brazen in their threats of assaulting and raping her during her imprisonment, she dressed as a man to dispel their advances. And was thusly judged a witch for it. She was brilliant and frequently acidic during Cauchon’s interrogations, and always adamant in her faithfulness, even as he tried incessantly to verbally trip her up. I think Cauchon was afraid of her.
Joan of Arc, judged guilty of heresy and witchcraft. For dressing as a man to fend off advances from captors who should never have served as her guards in the first place. Had it been a proper trial she would have been placed in an ecclesiastical prison, had nuns as her guards. But not with Cauchon and the English involved, no way. There was a lot at stake here.
The execution took place at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, not far at all from the marketplace where I had chased the tails of my father’s coat those many years ago. So much of my life took place within the walls of that city, and so little of it worth anything.
The fug of horse shit and rotten vegetables still hung in the air amid the same clamor of voices. The air that particular morning was heavy with the stink of thousands of unwashed bodies, all of us packed together, vying for space.
Lines of English men-at-arms leered at the crowd, occasionally calling them names and brandishing swords if they got too close. Thousands of people. I heard a soldier tell Cauchon, who was gathered beyond the pyre with a clutch of his assessors, to hasten it up, lest his men grow impatient and do the deed themselves.
I have been participant to executions where the crowd had a kind of inexplicable joviality, as if it were a celebration. Blankets laid out, lunches unpacked. Children had played games while the gallows stood within arm’s reach. But there was none of that today.
Joan was brought forth eventually and led the half dozen steps up the scaffold. Bracketing her was a pair of men I knew from their visits of mercy to the constabulary: the Fathers Isambart de la Pierre and Martin Ladvenu. Pious men. Good men, as far as those of their kind went. Joan was a diminutive girl no taller than Lavendu’s shoulder. Her hair had been shorn, badly. She was dungeon-pale and murmured prayers to herself, her eyes closed tight.
“Witch!” someone in the crowd screamed in a voice shrill as scree loosing itself along a cliff side. No one took up the call. I saw more than a few English gloves tighten on the hafts of swords.
Lavendu took quiet counsel with Joan as she was lashed to the pillar and Cauchon, sweating in his cassock, ordered his men to lay the mounds of tinder beneath the scaffold on which she stood. Bitterly dry wood, stove-lengths of it, bleached white by the sun somewhere.
After some minutes of this, and disagreements among the men as to the best manner in which to stack the wood, Cauchon walked onto the scaffold and held a scroll before him. His judgment began with the words, “In the Name of the Lord: Amen,” and his voice was high and reedy, wind whistling through the cracks in a wall.
I loathed him. He was little more than a bully hiding behind the impenetrable armor of Godliness, and it was beyond true that I had had my fill of bullies by then. Of course, I was one too, a monstrous one. A murderous one. It was our similarity, I realized, that drove me to hate him.
Cauchon pronounced Joan a relapsed heretic and it was read that we as a people would act as witness; we would see her cast off from the Church and she would be put to death. There was nothing beyond the sound of Cauchon’s pitched voice and the occasional burst of wind soughing along the city walls. Crows cawed their dumb flap-winged amusements from the garrets.
Cauchon stepped down and Joan’s lashings were adjusted again. Then the crowd grew still when she cast her gaze upon us and implored us all to pray for her and begged our pardon. She pardoned us for any harm we had done her. Her voice was high but without tremor and she asked Lavendu for a cross that she might pray with. Like I said, she was a pale girl, and her eyes were dusted with fatigue but also fiercely bright.
And I stood amazed when I saw an English soldier with a cross hanging loose in his tunic take it and, without a second glance, hand it to Father Lavendu. The father held it dumbly in his hand and looked back at the man, and I thought, maybe.
But then Lavendu stepped up the scaffold and placed it in the folds of Joan’s tunic so that she could look down at it, and I felt then the terrible velocity with which we were moving, this end that we were all moving toward. Some great and untenable act from which we would not be able to come back.
And I understood then, looking out at those faces, how sometimes people feel a strident desire to finish a thing, even if it is the wrong thing. Even if it’s terrible.
Another Englishman turned to Cauchon and cried, “What, priest, you’ll keep us here until suppertime?” A scattering of laughter among them. An English captain turned to me with teeth like dark beads in his mouth and said, grinning, “That’s right. Do it soon, harrier, or we will.”
Joan prayed, gazing down at that ragged, twine-lashed cross leaning crooked in the folds of her clothing. The sky was flat and white above us all and I felt the nearness of God for the first time in my life.
No, that’s wrong. Not the nearness of God.
What I felt was Joan’s perfect, impervious belief in God.
Joan’s belief.
I looked at her up there on the scaffold, and her faith was like a living thing nearly coruscating around her. In all my days of leading men toward death, cajoling them toward it, hurtling them, all of my days in which a mere glance from me was enough to set them rambling and begging for their lives, I had never seen anyone approach death like this. And I looked around and there were those in the crowd now openly weeping, studied men and layman alike with eyes streaming tears under that frank iron sky. People of both countries, of supposedly different Gods, armed with different intentions. Openly weeping.
Cauchon was in meeting now with the Englishmen and his judges and there was another glimmer of hope then, of possibility, but then Cauchon’s eyes found mine across the throng of people and I saw nothing there but a thirst to slake, a fear to quell, and he sent a runner to me who told me in a husky voice rife with bitterness, “The Bishop orders the pyre lit.”
And I have sometimes permitted myself the luxury of wondering what would have happened had I not? Had I strode up the scaffolding and loosened Joan’s bonds with the halberd in my belt? Would we have risen up against the English with their axes and swords? Eight hundred Englishmen against two thousand unarmed villagers, farmers?
Would that slaughter have been any more just or righteous or Godly than what I did instead?
I walked to where the torch was held for me, and Cauchon then would not turn his eyes my way. I held the torch, its sputtering flame, its dripping sparks and little globs of tumbling fire, and the English captain laughed again.
Joan’s faith was like a radiance around her, but me? I was only myself. I was the grand summation of the things I had done.
“Hold a cross in your hand that I might see it,” Joan pleaded, and Lavendu, weeping, pushed past me and placed himself in the crowd where she could see him, another cross in his hand now. She looked at the sky for a moment. The torch I held narrowed and flared against a flurry of wind.
She looked down at me then. The floor of the scaffold stood level with my chest, the wood piled beneath it. The look in her eyes was terrible, a thing beyond my understanding.
It was clear she pitied me.
“God be with you,” she said kindly.
“And with you,” I said, and turned my face away as I lowered the torch to the tinder.
The flames leapt, roared, wood blackening and soon glowing white and pink at their cores in hardly a minute, the smoke and heat rising in a shimmering funnel. The scaffolding lit then. The first flames licked her. Joan leaned her head against the pillar and cried Jesus’s name. Her form wavered in the haze. The heat pulled my skin tight.
The flames ate her form, swallowed her. She cried Jesus’s name again.
The world was a roaring cavalcade of fire and the faces around me, warped and shimmered, dark faces, and I looked to the sky for respite and this—oh!—this is what I saw near the end: I saw a white curl of smoke leave the flames and rise in the sky and take on the shape of a dove. It flew into the sky, wings beating, and vanished.
It was her soul, I knew. Joan’s soul. Leaving her body, ascending to the heavens.
I dropped to my knees right there.
I had damned myself.
• • •
Truth be told, I had centuries of terrible violence to draw from. Even after my life as Geoffroy, there had been any number of horrors I had seen and taken part in. A willful participant.
All that’s to say the fight that unfolded before us in the dining room of the Tip-Top was a little anticlimactic.
“Well, do it if you’re gonna do it, boy,” one of the counter men said to Casper, who stood there with his bat aloft.
Another sighed and said, “Go ahead and get your string up, son. My God.”
“Couple of limp dicks,” muttered a third, and turned back to his coffee cup. It was this that seemed to inspire both of the combatants toward some kind of action. The skinny one, Dunk, crab-walked across the floor, and Casper finally swung. I couldn’t help but wince when the bat connected to the floor with a hollow thwock that you could see run all the way up his arms. Vale stood looking confused and very drunk in front of the lounge door.
Casper said, “You owe me an EMF meter, Dunk. Among other things.”
“You’re living a lie, man,” Dunk cried out, still on his ass, arms raised in front of him.
“What about Specter Detectives? Huh?”
“No one’s gonna watch your stupid show, idiot! Rectum Detectives is more like it.”
“Why would you say that?” Casper lunged again, and now Dunk was scuttling around the table on his hands and knees. Casper lurched behind him, his hands choked up around the bat. We could all see he didn’t have it in him.
“This is one sad deal,” one of the men said, disgusted. He turned back to his plate.
“I want my money,” Casper said. “My money or my gear. You pick.”
“Jesus wept,” the last counterman said before wheeling around on his stool.
Then Gary, our mechanic, walked past me and threaded his way though the tables. He laid his hand on the end of the bat. Casper turned and looked at him. What little fight there was deflated out of him like a balloon. Almost lovingly, Gary put him in a headlock.
“Casper, Duncan sold your meter for a bag of crank days ago. Give it a break. Getting money from him is like getting Thousand Island from a basset hound’s tits, man. You can squeeze all you want, but it ain’t happening.”
From beneath the table, Dunk said, “Screw you, Gary.”
Gary said, “You better stay down there you’re gonna talk that way to me, you dickless wonder.”
Gary pushed Casper over my way. He held the bat in his other hand. “Got a big heart, this one, but a little short on guts. Anyway I got your van all prepped and jacked up, but it’s pushing nine o’clock and my old lady’s gonna shit a brick if I don’t get home soon. I’m gonna have to get the pump done in the morning.” Conversational, as if stopping an assault was just another thing that was done in the Tip-Top.
Vale had heard Gary from across the room and threw up his hands in disgust. He said, “Jesus Christ,” and without another word pushed his way back into the lounge. Dunk stood up and made a show of dusting off his clothes, and then slunk into the nearest booth and sat down.
Gary hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Motel next door’s always got vacancies. I’ll see you over at the shop at seven o’clock sharp. Won’t take long to put that water pump in. I just gotta get home; the wife gets pissed otherwise.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No biggie.”
“Let me go, Gary,” Casper said, his voice muffled.
“Shut up,” Gary said, his bicep rising like a pool ball as he gave Casper a good shake. “You’re gonna go over and apologize to Janelle for making a scene. You ought to know better.”
Casper said, “I ain’t going over there. Not a chance. Dunk’s right there.”
Gary shook his head and gave me a What are you going to do? kind of look. “Dunk doesn’t care, Casper. He doesn’t have your ghost meter thing but he doesn’t have any shame, either.” Gary spun around with Casper’s head still buried in his armpit. “Dunk,” Gary said, “you care if Casper heads over there?”
“Hell, I don’t care,” Dunk said glumly, spinning a coffee cup around.
Gary let him go. “See that?”
Casper ran his hands over his hair and spent quite a while putting his baseball cap on just right. Then he went over and quietly apologized to Janelle the waitress. He got a fair amount of ribbing from the men at the counter.
Janelle brought my pie.
Just a normal night at the Tip-Top.