From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
After Joan came the winding down of my life.
While I still performed executions, still pulled corpses from the prisons and dispatched diseased animals at surrounding farms, I hired no apprentice to take my place. Word got around regarding my behavior at Rouen and in the tavern following. If it was possible, I became even more of a pariah.
I honestly, truly believed I was damned, heedless of what I did with my remaining days.
This alone made me a fearsome man for the first time in my life.
What had been cruelty measured with theater before now became staunch heartlessness. I lacked compunction. Joan’s death—and seeing her soul take flight through the smoke—had carved that from me. There would be no pardon from God.
In Rouen, in the hallways and stinking chambers beneath the constabulary, I would speak at length of my own damnation to the prisoners, my fear of it, my assuredness, as I performed any number of atrocities upon them. I’ve wondered since if this is where the seedling of my need to confess was planted. Christ, I hope not.
It horrified them, of course—my confession stacked upon what I did to their bodies, their minds.
I became wraithlike in my terror, my disregard.
Those last five years of my life, word spread throughout France: Fear the executioner, the old man Geoffroy Thérage, who believed himself the murderer of a saint. He’s crazy, and there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—he won’t do to a man.
I sought out Father Lavendu once, but he had moved to another parish farther south, hoping assumedly to cast the pall of Joan’s killing from his eyes. The English stayed on and the war continued with victories for each swaying like the tide, the only constants being the ceaseless and unnecessary death of men and the dying of the crops. I, for my part, crossed the road whenever a holy man came near. I wanted no truck with it: Lavendu was the only religious man I’d have spoken to.
I dreamt of Joan, Cauchon, and damnation, all in equal measure.
My death came in 1436. Esme had died the year before of pneumonia, and as such, the home had fallen into great misuse. I paid a priest an astonishing sum to deliver last rites over her body. The desire to mourn was inside me, the idea of it, some small flower of grief that wanted to bloom, but it would not take root. I dug a grave and buried her next to our mother.
I slept solitary on a bed of damp straw and, alone now, felt the rats skitter over my legs in the night. Sections of the roof fell in. I spent my nights at home wrapped in rags, staring into the hissing hearth, my unwashed hands frequently darkened in the gore of recalcitrant men. I hardly ate. I looked for sigils of my future in the wavering coals.
My death, when it arrived, came from my horse. Of all things! Laughable. This was something I was to learn about death—how many ways besides war there are in which to die, the majority of them graceless and terrible, and so many of them full of a kind of dark mirth.
The mules, of course, had decades ago been butchered, and I had no use for a wagon anymore, as I needed little more than a simple blade and a gaze to extract confession or perform executions.
I had purchased a mare, old when I bought her; she had seemed a steady and diffident animal. I did not mistreat or abuse her: I could take the fingers off a man as if sawing through a rind of dry bread and I would feel nothing save my own impending doom, but the idea of ever hurting an animal simply did not cross my mind. The mare slept tethered in the house, her own sets of rags bundled over her for warmth.
Even now I feel I had done nothing to elicit her resentment or mistrust.
And yet the kick came one windswept rainy morning as I leaned behind her, reaching for that very coat my father had worn before me. I had cast it to the floor the night before, a stinking and blood-soaked thing. I reached for it, and the kick came from an animal who had never shown me any inkling of ill will, an animal so old I hardly thought her capable of kicking at all.
It’s enough to make you wonder, isn’t it?
• • •
We were nearly at the California border. The van was infused with Vale’s rancid sweat and deep sense of melancholy. I was trying to write in one of my journals, the words wavering, while quelling a bout of nausea. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of cars, even as a passenger.
The wind roared through Vale’s open window. Outside were vistas of grape fields and mountains dim and snow-shot in the distance, wineries and their tasting rooms like gaudy toys flung on the hills—but next to the highway itself were the boxy outlets, the strip malls, the parking lots and gas stations.
I had just put my journal in my duffel bag when someone in the back of the van said, “Hey, you guys are still going to LA, right?”
Vale screamed and swerved to the left, very nearly colliding with a rust-battered Camaro that appeared to be leaking pot smoke from its windows. The Camaro swerved toward the shoulder, fishtailed and swerved back toward us. A hand with its middle finger extended rose from the window’s smoky depths. Well, I thought, this is how I’m going. Highway collision. Damn. But the Camaro smoothed out and drove ahead of us. It was a close thing.
“Motherfucker!” Vale bellowed into the rear view mirror, then lashed his head over his shoulder, trying to look through the fortress of stacked boxes in the back.
And that’s when Casper’s head and shoulders rose up; he’d built himself a little fort back there, hidden himself amid the boxes and blankets. Vale had his hangover, but what was my excuse? How in God’s name had I missed that?
“Better pull over,” I said.