Teach the Children to Pray by Rebecca Harwick

Author:Rebecca Harwick [Harwick, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kastanien Press
Published: 2024-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

18

Ordinary Time

1630-1631

In the quiet hours, after the sun has set, when lovers and children are in bed, I still catch myself wandering time-worn roads back to that year. I wish I’d written it all down back then, every smile and every God-addled word of nonsense that tumbled out of his beautiful mouth. It would be my private missal—a year of marriage recorded in feasts, in fasts, in the reliable march of ordinary time. Instead, I must rely on memory.

We married in secrecy in the middle of the somber, meatless Lenten season. Fitting, I think—we’d never done things the right way around. A few days after our wedding, we rejoined the Tross. Isidoro wrote to his order, asking to be released from his vows, but their reply was slow in reaching us, so he carried on, fulfilling his duties as a priest by day and his duties as a husband by night, with only the two of us and a pair of Spanish mercenaries knowing the whole truth of it.

Can a person be a home? No more, I think, than he can be a tree or a spring. No more than love can be a forest. What’s the use of all these metaphors, except to try to build a bridge across the chasm of the inexpressible? These two things are nothing alike, and yet in one way, held up in a certain light, it is possible to see the one reflected in the other. In the end, a man is not a tree, and he is not a spring, and love is only ever love and nothing else. To say otherwise is to lop off parts of it, as in some gory fairy tale, to make it fit a certain shape.

We made a home together, in the quiet of my tent, calling each other “husband” and “wife” when no one else could hear.

Easter 1630 fell at the end of March, and still there was no war in Germany. Yet anyone could see that the peace of the previous year was fraying. The Emperor’s Restitution outraged the Protestant princes, and even his general, Wallenstein, enforced it only grudgingly. The noises of war from the Swedish king were growing louder. In darkness we waited, like the dead lying in their tombs—but what sort of world would we be resurrected in? One of peace or one of war?

That was a season of confessions and baptisms, of marriages and confirmations, and I hardly saw Isidoro during that time.

“I’m afraid I’ve been a neglectful husband,” he said one night as he laid his head next to mine for the first time in two weeks.

I touched my thumb to his mouth. “Serves me right for marrying a priest.”

His lips parted in a smile, but his eyelids were already drooping, and soon he was sound asleep.

A month later, he surprised me in my surgery at midday, wearing a lusty smile. He pulled me toward the tent. I laughed, feigning protest. Yet no sooner had I stripped the cassock from his body than I saw his chest was pocked with red bites.

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