Chapter 4 Aleys
Aleys
Damme
As the days grow long, Aleys finds she understands the priests better than they understand themselves.
She cringes as their village pastor stumbles through the readings.
The Latin syllables wash over the rest of the congregation like a cleansing burble of river water over a bed of stones, but not Aleys.
She wants to correct the priest—he stresses all the wrong words—but she can’t explain how she knows, so she bites her tongue. Finn is her secret.
But then their priest takes ill, and a substitute, one of the Franciscans, is sent from Brugge.
Everyone is impressed by the wandering friars who strive to live like Christ’s apostles.
Everyone watches to see if they can succeed with so little; there are those who take bets whether they’ll survive another year.
The friars own nothing but the robes on their backs and the bowls in their hands.
They’re the begging preachers that Papa admires.
No monastery lands. No vineyards. They collect no rents and no taxes, not like the bishop’s priests, who grow fat on fees for baptisms and burials, whose trade in indulgences is so brisk that rich patrons purchase forgiveness before they even commit their sins.
Claus and Henryk bought discounted pardons from a priest in the next town, stocking up for a life of depravity.
“Miserere mei,” Henryk intones piously, rehearsing.
No, the friars are different. They’re like the common people. That’s why she loves them. Why everyone loves them.
So the parishioners of Damme welcome this visiting friar, who they say leads his order in Brugge.
He’s a middle-aged man, rather meek seeming for the head of an order, the fringe of his tonsure starting to gray.
He gathers himself as he surveys the congregation.
He takes a deep breath and opens the day’s scripture and begins to read the Latin verse.
Aleys looks up. The man reads like he knows the language.
Really knows the language. He probably assumes no one else does.
Nevertheless, he starts to redden. A flush creeps over his Adam’s apple.
He intones, “Ecce tu pulchra es amica mea” and buries his head in the book to hide the rest of the line.
Aleys stares at him. What did he just say?
Behold, you are beautiful, O my love. Your eyes are those of a dove.
He looks up, and their eyes meet. The friar runs his hand over his bald pate, which glows bright with perspiration, but he doesn’t stop.
He’s actually reading it; he’s not making it up.
It’s like a play about a pair of lovers: Behold, you are handsome, O my beloved, and graceful.
Our bed is flourishing. In the church! Who is this beloved?
The friar is sweating, the congregants are nodding off, and Aleys can’t wait to get her hands on the text. She runs from the church to find Finn.
“Oh!” says Finn. The tips of the wheat behind him catch the last of the sunlight. “The Canticum Canticorum.”
“The Song of Songs?”
“Mmm.” He scratches his nose. “I’m not sure we should . . .”
“It’s a proper psalm, isn’t it?”
“No, it is. It is. It’s part of the Old Book.
The Canticle is the most beautiful, the most poetic psalm.
” He looks a bit misty eyed. He’s seen it already, she thinks.
He can get a copy. She wants a copy. She needs one.
Aleys knows, somehow, that it has answers to questions she doesn’t even know yet to ask.
“We should read it.” She leans in. “For the vocabulary.”
When he returns the next day, Finn places the parchment in her hands.
The words are astonishing, seductive. Sicut vitta coccinea, labia tua.
Your lips are a scarlet ribbon. And your cheeks are like pomegranate, except for what is hidden within.
There is a pomegranate in the pages of her psalter, the fruit broken open and garnet seeds spilling down the page, but she’d never thought of it like this.
The words make her yearn, make her grow warm, make her push herself against her pillow, which is full of devils.
Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis. Prop me up with flowers.
Close me in with apples. For I languish through love.
She imagines herself on a bed of roses, or shut within a bower of apples, the scent like wine.
She yearns to languish with love. Of God, of course.
About her, the colors brighten. The sparrows sing like nightingales; the nightingales sing like choirs.
Leaves shiver on the trees as they’ve never shivered before.
Something is happening. Aleys feels she has woken up.
She hopes the angel will return. Just so long as he doesn’t announce she’s pregnant.
Finn feels it, too. He lies beside her in their snug hollow in the field, the soil warming their backs, their hands pressed into the earth.
“Do you sense it?” he asks. “The world moving beneath us?” She turns her head and watches an ant climb a stalk, reach the seedhead, put out its feelers.
“I do,” she says. She senses other things, too.
Finn’s shoulders broadening, the hair on his forearms turning the color of brass coins.
She can smell him now, in their nest, a scent of earth and leather.
She thinks he’s unaware of it. She wonders if she, too, has a scent.
Summer deepens to fall. Aleys turns sixteen.
She wants to cry when their nest is mown down, but they move to the orchard.
Finn places rough-sawn planks between the branches of an apple tree to form a hidden bench among the leaves.
Our couch, he calls it, and she knows what he means.
Right there, in the Canticle: Our couch is green; the beams of our house are cedars, and its rafters are firs.
Some passages of the Canticle elude her.
She asks Finn what they can mean: I rose up in order to open to my beloved.
My hands dripped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of the finest myrrh.
Finn withdraws quickly, reddening. “Maybe you should ask your priest.” Aleys can hardly look at him, is embarrassed by his blush.
“I have to go,” he says abruptly, jumping from their platform and landing awkwardly, squashing fruit beneath his knee.
He takes a few paces, wipes apple pulp from his pants, then turns.
“See you tomorrow?” Aleys stays in their tree a while, stroking the backs of her fingers over her cheeks to cool them.
The next day, Aleys arrives in the orchard as shadows from the trunks glide into each other like dark paths.
Like invitations. Aleys jumps from one to the next until she gets to their tree.
More apples have fallen, and bees buzz around the bruised fruit, the smell sweet as brandy.
She pauses, looks around to double check no one’s passing on the road, and pulls herself into the tree.
Aleys leans back against the trunk and lets her legs dangle, knocking at the apples with her toes.
Finn appears suddenly, swinging his leg up to the platform.
“Where were you?” He’s not usually late.
“Oh just”—he hesitates—“just at the monastery.” He scratches behind his ear. “Aleys, I’ve been thinking—”
“Me too,” she says, “about the verse, what it means.” She doesn’t elaborate.
It feels dangerous, like they’re teetering on a knife blade between sacred and sinful.
One false step and they’ll plummet—or, possibly, fly.
But she can’t say that. She can’t say that she’s begun to reconsider her position on marriage.
That her fear of bearing children might have an exception, if they were Finn’s.
He doesn’t know that he was her third and final wish.
So instead she asks, “Did you bring more?”
Finn pauses, then pulls the parchment from his bag, tender with the page like it’s a newborn.
The sun casts freckles of light on his face.
He’s careful not to touch her hand as he passes it to her, as if he, too, feels the live sliver of space between them.
Aleys looks down to read and a lock of hair falls from her braid.
She shoves it back in and hopes he doesn’t notice how awkward she is.
She reads aloud: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.” She looks up at the ripe fruit hanging around them.
“An apple tree? Truly?” She gives a little giggle, but Finn doesn’t respond.
He’s lost in thought, half listening. She remembers the time they couldn’t stop laughing, when she showed Finn that the raindrops suspended from the tips of grasses each held a tiny world.
How he’d touched his tongue to a drop and swallowed it.
“I am the devourer of worlds,” he said, and they rolled around their nest, licking up globes.
That was a while ago. They’re older now.
Aleys bends her head to the page. This time, she skims the Latin first. She almost can’t say the words. They turn her liquid inside. When she speaks, her voice is hoarse. “His fruit is sweet to my taste.” She stops. She can’t look up or she’ll lose her balance. Does he feel it, too?
The leaves stir. She thinks, God has written this for us, God has made this orchard, has set us in this tree, has placed these words of his passion on our lips. Surely, he means us to fly.
Finn reaches up to twist an apple from the branch and holds it out to her. “Sweet like this?” he asks.
Aleys meets his eyes and shakes her head. “No. Like this.” She leans in, parting her lips, thinking of pomegranate. She’s about to taste the ruby fruit.
“Aleys, I can’t.” He can. The pulse in his throat, his heartbeat, says he can. He’s there, right there.
She lets her lips graze his. “Can’t bear the sweetness?”