Chapter 24 Aleys
Aleys
They brought him to the hospital in the night, a boy with a wound to his head, leaking pus. Fever like a hot iron. The senior beguine tsks her disapproval. “If they’d come in sooner, we’d have bled him. It’s too late now.”
Aleys bends over the boy, sees his downy fuzz of new moustache, barely visible against his skin, which is an indeterminate gray, blending into the shadows.
Though it is morning, the light barely reaches the back of the ward.
The boy’s wound has seeped into the bedsheet so that a yellow crescent blooms beneath him, edged with brown, like a halo.
The smell is putrid, a mix of sick and stool, and Aleys knows from this that the boy will die today.
She puts her ear to his mouth. His breath is barely audible.
His open eyes fix on the ceiling, as if the gateway to purgatory opens above them. He is half in the next world.
“Not a thing we can do for this one but pray. Sister Aleys, stay with him. I’ll get the priest.”
Aleys hitches her dress to kneel beside the boy.
She can feel the fever rise from him as she leans her elbows on the edge of his cot.
His limbs are already stiffening, fingers rigid on the blanket like he’s seeking his maker in a blind man’s bluff.
He doesn’t know she’s there. He’s already far away, alone in his passage.
She thinks of running after him, of grabbing his elbow and saying, turn around, you’re too young to go, turn back, let’s play.
Come chase me back to life. But he is far down a corridor she can’t enter.
She presses her ear to his chest and recoils, because his body is light and dry as a husk.
He still breathes, but barely. There’s not much time.
She doesn’t know what to do. She thinks of Sophia.
Of Ida. They’d appeal to the saints to illuminate his path. They’d call on Mary.
Aleys bows her head upon folded hands and begins the Ave Maria.
The words are starched and stiff in her throat.
She feels like a fraud. She has no gift.
Who is she to summon a saint? “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.” She looks up.
The boy shows no response to her voice. He is inert as the lead in the windows.
Can he even hear her? She screws her eyes shut and finishes.
“Now and at the hour of our death.” It’s not enough.
She knows it’s not enough. What else does she have?
“Ave Maria . . .” Aleys utters the syllables over and over, again and again, until repetition renders them supple and the prayer grows tender and round.
She sees the boy’s eyelids flicker. Aleys abandons herself to the graceful coiling words, and ribbons of prayer curl into the air.
Gradually, she feels the boy’s breath, the infinitesimal rise of his chest fall in tandem with the verse.
She slows to make it easier. Lonely boy, child of God, peace be upon you.
The smell of his death is ripe and sweet in her nose, too much, so she sips the air, tiny sips of death and prayer.
She does not stop when her vision grows murky, her hands begin to tingle.
She sinks further into the prayer and the edges begin to blur and she bleeds into the boy and he bleeds into the prayer, and the prayer beats with his heart and she breathes the prayer.
The spiraling words draw them together, deeper, into a space that is blue and gray, bound and unbound.
“Ave Maria . . .” Aleys feels a swimming in her head and grips the edge of the cot to steady herself.
She sways as she grinds her fingers into the coarse weave of the linen.
Abruptly, the cot disappears, the entire bed fallen away, and she opens her eyes and finds that all has changed.
The ward has receded like an echo into the blue-gray haze.
Around Aleys, around her knees, around the boy, who stands before her, a honeyed light drapes and pools, bathing them in warmth and grace.
A humming sound, of bees, fills her ears and her heart, as if they float in a midsummer meadow.
The smell of death has vanished, and a verdant scent, of fern and moss and soil, fills the humming, and the boy smiles.
She can see inside his chest, which holds neither organ nor bone but three sparrows, hovering, silver shining through trembling feathers.
They soar from his chest and she watches in wonder as they circle to a blue dome above.
When her eyes descend, the vision is gone, and she sees again the injured boy on the cot, only he has turned his head and is looking at her with eyes like a clear stream. She can see pebbles, brown and green and blue, through the water.
Rise, she says, though she does not know why, and he does.
He sits, and the bed linen comes with him, stuck to his wounds, so that he appears for a moment to be winged.
When the sheet falls away, it bears only a faded shadow of his wound.
Her fingers are ice cold, sparking like crystal flint.
She is suspended in confusion. The boy looks as surprised as she does.
A man moans from the next bay. “Touch me, Sister.” The voice startles her, breaks her reverie.
What did they see? And then the voices rise and merge, from around the bed, from around the ward.
“Heal me, Sister.” A whispering murmur spreads like contagion.
“Sister, Sister. Touch me, nurse me, bless me, Sister.” Aleys stands, but in the time it takes to cross to the next bed, the marvel in her hands is gone, and she can only collapse and weep.
Has Christ answered her? Is this her gift?
Outside, the storm gathers and lepers inch their way to the begijnhof gate.
News of the miracle settles upon the town like a snowfall in August. Flurries of whispers float from the hospital entrance.
“Did you hear?” Through alleys, the words eddy and swirl, and the people look up.
Zephyrs of wonder dust steeples and sills.
Priests gaze from their windows and raise their eyebrows at the swollen flakes and ask themselves, “Is it? Could it be?” Sailors in port feel the wind shift and cross themselves.
The rumors reach the marketplace and become a blizzard.
There’s a saint in the city. Beggars rejoice and barren women fill with hope.
News of the miracle drifts and piles. Chickens lay double yolks and gamblers triple stakes.
Blind men dream of blue. In the taverns, tankards are raised to Sister Aleys.
Bread and coins, salt and flowers, rabbits’ feet and squirrels’ tails pile up outside the begijnhof gate and the swan pond grows foul with offerings.
Only the children are unimpressed, for they see miracles everywhere.
They must have carried her back to the begijnhof.
When Aleys wakes, she’s in the infirmary.
Old Agnes is the only other one there, asleep, her clawed hands clutching the sheet.
Aleys tries to rise but cannot. Her head splits with questions as she struggles to recall what happened, as one does from a vanishing dream, grasping at fragments.
A meadow, and sparrows, and . . . a boy with limbs of light.
A beam of remembered ecstasy breaks through the film of pain.
She must find the boy. Aleys runs into the hallway in her nightshift, her shorn head bare and prickling.
A young beguine carrying a basin drops it with a clatter, and cold water spills over Aleys’s bare feet.
The girl bends to dry them with the hem of her dress, and Aleys pushes her away.
She doesn’t care about her feet. Sisters emerge from every door.
Seeing Aleys, some cross themselves, some bob a curtsy, one falls to her knees.
She sees herself in their faces. How she must look to them, disheveled, half naked.
They see a wild-eyed John the Baptist, a Moses stumbling down the mountain waving tablets of stone.
They think she is lit with revelation, that she has just risen from lying with God.
The senior beguines clutch each other. They’ve been waiting for this since they were children.
“Get up,” says Aleys to the girl on her knees. She isn’t a prophet.
The girl doesn’t rise.
“Where is he?” Aleys demands. “The patient, what happened?”
“Sister,” says the matron, “he is healed; it is marvelous.”
“No, I want to—I must talk to him.”
“But Sister,” says another, “he collected his bag and walked whole from the ward. It was a true miracle.”
She doesn’t know about that. “You didn’t stop him?”
No. They shake their heads. It didn’t occur to them. One adds hopefully, eyes wide, “We saved his linen?”
Aleys feels more alone than she has in her life.
There’s no one to corroborate, no one to help her remember the details.
None of them saw what she saw. She knows only that it was .
. . glorious. Like the moment the roof lifted from the beams and an angel whispered in her ear. A dream more real than reality.
But still, a dream?
Aleys retreats to the empty infirmary, sits on the edge of her bed, looks at her hands.
She bites into the pad of her thumb, gnaws at the flesh.
The boy lived, they say. She believes that much.
He wouldn’t be the first to rise from a deathbed.
Her teeth find a hangnail and rip it off, and she is glad of the sting.
A pink stripe, the color of coral, is laid bare beside her nail. It begins to well with dots of blood.
Aleys throws herself back across the cot, her head hanging over the edge, and covers her face with her elbow.
It was magnificent, she should be grateful.
But what was it? What is she left with? Her head pounds.
Her hands begin to throb. Her entire heartbeat is in her fingertips.
She has no idea what is happening. Maybe Friar Lukas will.
She is sure of only one thing: People are hungry for miracles.