Chapter 25 Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas hears the news from his brothers.
They are back from collecting alms and have gathered to observe Sext.
They enter in silence from the friary yard and assemble in the chapel, each one to his place.
For years, twenty of them have gathered here to observe the hours, eight times a day.
They know each other’s subtle signs. A cough, a sigh, that when Brother Baldric rubs his nose it means his devotion has drifted, the trouble brewing when Brother Albert scratches his neck.
Today, though, there is something in all of them.
As they chant the Kyrie, Lukas senses a restlessness in their limbs, and not just the young ones.
He sees eyes dart, one pair to the next, as they hold the notes.
Even Hervé is shifting from side to side like the floor is hot.
Something is up. They file out, their hands clasped before them as always, but once outside the doors, hands are flying everywhere.
They’re acting like they’re from Florence, not Flanders.
Lukas goes to his most trusted source. “Hervé, what is it?”
“You haven’t heard? Our Sister Aleys. She has healed someone!”
He pauses. “She works in a hospital.”
“The youth was close to death. Some say he’d already passed. He rose from his deathbed. There are witnesses.”
“Our Aleys? Hervé, you’re sure?”
“I’ve seen the linens. Clean as newly washed.” He shakes his head. “Lukas, when you inducted her, I had doubts. But this. This changes everything.” He looks around like he hardly dares to release his thought into the friary. “Don’t you see? God smiles upon us.”
Hervé, the most steady of friars, is looking at him with the wide eyes of a boy who has glimpsed the ocean for the first time. Lukas wants to reward him, wants to say, Yes, it is she. Yes, we have been blessed. He wants to gift the miracle to Hervé.
“I must go to her,” he says.
Hervé nods, then closes his eyes and tips his head back to the sky.
As Lukas walks through town, he tunes his ear to the chatter, taking the pulse of Brugge.
There’s an excited tone he’s not heard before, every voice is raised half a note.
People turn and stare as he passes. They stop what they’re doing, catch their neighbor’s eye, point their chins toward him.
He pauses on the corner of the Markt, and immediately a group assembles.
He hasn’t attracted a crowd like this since he brought the tambourine.
And it’s not just the widows. Before he opens his mouth, they are clamoring.
“Is it true, Father? Did she raise the dead?”
“Can she heal my son?” A woman grips the shoulders of a young boy, thrusting him forward.
The child lurches, and Lukas sees his twisted foot.
He thinks of Simon Peter healing the lame beggar, twisted limbs unbending true.
And Paul. Cloth that brushed Paul’s skin had healing powers.
Lukas thinks of the clamoring crowds in the dusty marketplace, the half-crazed people waving dishcloths like flags as they pushed to rub them against the apostle’s forearms, his ankles, the back of his neck.
He, Lukas, has preached such miracles. Here, on this very corner. So why doesn’t he believe one could happen now?
“Where is she?” someone shouts from his right. The crowd is growing.
“Can we see her?”
Lukas raises open palms to tamp them down. “Wait. Slow down. It’s all rumor.”
There’s a grumbling. The crowd shrinks back a step. He can’t lose them. Not this fast.
“Father, are you saying it’s not true?”
It would be better if he believed. “We just—we must verify.” He’s making this up. How do you verify a miracle? He has no idea. They would call the authorities, he supposes. From Rome.
“We’ll test her!” shouts a man waving his cap. “Bring her out!”
If Aleys walked through the square right now, the crowd would turn from him.
He pictures Aleys, not in the brown wool, but in her maroon cloak.
She’d appear in the far corner of the plaza and lift her head and his people would flock to her.
Though he’s been preaching to this crowd for decades, they’d forsake him in a moment for a miracle. Why can’t he be enough for them?
“Father, you believe.” The mother with the lame child looks at him closely. “Don’t you?”
Lukas takes a quick inbreath and feels something flare in his chest. Of course he believes.
He believes in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
His faith doesn’t require present-day miracles.
There is wonder enough without them. But Brugge doesn’t want the truth.
He feels tendrils of smoke rise up the back of his throat. Brugge wants cheap miracles.
From the back: “The friars are hiding their saint!” People raise fists. “Show her!”
Lukas feels the heat burst from his chest. “I am not her procurer!”
Even as he says it, he recognizes the half-truth.
He remembers the weight of her severed braid in his hand, his pride when he presented her like a sacrificial lamb to God in that church in Damme.
He was her eager agent then. He brought her to Christ’s door.
That was different, he tells himself. That was for God.
But he never expected God to grace her with miracles.
When Lukas reaches the begijnhof, he shouts to the first beguine he sees: “Get her. Bring her to the church.” The woman is alarmed. The friar has never raised his voice. She drops her linen into a basket and scurries off.
Inside the shadowy cool, he paces the flagstones.
This time, he won’t hide in the transept.
This time, he’ll face her, he’ll see what God sees in her, he’ll have certainty who she is.
Who he is. God will show him, Friar Lukas, the miracle.
After all, he brought her to the altar. God owes him that much.
The door opens and a band of yellow light precedes her, striking a path across the floor.
He sees her blurry shadow before he sees the girl herself, and he wonders if he’ll be able to tell saint from sinner.
He reminds himself how she relished the drama of running from home, back in the spring, not even six months ago.
This could all be the playacting of a child.
Aleys leaves the door open and crosses herself as she faces the altar. He shudders. She must not pretend at this. Her eyes are large in her pale face, the black of her pupils nearly eclipsing the blue. “Oh, Father,” she says.
He braces himself. “You’ve heard what they’re saying, in town?”
She is shaking her head. “Father, I need to talk to—”
“Deny it.” Even as he speaks the words, a voice within him whispers, Please don’t.
“I—”
“It’s not true.” Let it be true.
Aleys pulls her head back, suddenly wary, as though unsure she can trust him.
That’s not the question. Can he trust her?
His jaw tightens. He draws in a breath and holds it like a discipline.
His discernment, his judgment, his duty to protect his order from charlatans are all held in this breath. He’s aware that he’s trembling.
A sudden gust sweeps through the open door, as if invisible attendants have joined at her shoulders. He waits. She must speak. Everything hangs on her answer. Her cheeks color, and he doesn’t know how to read the blush. Boldness? Shame? Humility?
Did she, or did she not perform a miracle?
He can’t let himself be duped by a child.
But if it’s true—if it’s true—he hardly dares think of it.
Lukas feels boyish wonder rise. It threatens to fill him, and he must resist. He wants to believe.
His faith shivers, cautious and hungry, out on a limb.
She’s the apple at the tip of the branch.
He wants to lunge for the fruit. Please.
Everything, everything, depends on her answer.
He is waiting for God to speak to him through a woman.
But he remembers Adam, seduced by a woman. “I order you to deny it.” He lets the words hang like a challenge.
“Please, Father. Listen.” She hugs her hands to her stomach. “I don’t know what happened.”
“How can you—?”
“I was just praying. And the boy woke up.”
“No. It was more than that.” He hears himself. “There were witnesses.”
“It was a dream.”
“It was more than a dream.” What is he doing? He’s leading her.
“I don’t know.” She won’t meet his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“God spoke through you.”
“Father, I’ve prayed my whole life to meet God. But not for this. I don’t know if it was real.”
“God guided your hand.” He stretches for the fruit.
Her face contracts in confusion. “You just ordered me to deny it.”
“Tell me the truth!”
Frustration floods his hands, bursting open his fists.
Before he can help himself, he grabs her arms. He knows he shouldn’t touch her, he knows he’s out of control.
He starts shaking her. He can’t stop. Roiling waters surge within him, press through his chest, spill over his shoulders, course the length of his arms. He jerks her as if he would shake loose devils.
How dare she? “You think you’re Saint Clare?
That you can perform wonders?” He hears her teeth rattle. “You wicked child.”
She turns her head, tries to pull away. Wool slides through his hands until he is gripping the bare flesh of her wrists, so small he could snap them. “Why won’t you tell me the truth?”
He is breathing hard, and she is, too, gasping for breath.
He feels it then, a vibration. A buzzing coming from her clenched hands. He turns them over. Her knuckles are white, her small pink nails pressed hard into the heels of her palms.
“What are you hiding?”
“Nothing.”
“Open them.”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t make me force you.”
She flashes her hands open like a slap. Her palms are empty. And buzzing.
“What is this?”
“Since the hospital. Like I hold wasps.”
He touches his thumbs into the center of her palms and she winces. The humming grows stronger as he clamps her hands, a kernel of vibration, just where . . . He is picturing iron spikes driven through tender flesh.
Lightning judders up his arms. He drops her hands.
She raises her eyes to his. He sees not defiance, not pretense, but fear, clear and icy.
God help him, it is true. The impossible . . . has happened? Lukas feels himself on a precipice. He presses his fingers to his temples, hard, to form an axle for his spinning head. A miracle, here? In this mercantile city so far from any remotely holy land. Here!
He drops his hands, feels doubt drain from his fingertips.
He’s a pauper woken up to a banquet. He has yearned for this, worked for it, prayed for it.
But he never thought it could happen. Not in his lifetime.
Such blessings were for other eras, more deserving times.
Braver men. Through his amazement, Lukas feels the whisper of green belief. A miracle!
Aleys stands away from him, looking frightened.
This must be awe, not fear. Overnight, she has been transformed from a girl to a vessel of grace.
Wonder rushes through his mind, overturning carts, ripping thatch from rooftops.
He knew she was special. He must protect her.
Lukas runs his hands over his tonsured head.
The Lord has come to redeem this city. They have been blessed.
He remembers how she was lit like a lamp the night he gave her the brown wool and cut her hair. How she made him feel like Francis. Lukas feels his chest inflate with raw, clean air. He spreads his arms to heaven.
“Hallelujah!” His voice is resonant. He is uplifted, standing on the headlands of the rock of the church. Above him, the rafters sing. He thinks the roof may rise from the church. The sun will come out and flowers will bloom across the land.
His eyes descend to her face. The girl is crying softly into her hands.
“Child, what is it? This is a time to rejoice!”
“It’s gone.” She opens her wet palms.
He reaches out to take her wrists. They’re wooden as wheelbarrow handles.
“No, no, no,” he says. “It will come again. The grace will return.”
“How do you know?” She stares at him.
“Because you’re chosen.”
“Chosen?” Aleys shifts her blue-black eyes between his. “Do I have a choice?”
He could wring her with his exasperation. “Did Moses have a choice? Did Mary?”
“But I’m not sure it’s true.”
He takes a deep breath. Patience. The girl has just worked her first miracle, of course she’s confused.
That doesn’t give her leave to doubt. Or spread doubt.
This must be nipped in the bud, for the sake of the city, for the sake of his men.
For her own sake. He thinks of his brother.
The bishop can’t arrest a miracle worker. He doesn’t think.
Lukas feels his feet on the church floor. He roots himself in his own faith, back to the fundament. He remembers his knees in the cold soil of redemption. If ever there was a call to obedience, this is it.
“It’s God’s will,” he says. “I order you to believe.”