Chapter 5 #2
“I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve had this talk,” his father grunted. “It takes a lot more wits than I have to become a physician. I’m glad that you did.”
“But I’m a grown man, and look at me now, I—I’ve needed so much from you, still.”
“Oste. Look at me.”
Monsieur Lézin took the sides of his son’s face and turned it to meet his.
He stroked one index finger over the side of his cheek, which then crept up towards his earring, where he cupped it with his palm; Oste had grown familiar with how many times his father had chastised him to take those off for his and his mother’s sake, and how many times he hadn’t listened.
His father had told him he was sorry about that, eventually. And that he was sorry about a lot of things, too.
“Let me make a couple things clear. You wanted to prevent a massacre. That wretch Flassans and his men shot you off a horse for it. That’s not your fault. I wish it hadn't been you, but it wasn’t your fault.”
His son set his jaw.
“And second, I’m selfish, and also your father.
You screamed your head off as a babe and drove me and your mother crazy, but you know what we do at our age?
We look at each other and say, ‘damn, I wish I had a little more time’.
She’ll kill me for admitting it, but we love it when we can help you.
We do. We sit around on our hands and wait for you or the girls to need us for something. ”
“Boudiou, Papa…”
“I’ve not always done right by you, Oste. But you have me. You do. I don’t always understand you, and I won’t, but I’m here.”
Oste buried his head into his father’s shoulder. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. Lord knows I don’t say much, myself.”
And so the two lingered there, at the table with a bullet sitting on its surface.
Oste let himself be rocked in an ageless embrace from a father he’d run from as much as he’d run into the arms of.
That was their way. He assumed it would be until their bodies were dust. Different, and the same.
Distant, and together. A son who wanted to be a better son.
A father who wanted to be a better father. Neither of them knew what that meant.
Martin ran a finger down Oste’s right arm. “Is it still giving you trouble?”
He forced a smile. “Now and again.”
“And everything else?”
“I don’t know, Papa. It’s slow. My colleagues tell me it will be.”
“You loved sparring.” The wolfcatcher brightened. “Maybe that’ll help you get some strength back?”
“And embarrass myself?” Oste snorted. “No. I have a complex.”
“I thought you had a few of those. Which one?”
“Ha, ha. The one where if I’m not perfect I feel that I ought to toss myself off the city walls.”
“Oh. That one.”
“Did I get that one from you or Mama?”
“Definitely Tildy. I can tolerate average.”
Oste exhaled and withdrew from his father. He shifted in his chair to adjust his weight and let some blood flow back into his legs. “My work. This… case. It’s important to me. I’m glad you helped.”
“Just promise you’ll be careful, no matter what it is you’re doing,” his father pleaded quietly.
“I promise. It was a young girl. Her name was Marie. Dorotèa was there for—well, it doesn’t matter. It infuriates me, makes me think about my sisters.”
“I wasn’t going to ask, but she’s just helping? With work, and at home?”
Oste looked off to the side. He presumed he’d either be questioned about it or inevitably bring her up himself.
It seemed like destiny ever since his father opened the door and saw his face.
In his twenty-nine years, Oste had scarcely given his parents a sliver of a hint of any connections beyond his longtime friends and confraternity.
And anyone past a friendship had never broken Oste’s barrier of shame.
He’d told his parents he had little interest in marriage, and it had been true enough.
What other fate awaited him? His heart and mind leapt between amusement at his tastes and horror at their implications.
Oste was certain that no good thing awaited him beyond the short highs of feeling something.
How could there be, when he knew what the world made of men like him?
Oste didn’t consider himself anything other than unnatural.
To lie with other men was not only scandal, but a crime, and he’d done it, and enjoyed it.
He couldn’t make sense of why both sexes intrigued him; for all his time studying people and bodies, the texts only suggested this as sin of some kind.
Every time he found himself picky with women, he found it ludicrous, another insult; if he’d already erred, he had no business being selective.
There was no room for him to feel anything less than stymied by the idea of taking a wife when he’d done what he’d done and felt as he felt.
And Oste’s father—his dear, imperfect father—had told him perhaps the worst thing of all when he’d discovered this. He’d told Oste that, though he didn’t understand, what was important to him was that he was healthy and happy.
Happy. Oste had no idea how someone like him could land on such a fate. It would have been easier to have been told he was no man and no son of his, or told to ignore that part of him and go fetch a wife. At least that was a clear path.
Happy? Boudiou, what did that even mean?
“That’s all she is,” said Oste. “The confraternity insisted.”
All indeed. But he loved her, once, in his buck-toothed boyhood way.
Most of all when she cupped fireflies in her hands on a summer night and said they burned as brightly as he.
There was room enough for adoring her in the lavender fields they chased each other down before all his related sentiments were replaced by dread.
“I thought you were in charge.”
He returned a lopsided grin and even more lopsided shrug. “I should’ve assumed they’d not listen to me on everything when they opted to follow a voyageur. The scandal.”
“Mmh. Only half, though.”
“So, you admit it, instead of ‘Provencal’.”
“Oh, please.” His father cuffed Oste’s ear. “Can’t a woman be both?”
“Now that’s progressive. I’ll waive your membership into Saint-Mitre for that, but I think the Huguenots would like to have you as well.”
“Oste, I love you, but I’d take the cave bear over a social club or religious movement.”
“Point taken.”