? SEVEN ?
“IN THE VILLAGE OF Malden Fenwick, in England,” I began, “not far from Buckshaw, my family’s ancestral home”—it was important, I knew, in order to draw them in, to supply credible details—“stands the ancient church of St. Rumwold. It is dedicated to the infant who, immediately after being born, is said to have cried out three times, ‘Christianus sum! Christianus sum! Christianus sum!’ (‘I am a Christian’), requested baptism, delivered a sermon, and died when he was three days old.”
A little murmur ran through the group as the girls looked uneasily at one another.
“In the north transept of the church is a chapel containing the tombs of a crusader and his various wives and children, and, to one side, built into the wall, is a most peculiar stone carving.
“This is the thirteenth-century effigy of a prosperous local miller named Johannes Hotwell, or Heatwell—the inscription is now much worn and not easily legible. There, on his back, he lies among the crusaders, his eyes open, his stone nose pointing to the overhead vaulting as if scanning the heavens for some signal from the painted stars. In his marble hands he clasps what seems at first to be a sack of flour, but which some insist must be, because of its ornamental nature, a hot-air balloon—although it can’t be, can it? since the hot-air balloon was not yet to be built by the Montgolfier brothers for another five hundred and thirty years.”
I paused to let this sink in. I was telling the tale in, as best as I could remember, the same words in which my sisters had told it to me.
I could tell that my listeners were taken in.
“Johannes, being of an overbearing mind, had, in spite of his father’s warning, married young. ‘Tend your mill,’ the old man had told him time and again, ‘and leave wyves to such as be smytten.’ ” All of this can be found in a little booklet sold near the font by the ladies of the Altar Guild.
“In spite of his father’s warning, Johannes had, as I say, taken to himself a wife: a shrewish spinster from the next village who knew a good thing when she saw it.
“It was not long afterwards that Johannes’s pimple appeared.
“At first, it was no more than a tiny red spot between his shoulder blades, as if he had been bitten by an absent-minded gnat. But as time passed, it grew and grew into a fat, pus-filled pimple: an angry red blemish on his back.
“Rather like a dormant volcano,” I added, “with a cap of snow, or pus, on its upper peaks.”
“Ugh!” one of the girls said.
“His wife begged him to let her burst the thing. ‘It may be thought a wytch’s sign,’ she told him.
“But he would have none of it.
“ ‘Leave it, wife,’ he had told her, ‘for though it be but a pymple, it be myn own,’ and she knew her place well enough to leave the thing alone.
“At least, while he was awake.
“But one night, she couldn’t sleep for worrying about what might become of them. Surely when her husband stripped off his jerkin to take the first ceremonial May Day dive into the millpond, someone would spot the pimple. They would be aghast!
“Word would get round. Gossip would see to it that the villagers would stop bringing him their custom. They would begin carting their grain to Bishop’s Lacey, instead. She and Johannes would come to ruin, while others prospered.
“All of this and more ran through her mind as she lay awake, the moonbeams streaming in through the casement window as if it were broad daylight, illuminating her sleeping husband’s back—and its lurking purple pimple.
“She reached over and took the thing between thumb and forefinger—”
Jaws dropped round the circle of girls.
“It was almost too easy. With an audible pop!”—I made the sound with my finger in my cheek—“the thing broke, and the pus came out. She urged it along a little, coaxing it until there was nothing left in it but blood.
“Her husband stirred, gave a long sigh, rolled over, and began to snore.
“Next morning, he complained of a scratched back. ‘You must have rolled against the wattle,’ she told him, and he said no more about it.
“But as time went on, the pimple began to fill again, even more red and angry, if that were possible, than before.
“As she had done the first time, the miller’s wife waited until a Saturday night when he was sleeping off a second (or perhaps third) pot of ale, and then she broke it again, this time with more confidence—almost joyously.
“It surprised her that, rather than being fearful, she now actually enjoyed popping the pimple.
“As the years went by, the purple pimple bloomed, each time bigger and more livid than the time before. It was, she thought, as if Hell itself were filling the thing with foul and sulfurous matter thrown up from deep down in the inferno that was her husband, Johannes.
“The miller’s wife found herself looking forward—almost impatiently—to the next swelling of the infernal bag, which had now become a cyst. She could hardly wait, each time, for its slow and weary filling.
“And then one night the miller died. Between the beefsteak and the beer. Just like that!
“He keeled over at the table and was dead before his face hit the floor.
“The old woman was filled with mortal fear! Had she killed him with her incessant and secret tampering? Would he still be alive, eating roast beef and parsnips, if she had left well enough alone?
“Would she be taken by the high sheriff and hanged for her crime?
“And so she kept her silence and told no one about the pimple, or what she had done, and a few days later, the miller was laid to rest in the transept of St. Rumwold, under the lid of a massive slab tomb, with his name and dates carved upon the lid.
“Time passed, and the village began to forget him, as villages do with things that are always under their noses.
“But Johannes’s wife did not forget him. Oh, no—quite the contrary!
“She lay awake nights, thinking not of her husband, but of the excrescence which was quite possibly still growing between his shoulder blades—even in the grave. With no one to empty it, she thought, the thing would go on filling. She thought of it there in the darkness of his coffin, growing and growing and growing—untended. Neglected.
“She thought of it as hers.
“And to be truthful, she missed it. Missed squeezing the thing. Missed hearing it pop.
“She could hardly bear thinking about it. It was quite clear what she should do.
“And so on a moonless night, the old woman crept quietly through the sleeping village and made her way by a roundabout route along the riverbank to the church.
“Inside, she blessed herself, said a dozen Our Fathers and two-dozen Hail Marys, and, with a stout iron poker she had brought from her own hearth concealed in her shawl, pried open the lid of the tomb.”
I paused in my tale to look round me. The candle flame was perfectly smooth and still. No one was breathing.
Even Jumbo’s mouth was agape. “And …?” she whispered in a husky voice, the word rising in wisps at the end like smoke from a wooden match.
“There in his stone box lay the miller, just as she had last seen him. In fact, he appeared to have changed hardly at all. Had he been miraculously preserved, as some saints were said to remain, forever incorrupt?
“Or—and the hair on her head rose as she thought of it—was he still alive?”
Again I paused for my words to have their effect. One of the girls on the far side of the circle had quietly begun to sob.
“It was not easy, but she … rolled … him … over,” I said slowly, “and hauled up the hem of the shroud … in which all but his head had been wrapped.”
The silence was by now unbearable. I let it lengthen, watching the reaction of each of them.
“And there … there was the gigantic pimple, swollen by now to the size of a pomegranate—and much the same livid color, as if it were full of blood!
“The wife’s hands shook as she reached for the thing …
“And as she reached there came a sudden hollow groan!
“ ‘No-o-o-o-o-o-o!’
“—as if the miller’s corpse were protesting, as if he wanted to keep this treasure for himself, to take away into eternity. A ruby made of skin.
“In spite of her fear, the old woman leaned even closer. It would take only a moment and then she would be gone, her duty done. I shall leave it to the Lord, she thought, to say if I be right or wrong.”