He handed the bottle to my grandfather. The label was all heraldry and the kind of clerical script you saw lettering diplomas and pound notes, a bunch of French verbiage. Lean and raffish lions flanked a quartered escutcheon. The vintage was 1870. “Before the phylloxera,” my grandfather said.
Father Nickel sat back down on the crate. The muddy skirt of his cassock rode up. The soles of his high black boots were holed and patched with tarpaper. His high socks were hand-knit and curiously festive, socks that might have been worn by the grandfather in Heidi.
“That’s right,” he said. “Just before. So, you take an interest?”
“Purely scientific,” my grandfather said. He shook his head and handed the bottle back to Father Nickel. “But you go right ahead, please, Father.”
Father Nickel seemed to consider taking offense. “You think I put poison in it.”
“I want to see it properly enjoyed,” said my grandfather.
Father Nickel took a small oblong glass with a wide foot from a hutch by the table. He filled it halfway with cognac. He took a long swallow. He gasped pleasurably. When he lowered his head to my grandfather again, the offense seemed to have been forgiven. “Your friends are too trusting. They ate the soup. They took some wine.”
The old priest filled a second glass with cognac and handed it to my grandfather. Diddens and Gatto raised their glasses. There was a dark green wine bottle on the table between them. If it had come out of the ground with the cognac, it must be something special. Diddens and Gatto appeared to find it palatable.
My grandfather took a sip of the cognac. It came on crackling and hot, like the first hard pulls on a cigar as you were getting it lit. After the blaze of a flavor like tobacco, he tasted something between butter and walnuts, and finally, a bittersweet sparkle on his tongue, like a squirt of oil from a crushed grapefruit peel.
“Well?”
“Wonderful,” my grandfather said.
“The real treasure, eh?” The old priest tapped the crate between his legs. “The rest of it isn’t much. Some old silver plate. A telescope. A gold monstrance. An old Bible bound in wisent leather. Beautiful but so fragile it can’t even be opened, let alone read. All of it the work of men. But cognac . . .” He took another long swallow. He did not need to finish the sentence. His expression made clear his belief in the divine provenance of champagne brandy.
“What about the relic? Saint Dominic’s bone?”
“Ah, yes,” the old priest said. “The left stapes of Saint Dominic. No doubt, no doubt. A very precious treasure indeed.” It sounded halfhearted. His hand caressed the cognac bottle.
“A telescope,” my grandfather said. “Is that what you said?”
“Yes, my son.”
“Is that a relic, too? Is it some kind of holy telescope?”
“No. It is a Zeiss telescope. It is my personal property.” He smiled. “I did not wish it to fall into enemy hands.” The old priest poured another glass of brandy that had been put into a cask seventy-five years ago.
“Are you an astronomer?”
“An amateur,” Father Nickel said. “I have contributed a few insignificant observations. Chiefly lunar.”
“I also take an interest in astronomy.”
“In addition to vine blights.”
“That’s right.”
“Then you come under the protection of Dominic, my son.”
“How is that?”
“Saint Dominic de Guzman is the patron saint of astronomers.” The old priest looked a little melancholy. “As to the value of that protection at this juncture, I would not care to hazard a guess.”
14
The soldiers slept in the bed, each in his one-third share of heaven; it was the barn for the old woman and the priest. Diddens had taken pains to calibrate the amount of wine he consumed so that it counterbalanced the pain in his foot. Courageously, Private Gatto had volunteered to scout ahead, as it were, and locate the point where analgesia gave way to excess. Now my grandfather lay staring at the darkness as Gatto and Diddens took shifts working the stops and pedals of the pipe organ they appeared to have smuggled into the bed. Whenever they fell silent for a few minutes, there would be no sound but his own tinnitus and the intermittent booming of the war at night. It sounded very far away. My grandfather could take no comfort in that distance. He was accustomed by now to feeling grateful that when death settled like a flock of birds around him, it was other men and not him on whom it perched. This gratitude never had anything to do with happiness.
After what felt like two or three hours, he gave up. He extricated himself from the dogpile of Gatto and Diddens and climbed down from the bed in its niche. In the profundity of the rural dark, he groped for his trousers, his boots, somebody’s overcoat. At sunset the weather had shown promise of clearing, and my grandfather thought about opening the crate to look for the telescope the old priest had mentioned. He found the top-front edge of the crate with his shin. He knelt beside it and felt for the hasp. In the end he could not bring himself to lift the lid, discouraged in a way that he found mystifying by the presence of St. Dominic de Guzman’s stirrup bone. He went out into the yard between the barn and the farmhouse. Father Nickel sat hunched on a tall stool, his telescope pointed at the sky.
For a city boy like my grandfather, the number of visible stars had always been only a dim fraction of the five thousand or so he knew were visible to the naked human eye. Even in Rapides Parish there was ambient light enough to conceal the true madness of the heavens. On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.
Tonight, however, as my grandfather joined Father Nickel at the telescope, the stars were lost in the dazzle of a full moon. Also, of course, a large swath of Westphalia was on fire. Smoke cobwebbed the vault of night.
“You should rest.”
“No doubt.”
My grandfather reached into the left hip pocket of the coat he was wearing and found a ten-pack carton of Luckies. So it was Gatto’s coat. He tore open a pack and offered a Lucky to Father Nickel. Neither of them had a light. My grandfather crept back into the house with a piece of straw and lit it in the embers of the hearth. Once he got his cigarette going, he lit Father Nickel’s and carried it back out to the priest. They looked up at the Moon hung from the sky like a mirror.
“Permit me to show you my little mountain,” Father Nickel said.
My grandfather hunched over the oculus of the telescope. It was an old but excellent telescope, lovingly maintained. Father Nickel had fitted the eyepiece with a lunar filter to reduce the glare of moonlight. The resultant detail came as a shock. The rays of craters were sharp as cracks starring a mirror. The edge of the lunar disc was toothed like the blade of a circular saw. Somewhere in the center of the Montes Apenninus, according to the old priest, rose little Mons Gallienus.
“You see Mons Huygens?” he said. “You know it?”
“I . . . Yes. I see it.”
“Now, look perhaps three degrees of arc to the southeast. You will see a shadow, a patch of gray. To my mind it resembles the print of a deer’s hoof.”
“Right.”
“Now from there look, let us say, two degrees of arc to the northeast.”
“Okay.”
“It is there.”
“Right.”
“It has an almost castellated appearance.”
“Ah.”
“You see it?”
“Yes.”
Father Nickel clucked his tongue. “You don’t see it,” he said, not without a trace of bitterness. In fact, due to the earth’s rotation, the image of the Moon had already drifted out of the eyepiece. The telescope would have to be slewed.