Apollonia was treated particularly brutally. The heathens bashed out all her teeth. They threatened to burn her alive, but she didn’t give them the chance to do it—she escaped from them long enough to throw herself into the fire of her own accord. She was a saint, though, so she didn’t burn. The flames had no effect on her. But the story doesn’t end there. Heathens, shown evidence of their wrongdoing, don’t fall to their knees to beg the Lord’s forgiveness. They remained undeterred. They dragged Apollonia out of the fire and decapitated her.
Here’s another interesting case—Saint Etheldreda. She was known, commonly, as Saint Audrey, which is where the word tawdry comes from. See, after she died, women took to selling lacy garments in her name. Tawdries were sanctified things, holy garments. Then the Puritans came along and started looking down on cheap indulgences such as lace, so the word changed its meaning. Which just goes to show how you can’t do anything to protect your reputation when Puritans get involved—or heathens, either, for that matter.
My favorite saint, however, must have been Osgyth. She was married to a king, even though she didn’t want to be. She bore him a son, as was her duty—but then when her husband was away hunting a white deer, she ran off to the convent to become a nun. The white deer. That was important. Whenever they specified the color of something, it was important. I wondered what the white deer symbolized. Something worthwhile, I hoped, because the king lost his wife in the pursuit of it.
Anyway, she was killed at the hands of Vikings, and at the place where she was killed a spring erupted from the earth and continues to give water to this day. The tears of a saint, flooding the land. You could drink them up.
Like Apollonia, Osgyth had her head cut off. But a moment after she died, her body sprang back up (like her tears from the earth itself!). She picked up her own head and carried it to the nearby convent, where she finally collapsed.
This was not, so it seems, an uncommon occurrence among martyrs. There’s a whole category of saints who carried their own heads around after death. There’s even a name for them. They’re called cephalophoric martyrs.
Walking home through the drifts of new snow, I thought about that image. I thought about it over dinner, when my father asked me why I was being so tacit that evening. I couldn’t stop thinking about it that day or the day after that or the next day—or ever.
My virginity, my saintliness, like the new snow you hate yourself for tromping on. What saints do, I realized, is make everyone else aware of their lowliness. You were simply about the regular business of your day until the saint walks by and makes you reckon with your true state as a bristly animal wallowing in its own filth. That’s why everyone attacks the saints’ bodies—to prove they have them and are anchored by them. But what the stories tell us is that they’re not.
Peter Meechum had wanted to prove my frail, chafable, blisterable bodiedness. But there I lay under the afternoon sky—like a floating fairy or an ephemeral saint, smiling with her head removed and looking on from somewhere else entirely.
But what about the saint herself? Does she miss it—that puny tag of a body, with all its feeble, quaking pains and pleasures?
I still see it when I close my eyes—Osgyth, her neck a stump on her shoulders, feeling around blindly on the ground until she finds the toppled loaf of her own head, carrying it with effort across the fields to the convent.
What is a body without a mind? A slave to the feral instincts of ugly nature. An inelegant organ of gristle and stupid mechanics.
But also, what is a mind without a body?
It is a useless curd, lost in the mud. Or a pathetic piece of jetsam, bobbing in the spring-lake of its own tears.
*
Now it’s time to talk about Blackhat Roy Ruggle, who was no good.
I remember how he was in grade school, runty and dark, the teachers leaning away from him with sour expressions on their faces. I remember him cursing them under his breath, seeming very mature in his primal anger. It never occurred to me as strange, back then, that I equated obscenity with adulthood—as though we all grow inevitably toward the twisted and grotesque. Later, in high school, the administration tolerated him with weary resignation, because it was well known that his father had left when he was only two years old, that his mother was a drunk who survived on state aid, that the two of them lived in a shack with a sagging roof on the edge of town, and that he worked in a scrap yard in order to make money to buy things like cigarettes and booze—things that stank of angry manhood.
He came to school dirty, his clothes torn, his shoes tattered and repaired with duct tape, his hair unwashed. There was no fight he backed away from, no conflict he did not lick his lips at. It made no difference how big or small his opponents were—he gnashed his teeth and spit out vulgarities and burned himself bright and hot into a cindered black punk. Teachers avoided him because they knew their authority wouldn’t sway him. Younger kids avoided him because they knew their weakness wouldn’t, either.
No one was surprised when he breached early. No one was surprised that his breach lasted longer by far than anyone else’s. He had always been part animal, and he needed no moon to tell him that.
Me, I avoided him—which was not difficult. Our worlds had nothing to do with each other.
Until the day they did.
After the day in the woods with Peter, I had spent the next couple weeks mostly alone. I wore white as much as I could—because it was the color of sainthood and it was the color of the deer that Osgyth’s king hunted and it was the color of the snow descending everywhere around me.
In school I saw that Polly spent more time with the boys who had already gone breach. They would often have her pressed in a corner of the stairwell or against the lockers, their bodies flush with hers. Sometimes Polly seemed embarrassed to be squished between these boys and the lockers—but other times she gazed at the ceiling with half-lidded eyes, and I could see that she was lost to them.
“Do you have a boyfriend now?” I asked her in French class.
“Oui et non,” she said. “C’est compliqué.”
“Are you happy?”
“Personne n’est heureux.”
“Some people are. Some people are happy.”