Kindred Read Free Page A

Plain, and saw the smoke from the land rising like the smoke of a furnace.” I run to the bathroom and throw up.
    I want to speak with Tabitha, but each time I draw near, I can’t bring myself to walk up to her, to introduce myself again. The accident has changed her. Instead of the open, friendly look she used to have, as if someone had just told her some pleasant news, she now keeps her head down, her shoulders hunched up defensively. She was supposed to have been spared. It is all my fault.

III .
     
    I N THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY , a young peasant girl in rural France experienced a series of encounters with heavenly voices. They came first as a bright light, but over time coalesced into perfect, beautiful visions. The archangel Michael was there, along with several other saints the girl recognized. These visions were so lovely that she cried when they ended. The angel and the saints told her that she must help recover her homeland, devastated from decades of war and pillage.
    She was young when these visions began, only thirteen. They continued for years. Years of visions telling her she must overcome her fears, her reluctance, her previous understanding of her place in the world. Until finally, at age seventeen, she no longer doubted.
    She petitioned the local garrison commander to visit theroyal French court. Once there, she convinced the prince to let her lead his army against the British, who were holding the city of Orléans under siege. This siege had been dragging on for months when she arrived, a young medieval woman completely unversed in military strategy or tactics.
    Within ten days, she ended it. This was the start of her military career. Over the course of the next eighteen months, she was severely injured several times, ignored by seasoned generals and adored by the army and the people of France.
    During one retreat, she was among the last to leave the field and was captured and held for ransom. Her peasant family could not pay, and the prince, fearing her growing popularity, would not step in to help. She was sold to the British.
    This story does not end well.
    The girl goes on trial for heresy. Her crime was not hearing voices, but rather the sin of wearing men’s clothing. No one seems to have doubted her claim that God’s emissaries spoke to her; they were only looking for a loophole to stop her. The bishop leading the trial did not follow the laws and conventions of the ecclesiastical court. Some of the clergy on the tribunal had been coerced to serve. The girl’s answers were eloquent and correct, yet she was found guilty and burned at the stake. Concerned that her remains would be a rallying point or, worse, become holy relics, the men who had burned her insisted that her charred body be burned twice more and her ashes scattered on the Seine. The executioner later said he feared he was damned for doing such a thing.
    The girl’s name was Joan of Arc. And even though she dideverything she was supposed to do, everything God wanted her to do, by the time she was nineteen, she was dead.
    Never mind the fact that a mere twenty-four years later, the pope exonerated her and removed the stigma of heresy. Never mind that in 1920 she was named a saint. It’s pretty obvious that though her short life was full of glory, it was also full of agony, injustice, cruelty and, ultimately, betrayal.
    I have always known the basics of Joan’s story, but it is as if I am learning it for the first time. It sickens me, the gross injustice of it all. The unfairness not just of those wicked, evil men, but of the messengers from God who started it, who set her on her path.
    Where were they?
    It’s clear flipping through history books and reading about the people who claim angels appeared before them (outside of the patriarchs of the Bible, and not counting poor Joan) that they aren’t exactly a who’s who of sanity or importance. Besides having a disturbing tendency to be burned at the stake—don’t think for a moment