Vandal Love Read Free Page A

stayed away, afraid of Jude, who, like some mythical being, watched over her constantly. Often he came upon her as she sat alone, face to the fleeting sunshine, and then she’d hear him and jump. Cold made the skin around her eyes swell as if she’d been crying. She looked at the ground when he was near. She kept to herself or lingered after Mass. At home she made a crèche, though the curé told her that the baby Jesus did not have stigmata and a crown of thorns, that the animals in the manger didn’t need halos.
    The dry summer had passed, lilac and fireweed and the few wild roses withering in the headlands beyond the fields. Jude watched, drab clothes ghosted against dirt, an animal poised. On an October morning, as he went tocut kindling by the water pump, one of Isa-Marie’s schoolmates was waiting on the road to Mass. The boy had rim glasses like those of the monseigneur and had once been praised by the schoolteacher for composing a sonnet on the life of St. Francis. He was holding a roll of paper bound in silk ribbon, which he extended when Isa-Marie stopped before him. He’d just begun to speak as Jude came down the hill through the trees with the thrashing of a bull elk. Without pause or warning, Jude leapt the embankment and carried the boy to the outhouse, where he kicked back the board and shoved his head into the rudiments and slime.
    That evening, a brief, cold rain fell, and in sunset’s last silvery light, small pools shone as if the flat rocks of the coast had been strewn with mirrors. Isa-Marie had turned back on the road and skipped Mass. She’d gone home and into her room and hadn’t so much as glanced at Jude when he came in to mug about. She lay in her bed, turned away. He sat and shrugged and cracked his swollen knuckles, his glazed, red face blinking widely, often, as if to communicate feeling. Finally, he went outside and stood in the windy dark. The tide scraped the coast, and between a few isolated clouds a comet sketched a slow, bright flare. He stayed there until dawn lit the gradual contours of the eastern mountains.
    Isa didn’t leave her bed the next day. At first no one noticed that she hadn’t gone to school, but when, two days later, she remained curled in her blankets, the aunts began to murmur. Jude felt Hervé Hervé watching him. Winter was coming on hard, and Isa-Marie had alwaysfound the cold difficult. Dawns, when ice flowers sprouted from the stomped and rutted mud of the road, Jude returned inside and went into her room. She wouldn’t look at him. She lay on the bed, breathing shallowly, turned to the window. What sunlight filtered through the dirty glass made her skin appear translucent, bluish veins in her temples and throat.
    Now, as he did his chores, for the first time he dimly sensed all that he didn’t understand. Because of his and Isa-Marie’s silence or because she’d been born in his arms and their hearts had beat together so long, he’d assumed to know her mind. But perhaps she’d been in love, the moments before he came crashing onto the road the happiest of her life. He worked in a frenzy, feeding animals and mucking the barn, heaps of manure steaming in the pasture. A dry, crystalline snow fell and puffed about his feet. He gazed up at her window. He tried to understand her heart, to know what would make her better. He closed his eyes and saw sunshine. He saw the cup of the world spreading like a flower with dawn, wide and brilliant beneath the sun, then wilting into a fragrant dark.
    The tourists were fleeing winter, their long cars passing along the road in convoys. Days shortened, the sky a cramped, closed space, low and grey, and in the gradual darkness the coast became a rim of ash. Only a few lingered with cameras and tripods, parking in the weeds and hiking onto rises to click shots of the sea, the turningleaves, the rough, exposed shape of the land. Jude watched them, these often thin, dapper men who wore their pants tight at the waist like