Free Fool School by James Comins Page B

I
hate love. My mind is consumed with guilt. Look, there I go,
running across the stonecobbled riverfront of Sarum, leaving
Malcolm and the puzzled bargeman behind, leaving my luggage behind,
running straight to the nearest church. Yes. I have gone mad.
    Morning mass is ending. Good. I hear my feet slap the
stone floor. Wild eyes scan the area full of the good people of
Sarum--ah! This priest is free to hear my confession. Delirium
coats my words, but the Sarum priest smiles and recognizes the
symptoms of guilt and he takes me to a cell and I am crying in
relief. Where am I? Is this real, or one of my imaginings? My hands
shake. I come to, fade back to waking. Beneath me is a stool of
polished dark wood, well-worn by a thousand thousand sinners'
derrieres. Corkscrew rosemåling designs decorate the walls.
Nicely-woven grasses cover the floor, and good stone under it; the
church is built of a white stone, very smooth. Not marble.
Limestone?
    "Ig am Fetter Etling," he says, and oh God his accent
is completely different and even harder to understand than the
guilty priest's or the bargeman's. I can pretend I understand
him.
    "Father I've destroyed the life of a young lady," I
say, then I realize I could be misunderstood and I blurt: "She's
been punished for having the devil in her only she hasn't got the
devil in her and I've put her in a pit and--" but none of it's
coming out right.
    "Eicchht Ave Marias and four Our Fetters," he says,
not even listening to me, and it's not right, he doesn't care, he
doesn't understand, I take his floppy stole in my hand but I don't
have any words that will express why he's so wrong. So, so, wrong.
He pats my head avuncularly, and I hate him.
    The barge is waiting for me. Malcolm looks concerned.
I wonder if he wishes we had talked on the journey, instead of
clamming up. I sit on the barge and say eight Hail Maries and four
Our Fathers without mistakes and I make believe that it's good
enough. Now I have fulfilled my ecclesiastical duties, I tell
myself. There are twenty miles before we must part ways with the
bargeman. Malcolm has bought a pony. There's some sort of pony
exchange system in Sarsbury Plain, he tells me, so it was cheaper
than it might have been. That's good. The small cart rests
upside-down on the flat of the barge, and before long we'll be
walking ahead of it, I think. Both our weights would be too much
for the pony.
    I take a look at the animal. His blunt nose has a
black cross, which seems very religious, and the rest of him is
white like good butter. He seems a sturdy pal, the pony, but I
wonder if he can really take us the way across Somerset to Bath.
His legs are so thin and white. Pale.
    The bargeman hooks the pony up to the barge and it
follows along behind the Spanish horses. It seems very tired, but I
don't want to insult Malcolm's horse-buying skills. I wonder if
it's been exchanged along the Sarsbury Plain many times. Most of
the barge's barrels are gone, but a few remain.
    A crossing of Roman roads built of the same white
stone as the Sarum church intersects a real stone bridge, clearly
built for legionnaires to travel quickly to Exeter from London.
There's a settlement here, nothing exciting, a few shops with pigs
hanging from hooks. At the stone bridge the bargeman lets us two
off and helps us set our luggage on the cart. We tether the horse
to the cart's iron rings and set off due north. It's straight
north, we're told, past fabled Stonehenge and four days' leisurely
ride to Treeburgh a few miles from Bath. The bargeman even wraps us
a stack of cakes and buys us a waterskin full of third small. I
find room in my heart to appreciate his gestures. He once was a
boy, too, and says so.
    We walk, the two of us. Cross country, through the
weeds of England.
    The cart is not well-made, and at once I find the
irregular clumping of the axle to be unbearable. There are strange
insects in the grasses, and I tie my hose tighter around my ankles
to keep them away. Trees in odd