The Maid (4 page)

But watch her now as she moves through the blond wheat fields behind the little hunchbacked house by the river. Watch her walk uphill, this small, intent figure in a rough red dress, moving through the fields beneath the summer sky, a fire, a kind of possession growing in her eyes as she goes, running her palms over the velvet tops of the wheat tassels, whistling lightly through her teeth. At the brow of the hill stands the high, rustling oak forest. She approaches it slowly, with reverence, pushing carefully through the branches into the green cathedral of leaves, the twigs reaching out, tugging at her dress, her braids, as she moves, pulled forward through the sun-dappled world until she comes to the old stone altar deep in the trees.

A small collapsed ruin, roofless and forsaken. Open to starlight, thunderstorms, lightning. The walls are half fallen down, saplings have sprouted here and there, and at one end of the space stands the old statue of the Virgin, her head cloaked in a hood of green moss. Jehanne steps toward the statue, strokes the velvet moss with the ball of her thumb, takes in the shimmering forest once more, then kneels down carefully before the statue, bowing her dark head, speaking softly as she brings her hands together in prayer.
Are you here?

She remains this way for a long time, her eyes closed, her head bowed, waiting. Occasionally she shifts her haunches slightly or sighs, lowering her shoulders as if a slight change in posture might help her case. A lark sings out high and clear above her, its song piercing the upper vaults of the trees. The old branches lifting slowly and falling in the breeze, their leafy sleeves articulate, sad as fingers.

Later she lies on her belly on the forest floor, palms down, arms extended like Christ. The cool, nutty scent of pine in her nostrils.
Won't you come?
she says. Tears leak from her eyes. The sun sets, a red ball sinking through the trees. The forest grows dim, cool, and menacing. Still she does not move.

"Where were you?" says the father when she comes in hours later, after dark. The family is gathered around the table, a brown ham gleaming in the firelight. Beside her father sits a plump, pug-nosed boy who stands when he sees her, grins like a fool.

Jehanne takes a step backward, blood roaring in her ears. Her mother stares at her. "For heaven's sake, Jehannette, what's become of you?" Jehanne looks down. Her feet, her legs, are streaked with mud. A stiff hem of mud ringing the bottom of her dress. "Why do you have leaves in your hair?"

She mumbles something about falling asleep in the fields and runs to her room. From there, she hears her mother calling her, but something holds her back. It is as if her feet are nailed to the floor.

She stands behind the door, listening to them talk. Her mother's high, unnatural laughter. Her father's forced, jovial public voice. After the boy leaves, her father comes into the room and hits her hard. Her nose begins to bleed. A feeling like a knife jamming into her brain. "What the hell is wrong with you? Don't you know a suitor when you see one?" He drags her by the hair into the main room and says to her mother. "Look at this little bitch, this daughter of yours. What man would want her for a wife?"

Outside the moon is full. The great black shadow of the beech tree in the yard stretches across the bedroom floor and up the wall. "He doesn't mean it," the mother says. The mother sitting on Jehanne's bed, holding her, stroking her hair, wiping the black crust of blood from her face with a damp cloth. Jehanne lies motionless, stiff as wood. "It's those dreams he's been having. Those horrible dreams ..."

Jehanne is silent. She lets her mind wander until she sees the old beech tree in the garden twist and flex and burst into flame. The tree suddenly hot and alive, red and yellow and crackling with fire, reaching a branch into the house, breaking through the glass window in the main room (the treasured window broken!) and picking up her father, pulling him out into the darkness and holding him tight in those burning branches until he too catches fire, until he too is burning and screaming, then burning and silent, melting, crumbling to a pile of ash on the ground.

She grew older. She watched her body begin to change. Softness where there had been bones and sharp angles, hair, a musky smell from the hollows. Sadness too, in the afternoons. Pain like a sharp hook, rusting in her heart. Loneliness. Other times joy. Wild soaring joy. Ten thousand birds singing inside her. She walked through the village in the violet light of dawn, swinging her arms, thinking,
Thank you, oh thank you!
Everything moving in her like wind, shaking her foundations.

It drove her father wild. Watching his child transform, grow powerful, secretive, defiant. As if an uncontrollable stranger were suddenly sleeping under his own roof. A stranger scheming to destroy his life.

Soon there were rules. Her father forbade her from going off into the woods by herself. Forbid her from the fields, the trees, the hills. "No more running off," he said. "Do your chores, help your mother, go to church, be polite to the young men when they come calling, that's all."

She had to think about the future, her mother said. Marriage. She was sixteen now. It was time. The word made her sick to her stomach. She watched the other girls her age, braiding flowers into their hair, pinching their cheeks, smiling shyly or picking up their skirts and dancing, showing off their knees for the boys. Competing over who would live with whom in which dark hovel, who would spend their lives plowing which burned-out field, making which gray stew in which sad hearth, having her hair torn out by which man, dying of which plague or beating or wretched childbirth ... and she thought she'd rather die.

She'd rather be dead.

Listen now, darling. It is time for you to know your purpose.
It was Michael who told her. Michael who came one day while she was kneeling among the green shadows in the
bois chenu
with her eyes closed, face lifted, listening to the wind. It was afternoon. Suddenly the light was there, a torrent of feathered sunlight pouring through the trees, the deep Godvoice making the hairs on her arms stand up.
You must raise an army and drive the English from France. Take the Dauphin to be crowned king at Reims. This is God's command.

Her mind rejected it at first. The words floated through her like underwater sounds, impossible to understand. Then, when she did understand, she ran into the trees and threw up, a yellow puddle on the ground.

It was as her father had dreamed. God had shown His wish in the dream—her father just hadn't understood. Jehanne said it was impossible, what He asked. Impossible.
I'm only a girl, a peasant. I know nothing of cannons or lances. I have no money. I can't even ride a horse. Please, ask me anything else. I'll do anything else!

No.

This is God's mission, child. We will help you. God will help you. Go to the King, drive the English out of France. Crown the King.

She sobbed and ran from the forest. "Leave me alone!" she cried. "You ask too much."

The Church of St. Remy sat beside Jehanne's house, not twenty yards away. Separated only by a shaggy row of willows and a cemetery of leaning stones starred with pale green lichen. The church itself, a small peach stone building with a big wooden cross inside. In her mind's eye Jehanne pictured Christ stretched and lean as a cat on that cross, his wrists and ankles jeweled in blood, his sad, all-seeing eyes shining from behind the blades of his cheekbones, and seeing him there, she felt less alone. She began spending all of her time there, lying to her parents, saying she was going to work in the fields but instead creeping back behind the house and into the church, praying in a pew up near the altar.

It was very cold inside the church. The tips of her fingers went numb, turned white and mottled with lavender spots, but she stayed anyway. Eventually she forgot about the pain. Sometimes there were birds up in the eaves, pigeons fluttering and flapping in the shafts of sunlight that poured through the windows. And at sunset came the bells. She sat in the cold wooden pew with her head tilted back, her face lifted to the ceiling as the great bell rang and echoed through the high stone space, echoing off the walls, the high arches, the dim, shadowed corners of the nave, the rings of sound rippling though her body, her blood. In her mind she pictured a whole world of bells, all different sizes, ringing inside her. Big heavy bells in her ribs, her pelvis, her skull, tiny high-pitched bells in her fingertips. Ringing and ringing.
And that is God too,
she thought.
That is you too.

Up near the altar there was a window that was left open all day once summer came. Just outside it sat the well that Jehanne's family shared with the church—a black stony hole that Jehanne had loved leaning over as a child, drinking in the cold, deep, earth air and the mossy stone smell, dropping pebbles down into the black shining water. Often she wished that she could fall in, down and down into the dark bottomless tunnel, swimming down through the water until she touched the ancient heart of the earth.

One day, while she was praying, Jehanne heard her mother's voice there by the well. There came a sudden bray of boyish laughter. Jehanne got up and walked to the window. She crouched on one side of it and peered past the leaded corner of the frame. Her mother was standing in the sun, pulling on the frayed well rope hand over hand and talking to a boy named Michel Le Buin. The miller's son. A blond, pimpled boy with an angry red chin and slicks of oil on either side of his nose. He walked around with a proud, haughty look on his face, as if he were very handsome and very rich. This infuriated Jehanne. Made her long to slap him. "Such a long time since we've had a visit from you," her mother was saying. "I know Jehannette would love to see you."

Jehanne backed away from the window, her arms cold. That night she did not sleep. She lay awake in her bed, staring up at the darkness and the dim wood beams in the ceiling that seemed like bars upon her future.

Several days later Michel Le Buin came to dinner, bowing and sweating in a new green tunic. His hair was spit-combed across his forehead. He held a bouquet of vetch under his arm. Jehanne's mother welcomed him like a long-lost son. "Such lovely flowers, Michel!"

He smiled, his greedy eyes on Jehanne, gleaming. "They're for Jehannette."

"How lovely. Jehannette, put them in water."

When she did nothing, her father kicked her hard under the table. Spoke through his teeth. "Jehanne, up. Now!"

Slowly she rose. She could feel the boy's eyes on her as she moved, inspecting her breasts, her neck.

"A fine young woman she's grown into," he said.

"Hasn't she," said her father.

After dinner she crouched like a thief beneath her bedroom window, her ears pricked, listening to the low chuckling voices outside. "Not a typical beauty, of course," her father said. "But there's power in her. Spine. Good thing in a woman." He was talking like a salesman, using the same voice he used when he talked about his pigs at market.

"I see that. Will she breed?"

Jehanne was caught by a sudden vision of herself held up by the ankles, turning in the air, the men discussing her hooves, her haunches.

"Oh yes. Did you see the hips on her? She's born for it."

"Is there not some insolence in her?"

She could hear her father smiling in the night air.

"Nothing that can't be corrected," he said.

She ran very quickly through the dew-wet fields in the white mist of dawn, up into the woods, on and on until she thought her lungs would burst, and then she stopped and hid herself in the roots of a great gnarled black oak. The forest seemed not quite real to her yet, still emerging from the mist, the trees still half hidden, ghostly in the cool early light. Jehanne curled herself up tightly among the roots of the tree with her eyes closed and her head bowed, wondering, thinking, asking ...
What would be the first step? I cannot go directly to the King. He would never see me.

Soon the light began to spread in her bones. Then the low, thrilling thunder of Michael's voice:
Go to Vaucouleurs, little one. The governor will give you a letter of introduction to the King. You will find supporters there.

She wanted badly to answer him. Wanted badly to say,
Yes, I will do as you ask.
But when she tried to speak, no words came out. She watched silently as the light drained away. It was as if her mouth were filled with stones. "Coward," she said at last, spitting the words out. She stood up and dusted herself off. "Stupid. Stupid coward."

She spent the day walking blindly through the woods, praying for courage that did not come. Then, as she was making her way home through the hills above Domrémy late in the afternoon, she saw smoke. Fat black blooms rolling upward into the chalk-white sky. Not chimney smoke, too fast, too big for chimney smoke. Something else. Jehanne moved quickly to a ruined wall, tucked her red skirt between her legs and scrambled up the moss-bearded rocks until she was on top of them, looking down over the green countryside to the little neighboring village of Greux, where a clutch of houses by the river stood engulfed in flame. Wild orange sails of fire were billowing and snapping in the afternoon breeze, columns of black smoke pouring out of the windows, the houses themselves melting down to bone.

Heart hammering in her chest, Jehanne looked on to where the church tower of Greux was burning like an enormous candle, and farther still to where a lone black horse had burst from the village. Its back was on fire and it was running, screaming toward the river. Behind the wretched animal came a handful of men on horseback, moving fast through the high summer grass with torches in their hands, shouting and cheering as they raced along the back path toward the
bois chenu.
"Oh no," she said as the burning horse stumbled, then collapsed a few feet from the river. She jumped down off the wall and ran.