His father seemed unbothered by the whole affair. He wiped the bloodied blade across his jeans before slipping it back into its sheath. The butcher’s daughter held her cheeks, her shaking slight but apparent. She looked to Samuel’s father, no longer able to hide her confusion and fear.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “He wasn’t in his right mind. I know he wouldn’t have … what will they do to him? To his body? What will they do to us, cleric?”
Samuel held tight to the scriptures as his father walked to the door. He reached for the door handle but stopped.
“Tell no one.”
A fresh fire had been lit in the center fireplace, helping to illuminate some of the shadows. Samuel sat beside his father on the Littens’ large sofa, waiting for the sheriff’s return. He bounced his heels against the pine floor, unable to stop seeing the decrepit butcher grabbing his father’s marked arm.
“Thirsty?” his father asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Something has been prepared for us.”
Samuel straightened his back and looked up. A thin tray with two porcelain cups hovered above his knees, both filled to the brim with some sort of steaming brown liquid. A girl around his age stood in front of him, delicately holding the tray. She wore a gray woolly dress, similar in style to her mother’s. Her chestnut hair had been braided into two separate strands that came down on opposite ends of her collarbone, exposing and elongating her neck.
“My mother asked me to bring this,” the girl said.
His father nodded solemnly. “Might I ask your name?”
She kept her eyes on the tray. “Claudette.”
“Thank you, Claudette.” Samuel’s father took both cups and gave one to him. “I pray that Azhuel gives you and your family comfort in this time.”
“Yes,” the girl said.
The brown liquid smelled like tree bark and dirt. Samuel put it to his mouth and drank. It was bitter; he had expected as much, but it somehow had a soothing effect. His lips puckered. “What is this?”
“It’s coffee.” The girl grinned. “Have you never had it before?”
Samuel shook his head. He took another sip before shoving his glasses farther up. Coffee was a delicacy that had to be imported from the greenlands. He wondered how many coins it cost the Litten family to brew a single cup.
“It’s really good,” Samuel said sheepishly.
He couldn’t help but notice the girl’s fingers. They were thin and long like the old butcher’s but free of wrinkles and bulging veins. He wondered what they would feel like on his arm. The girl must’ve noticed him staring. She clutched the tray tightly, bowing slightly before walking down the hallway like she’d done something terrible.
Samuel breathed deeply. Although he wasn’t a cleric yet, most treated him like he was. It wasn’t against the law to touch the bastard of a cleric, as far as Samuel knew, but he understood why the citizens avoided him. His arm had not been inked with holy roots, but it may as well have been. What future could the bastard child of a cleric hope for besides the mark of the clergy?
About halfway through his cup of coffee, the sheriff returned. The ride back home seemed far less eventful to Samuel. When he and his father went inside their cabin, he tossed off his boots and put his father’s knife under the bed. The fire from several hours before had cooled to nothing more than glowing coals. His father lit a candle, laying the scriptures beside the picture of Samuel’s mother.
Samuel gazed at the tattered photograph. His mother had left him her smooth black hair, petite height, thin figure, and bad vision. He wore her old pair of glasses. His father had saved them in case Samuel’s sight worsened with age, which was a wise choice. By the time Samuel turned seven, he could hardly see a thing without them. Even with them, certain shapes and colors, like the speckled patterns of yellow and green on the pine leaves surrounding the log cabin, were hard to decipher. He told his father he needed lenses made specifically for him, but eyeglasses were expensive and hard to come by. All specialized goods needed to be brought up by train carts from the greenlands, which was always costly. And it wasn’t as if his father was in a high-paying profession.
“Father?”
“What is it?”
“Why’d the butcher touch you?”
Samuel had been too scared to ask before, and the Littens’ house didn’t seem like the right place to bring it up.
His father glanced at the photograph of his mother. He’d said her name only once before, but Samuel had never forgotten it. Atia. It was a southern name, and to him it sounded warm and free.
“Death often supersedes the worries of the living and can break the hardest of men. What is another day on this earth in comparison to eternity?”
His father often spoke this way, incorporating the scriptures into daily dialogue.
“Do you think the butcher’s daughter will report you?”
“No,” his father said calmly. “She is grateful that her father passed in peace. I know that much. If she reports the incident, she and her family might be the ones who suffer the consequences. As a public citizen, she welcomed a cleric into her home. To perform the rites, yes. But this wasn’t a ceremony. Our combined stories together may still leave much for speculation. My word would be of little help.”
“The sheriff would defend you, right? He could speak on your behalf.”
“Perhaps. But only Azhuel knows the hearts of men.”
His father moseyed through the cabin, readying himself for bed.
Samuel grabbed fresh firewood and rekindled the fireplace. He extended his palms to the cackling flame. He pictured his father working in a different profession, like logging or smithing. He had the muscles for it, unlike Samuel, whose frame and body seemed more designed to reflect his mother. His thoughts often came back to her, especially recently. If his father had been something else, would his mother still be alive? Would Samuel have despised his future so much, the inevitability of religious piety and isolation? Like many orphans who’d been abandoned by their families, his father had been selected by the high council to be raised and trained in the faith by a lead cleric. Many impoverished citizens would try to voluntarily give their sons over to the cloth, if not merely to guarantee that their children would be fed on a regular basis.
“Do you ever regret it?” Samuel asked. “Being made a cleric, I mean. Do you ever wish you weren’t?”
Samuel’s father blew out the candle near the nightstand. “I’m honored to serve. That’s the beauty of Azhuel’s mercy. In the end, we all have a choice to be cleansed by the roots. To be forgiven our faults. To be made whole again. All men need this.”
Samuel glanced at the photograph of his mother, imagining how the warmth of his mother’s skin must’ve felt when she held him as a baby.
“Do you think she regretted it?”
His father, as he often did, ignored him.
“It’s late. Come to bed.”