Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [169]
“‘Do not be afraid.’ Our Lord said that more often than he said anything else.”
Hans clacked his side-lips. “Do you have the sentence in your head that tomorrow’s procession will halt this pest of yours, that it will bar the small-lives from the High Woods?”
“If it is as you say, no. No more than prayer can stay a charging horse. But that is not why we pray. God is no such cheap juggler as to play for a pfennig.”
“Why, then?”
“Because it will focus our minds on last things. All men die, as all Krenken die. But how we approach that death matters, for we will receive another life according to our merits.”
“When your folk submit, you kneel before your Herr. Among us, we squat as you see.”
Dietrich accepted this, and after a moment he asked, “For what purpose have you prayed?”
“For thanks. If I must die, at least I have lived. If my companions have perished, at least I have known them. If the world is cruel, at least I have tasted kindness. I had to cross to the far side of the sky to taste it but, as you say, the world is full of miracles.”
“There is no hope, then, for your folk?”
“‘One thing alone removes all chance of death; and that thing is death.’ But hear me, Dietrich, and I will tell you a sentence that my folk have learned. The body may be strengthened by an exercise of the spirit. Do you understand me? One man may welcome death, and so find it. Another man may will himself to live, and in that will may lie the difference in their fates. So, if these prayers and processions muster your energia, you may better resist the entry of the small-lives into your bodies. As for me, I have an answer to my own prayer.”
“And what is that?”
But Hans refused to say. He hopped to the bedside of the dying Kratzer and affixed to the wall before his eyes a brightly colored reproduction of the meadow-scene that Dietrich had first noted on the strange “view-slate” on the Kratzer’s desk. Hans then squatted by the bedside for a time in silence. Then he said, “For every Krenk, the sentence is that he would see his birth-nest once more. What you call his ‘heimat.’ However he fares through the world-inside-the-world, whatever wonders he finds in distant places, there gives always that place for him.”
Hans unfolded to his feet. “Our ship will sail,” he said. “In another week, perhaps two. No more.” Then without another word he left the parsonage.
DURING THE week that followed the procession, a curious humor came over the folk of Oberhochwald. There gave much merriment and spontaneous laughter, and they told one another that Munich and Freiburg were far off and what happened there did not affect the High Woods. Folk left their harrows to sport in the field. Volkmar Bauer gave Nickel Langermann a meat pie and his wife cared for little Peter, who had fallen ill with the murrain. Jakob Becker walked through the village and left a loaf of bread at each cottage and two at each hut and afterward visited the grave in which his son had been laid.
Gregor and his sons brought Theresia Gresch to Mass on the Fifth Sunday in Pentecost. This Mass was better attended than most, and afterward Gregor said that if people were frightened more often, the village would be a friendlier place, and he laughed as if at a great and terrible joke.
Dietrich gave thanks for the newfound concord but when, after that week, nothing had happened, the village slowly returned to normal. The free tenants once more spurned the gärtners and serfs; the horseplay in the fields ceased. Dietrich wondered if the penitential procession had, as Hans had suggested, strengthened their spirits to resist the bad air; but Joachim only laughed.
“How heartfelt is a penance that fades so soon?” He shook his head. “No, true contrition is longer, broader, deeper than that, for this sin was so long with us.”
“But the pest is not a punishment,” Dietrich insisted.
Joachim turned his eyes away. “Do not say that,” he whispered fiercely in the soft confines of the wooden church—and the statues seemed to whisper back in creaks and moans. “If it is not punishment, it is nothing; and it