‘Everyone is ashamed. So they pretend they’re perfect. But everybody sins. Only God is perfect,’ Jude said.
‘That’s what I keep telling my children,’ Grigor said.
‘People don’t like it when the truth is easy,’ Jude said. ‘Let them think what they want.’
‘I will try that. Thank you, Jude.’
Grigor’s son, Jon, and his daughter-in-law, Vuna, assumed that the old man’s mind was fading due to age and the damage of the summer starvation. They could see that he had changed since the drought. Grigor was grumpier. He couldn’t get settled back in the house after he’d spent so much time with Ina. He felt odd when he went out into the village, knowing what he now knew; that he was saved and had been saved, and only his doubt had kept him from ever being truly happy. But now he had a chance. He could walk around with love in his heart, fearlessly. He tried, during the days, to feel it. He tried feeling it standing in the sun in the village square. He tried it visiting the neighbors. He tried it talking to his daughter-in-law about Ina’s herbs. Grigor wasn’t sure he was doing it right. Society felt awkward now. It took everything Grigor had not to scream sometimes. When he looked at Jon, he saw someone tired and worn beyond his years. It seemed lunatic to be eating a crust of bread and sipping a cup of broth and to give thanks for just that. Thanks for nothing? The world was full of bounty. Just look up at the manor and you could see Paradise. Why had nobody realized it before? His boy was so grim and serious. He worked too much.
Grigor said, ‘Work or don’t work. It doesn’t matter.’
‘How will we eat if we don’t work?’ Jon asked. ‘Who will provide for us?’
‘Oh, someone.’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Jon said.
‘I finally heard the truth,’ Grigor told him. He couldn’t explain when he’d heard it, or from whom, but he’d heard it in his heart, without words, a deep knowing, and nothing could hurt him or frighten him now. It was so simple that the reasoning of it tended to slip through his mind as soon as he touched it, like a rabbit in the woods. Once you breathe, it’s gone. He tried to explain this to Jon and Vuna, but he was not good with words.
‘God rewards hard work,’ Jon said. ‘If I don’t serve God, how will He know I’m any good?’
‘How will we pay the monthly tax?’ Vuna asked.
Grigor shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Don’t worry.’ Speaking with them was useless. It didn’t matter. And they seemed to resent his new attitude. He was acting lazy around the house. He spent more and more time away, wandering in the woods and resting in Ina’s empty cabin. He liked it there. He liked to dust and keep her place tidy. When Jenevere had come to pick tansy and canniba per Ina’s request, and she saw Grigor there, he had offered to pick the herbs himself—she told him which ones—and deliver them to the manor. The task made Jenevere’s work easier and made Grigor very happy. He had missed being in touch with what grew from the dirt. The herbs were all wild. Picking them was not like harvesting the crops of his farm, but like a discovery of nature’s magic. He hunted through the forest and picked them carefully, wrapping each bud or branch in its own clean cloth, like jewels. His heart felt cool and calm as he picked the herbs, as though even just the discovery of them had healing properties.
* * *
*
The horses had all been well trained by Luka, and the stableboys were attentive and did whatever Jude asked. He had an intuitive knowledge of how to care for animals, and he was gentle and generous with each horse, taking the time to get to know them, their differences, and ride them and pet them and speak to them and lie across their backs and hold them around their necks and tickle their ears. They liked him. He fed them handfuls of barley and wheat from his hands and kissed their noses. Now Jude dressed not like a beggar but like Luka. He wore Luka’s old chore coat and hat and gloves and fit his hands into the worn leather wraps on the ropes and the wood fence of the corral when he took the horses out to run. He slept in a horse stall, shared the thick hay with Dibra’s blind horse. The blind horse had no name, and it did not run with the other horses. Jude worried it might hurt itself if it stumbled or ran up against a steed or into the fence. It seemed the other horses didn’t like the blind one, like a wounded soldier who had seen too much and reminded them of their own possible fate. So Jude took the blind one out alone at dawn, leading it by hand and walking beside it, no tether or harness, not even a rope around its neck. He envied the eyeless horse in a way, that it required and received so much careful attention, like a babe, and that it was blind to the disturbed looks on the other horses’ faces. Creatures were cruel. It reminded Jude of how the villagers had regarded Marek—a freak. But Jude had sympathy for the horse. It was not a freak by nature, but as a result of betrayal and abandonment. He felt they had that in common.