When the sun came up, he went to Ina’s cabin with a lamb to pay her to nurse the baby. She refused the animal but said she’d take care of Marek whenever Jude needed.
‘Why does he look so strange?’ Jude asked.
‘Your girl tried to kill it, that’s why,’ Ina said. ‘She came to me many times for herbs to get it out of her.’
And that was it. Agata was dead to Jude.
* * *
*
Jude petted the newborn lambs now in the afternoon shade and tried not to think about Agata. ‘The poor creature,’ he told himself, fingering the ear of the runt of the last litter. He had sixteen babes and five ewes and one ram. The ram lived apart from the rest in a small pen at the southern end of the pasture, under an awning of pines. Jude didn’t care for him the way he cared for the females and the babes. When he fed the ram, he simply threw some hay over the fencing. Water was dumped once a day into a leaking trough. The ram seemed indestructible. And he was strangely complicit in his own imprisonment. He never tried to break through the fencing, although it was made of weathered branches and old wooden boards and was very near ready to collapse on its own. Marek wasn’t allowed to go inside the ram’s pen.
‘He will think you’re a sheep and try to fuck you or kill you,’ Jude said. ‘That’s all he knows how to do.’
‘Why does he not kill the ewes then?’ Marek asked.
‘What a stupid question,’ Jude said, sincerely appalled. ‘A man doesn’t kill his lady. How else will he live on but in his children?’
‘Will you live on in me?’
‘I hope I will. And you’d better have a son of your own someday soon.’
‘Soon?’
‘You’re thirteen years old. You’ve got hair on your pubis. You could be a father any time you like.’
‘But I want to be a son, not a father.’
‘Well then.’
Marek and Jude always watched the mating rituals. Jude liked to guess which of the ewes was in heat first. After so many years, he had grown sensitive to their smells. He was usually correct, which made him all the more upset when he’d watch the ram mount and fuck the ewe. She did not like the feeling. Jude knew that. It was an invasion and a penalty for her sex to be so brutalized, and then so burdened. Jude felt sorry for the ewes and fed them extra wheat when they were with child. But he hadn’t felt so sorry for Agata. He had felt proud of her swollen belly. He had loved her, had infused himself into her, unloaded so much into her womb, which was built for him by God. When he ejaculated, he groaned, and felt in that moment that this was the language of God Himself, the groan of creation. He remembered how Agata turned her head as he released his grip on her neck and moved her face to look back at him from where it had been pushed into the hay pillow. She was crying. And Jude thought, Good girl. That’s my good little girl. You are mine now. The white that dripped from his greasy penis smelled like a summer rain, iron in it, tangy. ‘I love you,’ Jude said, and sat back against the wall. Agata had cried—she was still a child, after all—and Jude took her by the arm so she could wash herself outside with water from the lambs’ trough. Later she fell asleep inside by the hearth, her feet bound by rope to the round rock that would later mark her false grave. This had been their nightly ritual. He discovered, not long into their love affair, that she was with child.
* * *
*
When Marek returned from the stream, bruised and bleeding, toddling through the door with the broken pieces of bucket, Jude put down his work of darning a sock and picked up a shovel and threw it at the boy’s head. Marek felt the blow to his right ear, and his vision went white. He heard the singing of angels. The wooden pieces of the bucket silently clattered to the floor, and Marek lifted his hand to his ear, which was numb and hot to the touch, and then Jude started punching. Marek fell to his knees and bent his head low to protect his face while Jude hit. And then he took his hand away from his ear to allow Jude to deliver a few more blows. And then he lifted his face to Jude, and Jude hit him across the nose and again on each cheek, like a king with a sword on a knight’s shoulders, and then Jude kicked Marek’s left knee so that he fell to the side, and then Marek stretched his legs and rolled on his back so that Jude could kick him or stomp him wherever he liked. If my father kills me, Marek thought, I am sure to go to heaven. Another blow to his head made him turn and gag. A tooth skipped out of his mouth and landed in a little shard of light coming through the doorway, the last of the sun between the trees. He watched the light play on his glistening tooth. He’d seen a lot of blood today. That was all right. Blood was the wine of the spirit, was it not? He licked his lips and sucked the blood back into his mouth, comforted with the knowledge that the damage Jude had done to him would warrant a whole night of praying, repenting, that his father would cry and beg God to forgive him, and Marek would become hypnotized by his father’s remorse.