Fool School by James Comins Read Free Book Online Page A

musician, even
though Papa taught me the recorder and the pandora lyre and other
things, as well as singing. I fear embarrassment. But songs are
expected of fools; in poorer courts, the fool is all the
entertainment: orchestra, comedian, wizard, dancer and grand
vizier. I run to dig my recorder out of my cases, which have been
brought to the ealdorman's house. Part of me imagines that the
devil harbormaster of Cherbourg has stolen my recorder, too, which
is more than a hundred years old, made in Italy, of African acacia
wood, clasped in finely-wrought iron bands. I may be the son of a
drunk, but my Papa had the wit not to pawn our finest. A drunk
fool, but not a fool. You understand.
    I race back to the ealdorman with the black hasped
box that holds my recorder. I tell him I've only received the most
basic musical training, and he waves me on. A cheery song, I think,
one of Papa's drinking songs. "Long the Yard," I decide, hoping the
ealdorman and his wife don't know the bawdy lyrics. It's a
rollicking wine song and uses only the basic scale, and I play it
just fine--it's not tricky or impressive--and the ealdorman clearly
has found himself enjoying it.
    It's a very rare and special thing, let me tell you
about it, when you perform in front of a crowd, even a small crowd,
and find someone who takes special joy in your performance. Too
often you'll watch an inadequate performer, maybe a traveling
morality show, create a crowd only to see the people slough away
like dead skin from the back of the theaterground, those few who
stayed forcing themselves to put up with a bad show out of
politeness, or out of a lack of entertainment in their lives, or
God forbid out of a sense of pity for these sad men who have
devoted their lives to entertainment and have failed at that
task.
    I don't want that to happen to me. I don't want to
turn into the St. Martin's friar, escaping from the world of
jesting to the priesthood as a failure and a cad.
    So it's strangely gratifying when one of your
audience finds joy, actual joy, in the music you make. Reassuring.
The ealdorman conducts with his fat fingers, a genuine stupid smile
on his lips.
    There's danger, too, in overplaying to the one man in
the audience who's happy with your performance. I overplay to this
man.
    "Enough," sighs the ealdorman's wife before long, and
my tune dies away. I feel a pit of danger inside my chest. A
warning. I see that the ealdorman himself is not the most powerful
person in the room.
    "But--eh--darling," he murmurs, "don't you
think--couldn't we--he's but a boy--"
    "Enough," she repeats.
    "Madame," I find myself saying, "how may I entertain
you?"
    The room fills with a terrifying void, borne from her
cold Welsh blood. A mist of icicles forms over the longtable draped
by the red tablecloth, and people find their hands halfway to their
mouths, food raised, uneaten. I fear for my life. I will be hanged
now, taken to a gallowbraid and thrown off the side of the platform
by this darkeyed woman and her timid, complying husband. I will be
kept in the wine cellar till dawn, swatting drunken mice, and in
that moist-eyed fresh breath of day I will see the whole of
creation pass before me as I take fugue steps up from the damp to
the sunlight and the dew of summer's toil, my feet drawn by the
woman's harsh words toward a fate of breathless--and--but here the
ealdorman's wife is speaking to me.
    "Play a love song," she whispers, and this is somehow
worse than being executed on the gallows.
    I don't understand love. I say so. She dismisses
it.
    "Madame," I repeat, "I'll play for you, but I know
nothing of love."
    "Yes," her lips say, "that's what I want to hear
again."
    I'm frightened of her passion.
    There is an old song, some say it comes from Master
Boethius himself, that speaks of the devotion that the constant
Penelope felt toward her husband, the warrior errant, Odysseus. It
speaks of long years alone, sequestered in a house, surrounded by
enemy lovers like flies buzzing,