Woodsburner by John Pipkin Read Free Book Online Page A

paper. He worked late into the night, rewriting the Latin benediction into a blasphemous tangle. None of his followers will understand a word of what he is about to say, but it is not them he means to offend. This patch of earth will be more than the bedrock of their new congregation. It is here that Caleb will put the Almighty to the test, here that he will at last tempt God to give evidence that He is not some pitiful illusion.
    Caleb looks up from his text and feels a cold hand seize his heart. There, at the edge of the field, he sees two old women; he guesses that they are sisters by the similarity of their mannish features and their close-cropped silvered hair. He thinks he might have seen them once before, but only from a distance. They speak to each other behind cupped palms while mimicking the gestures the carpenter made earlier, outlining imaginary steeples and doors. And after each gesture they point to a different part of their bodies—an elbow, a thigh, a forearm—as if they were casting aspell. He starts to tremble as they approach. Absently, he reaches for the hatchet he has not brought today. He thinks of Revelation, the Gospels, Genesis, but he recalls nothing about the Devil assuming the form of two old women.
    His followers take no notice of the women, so enraptured are they by the light in the woods. It grows brighter, as if moving closer. The women hobble toward Caleb with agonizing slowness, and he fully expects their ancient faces to be his last vision in this world before their curses send him spiraling into a realm of indescribable suffering. He braces himself for judgment and whispers,
“Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself for thou that judgest doest the same things.”
    The old women stand before him, withered faces, twisted bodies; their demeanor gives belated credence to the fears of an earlier generation in Salem. They mumble to each other in a strange language; then the taller of the two speaks in fractured English.
    “Prominte!”
Her eyes are black, her blind companion's milky white. “We are begging your pardon.”
    “This is to be
kostel?”
the shorter woman with milky eyes asks impatiently. She turns to her dark-eyed friend, seeking out her shadow, whispers a question, and then says again,
“Kostel!
Yes,
kostel—
ah, church, yes? You build church?”
    “How do you know this?” Caleb sputters. He notices that the others have begun to drift toward the light, leaving him alone. Thus does the hand of the Almighty rescue the faithful, he thinks. The Lord is shepherding them from the chasm about to open beneath his feet, guiding them away from the thunderbolt about to fall from the sky.
    “We are hearing of this,” says the blind woman.
    “We are wondering,” the dark-eyed woman adds. “You are making with bones, maybe?”
    “Yes. Yes,” says the other woman. “You will build for us church of bones?”
    Caleb's hands tremble as if they will fly from their wrists, and the empty field seems to move away in all directions. He becomes conscious of his skeleton, brittle beneath his skin and muscles, a flimsy frame for an unworthy soul.
    The dark-eyed woman swings her skinny forearm from the elbow and points emphatically to her wrist.
“Kost
. Bone. Bones.
Rozumite?
Understanding you? Yes?”
    “Like trees, to build with bones.” The blind woman crosses her forearms in a pantomime of stacking firewood, and she holds Caleb with her milky-white stare. “In old country. In
Kutná Hora
. We have beautiful chapel made from the bones. The altar with beautiful ornamentings from bones. All bones. Not animal. People bones. White, beautiful bones.”
    “Sedlec Kostnice,”
the other woman added as an explanation. “It is what you call
Beinhaus
, yes? Full with bones.”
    “You will build here a new church like this, with people bones?”
    Caleb closes his eyes and holds his breath. He waits for