Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

Cherub

Childbirth always means pain, and not just for the mother who must strain to expel both the squalling infant and its parasitic demon rider from her womb. It also torments those of us who must stand around the outer wall of the birthing shed and watch, both eager for our first look at the baby and dreading our first glimpse of the hateful attached thing bearing the face of the corruption in that child’s heart.

It is midday. A peremptory daylight enters the shed in stripes, illuminating the dust in the air, but not the bleakness of these last moments before we discern the nature of the monster who will accompany the child into the land of the living. My beloved wife Faith squats in the center of the room, slick with sweat and tears. Her straw hair clings to her cheeks, and her toes sink into the diarrheic puddle she expelled as the ordeal entered its final stage. She has uttered curses since dawn that prove the common wisdom that women turn savage during birth: oaths of terrible hatred directed against the child inside her and I the man who planted the seed. I believe she would kill me, and it, right now, just to be rid of the pain.

I know I’m right about the rage because of her own personal rider, a hideous idiot monkey-thing riding piggy-back on her soft shoulders, whose spindly leprous arms lead to scaled claws buried knuckle-deep in her temples, leers at me over the top of her head. It is the embodiment of everything that is bad about this mostly good woman I married, and it mocks me with the deep pleasure it takes in her suffering. Its tiny piggish eyes and moron leer, all sharp teeth and pointed tongue, manifest the vindictive cruelty my darling wife is prone to whenever the world requires more of her than she can freely give. Despite the genuine affection she has always shown for me, Faith has also always been capable in heated moments of flinging words that flay all my self-respect away in a single lashing sentence. Even as she strains with the effort of expelling our son, her rider’s face betrays the few secrets Faith bothers to keep, her unspoken resentment of every passing disappointment I’ve ever caused her rippling across its noxious features like pus flowing from a septic wound.

Nor am I any better. My own demon rider, whose petty features betray my cowardice, my pettiness, and my secret selfishness, tightens its grip on my skull and tickles the part of me that cares not for Faith’s pain and wants only for this long, stinking, noisome day to end. I’m certain that Faith can see that and I can only hope that she sees the best of me, the part of me not embodied by my rider, as easily as she can see the worst.

The men of the village form a circle around the wall of the shed, their arms linked in the traditional last gesture of defiance against whatever evil thing comes to join us atop the child about to burst from Faith’s slit. They are silent. Their riders keep up an animated conversation between themselves: not one we can hear, thank the Lord, for if riders spoke aloud their voices would drown out our own. It is not a nice conversation. The riders make faces, they make obscene gestures, they laugh long and hard, they pull their talons from the bore holes in our skulls and nail them in again, in cruel emphasis of their dominion over us. I think they are arguing between themselves. I think they are wagering on the new arrival. I think they are as tired of the wait as we are.

On either side of me, my brothers Noah and Eben hold my arms, counseling strength. They have always been good men, but Noah’s gibbering imp of arrogance and Eben’s stone-faced golem of coldness peer over their respective faces. I am entitled to hate my brothers a little for this, and no doubt my own rider—(that loathsome many-eyed insectile thing, that whispers obscene things to me in the night, that assures my wife of the vile rape fantasies I must sometimes employ to keep me hard during the act of love)—now shares that secret with them, over whatever pretense of a grateful look I can place on my own merely human features.

Then Faith screams, her voice hoarse and breathless. “They’re coming!” The word becomes a bellow as she puts all she has into the final push, expelling a gout of blood and the head of a baby, which for a moment dangles between her spread legs, glistening scarlet. She gasps, takes a sideways crab-step to relieve the horrendous cramps in her knees, and squeezes again. My newborn son lands in the dirt we’re all heir to, the dirt that greets us as we enter the world and embraces us again as we leave. There is of course something on the back on his neck, something as soft and as rounded and as new to the world as he is: the passenger that will define much of what he is, even now grasping him by the neck, cementing its grip on who he will be.

This is the most terrifying moment, for any parent. In my life I have attended births where the first sight of the rider was enough to prove that no joy would ever come from the child, where the rider’s distinct features branded its human mount as thief or rapist or murderer, and the babe for all its apparent innocence was revealed as naught but a seed from which nothing but evil would ever grow. True, even those were usually permitted to live, for even a future murderer might be able to live a worthy life blessed to his kin until the moment he commits his terrible sin, and remains possible to value such a person, even if it will always be impossible to look at them without some inner voice raising that dread question, when? But that is still a shattering thing to see for the first time, on what should be a day of celebration.

And even that would not be the worst. I still have nightmares about that foul morning some five years gone when my neighbor Jeremiah’s son was born and the thing on his back bore the face of something so savage that we could scarcely bare to look at it: an awfulness that we could only compare to riders of legend whose human hosts had not just killed once or twice out of greed or rage, but slaughtered freely, sometimes entire families and sometimes entire populations, in sprees driven only by their sheer love of killing. When Jeremiah took the child from his shrieking wife and headed for the village well, we all knew what he intended to do, and none saw the point in stirring a muscle to stop him. After all, he’d borne his own murderer imp since birth, and the time had now come for him to live up to it.

Now I have to behold my own child, and see whether the sins on his back bring more heartbreak than joy. My brothers release me, and I join my darling Faith, who still strains with the afterbirth. I tell her I love her and I take a deep breath and lifetimes later raise my son from the filthy puddle that is his first introduction to a debased and sinful world.

He is a tiny thing, bearing the correct number of arms and legs and a scrunched-up face indignant about the ordeal just forced on him. He coughs out a mouthful of liquid and then starts to cry, a high-pitched, angry wail that assails me his fury at me for inviting him into a place this filled with pain and fear. I sense that he is strong, and before I allow myself to feel the first stirrings of love for him turn my attention to the creature on his back, which is of course even smaller than him, and so covered with slime and blood that it is at first impossible to determine its true nature. Somebody hands me a wet cloth, so I can clean it enough to see; and as I wipe away the blood and the piss and all the other shiny effluvia of life, I first feel fear, and then puzzlement, and then relief, and then the dawning amazement of a man faced with the kind of miracle no man dares hope for.

From the shadows, Eben asks me what it is.

The tiny creature clinging to the back of my son’s neck is beautiful. It is pure and it is innocent. Its face is as smooth and as unmarked by any of the possible cruelties or follies as the mirrored surface of a lake can be when undisturbed by wind or current. Its eyes are closed, its expression sweet. Its hands are not the sharp, raking claws we all know from our own riders, but hands that could belong to any other baby’s, and they cling to my son’s neck without breaking the skin, their touch more gentle caress than possessive grasp. It is absolute innocence personified: something that exists only in legend, something that no man I know has ever worn, something no parent I’ve ever heard of has ever dared hope for.

“It’s a cherub,” I say.

Fifteen years later, I am at home tending to my infant daughter, when Eben rushes in with the bad news. My son Job has been beaten and robbed again.

I wish I could say this was a shock. It is not the first time, or the tenth, that others have seen my son’s innocence as weakness, and done whatever they wanted to him, whether robbery, bullying, or—on one terrible occasion—rape. His back is a relief map of scars, his face a history of all the brutal things other boys have done to the one perfect boy who will not defend himself for any reason. Many of these are also visible on the back of his rider; not just because our riders tend to take on the same ravages time inflicts on us, but because more than one boy ridden by something foul and angry has attempted to peel my son’s harmless rider away, with fingernails and sticks and even knives, in the apparent belief that the boy envied and despised by all should not even be left that which marks him as what he is.

I know it is my duty to go with Eben, to tend to the son cursed by a birth that failed to sufficiently damn him. I should, but I feel a great weariness, the kind that only comes after years and years of watching someone you care for live through one torment after another. I am tired of hearing that the other boys have beaten him. I am tired of hearing that strangers have robbed him. I am tired of hearing him lashed with the kind of horrible words that leave barbs in the skin and continue to fester even after the surface wounds have healed.

It is not that I don’t know of other children who have been almost as brutally treated; there is a man in my village, Jared, ridden by a thing of perverted carnality, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Ruth avoids all eyes as she carries his latest rape-spawn to term. Everyone knows what Jared does to her at night. But she at least bears the imp of a future patricide on her back. She deserves what she gets and he deserves what she will do. A case can be made that Jared is only doing what he has to do, to punish her in advance for the inevitable moment when she will destroy him. But what of Job, who has never sinned, and never will sin? Who, it seems, may even be incapable of sin? How does he deserve what they do to him? How will his scales ever be righted?

I glance down at my new infant daughter Miriam, who is round-faced and beautiful and (I know from the hateful second face grinning at me over the smooth curve of her head) a brat, a user, a castrating bitch who will someday brandish her sex like a weapon to manipulate men who will give up their dignity and their principles for a mere moment of her favor. When she is old enough to know what her eldest brother is, she will doubtless manipulate him as well, showing him moments of kindness in between vivid demonstrations that she feels nothing for him but contempt. I feel no fear about her ability to make her way in the world. If anything, I take comfort in fearing for the world’s capacity to survive her attentions.

Faith enters from the other room leading our other son, the dull-eyed seven-year-old Paul, who is not feeble-minded as he would like us to believe but (we know from the features of the creature on his back) has an utter contempt for anyone but himself and a low and animal cunning that leads him to pretend dependence on others in order to get them to do things for him. It was difficult to remain patient with him when he resisted toilet training as a means of remaining a coddled, indulged infant; it will be even more difficult to endure the selfish, spoiled, half-formed being he will be as an adult. I know that my rider’s face clarifies the depth of my growing disgust for him, so I turn to Faith, who has aged thirty years in the past fifteen, and tell her that I need to go to Job.

Even as she takes Miriam to me and coos to her, the rider on her back flashes the mien of any mother who sometimes hates her own children, for making her worry about them, for making her spend time on them, for making her subsume everything she is to them. Paul, jealous of any attention spent on any human being other than himself, starts to tug at her sleeve. Faith reassures him, her sweetness never wavering even as her rider underlines how much she’d like to kill him.

I tell Eben to take me to my eldest son.

The two of us trudge through the streets of our village, which are cold and ankle-deep in slush from recent snowfalls. I do not look at the familiar faces of my neighbors, or at the faces of those who ride them. I do not look at the liars or the thieves or the bullies or the connivers or the bigots or the hypocrites or the self-satisfied stupid. I do not look at the adulterous or the violent or the ones who show compassion but exult when others feel pain. I do not look at the boy who kicks dogs or the girl who twists her little sister’s hair when their parents aren’t looking. I do not look at the other boy, the surprisingly gentle one who everybody knows will kill somebody someday, and who once tearfully confessed in my hearing that he wishes he didn’t know, because the knowledge leaves him unable to look at any other person, even the girl he likes, without wondering if that’s his future victim. And when I pass the glass window of Judah’s bakery I do not look at my reflection in the glass. I never look at my reflection in glass.

It is not that long a walk, overall. It is only an eternity.

In less than ten minutes we arrive at the crossroads on the edge of the village, where a small crowd has gathered around my bleeding son. There are wagons, some drawn by oxen and some by horses, left untethered in the grass, as their owners hopped down to bear witness. Two local girls who have always been kind and even loving to Job, despite what I know about their true natures from the savage crones clinging to their respective backs, tend to his wounds, cleaning the gash in his forehead and staunching the copious flow of blood from his nose. He whispers something to one of them, and she blushes. Then he sees me and his wounded but still beautiful features brighten at the sight.

As always, it takes my breath away, to see nothing hiding behind that love but more love; it is not something I’m used to.

This is the beautiful and the terrible thing about my boy Job. He is always as he seems. When he smiles, there is nothing behind that smile but warmth. When he offers to lend a hand, there is nothing behind that generosity but an eagerness to help. When he is hurt by others and later professes forgiveness, it is true forgiveness and not the kind of grumbling, suppressed resentment that amounts to vengeance, biding its time, but the absolute inability to pollute himself with grudges of any kind, even when he has been wronged so grievously that he could be forgiven for seething with hatred. He puts me, puts all of us, to shame. Maybe that’s why he’s so hated. People may think they despise those not as virtuous as themselves, but there’s no end to the reservoirs of wrath we bear for those we know to be better.

He tells me what happened. There was a gang of them. They came upon him as he returned from the next town with the goods I sent him to get, and swarmed him like rats, ripping his clothes, kicking his ribs, stealing his money and taking his goods. In the end, they took turns pissing on him.

I am livid. “Who?”

“You know I can’t tell you. I won’t subject them to your anger.”

“If you won’t give names, it’ll only happen again. You’ll never know a moment’s peace.”

I know it’s the wrong argument as soon as the words leave my mouth.

He says, “I already know peace.” And there is no denying that, in the same way that there is no denying that the sun rises, or that rain falls from the sky.

There is no denying that because, even now, even after its mount was savaged by savages, his cherub sleeps. Riders never sleep, not even when they ride those marked by indolence and sloth. A man’s sins always cling to him, even when he slumbers. Like all married men, I sometimes spend time on sleepless nights studying the features of the woman who shares my life, and even when her own face is a peaceful mask buried by the false death of sleep, her rider is always peering over the tousled curve of her hair, miming its endless caricatures of all the waking woman’s sins. But in all these years Job’s cherub has never once opened its eyes. It has always hugged his back in gentle acceptance of all that befell him, its dozing features testifying to a soul as placid, and yet as possessed of great depths, as a vast becalmed sea.

This is not a state of being I understand, as I would track down those responsible for this outrage and carve their punishment from their own flesh, with even less mercy than they showed my son… but then my passenger has always borne the features that mark me as vengeful at heart, and Job’s has always borne features marking him as a boy who refuses to hate.

“Tell me their names. I won’t hurt them. I’ll just make sure they never hurt you again.”

He tells me, “I’m sorry, father. I forgive them.”

From deep in the surrounding crowd there’s a rumble of derisive laughter, the kind a bully makes when he dismisses a weaker soul’s right to conduct his life without fear. I recognize the laugh before I turn, and find myself cursed by the awareness that it comes from a man who either knows who beat my son, or happily participated. He is a man known to me, whose own boys bore bruises and furtive looks before they grew old enough and large enough to become, like their father, blights on the lives of any with the misfortune to know them. He says, “It is like they all say. Your son is useless.”

The man’s name is Kenneth. He owns a pig farm outside of town, but lives better than his income from that enterprise could explain were it not supplemented by extortion and theft. He has burly arms and a weather-beaten face marked by too many scowls and not enough smiles; his shoulder-length red hair and beard frame his harsh features, always unruly, always catching the wind in a manner like a corona of fire.

These are the things I know of Kenneth. I know that he is stupid, in the way that the worst cruel and bullying men are stupid: that he is incapable of considering any concerns but his own, and sees any objections to his conduct as a personal affront, demanding of punishment. I also know that he is crafty, in the way that the worst cruel and bullying men are crafty; that he knows how to hurt people, and when, and has an infinite imagination when it comes to breaking them. I know that his wife is little more than a despised slave, who rarely opens her mouth for fear that he’ll shut it for her. I know that he lives with four other women, each of whom joined his extended family while barely more than children, at least two of whom he simply took from their families and rendered utterly devoted to him by the simple method of alternating brutality with unexpected kindness until they were willing to do anything he asked of them if it guaranteed the latter. I know that he has punished their prior families for trying to interfere, that homes have been burned, and livestock killed. And I know that, even without his rider’s terrible visage, a mask of cruel self-satisfaction not all that much more offensive than Kenneth’s own, it would be just as easy to see it in the set of his tiny black eyes.

A couple of his younger sons, who are still not coarsened to the degree he wants, refuse to meet my eyes. The three eldest meet them with defiance, enjoying my hatred. All five of their riders grin at me, their demented faces as exultant in their evil as Kenneth has always been in his.

Whether they witnessed the beating or not, everyone in the crowd knows at once that Kenneth directed his sons to beat and rob mine: and that he doesn’t care that we know.

The old man sneers. “Your son’s a woman. If you took his trousers off you would find a hole where a boy should have a good strong rope. A true man would have dirtied his knuckles with the blood of at least one of the scoundrels who attacked him, or at least now had the stones to name them. This one’s less a boy and more a mushroom, planted in shit, born without backbone and doomed to wither as soon as the sun strikes him.”

Even as I stand, my hands curl into fists. But I know it’s no good. I cannot stand against Kenneth alone, let alone his sons. Nor will any of my neighbors stand with me; certainly not Job, whose gentle right hand even now reaches up to touch my wrist, to assure me as always that this is nothing, that he can bear it, that no wound can be inflicted on him that his infinite soul will not heal.

I have never wanted to kill a man so much, and I have never been as shackled to the cowardice that is the least of my sins. I burn from the awareness that my rider shows Kenneth both.

His look of answering recognition is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

“Leave him alone,” I say, “or I’ll kill you.”

He chuckles and gathers his sons for the journey back home. I have no doubt that were I to wade into them with angry fists, and by some miracle reduce them to as battered a state as they left Job, I would find in their pockets the money they took from him, and in their cart the goods they stole; and I know that were I to raise my voice and demand that the other onlookers aid me in finding justice for my boy, there would be no takers. Even those who hate Kenneth agree with him on this: innocence has made Job worthless, as far as defending himself is concerned.

Even so, the moment would not pain me quite so much if one of the two pretty girls tending Job did not stand up and leave him behind, to hop aboard Kenneth’s wagon and sit pressed up against one of his sons.

Three years later, Leah enters our life for the first time.

She has been brought to us by her father, a man whose rider marks him as a cheat and occasional petty thief, but there is nothing in its manner or in his that marks him as anything but a parent who loves and cares for his daughter. I might keep an eye on my coin purse, but I believe him when he says that his only concern is for her.

Leah is a fragile wisp of a thing, with skin so pale it is almost translucent and hair so blonde that it is almost white. I would mistake her for albino if not for the tracing of freckles that form a constellation across both cheeks and the tip of her nose. She has weak eyes, by which I mean that she refuses to meet mine, not even when I speak kindly to her, and not when I tell her, in all honesty, that she is a pretty girl and that I am charmed by her face. In truth I am even charmed by her rider—it is no cherub, like my son’s, but it is so unmarked by anything terrible that it might as well be, resembling an innocent babe in all ways but for a powerful stormy affront about its eyes. It is not a happy thing, but neither is she. I have seen riders like hers on the shoulders of other souls too sensitive for this world, souls so helpless at fending off the cruelty of others that they don’t even grow inured to the sharp and cutting places inside themselves. It is the look of self-hatred, which can be as great a sin as any other, a look that anyone would recognize as the mark of a possible future suicide.

Leah and her father, who are strangers to us, come from a village further down the coast and have spent weeks on the road, traveling here. The reason is of course obvious. It is often said that a marriage can only be happy if the rider of the man and the rider of the woman betray sins of equal weight. A man whose rider marks him as an epic monster will bring nothing but misery to the life of a woman whose rider marks her as one whose sins amount to little more than weakness. And certainly a woman of cutting tongue and demeaning temperament will always drain the life from a man whose rider embodies nothing worse that a shiftless soul. No man or woman seeking some semblance of happiness should ever join with anyone much worse than themselves, else they risk bearing the weight of their partner’s rider as well as their own.

Leah’s father has always despaired of finding her a man capable of treating her with the kindness she will need to survive. And our greatest fear for Job’s future has always been the impossibility of finding him a wife who would not take advantage of his unassuming nature and enslave him in ways beyond the chains that should be forged by love. It is indeed part of why we have ordered him to remain close to home, these past few years; not just because of the danger he faces from rapacious people like Kenneth’s family, but because too many of the local girls have divined at a glance just how much power they would have over him if ever they ensnared him into marriage. I have seen what rides the shoulders of those with the kindest eyes and sweetest faces and shuddered at the thought of my poor son, subjected to their version of love without any rider of his own to provide him the strength he would need to have any will of his own.

So, yes, I understand why Leah’s father thinks his daughter and my son might be the greatest hope for one another. But as we all sit together in our home’s largest room, the unshuttered windows admitting a hot dry wind from the west, the conversation erupts only in fits and starts. Three-year-old Miriam cries nonstop and tugs at her mother’s leg, upset beyond reason that the gathering isn’t about her. Ten-year-old Paul, who always resents the attention she gets, tugs at her ear and makes her cry. Leah averts her eyes to avoid meeting Job’s, he struggles to find words that won’t be embarrassing or shameful, and the air itself thickens like amber, trapping us all in an afternoon that seems to have stopped like time.

A few minutes after Faith goes into the other room to stir the stewpot—Paul following so closely behind her that he might as well be a second rider, clinging to her with the insistent intimacy of a mistake—I mutter that I better go check on her and find my beloved wife weeping in utter despair that anything will ever turn out all right. Nothing I say to her, no reminder of how shy I was the day we met, will staunch the tears. I ask her what’s wrong. She draws close and beats at my chest with her fists, while Paul continues to tug at her apron. She asks me, “What did God think he was doing, when he gave us one son too good for this world?”

This prompts a tantrum from Paul, who hates the special regard his mother has for Job. The screeching begins.

Dinner is grim.

It is not until much later, when the smaller children have been banished to bed and the adults have wandered to a different part of the house to talk about something, anything, but the fiasco we believe we’re experiencing, that I look out the window and spot something in the gathering twilight that takes my breath away.

Unnoticed by any of us, Job and Leah have stolen off together, to the edge of the meadow, well within the distance we have declared safe for him but farther than he has ventured since the last time he was rendered bloody from a neighbor child’s hurled stones. It is late in the year, and the sun is just starting to set. They stand facing one another, but not eye-to-eye the way they would be if about to kiss. She’s looking down at his feet, her long hair hanging like a curtain over any emotions that might be betrayed by her features. He’s doing something that most people would consider obscene even in marriage, and downright scandalous when seen in two young people who have only met a few hours ago: reaching past her face to stroke her unhappy, self-loathing rider on the back of its head.

From the window, I can see the face of Leah’s rider far more clearly than I can see her own. I can see that stormy scowl so redolent of misery resist his touch, and even grimace from resenting it. And then I see that scowl falter, come back as angry as ever as the rider realizes it’s losing, and then disappear completely. The rider’s features smooth over, becoming placid. Its eyes close. It adopts the expression of a baby lost in sleep. It becomes a cherub, as unpolluted by darkness as his own.

As Leah looks up to face my son, the curtain of blonde hair falls away from her delicate profile, revealing cheeks slick with tears that are just beginning to curl into an unaccustomed smile.

Job and Leah don’t kiss, yet, but instead just stand there looking at one another, their lips moving in words I would almost kill to hear. She looks down again, but this is just a flicker, a moment of vestigial reflex no longer relevant after a lifetime. Her rider continues to doze. His never stirs. The setting sun makes the meadow glow red, cradling boy, girl, and riders in what might as well be a wreath of flame.

The news that a boy and girl ridden by cherubim—his that way from birth, hers created by a moment of kindness from him—have betrothed spreads from village to village, bringing not just curiosity-seekers but monsters, seeking to spread the hurt as a matter of principle. Our neighbors close ranks. Many of those who abused Job in the past take to watching the roads in and out for strangers whose riders signal their intent to do harm.

Even that human viper Kenneth takes part, driving his boys against a caravan of ragged and unshaven men whose riders all bear faces marking them as the worst kind of vindictive destroyers, the kind of men who spread misery not out of greed or hatred but for the sheer joy of shattering the lives of those more fortunate than themselves. Kenneth and his sons confront this wolf pack, determine that they have come from many miles away to entertain themselves by committing malicious mischief against this couple they have heard about, this man and woman who consider themselves so special, and with remarkable efficiency sent them on their way, missing coin-purses, wagon, clothing, a number of teeth, and in one case a right eye. I do not forgive Kenneth and his family for what they have done to mine in the past, but I now give him a nod when we make eye contact encountering one another in public. Maybe he’s decided that his family has tormented Job enough.

My brothers, alas, are less sanguine about our newfound hope for a better future. They buy me ales at the inn and congratulate me on the upcoming new addition to the family but turn dark as the brew poisons their blood and hint at bad times to come.

Noah says, “I fear for the children of such sinless people. Whether ridden by cherubim or demons themselves they’ll have the misfortune of growing up with parents unable to summon enough anger or hatred to protect them from anyone not quite so pure.”

Eben has other worries. “They will have trouble if they become parents. A mother and father without so much as a dark thought in their heads will never be able to tend to children prone to lies, cruelty, or worse.” He goes on to tell us the story of a mother and father he knew during the five years he lived further down the coast, whose riders were, though not quite cherubim, also not quite formidable enough to arm them against their son, who was a little monster. By the time that boy reached adolescence, he ruled their home like a despot, reducing mother and father to beasts of burden too terrified to do anything but indulge his slightest whim. Nor did it ever end for them, for why would such a little monster ever seek a life away from his parents, when his parents were so incapable of denying him?

Eben tosses back another drink and tells me that I should take special care that Paul does not end up like that. “You need to take him in hand now or know the nightmare he will become later.”

It is all true, every word of it, but from the way my other brother Noah peers with sudden alarm over my shoulder I know that my rider reflects the extent of my growing anger. He mutters some words about how I should take all this as well-meaning advice and not as mockery.

I allow myself to be mollified, and return to my drink. But when I walk home, later that night, more than one of my neighbors, passing me on the way, walks a little faster when they see me, or the terrible aspect of my rider. For I know that my brothers are right.

I sleep that night in a downstairs bed to avoid frightening Faith with the rage of my rider. She will never miss me, not when Paul still insists on sleeping between us, a living barrier erected to exclude his invasive father from the territory on his mother’s side of the bed. My dreams are terrible, though when I wake I don’t remember how. With dawn still hours away I trudge to the outhouse and return, taking a protective detour past Job’s door, which is always ajar, an invitation to a world that he insists on treating with trust. He is sleeping. I stand there for long minutes and listen to him breathing, marveling as any father would at the miracle of a boy now on the threshold of becoming a man, and reeling from the terrible vertigo that can only be known by a parent of a child in danger.

Job and Leah become husband and wife seven months later, in the tradition of our village. We stand them in the public square, carve a tight circle in the dirt around both, and bid spend four hours back-to-back, their riders pressed together in mutual acceptance of the respective sins borne by both man and woman. This has always been, by our teachings, the most intimate covenant by which the betrothed can demonstrate not just their love for one another, but their acceptance of the very worst to come.

Tradition among us holds that if either the bride or groom can be driven from the circle before the time is up, their sins will always stand between them and that they must therefore not be wed. Friends, family, and strangers are encouraged to surround them shouting whatever they can, to drive the pair apart… sometimes bribes, sometimes declarations of love, sometimes just mocking recitations of all the reasons why they’re bound to make one another miserable. In my day I have seen many a wedding end with the bride breaking down in tears and fleeing, face in hands, minutes before the end of that four hours, and have never doubted the ceremony’s efficiency at preventing marriages doomed to misery.

Other villages do it differently, I hear. Eben says that some far from here, which he visited during the years he spent as a wanderer, have a specific series of prayers recited by a designated holy man. This makes no sense to me at all, as I have never seen a man anywhere who could be called holy. Even Job isn’t holy, the more appropriate word for him being innocent. All I know is that if I ever did meet a self-professed holy man who claimed the power to preside over the most intimate moments of my life I wouldn’t let him speak prayers about anything having to do with my family unless I first spent long minutes examining whatever rode on his back. I personally suspect that the riders of these holy men may be even worse than those carried by those of us who don’t claim freedom from sin.

For hours Job and Leah stand back to back inside the small circle, the spine of his sleeping rider pressed tight against the spine of hers, both demonstrating a level of divine peace well beyond the reach of those of us whose riders snarled and spat and brandished our worst secrets on this special day. Both Job and Leah are calm, smiling, confident of their ability to outlast the ordeal.

Outside the circle, the required ritual abuse by our neighbors is mostly restrained, limited to little more than good-natured teasing. The unmarried girls cavort and waggle their tongues at Job, promising him endless nights of wanton abandon should he abandon his foolish devotion to this girl with no idea how to set a fire in a wedding bed. The unmarried men advise Leah that they understand her ignorance in these matters, but feel obligated to tell her that Job has a root doomed to remain soft for life and that she’d be better off spreading her legs for a man who can make his stand at attention. There is a bad moment when Kenneth strides from the crowd and circles the pair, looking over both of them as if appraising pigs that have come to market, but after two orbits he nods his head and ambles away, with a nod at me that I can almost consider friendly. It is never possible to tell for certain, but there is nothing in his eyes or in the eyes of his rider that betrays simmering malice against my son and his bride. He doesn’t seem to be letting the day pass without incident only so that he can indulge his cruel appetites later. There is reason for hope.

The afternoon is of course not completely without trouble. Paul, who we gave the honor of drawing the circle, grows upset that his contribution is over with and that he is no longer the focus of all eyes. He starts whining that he’s bored and then wailing that he wants to go home, and is unstirred by appeals that this is his brother’s day and that he should be as happy for him as we all are. Miriam gets sick from something she’s eaten and is soon as cranky and as inconsolable as her middle brother. The tension Faith has felt up until this day combined with the poor behavior of our younger children makes her blame me for being so useless a father.

But all of this falls far behind next to something else I see, something that I have never heard tell of happening before, and that as far as I can tell only I can see, because I will afterward question my wife and friends and neighbors and find not a one who confesses to beholding what my eyes are blessed to behold now. As I watch, amazed, Job’s sleeping rider turns its little head and, without ever opening its eyes, brushes its lips against the cheeks of Leah’s rider. Her rider, without opening its eyes, turns its head and kisses his on the lips. Both riders then turn their attentions back to those they ride. I look up at the faces of my son and his bride and see from both blinding smiles that both are fully aware of what just happened, and both know what it means. This is not just the only possible union for a boy born without sin and a girl who lived too long without hope; nor is it just the loving union we all hoped for. It is the kind of union they write about in the stories, the kind that is not supposed to happen in the real world. Maybe it is why even Kenneth would not wield his evil against them. I can only dare to hope, my knees turning weak at the thought.

As the ceremony ends a great weight lifts from me as a cheer erupts from my friends and family and neighbors and the couple is mobbed by well-wishers who hoist them aloft and carry them about like trophies for long minutes before once again allowing their feet to touch the ground. Another cheer splits the sky as the couple kiss a second time. Job embraces his mother and then me and tells me that it does his heart well to know that I was watching on this glorious day. Leah kisses me on the cheeks and tells me that she will take joy, from this day forward, in being able to call me father. Even Paul senses the tug of family and congratulates his older brother. The songs and dancing begin, and then the feasts. It should be the happiest day of my life.

I can only wish I knew why I remain afraid.

Another two years later, something big happens. I do not know how to classify it in my heart. There must be a special word for an event of staggering undiluted evil that can only stun you with its depravity, that you are bound by all standards of human decency to regard with and that you cannot help face with any emotion darker than relief. But I do not know it. I can only report what’s happened and try to measure my feelings later.

Kenneth has been murdered.

It should be no surprise. His family has if anything gotten worse over the past few years, robbing homes and stealing livestock and growing their little colony of corruption by taking girls by force and making them too frightened to leave. In the last three years, three men who decided to stand against him had their homes burned, and one disappeared on his way home from an errand, leaving no signs of the nature of the misfortune that befell him. Kenneth was always in a public place, making himself visible, whenever these things happened, though he never showed any surprise whenever somebody came running from a distance to report the news. Nor were his sons anywhere to be seen. There was always a terrible, mocking knowledge in his eyes, showing us how much he relished our awareness that the responsibility remained his even when his hands were empty and displayed in plain sight. He loved our impotence.

I have always known that it was just a matter of time before somebody did what so many have wanted to do.

Noah, who witnessed the event, brings the news while I am at Job’s house helping adding a room for the baby now only two months away. We have been working all afternoon, enjoying the heat of the day and the slick sheen of sweat our labor summons to our skin, and when Noah rides up, his horse shining from a hard gallop, we wave at him, thinking at first that he’s only come to help us. But then he gasps out the news and we put down our hammers and we step away from the skeletal frame of the nursery under construction and join my brother on the front porch so he can tell us what happened while we were here preparing for the miracle of new life. After a few seconds Leah comes out preceded by her belly to hand him a cup of water, then stays to listen.

This is what he tells us.

It happened a little more than an hour ago.

Kenneth rode his open wagon into the village to pick up some supplies he’s sent for, accompanied by his eldest son and the youngest of the young girls to join his extended family. She is Amelia and she is fourteen and she has been with him with three years, a relationship that began when she reported being raped by him at eleven, changed when she recanted two days later, and became whatever it is now when she left her parents and two younger sisters and moved in with Kenneth, calling him her “husband.” Following the usual pattern, her parents expressed outrage and appealed to her neighbors to help them rescue their darling girl, receiving little help before inevitably showing up bearing cuts and bruises and frightened expressions to go along with their insistence that it was all a misunderstanding and that Amelia’s new marriage had their blessing. The girl has rarely been seen in public, since then. Today, the first time in months, her little belly was as swollen with new life as Leah’s.

Kenneth pulled his wagon up to the community store, tied up the horses, then took his boy and went inside to get and carry out his goods. It took several trips. Amelia remained silent where she sat, not answering anybody who tried to speak to her. A crowd started to form. By the time Kenneth and his son finished the loading, half the village was there, many surrounding the wagon in a crowd five bodies thick.

Shaking his head, Noah tells us that Kenneth was not afraid, even then. He had always been untouchable and he thought he was untouchable still. When he took the reins and told the crowd that they better move, because they were hemming him in, he had the eyes of a man who was memorizing faces. His rider’s burning visage declared a dozen separate vendettas. Then somebody, it could have been anybody, shouted a call to action. Somebody, it could have been anybody, dragged Kenneth’s son from his seat. Somebody, it could have been anybody, grabbed Kenneth as well and forced him to the ground, where he was engulfed by a wave of shouting people.

He would have survived the beating.

But somebody, it could have been anybody, stabbed him in the heart.

So far, nobody had confessed to seeing who drove the blade between his ribs, though a number of the people there had long borne riders bearing the face of murder and a number bore riders bearing the face of complicity. No one will testify against a killer. In a sense, they may all be killers.

I do not know how to feel about this. Kenneth’s family hurt someone I loved as much as anyone I loved has ever been hurt. There was once a time when I might have snuffed out his life myself, had I believed there was a chance that I might get away with it. But either I’ve grown soft with the years or the long time he’s left my loved ones alone have diluted any hatred I feel. No weight has been lifted from my heart.

Leah, looking sad, asks, “Is his son all right?”

Noah tells her, “As all right as any boy can be when his father is murdered mere steps away from him.”

“And the girl?” Job asks.

Noah tells him, “She is unharmed as well. She has been brought to the home of her mother and father, neither of whom she has seen in more than a year. There is no telling whether she will stay there, rather than return to Kenneth’s family, but for the moment she is where she should be.”

Job says, “Good.”

It is his only immediate reaction.

After a little while Noah takes his leave of us and gets back on his horse, to bring the news to some of our more distant neighbors. We return to working on the new room. More than a hour passes, by my estimation, before I ask Job to stop.

He puts his hammer down and waits.

“If you were not the man I know you to be, and if I were not with you all day today, I would have wondered all my life whether you’d been the one to put that knife through that bastard’s ribs.”

Unhurt and unsurprised, he says, “But I am, and you were.”

“True. But with the man dead, there’s no reason to not tell me the truth. Was Kenneth the one who beat and robbed you, that last time?”

“Yes. Him and one of his sons. I won’t say which son, but it was one of them.”

“God. Are you all right?”

He considers his answer a long time before answering. “If you’re asking me whether I feel any pleasure at Kenneth’s death, the answer is no. It solves nothing. The world is still awash with brutality, and becoming part of it, even taking distant pleasure in it, interests me not at all. All I feel is sadness for a man whose rider so bubbled with hatred and pain that he could only achieve release by sharing it.”

“But don’t you feel safer?”

“Of course not.” He takes up his hammer again and strikes a protruding nail just once before looking ill and putting the tool down. “One day I was born. Someday I will die. What takes place between the beginning and the end is too short to fill with fear. The bad days happen from time to time, and more must be coming, but I’ve had far too many good ones in between to give the bad more weight than they’re worth.”

My vision blurs. “You’re a far better man than I’ll ever be.”

“No, I’m not. I will not lie to you, father. I fear that I’m not the man you and so many others believe me to be. I’m capable of hating people who hurt me, and wishing for bad things to happen to them. But I don’t want to hurt anyone back. While I’m alive I just want to live the best life I can, and this is the only way I know how.”

I know him well enough to recognize the closest he ever comes to annoyance. It hurts him, hurts everything he is, to be pressed for some form of celebration at his old tormentor’s death. It is the chief disadvantage of having a paragon for a son. Sometimes, many times, I cannot live up to him.

It is only late that night, as I lie beside Faith, that I wake and realize that it must not have been Kenneth I’ve feared all these years… for in asking Job whether he felt any safer, I neglected to notice that I do not.

The wheel of time continues to turn. Life in the village becomes much more peaceful without Kenneth around to prey on us. His sons heed the warning that there is only so much their neighbors will take from them, and scale back their criminality, without ever ceasing it. Leah strains a day in the birthing shed and presents Job with a son they name Isaac whose gentle rider betrays no sin worse than mischief. I put the baby in twelve-year-old Paul’s hands and he looks down at his new nephew with harmless bafflement, almost dropping him when the baby’s lips burble over with cheese. Miriam toddles about, stealing hearts with sideways glances. Leah brings me a jacket she has made for me and kisses me sweetly on the forehead, telling me that I am her second father, blessed for raising a man who could tame her rider and teach her that life can be an occasion filled with joy.

While playing with my grandchild I catch a glimpse of my face in a mirror and am stunned to see that my own rider has been tamed as well. All my adult life I have tried to be a good husband to Faith and loving father to the children, but I have also always been aware, as much from the way it felt in my heart as from the terrible aspect of the second face peering over my own, that it has always been more the act of a man pretending to be good than a man who could just be. I have always told myself that this is true for everybody, because we all feel the weight of our riders and we all know the evils we bear. It does not mean that the good among us are frauds. But I have always felt that way anyway… until this moment when I see the reflection in the glass and realize for the first time that happiness, years of fighting the worst in myself, and the example of a man better than any I ever hoped to be, can calm the greatest beast. My rider’s gnarled features have smoothed, its aspect turned more human than ever before. It is not the peace Job and Leah know. But it is still more than any man could ever hope for. I turn to Faith, beaming, and see her beaming back, her own rider as soft and innocent as it has ever been. This may be the most loving moment of all our years together.

We make love that night: the kind of love that only long-marrieds can make, when they are reminded of how hot their flames burned in youth.

I don’t know why, but I remain awake long after Faith has surrendered to sleep, all the strangeness of the world large in my thoughts. After a long time I kiss the back of my dozing wife’s hand and go to the common-room, lighting a candle so I can look at myself in the mirror again. My face is lined with the kind of furrows that come with years, and hard work, and broad smiles, and—it stuns me to see—wisdom.

My rider, wide-awake and curious, blinks at me, wondering what I’m up to. I find myself, wondering, idly, if its current strange purity would be at all affected by deliberate and conscious evil on my part. It is the kind of game played at least once by every child who ever picked up a mirror, tired of making silly faces at themselves and wondered if their rider could be induced to do the same.

It could be done. The philosophers say that our riders don’t define us. We would not be perfect people, if we were lucky enough to be born without them. We would instead be people whose sins were hidden, who could conceal their most vile natures behind the most angelic countenances. We would never know if a man was fated to become a rapist, or a woman a murderess; we would not find out until the sins were committed, and the evidence of their crimes lay bleeding on cold earth. There would even be those of monstrous aspect but innocent hearts condemned for deeds committed by others: a terrible thought that speaks to alien possibilities, and worlds even worse off than our own. What would the world be like, if the prisons could fill with innocent men?

I have not indulged in this kind of experiment since I was young. But a strange whim drives me to make the attempt now. I concentrate on the very worst atrocities I can think of, trying to mean them as more than ridiculous abstractions. I will go back to our bed and take Faith by force. I will go to Miriam’s bed, take her by the ankles, and smash her skull open against the wall. I will do what some monstrous parents do and take Paul as a man takes a woman. I will go out in the night and knock on Job’s door, pretending an emergency just so I can strangle him with my bare hands once we are alone. I will hold Isaac below water and

I cannot go on. I am too sickened by even thinking these things, and feel shamed for allowing them to take root, for even a moment, in the imperfect soil of my mind. Maybe I am an evil man, after all. But my rider just blinks at me, its expression as placid as before, marked only by the confusion of a child who has just seen his father spouting inane gibberish.

Our riders are part of us. They know our pretenses. They know what we are and what we only pretend to be. I cannot summon enough pretend evil to fool my own, any more than I could have summoned enough pretend good.

Maybe that’s what prevents true evil from overrunning the earth.

I put down the mirror, blow out the candle, and return to my wife’s side, imagining myself at peace.

And then one day two years afterward Job shows up at my front door carrying Isaac’s shattered body.

If a man’s life is like a ribbon of time, stretched out upon the earth and extending from the moment his parents conceive him to the moment some bedridden old man releases his last breath into a world that has long since robbed all of his reasons for living, then there are during those years moments that cut like daggers, that can plunge from the sky and snap that ribbon in two. They can even be poisoned, these moments, carrying toxins so foul they shrivel everything to come and everything that came before. Any happiness that ever existed becomes a lie, any hope that ever beckoned a fraud.

I don’t refer to my grandson’s death. It has only been one day since he toddled away from his mother and some damned drunken wagon-master crushed him in the road. It has only been one day since I saw his chest staved in, his little body opened by a scarlet groove where his ribs should have been. It is only one day since I heard Faith scream when she saw him, one day since I had to look into the eyes that had been laughing, just earlier that morning, now burst cherries in a darling face.

All of that was terrible and all of that was like having all the joy torn from the world, but that is not what tears the ribbon of my life in twain and poisons everything that came after and came before. It cannot be. I have lived a long time. I have had people I love die before; parents, friends, and once before all that the baby sister I had to go along with my brothers, who drowned at seven and left a hole I still feel after a life of never mentioning her name. I know that life is what you live in between watching the people you care about die, and though it breaks my heart it is not the dagger that cuts my life in half and makes all our lives a lie.

That happens later in the evening, when we are all gathered at Job’s home, offering what shallow comfort we can. Leah sits on the floor, her eyes staring, her hands shaking, her rider once again assuming the self-hating aspect it possessed when first we met. Faith sits by her side, whispering one empty reassurance after another. Miriam stays close to me, stunned by her first encounter with death in all its fullness. Noah and Eben stand silently by the wall, their hands folded before them, their shaggy heads turned toward a floor that fails to offer any clues as to what they can do to make the tragedy bearable, if not better. Job answers the many knocks at the door and accepts the condolences of neighbors who have heard about the tragedy and want us to know how sorry they are, kindly ushering away those who want to come in long after a lesser bereaved father might have gone mad.

At one point I recognize the visitor at the door as one of Kenneth’s sons, a brute who I’ve always believed to have participated in Job’s beating, and though he comes hat in hand and delivers his condolences in the tone of a man who dearly wishes he could be anywhere else, I feel the fury rise in me and almost race to the door to lash him with all the hatred of a father and grandfather irate that this pig still breathes while Isaac waits at the gravedigger’s house for his new home beneath dirt. But Job takes his old tormentor by the hand and thanks him, with a sincerity that shames me, as so many of the examples he’s set have shamed me.

The worst begins not long after that, as Leah starts talking about her fallen baby boy, the way he ran and played, the golden way he laughed. The memories wound her so much she starts to sob again. Job rushes to embrace her, to tell her that Isaac is not truly gone and all that nonsense. Faith holds her hand and murmurs sweet lies of her own, and all this might help, but I cannot tell, because we’re entering the worst of it, that horrid point in the shattering grief of the bereaved mother that only comes after the immediate shock of the tragedy passes and she finds herself seeing for the very first that this is now her world, the only world she’ll have.

And there’s no way to get past this moment except by living it, and in another few seconds we might be able to, but my other son Paul, who at twelve is more than old enough to know better but who has been simmering throughout all of this with the impatience known only to those who need every moment to be about themselves, incredibly chooses this of all possible moments, this one, to start tugging Faith’s sleeve and start whining that he’s bored, that he’s hungry, that he wants to go home…

Job curses him and shoves him away.

It’s a light shove, even if it does leave Paul sitting on his rear end with a comical look on his face. It would be forgiven from any bereaved father, seeking a moment’s respite from a brother half his age who has never been anything but entitled brat. But from Job, who has never in his entire life lost his patience, it hits with the impact of a thunderclap.

All sound in the room ceases.

Job’s lips move without making sound. He peers down at Paul and then at Faith and then at me, and each time he bears the look of any man caught in a monstrous lie. For the very first time I am able to see beyond his placid and compassionate eyes to an infinite and stormy place beneath. His face contorts with what might be shame and might be rage, though it’s impossible to tell because he has never betrayed either.

The shock is so great that it cuts through even Leah’s bottomless grief. She blinks up at him and says, Job?

He flees past my gaping brothers and barrels out into the night. Noah and Eben make to go after him, but their hesitation allows me to beat them to the door, where I assert my responsibility as father. Eben relents, muttering about this being the first time he could be sure the boy was even human. I glare at him and he looks away, before I depart.

It is not long before I find my son, kneeling in the meadow with his forehead pressed against a bare patch of dirt. He shakes and sobs as he pounds his fists against the ground. I can only approach and kneel beside him, allowing him to wail, thinking of how I might have acted if a catastrophe just as stupid had taken him, or Faith, or Paul, or Miriam. After a few seconds I say, “Come on, son. You need to be better than this.”

Without looking up at me he murmurs, “Why?”

“Because this isn’t you. Because your wife and your mother expect you to be strong… and when you’re not, it scares them.” I hesitate. “And me.”

The sound that bubbles up from the ground strikes me first as chuckle and then as sob, and then as some terrible mixture of the two, celebrating and mourning all at the same time. He claws furrows in the ground with his fingers and mutters something I cannot hear, something followed by the long seconds of weeping and then by the same words, repeated in a voice as empty as the shell he must feel he’s become. “This is me, father. This has always been me. You just never really knew who I was.”

I pull him upright and face him. “Yes, I did.”

This, again, seems to strike him as hilarious. He giggles and weeps, the tears pouring from him in waves. “I thought I could be a good man. I thought I could live the life of a good son, a good husband, a good father. I thought I could do it and that nobody I loved would ever be hurt.”

“It’s not your fault. These things happen.”

“You think so?”

“I know it, Job. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.”

“Oh, Father.” He bows his head and lays his fists against my chest, pounding me with a frustration that, even now, he keeps in check. “I keep telling you. I’m no man at all.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, son. That’s just the likes of Kenneth talking—”

He chokes on his snot and tears. “No, it’s true. I’m no man. I’ve sinned more than any true man could, every second of every day you’ve known me. I sinned by being liar and murderer and thief all at the same time, taking everything that belonged and ever would belong to another. Isaac’s death is just one of my punishments… and I’m afraid, so afraid, that the way you’ll look at me from now on is another.”

I have no idea what he’s going on about, not right away, but my incomprehension shatters him further, and he falls back to hands and knees, clawing at the ground as if hoping to dig himself a home there. Knowing only that whatever’s bothering him, however foolish, is as real to him as Isaac’s death, I draw closer and wrap my arms around his back, lending him the strength that is all I have to offer.

It is while I am doing this that the little creature on his back turns its little infant head to face me. Though it has made its own soul known once or twice in its many years among us, it has up until now always been the placid embodiment of innocence, the one quality we all remember from childhood that we all lose as we make the foul compromises required by life.

But now, in the instant before it opens its eyes, it occurs to me that innocence is not always a measurement of virtue. It can also be the domain of fetuses or infants, those who have not yet known life, or ever been permitted it.

The thing clinging to Job’s back opens its eyes and looks at me. I see through those eyes into a soul that should not be rider, but man: a soul trapped there by another, that now wakens after a lifetime of sleep.

For the very first time, I know the true face of my eldest son… and understand what that makes Job.