thunders of the upper deep

He didn’t come back to the land of his birth for the greater glory of Europe. He might have lived abroad, in the company of other Jesuits, and still been of use — but there’s nothing he can do now but return and return, return to villages like the one he left behind him and the one that waits for him — where God’s children will hear Mass and receive what their souls hunger for. His own hunger is a guilty thing, and it betrays him.

There must be some place to pray, some place to collect his thoughts where none of his parishioners is rushing to his side for consolation. This is a selfish impulse, but he can no longer ignore it — night is falling, and he’s alone. He picks his footsteps carefully along the rocks here in the stinging cold, and wet snow, and frost crackling along the shoreline. There on the edge of the water he sees the glint of flesh — something slick and indistinct. A drowned dog, or a very lost salmon.

Father Francisco Okuda says a prayer for strange things, and kneels in the wet snow to peer at it — stopping just short of poking the skinned hide with a stick. There’s no blood, but the sinews are still attached — a sort of ragged band, and when he turns the sinewy edge down there’s the edge of a white band on the oily black fur. He’ll have to draw a picture of it.

A man’s voice calls out: “What do you think you’re doing?”

He shrinks back from the hairy thing spread over the sharp rocks, hunger gripping his belly like the rattle of a drum — a strange sixth sense buzzing in his ears, the sense that he is not alone. There is a naked man in the water, his hair straggling over his shoulders like a woman’s — no, like John the Baptist’s in the wilderness. And this is a wild place, isn’t it?

“That’s not yours,” the naked man says, in an indolent pillar of white breath.

“Oh,” the priest says, “excuse me,” and rising from his haunches makes some gesture to transmit his own helplessness. The skins on the backs of his hands are stinging. He clutches his bag to his side, though surely if he is about to be robbed by one of his countrymen he won’t be able to mount much of a defense — and there are monsters in coastal waters, numerous and excellent reasons not to dawdle along the shore…

Of course, there was a man here all along. The dark streak on the rocks is not a hairy skin but a ragged garment, patched together from irregular lengths of cloth. The sweep of water had warped it — some trick of optics. How foolish, how absurd.

“You came from the village, didn’t you?”

Francisco clears his throat and straightens. “Yes, I came down to see—” The ocean? The coastline? “—the stars.”

There’s nothing familiar about this man, no resemblance to his local hosts or to anyone he has ever known — but then, there wouldn’t be, if he’s a peasant fisherman or a tradesman of some outcast occupation. The man gestures up the incline toward something, a blackened place — a fire, perhaps, too low to be seen from the road.

“You can’t be out here in the cold dressed like that. Come eat with me.”

For thereby some have entertained angels unawares— but this man doesn’t have the aspect of an angel, not like the images he’d seen in Manila or Macau. Yellow-haired and long-nosed. He’s handsome and black-haired and black-eyed, barrel-chested and thick-armed. But his feet — when he rises from the water it’s too clear. His feet are heavily ulcered, his crippled legs are marked out in pale patches and his gait over the rocky ledge lurches like a sailor’s.

Instantly, he understands. The man is a leper.

*

The heap of straw is not a heap at all, but a poor covering — little more than a lid over a hole in the rock, snug and dry but not warm. Any man might be justified in asking person questions in such close quarters — who his guest was, where he came from, why his attire didn’t match his speech, and so on. But this man makes conversation in an amiable kind of way, he shares a little millet and a tangle of dried squid — Francisco thanks him, but his eyes are on the man’s hands. He has the requisite number of fingers, but the fear of pestilence has been strong in Francisco’s mind since he was only a boy-delegante in a foreign land, shuttled off to Rome during an outbreak of plague — surrounded by stinking barbarian strangers, trapped in the strain between his first budding piety and his fear of contamination. Priests must not be afraid. It is sinful to be afraid. They can’t afford it.

“You must wonder why I’m out here too. I must have gotten lost. My people aren’t from around here.” He laughs a spectacularly barking laugh. The man has eyebrows but no eyelashes. “Where are you from, stranger? Don’t be shy.”

He might as well not bother to conceal the truth. There are equivocations for just such circumstances as these, but this man’s round ruddy ruined face is too earnest and it’s difficult to find him threatening. A leper has nothing to gain as an informant. Francisco tells him his family name, where they’re from, but not what’s brought him so far from Yedo.

“Oh, so you’re rich! That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

The man gestures with a salty curl of dried squid.

“Your bag.”

“What about it?”

“You’ve been grabbing on to it since we met. Your knuckles are white. What do you have in there that’s so important? Tell me it isn’t money. I don’t have any use for money.” No doubt no one will take it from him. If the people of the town knew an unclean leper had set up camp nearby, they’d drive him out. His tone is jocular, but surely even a leper’s eyesight can’t be bad enough to mistake the contents for anything but what they are — the tools for saying Mass. The pyx, the very Hosts, those things he hadn’t dared to leave behind but had been foolish to bring with him, terribly foolish—

“Only some books.” Which isn’t a lie — Christ’s body being the text in which mankind’s salvation is written, and so on. Francisco huddles closer to the implements of his trade.

“I don’t think so. You’re a priest — don’t run off, I met one once before, down in the water. He even made a sign over me.” The man makes the sign of the cross, and grins. His lips are beginning to wear away — the illness will take his mouth and his nose, in the end — but his teeth are very good. “You’re just like one of those Portuguese fellows, but you don’t talk like one. Will you pray for me, priest?”

He must have started back against the coarse wall of the shelter; the man must have seen it. Still he must tell the truth. “Yes.”

“Will you pour water over me? Baptize me? Maybe it’ll help, you never know.”

“Only if you’re serious.” Francisco is beginning to feel flustered, both by the proximity of their bodies and this jocular line of reasoning. Weren’t there hospitals once? Sanctuaries? That same impulse that had been so striking, as if the Portuguese and Italian Jesuits were fearless. He doesn’t feel so fearless himself, but he’s not afraid of this man’s deformity. “Only if you’re truly committed to dedicating your life to Christ.”

He is trying not to study this man’s face any further. The soft dimple in his cheek, his sparse whiskers, the set of his mouth.

“Will it make me well?”

“With God’s help, it will.”

“You don’t have to be shy with me.” The man’s hands are only beginning to coarsen; when he lays his warm arm companionably over Francisco’s shoulder his easy touch burns like a brand. The weight of the bag against his side begins to feel like nothing at all.

The glances from this man’s lashless eyes are burning him like coals. This is one part of him that is indelible — some sin that’s native to him, native to him in a way other men will never understand. In the dark they can find each other — Francisco’s mind is rattling with prayers, over and over with the same words. They come together, man and man.

*

He baptizes him in the morning. He sheds his outermost robes and staff on the shore, laying them cautiously over the bag — saying a prayer to Our Lord as he does it, blessing the cold bite of the air on his legs and remembering the imagined sleekness of a robe stitched without a seam.

They have no holy oil and no witnesses. The man kneels in the surf without being bidden and Francisco girds up his kosode before stepping into the cold gray water. They must lean in close together to hear one another’s voices over the bitter whistle of the wind. Francisco asks the questions, and the man gives his answers. He says his name is Goro — just as Francisco was not always Francisco, let him be Antonio now in his baptism, Antony of Egypt, patron saint of diseases of the skin. And of gravediggers.

The water spills from Francisco’s hand, just once. Goro-called-Antonio sinks down in the water like some bond has been broken, some cord has snapped — his black hair smooths in a black sway when his head goes under the waves, like a spill of ink. When the newly-baptized man doesn’t rise up again from under the black water, Francisco’s heart goes cold in his chest. This has never happened before. His clothes have slipped loose around him, the rosary tucked away in his belt has fallen loose against his leg in the push of cold water.

He pushes deeper into the bitterly cold ocean, scrabbling in the tides for an arm or a leg and grasping only slippery indistinctness, a single pulse of powerful muscle under his hand and a flashing pattern of white like the block-print on a robe. There is no disturbance on the surface of the water, only smoothness and stillness and darkness