The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

“She’s not a real saint,” said the priest. “She is only referred to as a saint in parts of the Holy Writing that have been forbidden.”

Hempfil turned and gave orders for the driver’s wife and daughters to be shot. When the volley sounded, the driver dropped to his knees and hugged the desiccated foot to him as if for comfort. I saw the woman and girls, in their pale dresses, fall at the side of the road. The colonel turned to me and told me to give him my rifle. I did. He took his pistol from its holster at his side and handed it to me. “Take the prisoner off into the woods where it’s darker, give him a ten-yard head start, and then kill him. If he can elude you for fifteen minutes, let him go with his life.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, but I had no desire to kill the driver. I led him at gunpoint up the small embankment and into the woods. We walked slowly forward into darkness. He whispered to me so rapidly, “Soldier, I still hold the sacred foot of Ifritia. Let me trade you it for my life. Miracles.” As he continued to pester me with his promises of blessings and wonders, the thought of killing him began to appeal to me. I don’t know what it was that came over me. It came from deep within, but in an instant his death had become for me a foregone conclusion. After walking for ten minutes, I told him to stop. He did. I said nothing for a while, and the silence prompted him to say, “I get ten yards, do I not?”

“Yes,” I said.

With his first step, I lifted the pistol and shot him in the back of the head. He was dead before he hit the ground, although his body shook twice as I reached down to turn him over. His face was blown out the front, a dark, smoking hole above a toothful grimace. I took the foot, felt its slick hide in my grasp, and wrapped it in the dirty towel. Shoving it into my jacket, I buttoned up against the rain and set off deeper into the woods. I fled like a frightened deer through the night, and all around me was the aroma of wild violets.

It’s a long story, but I escaped the war, the foot of Saint Ifritia producing subtle miracles at every turn, and once it made me invisible as I passed through an occupied town. I left the country of rain, pursued by the ghost of the wagon driver. Every other minute, behind my eyes, the driver’s wife and daughters fell in their pale dresses by the side of the road in the rain, and nearly every night he would appear from my meager campfire, rise up in smoke, and take form. “Why?” he always asked. “Why?”

I found that laughter dispersed him more quickly. One night I told the spirit I had plans the next day to travel west. But in the morning, I packed my things up quickly and headed due south toward the end of the world. I tricked him. Eventually, the ghost found me here, and I see him every great while, pacing along the tops of the dunes that surround the valley. He can’t descend to haunt me, for the church I built protects me and the power of Saint Ifritia keeps him at bay. Every time I see him his image is dimmer, and before long he will become salt in the wind.

The impromptu congregation was speechless. Father Walter slowly became aware of it as he stood, swaying slightly to and fro. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said, a phrase he’d actually heard from Colonel Hempfil. There was a pause after his delivery of it, during which he waved his hands back and forth in the air like a magician distracting an audience. Eventually, two of the sisters nodded and the honeymoon couple shrugged and applauded the sermon.

Father Walter took this as a cue to move on, and he left the altar of the shrine and ran back to the church to fetch a case of whiskey that the Lord had recently delivered onto the beach after a terrific thunderstorm. The young couple produced a hash pipe and a tarry ball of the drug, which bore a striking resemblance to the last knuckle of the middle toe of Saint Ifritia’s foot.

Late that night, high as the tern flies, the young man and woman left and headed out toward the end of the world, and Sister North’s sisters loaded into their wagon and left for their respective homes. Father Walter sat on the sand near the bell in the churchyard, a bottle to his lips, staring up at the stars. Sister North stood over him, the hem of her habit, as she called the simple grey shift she wore every day, flapping in the wind.

“None would stay the night after your story of murder,” she said to him. “They drank your whiskey, but they wouldn’t close their eyes and sleep here with you drunk.”

“Foolishness,” he said. “There’s plenty still left for all. Loaves and fishes of whiskey. And what do you mean by murder?”

“The driver in your sermon. You could have let him live.”

He laughed. “I did. In real life, I let him go. A sermon is something different, though.”

“You mean you lied?”

“If I shot him, I thought it would make a better story.”

“But where’s the Lord’s place in a story of cold-blooded murder?”

“That’s for Him to decide.”