The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Father—By the time you find this, I’ll already be four miles inland, heading for the city. I mean to bring back the stolen toe and make amends to Saint Ifritia. She’s angry that we let this happen. You, of course, bear most of the responsibility, but I, too, own a piece of the guilt. It may take me a time to hunt down Mina GilCragson. I’ll try the university first, but if she’s not a scholar, I fear she might be a trader on the black market, trafficking in religious relics. If that’s the case, the toe could at this moment be packed on the back of a mule, climbing the northern road into the mountains and on through the clouds to the very beginning of the world. If so, I will follow it. If I fail, I won’t be back. One thing I’ve seen in my sleep is that at the exact halfway point of my journey, a man will visit the church and bring you news of me. If he tells you I am dead, then burn my shack and all my things and scatter the ashes over the sea, but if the last he’s seen of me I’m alive, then that means I will return. That, I’m sure of. Wake up and guard the foot with your very life. If I return after years with a toe and there is no foot, I’ll strangle you in your sleep. Think of me in bed, and in the morning, when you shovel sand, pray for me. There are four bottles of whiskey under the mattress in my shack. You can have three of them. I spent a week of solitude contemplating your sermon and realized that you didn’t lie. That you actually killed the driver of the hay wagon. Which is worse? May the sweet saint have mercy on you.

—Sister

TWO DAYS LATER, Father Walter realized he’d taken Sister North for granted, and she was right, he had killed the driver just as he’d described in his sermon. Without her there, in her shack, in the shrine, in his bed, the loneliness crept into the sand dune valley and he couldn’t shake it. Time became a sermon, preaching itself. The sand and sun and sand and wind and sand and every now and then a visitor, whose presence seemed to last forever until vanishing into sand, a pilgrim with whom to fill the long hours, chatting.

Every one of the strangers, maybe four a year and one year only two, was asked if they brought word from Sister North. He served them whiskey and let them preach their sermons before blessing them on their journeys to the end of the world. Sometimes an old man, moving slowly, bent, mumbling, sometimes a young woman, once a child on the run. None of them had word from her. In between these occasional visits from strangers lay long stretches of days and seasons, full of silence and wind and shifting sand. To pass the long nights, he took to counting the stars.

One evening, he went to her shack to fetch the second bottle of her whiskey and fell asleep on her bed. In the morning, there was a visitor in the church when he went in to shovel. A young man sat in the first pew. He wore a bow tie and white shirt, and even though it was in the heart of the summer season, a jacket as well. His hair was perfectly combed. Father Walter showed him behind the altar and they sat sipping whiskey well into the afternoon as the young man spoke his sermon. The father had heard it all before, but one thing caught his interest. In the midst of a tale of sorrows, the boy spoke about a place he’d visited in the north where one of the attractions was a fish with a human face.

Father Walter halted the sermon and asked, “Lord Jon?”

“The same,” said the young man. “An enormous plum fish.”

“I’d heard he’d been killed, shot by the father of the girl whose leg he’d severed.”

“Nonsense. There are so many fanciful stories told of this remarkable fish. What is true, something I witnessed, the scientists are training Lord Jon to speak. I tipped my hat to him at the aquarium and he said, in a voice as clear as day, ‘How do you do?’ ”

“You’ve never heard of a connection between Saint Ifritia and the fish?” asked Father Walter.

The young man took a sip, cocked his head, and thought. “Well, if I may speak frankly . . .”

“You must, we’re in a church,” said the Father.

“What I remember of Saint Ifritia from Monday Afternoon Club, is that she was a prostitute who was impregnated by the Lord. As her time came to give birth, her foot darkened and fell off just above the ankle and the child came out through her leg, the head appearing where the foot had been. The miracle was recorded by Charles the Bald. The boy grew up to be some war hero, a colonel in the war for the country of rain.”