The Rebellious Son: A Fairy Tale -- Part 13

While they walked the clouds rolled in like a hovering wave on the sea and rain began to fall. The woman cursed the rain but the boy welcomed the water, it felt wonderful. Claudia never allowed the children to touch any water save for the muddy puddles next to the garden.

"Do you have a well?” asked the boy.

“I have a wonderful pond full of bull frogs! You should hear them at midnight!”

“Do you have a garden?”

“Gardens are too much work. I keep wasps!”

“Wasps? Why not bees?”

“Bees are weak and finicky. They die in winter or flee if they find a better home. Wasps are loyal.”

“But you will not get any honey.”

“Oh, child. Wasps provide more than honey. They give me protection. Remember, too much sweet makes the legs weak.”

They walked on. The rain fell. The boy wanted to name every drop. He wanted names, he didn’t even know his own name. He dreamed of having a name, to be called by it every single day. To hear it. Jamis had a name – that strange man wearing his wife’s dress. The boy wanted to talk to Jamis, to see why he thought the boy was so dangerous to the town.

The walking with the lady was endless.

The boy had a question, “Who was the preacher?”

“What is it, boy? What is the real question?” said the lady still gripping his shirt.

“Well, when he was praying I opened my eyes and looked at him, but he was a different man with golden hair and long fingernails.”

“Ha!” laughed the lady. “You have admitted your sin. Is this a confession?”

“Who is he?” the boy wanted to know.

“The Devil? A preacher? What’s the difference? Ha!”

“There’s a difference,” said the boy.

“Oh, to you there is a difference. But what does that matter to the rest of us?” She yanked his shirt and stopped his pace. She looked into his young eyes. They were blue with a dash of crimson over each pupil. His hair was greasy and long, falling on his face like a ratty curtain. “The devil? The Lord? Ha!”

“I met our Virgin Mary and I believed her.”

“Show me a child who does not believe.”

Upon approaching the woman’s house the boy could see a man standing on the roof. He seemed to be thinking with great amount of concentration, looking out over the land towards the village. The boy looked in the same direction, but did not see anything extraordinary.

“Who is that man?”

“Oh, that’s just Husband. He spends many hours on the roof.”

“What does he do up there?”

“Stays out of the way.”

He didn’t understand even one word of this strange lady. Nothing she said made sense.

Great unkempt bushes covered most of the front of the house. It was lonely and small. There was a rusty looking barn off in the field. The boy looked for animals, a garden, a well, but only found the pond out past the barn. The boy could not see any other homes in sight.

“Do you have company?” he asked.

“Oh, just the wives.”

“Wives? Whose wives?”

“Why Husband’s of course,” she said with slight irritation. She was acting tired, too.

They walked in. There must have been twenty women of all sizes and ages, ranging from a massive fifty-year-old woman, to a young one, maybe a few years older than him. In the eyes she is still a child, thought the boy.

The women stopped their chores and chatter and stared at the boy. Some were holding dishes, others held filthy rags. The young girl with childlike eyes was resting her head on the table, gazing in to a spoon. The boy watched the girl set her spoon down and look at him. She wore a bonnet and a dress with lace around the neck. The other wives wore bonnets too, but their dresses were threadbare, sections of their underclothes revealed.

The boy could tell they were not used to visitors.

“This is the boy!” said the lady. “The one I was telling you about.”

The girl stood up, she was shorter than the boy. Her brown eyes were big, almost the size of ripe dates, but smooth and soft. The boy felt ashamed of his appearance. He desperately wanted to wear a pair of trousers. He actually had never owned a pair in his life.

The enormous wife, cheeks splotchy red and bulbous, moved quickly past the little girl, and wrapped an old blanket around the boy, “Oh, isn’t he something!” she said. “Like a blind worm!”

The wives all laughed. They laughed considerably longer than the boy would have expected them to laugh, but it all came to a sudden silence when the pounding on the ceiling began.

Husband was stomping his feet.

Then came the shouting, “Shut up women! Shut up! Cannot a man have a moment of silence!”

The wives began to quietly giggle into their hands. They continued the giggling until finally the big wife raised her dress above her waist, exposing many folds of flesh on the thighs, and shouted, “Please come and hit me! Hit me good! Reeeeal goooood!”

The house began shaking with the roar of the wives.