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20
Bennacio and I sat in the parlor after dinner. It was half past one in the morning and Bennacio said we had to leave at dawn, but neither of us felt sleepy. My seat was right next to Windimar’s shrine, and his big blue eyes stared at me like a rebuke.
Bennacio wasn’t in a talkative mood. He sat with his elbows on the armrests, his long fingers laced together, staring at the fire.
Miriam’s words were still echoing in my head, and his silence wasn’t helping my creepy mood any. So I asked, “How do you become a knight? I mean, I know you have to come from one of the original knights, but you guys aren’t born knowing how to handle a sword and all that stuff. What do you do, go to knight school?”
If he got the joke, he didn’t let on. “We are trained by our fathers. In some cases, we apprentice under another knight, if the father is unable.”
“What about Windimar’s dad?” He was young enough for his father to still be alive, judging by his picture in the gilded frame beside me.
“His father died before he could complete the training.”
“You completed Windimar’s training, didn’t you, Bennacio?”
He didn’t say anything. Miriam came into the room with a big brandy snifter for Bennacio. She asked me if I wanted anything and I could tell that took a lot out of her, being gracious to me, but I told her no.
She said something in that funny-sounding language and Bennacio shook his head, but she came back at him pretty insistently, and he finally shrugged and shook his head, waving his hand at her as if to say, Whatever, I’m too tired to argue. She left the room.
“How’d his father die?” I asked, expecting to hear a story about a jousting tournament gone bad.
“His riding lawn mower flipped over on him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Even knights are not immune to absurd ends, Kropp.”
Miriam came into the room again, this time carrying a long black case that looked like a musical instrument carrier. Maybe she expected Bennacio to play a dirge on an oboe or something. She laid it at his feet, fussing at him in that strange tongue, until he finally said, in English, “Very well, Miriam.”
“He would want you to have it.” She couldn’t seem to let the argument go.
“And I shall take it, in his memory. I pray I will not have to use it.”
“You will use it, Lord Bennacio, before the sun sets on the morrow.”
She left us alone. I cleared my throat. “Do her visions always come true?” I asked, because who wants to die alone in the dark, where no days break or nights fall, pierced in the heart by the Dark One?
He said, “I have never questioned her gift. But you must understand, Kropp, she is nearly overcome by grief, and grief always clouds our insight, even the insight of the gifted. From his birth, Miriam has known Windimar would die a bloody death. Imagine that if you can.”
“I guess it could mess you up. I remember when my mom first told me she was dying from cancer . . .” I couldn’t go on. Bennacio nodded as if he understood I couldn’t, and patted my arm.
After he finished his brandy, Bennacio announced it was time we got some sleep because he planned to drive straight through to Canada. There was another long discussion or argument with Miriam about sleeping arrangements, I guess, and I wasn’t sure who won, but I figured it was Bennacio by her fierce expression and the way she stomped down the hall, leading me to a room.
It was Windimar’s old room. There was no bathroom, but there was an antique washstand with a bowl set in a hollowed-out shelf and a pitcher of steaming water. I washed my face and brushed my teeth in the warm water from the pitcher, and then I looked around the room.
A rocking chair sat beside a small fireplace on the wall opposite the bed, where a silver and gold crucifix was hung over the headboard. On that side was a tapestry that looked very old but couldn’t have been that old, because there was Mr. Samson mounted on a great white horse in full armor and around him eleven men dressed in purple and holding shields painted with a horse and rider. At least it looked like Mr. Samson—there was the same large head and flowing golden hair, and I picked out a tall knight that could have been Bennacio and a knight with bright blue thread for eyes, Windimar, I guessed, staring right at me, and he was one good-looking guy; he looked a little like Brad Pitt, except for those bright blue eyes. Jealousy never did anybody any good and I wasn’t really the jealous type, but this guy was learning swordplay and how to ride a horse and pledging his sacred honor to die for a noble cause when I was sitting by my mom’s hospital bed watching her die and getting the stuffing beaten out of me at football practice.
I opened the closet door and inside was a full suit of armor, shined to a mirror finish, with a six-foot lance leaning against the wall beside it. It was fully assembled and I gave a little yelp when I opened the door, thinking I was the victim of a medieval ambush.
I stared at that suit of armor for a long time. It was polished so bright, I could see little shards of myself reflected in the metal, twenty-five Kropps at least, distorted like funhouse images. Shaggy brown hair, brown eyes, average-sized nose, chin, ears, teeth. If there was one trait these knights in the tapestry shared, it was that none of them looked average. Not all were as pretty as Windimar, as noble-looking as Samson, or as intense as Bennacio, but there was a set to their jaw, a certain look in the eyes they all had in common. I wondered if I put on the armor in the closet something like that might happen to me, the way even the geekiest guy in school looked macho in his ROTC uniform. I had this nutty urge to pull the armor off its stand and put it on. Then I tho
ught that would be the ultimate gesture of disrespect, donning the armor of the knight who died because of me. I closed the closet door.
I turned out the light and crawled into the bed fully dressed and it bothered me, Christ hanging right over me, looking down like, What the heck are you doing here? that it took a long time for me to fall asleep. It didn’t help that I could hear Miriam crying down the hallway, a low moaning sort of weeping. For a crazy second I thought about finding her and telling her I was sorry, which I kind of did already but not really in the kitchen. But Miriam didn’t want to hear about me being sorry; she wanted her son back. Probably if I went in there she’d find the nearest heavy object and bash me over the head with it.
Her crying went on for a long time. I had cried for my mom when she died, but not the way Miriam was crying for Windimar. It was while I listened to her cry that I realized what I did went beyond Uncle Farrell, Mr. Samson and the knights, Bennacio and Windimar. What I did was slamming people I didn’t even know about, like Miriam, the shock waves of my boneheadedness spreading out in ever widening circles, like a boulder the size of Montana landing in the ocean or that huge asteroid that hit the earth millions of years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.
I finally fell asleep and dreamed I was scrambling up this rocky slope, not exactly a mountain, more like a slag heap of broken rock and tiny glittering shards of quartz or maybe those crystals you see growing inside of caves, sparkling like big wet teeth in the moonlight. I kept slipping and sliding as I tried to reach the top. The palms of my hands and my knees were all cut up and bleeding. Every time I gained a couple feet, I lost one, but it seemed very important I get to the top. I caught ahold of a big boulder near the summit and pulled myself up.
