The two chickens are held in a brightly lit gilded box, high up and recessed into an inner wall of the cathedral. A cock and a hen. The coop resembles an old-fashioned circus cage more than a functional pen for farm animals. The closely arranged iron bars are ornate, bent into fancy twists and curls along the front with a Plexiglas divider laid on top, a practical addition to prevent the chickens from kicking hay and excrement onto the cathedral floor below. Even divine animals have bodily functions.

  “I cannot get a picture,” the Dutchman says, trying to adjust the camera settings on his smartphone. “The light is too strong.”

  Daniel views the image Rob shows him on the screen. It is true, the light from the chicken coop has got to be a couple hundred-watt bulbs’ worth. The rest of the cathedral is not well-lit. Whenever Rob tries to take a picture, the surroundings are lost in the background of the bright light, making the chicken shrine appear to float in a sea of blackness.

  “I got some good pictures of Mary Magdalene,” Ginny says, returning from around the corner where she had gone to observe the chapel noted in her guidebook. She holds out her phone to Daniel and he sees first a picture of a small room with an arched opening, not unlike the one they saw in the church where the Borgias were buried. She moves to the next photo, a gorgeous close-up of the saint painted in sumptuous reds and blacks. Mary Magdalene holds an urn in an awkward hand-over-hand manner. It’s as if the artist meant to paint the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child and then changed his mind midway, turning the baby Jesus into a vase and the Virgin into the local harlot. The two women do share a lot of physical characteristics as well as a first name, Daniel has noticed. Except Magdalene wears a knowing look while the mother of Jesus is most often depicted as beatific and amazed, like Audrey Hepburn coming out of Tiffany’s with two fistfuls of shopping bags. He laughs to himself, and Ginny looks at him strangely, wondering what the joke is.

  “I like that one,” Rob says, admiring the portrait on her phone as well.

  The painting is done in the traditional Dutch style of the Golden Age, and Daniel wonders if that influences Rob’s tastes. He’s surprised he can remember this bit of art history even though his brain is becoming increasingly fogged. Petra had schooled him well. She had made sure he learned to appreciate the great masters housed in the buildings he was restoring that summer when they met. Introduced him to the world of Rembrandt and Raphael. It was a gift she gave him, the ability to slow down and take in the details of beauty that he had previously passed by without noticing. Right now he is feeling so loose that he doesn’t think he would notice if an eighteen-wheeler drove through the sanctuary.

  “So, why chickens?” Ginny asks, gazing up at the lit rectangular cage above them.

  The proud cock walks back and forth in front of the bars. The hen sits unimpressed.

  “They’re here for the miracle of Santo Domingo,” Daniel says, waking up at the opportunity to relate another fact.

  They move toward another shrine surrounded by tourists. Many of them have audio devices held up to their ears listening to an explanation in their native language of the contents of the twelfth-century building. Ginny doesn’t need an audio device, he thinks, she has me.

  “This is his tomb, so,” Daniel says dramatically as they approach the raised and railed-off display. It contains an alabaster sarcophagus. The Egyptians weren’t the only ones to use them.

  “What was his miracle?” Rob asks as he joins them at the railing. He has given up on getting a good picture of the coop. He also has opted out of the audio device. “They never are having the Dutch language anyway,” he had complained earlier.

  “There was a family making their pilgrimage on the Camino,” Ginny begins, surprising them both.

  “Sure, you do know the story,” Daniel says, feeling proud of her rather than upstaged. He leans against a marble column, hoping to look casual but really needing the support. He watches as she pauses and bites lightly on her lower lip in reply. It is just a quirk of self-consciousness, but it stirs something in him despite his anesthetized state.

  “They stayed with a local nobleman and, apparently, the young daughter of the house made advances on their son,” Ginny says. “Okay, now your turn,” she says, looking at Daniel.

  He wants to continue the story in tandem but finds himself highly distracted by her lip. It takes a few clearings of his throat, but eventually he manages to speak. “The devout young man rejected her advances,” he says, trying to focus on the carved details in the alabaster sarcophagus that has begun to appear in double. It starts to give him a headache and he turns away. “She accused him of stealing the family silver,” he manages to choke out. Christ, he needs to get a hold of himself.

  Ginny walks toward the far wall that leads down to the side chapel corridor. A display is housed in a shallow alcove there behind yet another barrier. Daniel can’t make out the contents. He moves unsteadily toward it for a better look. So does Rob.

  “Of course, he was charged and convicted. The girl was from a noble family, remember. Not much hope there.” Ginny keeps on with the tale as they approach the display. He can see the painting at the centre of the exhibit now. A man holds on to the lower half of his son in a grief stricken embrace. The body is dressed in white and the feet dangle a few feet above the ground.

  “He was hanged,” Daniel says, standing resolutely in front of the painting as best as he can. His head is really starting to pound now. He sees the robed medieval figures standing at the gallows in the painting, weeping. They begin to appear in double just like the sarcophagus.

  “The mother and father were devastated, of course,” Ginny says, keeping up her part of the tale. “But still somehow made it to Santiago. When they came back, they visited the place their son had died and found him hanging where they left him.”

  Sweat has begun to break out on Daniel’s forehead. He can feel the little beads gathering, welling up from somewhere inside him like a fever. It makes the wound at his temple throb. He leans against another column.

  “They found him still alive. A miracle.” Ginny waits for the question that sets up the ending of the story, but only the Dutchman asks it. Daniel can’t.

  “What is this to do with chickens?” Rob asks, looking hard at the painting. Ginny waits and doesn’t answer, knowing it is Daniel’s turn.

  “The parents went after the local reeve.” He pauses, wets his lips. “They told him the miracle of their son’s survival.” Daniel forms the words slowly, still trying to gain his composure. Nobody seems to notice his distress. He closes his eyes tightly and takes a deep breath.

  Ginny takes the pause as permission to finish the story. “The reeve was in the middle of his meal and told them that their son was no more alive than the chicken on his plate.” She turns around and delivers the much-awaited punchline to the Dutchman. “And the cock got up off his plate and crowed. They’ve kept chickens in a shrine here ever since.”

  She grins and turns to Daniel for approval. He has opened his eyes again, but his face is ashen. She drops her storyteller air.

  “Are you all right, Daniel?” Ginny doesn’t move toward him, but even Rob turns around when he hears the apprehension in her voice.

  Daniel stands at the entrance of the dark corridor staring at the painting of the boy in the tight noose. A slight twitch starts at the corner of his mouth. Aware of the unwanted spasm, he speaks in an attempt to cover up the strangeness of it.

  “What did the reeve do then, so?” he asks, his voice breaking, even though he knows the answer. He looks down at the block floor of the cathedral and then back up at Ginny, swallowing hard.

  She hesitates and then answers him gently. “He took them to the gallows and cut down their son,” she says. “He was alive, just like they said.”

  “A miracle,” Daniel says, looking up at the painting again, seeing not the young boy but Petra in the noose, her blue swollen face with the life choked out of it. It hangs down, a dead piece of meat, like dinner on a plate. The figure of the reeve floats up and cuts into the lower half of her jaw with a knife and fork. He lifts the bloody flesh to his mouth and bites down on a piece of lower lip he has cut out with part of her chin.

  “Daniel,” Ginny says again, “are you sure you’re …”

  Daniel stumbles out of the cathedral before she can finish. He staggers through a side door and out into a small churchyard garden. He doesn’t notice the nun sitting on a bench until he lifts his head from vomiting in the flower beds she planted in the spring. She points an accusing finger at him as she scolds in staccato Spanish.

  He doesn’t know what she is saying, and he doesn’t care. He is going mad. And madness has its own language. He wipes the sick off with the back of his shirtsleeve and meets the nun’s angry glare head on. Her face goes white to match his own and her mouth drops open. The desperate look of him betrays what he is capable of. The nun sees what is inside of him and hurries away through a low archway in the garden. Her long black robes make a swishing sound as she disappears from sight. From behind the closed door of the cathedral someone slides a bolt into the lock. Daniel can hear the cock crow from inside, lurid and lonesome, a divine prisoner crying out for justice within its gilded cage. He staggers away from the sound before vomiting one more time in the garden. Then he looks for the road, not knowing where it leads.

  Miles away, in Grañón, Daniel is pulled up the back stairs of an old church. All the churches are old here. The word really loses its meaning after awhile: ancient, antiquated, archaic. Everything is old on the Camino, or perhaps everything is lost in time with no real age at all.

  Daniel can’t think straight although his head is clearer than it was back in the cathedral. He doesn’t even know how he got to Grañón. He remembers hopping over a short wall of the churchyard onto a back street where low-hanging trees robbed the light. He had walked aimlessly from there until he left the city behind him, faintly registering the cars that honked and braked in his midst. They could not touch him. He was invisible. He was damned. He was a ghost.

  By the time he came into Grañón, he had started to come back to himself, noticing the change in scenery. His head began to clear, either from the painkillers wearing off or from the shock, perhaps. That is when a fast-talking group of Italian girls had grabbed him by the arm and led him into the stairwell of Iglesia de San Juan Bautista. When he first walks in, he is in such a daze he thinks the twelfth-century church is named after a baseball player.

  “Welcome, welcome, peregrino.”

  Daniel had expected a priest, but instead a short middle-aged woman in a flowery print skirt greets him at the top of the stairs. She has frizzy red and grey hair held down under a bright kerchief, and Birkenstocks with socks on her feet. Her accent is American. She reminds him of the teacher in those children’s science books, Ms. Frizzle. Petra used to read those books to her pupils. Sometimes he stole a look at them, enjoying the basic lessons about electricity and the solar system.

  As Ms. Frizzle leads him into the foyer, he sees a common room off the hallway. It has a fireplace, low couches, and a set of long tables stacked against the wall. A small kitchen emits steam from a doorway. Stairs lead both up and down from the space. The Italian girls appear to have dispersed along one of these; he’s not sure in which direction. Aged buildings such as these contain many twists and turns. You could hide an entire football team among them.

  “Thank you,” Daniel manages to cough out. He shakes his head, as if to put something back to rights. Like one of those games where you tilt a box to slip the little ball bearing back into place.

  “Would you like a drink of water?” The woman can sense his distress.

  He nods, and she disappears into the steamy kitchen, returning shortly with a tall glass filled to the top. He takes it and drinks it all down in one go, belching heavily afterward. The laughter of the Italian girls peals out from another room. Daniel doesn’t know which is worse, the taste he just brought up in his mouth, or his mortification at having belched in this woman’s face.

  “Excuse me.” It doesn’t seem like enough, but it will have to do.

  The woman smiles and tucks a red and grey frizzy piece of hair into her kerchief. “That’s okay. You must have been very dehydrated.” She clears some clean linens from a bench beside him. “Please sit down. You need to rest, I think.”

  He sits down, and she helps to remove his backpack. Her adept fingers unbuckle the straps when he fumbles with shaking hands. He feels the delicious release of the heaviness being lifted off his back. You never know the weight you’re carrying until it’s taken from you.

  “How far did you walk today?” she asks him as she props his backpack against the wall with the others in a perfect line. Daniel looks over at a deep windowsill halfway down the stairs he just came up. Dozens of hiking boots are stacked there, ordered by size like a used shoe sale. This woman runs a tight ship.

  “I’m not sure,” he says at first, and then concentrating harder he comes up with a name. “Azofra, I walked from Azofra.”

  “Well, that’s far enough,” she says, reaching for the glass still in his hand. “Let me get you some more of that.” She disappears back into the kitchen and Daniel leans back against the wall and shuts his eyes.

  How many miles had he walked since he left Ginny and Rob in Santo Domingo? It felt like he’d walked for days, but he knows it is not even dark yet. He senses he travelled in circles before he came to enough to see the yellow arrows pointing up the hill and back onto the trail. He followed them even when he didn’t realize he was, faithful in their guidance. “Good Orderly Direction,” he supposes. That was the new trendy word for God. More like dumb luck, Daniel thinks, coming more and more back to himself as he rests on the bench. He opens his eyes and sees the woman standing in front of him with a replenished glass. He takes it from her with thanks and introduces himself.

  “My name’s Daniel. Forgive me, I reckon I got a little too much of the sun.” Or I may be going stark raving mad, he thinks to himself, but don’t worry because the only people I scare are nuns. Then it occurs to him this woman may be one.

  “I’m Patrice.” She folds her hands in front of her in a way Daniel associates with little girls reciting poetry. “I’m a volunteer here. I used to be a pilgrim myself. I came back for a few months to give back to the Camino what it gave to me.” Her hands remain clasped.

  He wonders if he is supposed to say something or just nod. He goes with nodding.

  “We are a parochial albergue, run by the church. You can pay whatever donation that you can.” She narrows her eyes at his brand name backpack, expensive hiking boots. “I suggest fifteen euros.”

  “Of course,” he says, reaching into his pocket. He pulls out some crumpled bills, stuffing them into a gift-wrapped shoebox she has presented before him with the word Donativo written in black marker down the side. He manages to do this while balancing the slippery glass of water in one hand, a concerned Patrice looking on. She does not appear to be a woman who takes kindly to spills. He gulps down half the water to set her mind at ease.

  When she asks for his passports, both pilgrim and Irish, he fishes those out as well. She takes them to a table in the hallway with the shoebox and enters his name in a black ledger with precise block letters. After she hands his documents back to him, she carries on with her prepared monologue.

  “There are mattresses on the floor for sleeping. One bathroom for both the men and women. Your room will be down the stairs and to the left. Mass is at five o’clock and afterward Father Matias will conduct a tour.”

  “A tour?”

  “Yes, there are some significant religious artifacts and artwork stored here. A sixth-century baptismal font was uncovered in one of the last renovations.” She is proud telling him this. He wonders how she manages to explain all this to the people who don’t understand English.

  “After the tour, we will all return here and prepare dinner. We eat together in the common room.” That explains the tables against the wall.

  Daniel rubs his thumb on the sleek condensation of the glass and waits for Patrice to go on, but she appears to be finished with her script. When he drinks down the last of the water she reaches out and takes the tumbler from him before he can offer to put it away. The woman is a cross between an angel and his Aunt Breda, who never let them eat crisps in her parlour.

  “Please make sure to remove your footwear before going to your room.” Patrice observes his boots and he follows her gaze. They are covered in mud and a spray of tomato-red splatter. It may look like blood, but he knows it is just remnants of the crappy pizza he threw up. He leans over to undo his laces as she returns to the kitchen.

  When he is placing his boots in the window well with the others, he sees them, Ginny and Rob down below in the street talking and pointing. Ginny’s ponytail swishes back and forth as she chats and gestures, her hands moving expressively. She holds her arms out wide, as if to exaggerate the size of a fish she has caught. Then she laughs. He can’t hear it, but he can see her body shake with the pleasure of it. The Dutchman leans casually on his walking stick, ankles crossed as he laughs with her.

  Daniel turns away when he hears the sound of change clattering onto metal behind him. Patrice is emptying the collected donativos into a rectangular strong box. He sees his folded bills disappear inside to join the smattering of coins.

  “These religious artifacts and artwork on the tour. Do they include anything at all to do with Mary Magdalene?”

  “As a matter of fact, they do.” Patrice’s face brightens with the opportunity to showcase more about her volunteer home. “There is a tiny but exquisite statuette of her held in the rear cloisters. It was carved out of a single piece of ivory. La Magdalena is lying on her side in repose.” She lowers her voice before she goes on. “A bit racy for the Catholic Church. It is a miracle that it survived all these years. One of the priests hid it under a floorboard during the Inquisition, apparently.”

  “A miracle, so,” Daniel repeats before he turns back toward the window again. Ginny and Rob are gone. The street is empty, red dust whorls in colourful closed doorways.

 

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