letter, and sometimes they sing something, too. And even if most us can’t read or write, we’re very good at arithmetic, which is a practical, useful subject, and anyway, what we know and what we can do is quite enough for us.
The parish priest may be our shepherd and we his flock, but that doesn’t mean we’re just ordinary sheep that the Church, counts, princes, stewards, tax collectors and parish priests can fleece any way they like. We might be meek, but beneath our sheep’s clothing our blood can boil so we start frothing at the mouth, ready to attack. We need to be treated decently, properly, which the authorities don’t understand, and the same is true of our town, which we call our town because it’s the one nearest us and we do a lot of trade there, but the townsfolk just laugh at us and think we’re ignorant yokels. But not only do we know arithmetic, and are quick at it, we’re also quick at making connections between events, things and people and recognizing the root cause and meaning of something. It’s true that in some cases we don’t fully understand the cause, and it can happen that when we’re speculating and looking for connections we make mistakes. But, since we have faith that God forgives our mistakes, we take a lot of things into our own hands without fear and asking God’s forgiveness in advance.
After all, who says the parish priest is always right? What makes him more right than us? He tells us we’re equal in the eyes of God – well, maybe he’s thinking of the Last Judgement, we can’t say, but we’re not endlessly patient, and we often ask ourselves why we always have to be the poor wretches who get invited to the Creator’s banquet only after death, while in the here and now there are half-eaten legs of veal and pork ribs falling from the count’s overladen table, game meat, too, from game we’re not allowed to just go into the woods and hunt for ourselves, since everything in the woods belongs to the count? And why does everything have to belong to the count? Game, woods, sheep, cows, pigs, fish ponds, quail, and us, too, the populace, while we’re barely surviving hand to mouth, with our empty tables and louse-ridden mattresses, with maybe an ox for working the field, a goat and a sheep – cows are a luxury – and from all of this we are also required to set aside tax payments for the count, the prince, the Church and the emperor? We don’t doubt that such is the will of the secular authorities, but is it the will of God? We’re not so sure about that. And is it our will? Absolutely not! Why can’t we be the ones who live in trepidation of not being able to squeeze ourselves into heaven through the eye of a needle? We’d much rather live with fears like that than worry that one day soon we’ll have nothing to mix in the pot but water and air. We’d even prefer the priest’s position, since he’s well-fed and lives in comfort at our expense. He’s got two farmhands who work the land for him and a housekeeper who, people say, works everything else. The question is whether he will be able to wriggle through heaven’s gates, if only because the eye of God can see even beneath the blankets where the priest likes to dispense indulgences.
So we pay close attention to everything we hear, everything we see. And we see not only with open eyes, but, lying in our beds, we also see beneath the skin, as we sleep and dream. And what we see in our dreams is not by chance. Sometimes a person dreams things they’d never tell another soul, not even the priest in confession – that village blabbermouth least of all! Sometimes a person dreams
horrible things, disgusting things, all of the deadly sins, each of the Ten Commandments broken – even if many of these things would never cross our minds when we’re awake, for we know that just as we watch others, God, too, constantly keeps his eye on us and sees even into our minds, so we are careful not only in our speech and behaviour but also in our thoughts and ruminations. And when we dream such dreams night after night and wake up in the morning not rested but worn out, as if we’d been pummelled all through the night, then it’s good to look around, say a word to someone, ask questions and chat with someone about what might be the cause. That’s how it is and how it was, and that’s how it will always be in our land, where we honest folk live.
The Scapegoat
And that’s how it was, too, a few years earlier, when the populace made a certain widow the scapegoat for a number of seemingly natural catastrophes. She was known to brew concoctions from plants and animals, and people said she had brewed a young man into her concoctions, someone who had been coming to her place for months and then simply vanished. He wasn’t the only young man who had got himself involved with the hag (which is what most people called her), who surely had her own twisted reasons for never remarrying after her husband’s death. Indeed, it’s quite possible that these reasons were somehow connected to the death that had suddenly and under extremely suspicious circumstances struck down her husband. The death was said to have occurred when he was on the privy, or headed there, which (probably not coincidentally) was in early autumn, when the woods and meadows abound with mushrooms along their margins, in particular the tender-fleshed parasol mushroom. But there are others, too: one that is very similar to the parasol, when it is still small and demurely closed, is the green fly mushroom (as it is known here), whose only good quality is said to be its excellent flavour, but for anyone who has ever tasted it, it was also the last flavour they tasted, for within days they had departed this world. Not unlike the way her husband departed the world. He was a miller, around forty, and a healthy, hard-working and honest master. But don’t we say the same thing of everyone who dies, that he was hard-working and honest? People fear to speak ill of the dead, and not because God might hear but because the dead person might hear and, in fury at the gossips below, return to earth to make them shut their big mouths for good. Especially if the sinful soul is still wandering about, lurking in churchyards or dark, dank hollows, or on the riverbank, luring people into the water – a soul whose body was never properly interred and who is still waiting for someone to discover the now unrecognizable corpse and give it a decent burial.
And so people sang the praises of the late miller, who had crapped out his soul (so the story went that spread among the populace) – a soul very likely mixed with mushrooms remarkably similar to the delicious parasols, which in those days perhaps were not even called that but had an entirely different name.
As the priest intoned his prayers above the open grave and made the sign of the cross in the air, most of the mourners were glancing at the widow to see if she was sad enough, and sincerely sad, as befits a new widow. Did her breast heave with bitter sorrow? Was a tear trickling down her cheek? Or did her countenance possibly betray some other emotion? Well, not delight exactly – in such circumstances only a madwoman would display that – but, for instance, relief?
The thirty-five-year-old widow was, relative to her widowhood, too erect, not stooped enough, and her protruding lips were hardly pressed in woe but limp and relaxed. The miller’s death had been no great loss for the village; there was another miller working there who was both easier to do business with and better at his job. What’s more, people weren’t afraid of him, as they had been of the deceased miller – even horses, which are sensitive animals, could tell he was a highly strung man, not to say a boor. But a community must have order. There are rules to be respected and customs to be upheld, which are well known and clear to the populace of these parts. And one such custom is that the woman is in charge in the kitchen, in raising and caring for young children, in looking after blood relatives and in-laws, and in various other tasks that hold the community together, but the public representative of the property and the house, even if it’s just a flea-bitten cottage, is the master, that is to say, the man.
By the time the Requiem Mass was held, a week after the departed’s death, a theory had developed which said that the miller had died a natural death only in so far as mushrooms are part of nature, and that the deadly recipe had been literally cooked up by the new widow. The miller’s two maidservants, when cross-examined by the populace, did not have much to say.
‘It’s true we had mushrooms a few times in September,’ the girls admitted and listed the different sorts, ‘parasols, foxes, georgies, buttercaps, little doves and hoofs and claws and deadman trumpets …’
‘What sort of trumpets?’ the populace asked in alarm.
‘Deadman trumpets. That’s what they’re called,’ the girls said, at once regretting that they had mentioned the mushroom’s name at all. ‘They’re black and look a bit like they’re rotting, but they taste good. Although it’s best to use them as