Here is an excerpt from a novel I started a year or so ago… other stuff has interrupted me, but one day it will be finished, and one day Frederico will find out what happened to his missing wife!
“Hello Frederico.”
“Hello, Father.”
The priest looked at the big man. He should be a smiling person, a happy person. He had a wide mouth and gentle eyes. Father Apinski had never seen Frederico laugh. He had seen Frederico several times, wandering round the church as if studying the architecture. He had seen him sitting in one of the rear pews a couple of times, and noticed him in the tiny midweek congregation although he never took the sacrament. Apinski wondered if he wanted to use the confession but Frederico never hung around by the dark wood boxes as some did as they tried to decide what to do.
Apinski had spoken to Frederico one evening when he came across him sitting on a bench by the harbour. Although their conversation was only brief Apinski saw a great yearning loneliness in the man. After that he made a point of talking to Frederico whenever he came into the church.
Despite the name, Frederico wasn’t Catholic, he just like the church, he said. Once Apinski had ventured to ask if something was troubling him. Frederico had sighed and said he was fine.
Frederico didn’t even come to the church once a week, it was as if he just dropped in while passing and once Apinski had followed him out and watched him wander away, ambling bear-like as if he had nowhere particular to go.
Then one evening, when the stars had appeared from behind scurrying clouds, Apinski was walking back with his dog from an evening run on the beach. He saw a figure hunched on the bench by the steps and late at night and on his own wished he hadn’t felt a momentary quiver of apprehension. A priest had been attacked in Castair not long before, although that was in his church as godless men had stolen and pillaged as Vikings had a thousand years before.
As Apinski trotted up the steps a muffled voice greeted him.
“Frederico!”
“Good evening, Father.”
The man had been crying and Apinski dropped onto the bench beside him, exaggerating his panting and said he had to rest for five minutes.
Then Apinski didn’t know what to say despite his years of experience of dealing with the troubled and distressed.
“The stars are wonderful tonight,” Frederico said as if it saddened him.
“Ah, yes, I just wish on nights like this I could look up and know what they all were,” Apinski answered leaning back and looking at the huge sky above.
“You know Ursa Major, surely, the great bear?” Frederico asked.
Apinski tried not to laugh. That surely was a great description of Frederico himself.
“Well, yes, but when it’s so starry it gets lost.”
“Well, look its over there, the Great Dipper. People think it means like the funfair ride, but it means a pan. And look from that you can find the Pole Star – see that over there. Now you know which way north is.”
“Really, well, I never knew that,” or maybe Apinski had once, perhaps as a child, known that. Was that a distant memory of his own father, holding him one cold night and pointing to the sky?
“Orion is easy, look, there are the three stars of his belt, and the broach pinning his cloak to his shoulder, and his sword hanging down from his belt.”
And a giant leapt out of the sky.
“Its so obvious when you show me. Tell me some more.”
“Look over there, can you see the Pleiades? Look in Taurus.”
“Pleiades?” that name rang a bell
“The seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, look can you make out Taurus, his mighty horns, his great shoulders. Do you think his head is down ready to charge? What do you think?”
Apinski laughed at the unexpected enthusiasm in Frederico’s voice, and Frederico laughed a little too, something the priest had never heard before. But the laughter was too near to tears and Frederico bit it back, sniffed, and started to hum something.
“Show me some more. I’m Capricorn, aren’t I up there?”
“Hmm, astrology, is this something your bishop knows about?” Frederico said so seriously that for a moment Apinski didn’t realise it was a tease.
They sat for a while Frederico bringing the sky alive with beasts and heroes. Apinski shivered, chilled after his run, sitting with the perspiration drying. He whistled for the dog and stood, still wondering how to ask Frederico why he wept in the night.
Lois Elsden 