The Leper's Companions Read Online Free PDF Page B

was not stiff. The priest told the others to lift her up carefully and place her on the bed.
    She lay there very quiet. Her breathing was so faint it could hardly be detected when a feather was held in front ofher lips. Her body was so still it seemed to merge with the thin blankets that covered it. Her face was empty and calm, she looked like the figure of a saint carved in stone.
    The priest was convinced she was about to die at any moment and so he came with the oil of Extreme Unction and recited the final prayers for the dead over her. Although she managed to swallow a fragment of the wafer and a sip of the wine, she made no response.
    People began to make preparations for the funeral. A shroud was placed neatly folded on the floor beside the bed and the length of the body was measured with a piece of string so that the carpenter could make a coffin. The more curious of the onlookers took this opportunity to explore the house and examine the treasures it contained.
    But after three days of flickering on the edge, Catherine slept peacefully, and when she woke she was fully recovered. The priest was very shocked by the mistake he had made. He explained to her that she was now, as it were, dead to the world because of the prayers that he had said over her. She must never again wear shoes or eat meat or be intimate with a man. She laughed when he told her this and didn’t seem at all upset.
    The priest was eager to know if she had any experience of dying that she could share with him, since people were always asking him what they might expect.
    She could not remember much but said she had seen a huge army of men and women walking across the world. “I think they were on their way to the Holy Land,” she said.“They swept past me, wave upon wave of them, as if they were everyone who had ever lived and died since the beginning of time and I was able to join them. It was a vision.”
    Soon afterwards Catherine gathered up all her possessions and distributed them among the people of the village. One of the children received the tapestry. The shoemaker’s wife got the pot with the dragon on it and the woman who saw devils suddenly had a rug to place over the rushes on her bedroom floor.
    Catherine had quite a lot of money in a leather purse and she took it to the priest. She asked him to use it to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He could take two or three others from the village, there was no hurry. When he got there she wanted him to say a prayer for her in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and to bring back a flask of water from the river Jordan. “I think that is what is expected of me,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice.
    She arranged to have a little house built on the mound of land they called The Island. It was just a circular hut made of mud and wood with an open fire on the earth floor and a box bed filled with straw.
    From that time on people referred to her as The Dead Woman. They gave her food and firewood and clothing when she needed it because they were sure it would bring them luck when it was their turn to die, but they never spoke to her and she never asked them to.
    Quite often when the tide was out she could be seen threading her way with awkward halting steps towards thevillage, following the slippery paths on bare feet, a storm of birds flying around her head where she had disturbed them. And when the tide was racing in she would be there in front of her hut, watching the water spreading across the land and separating her from the shore.

9
    I entered a room in a house in the village and there was an old lady sitting very upright in her bed. She wasn’t ill or in pain and she wasn’t even particularly tired. She had decided to stay in bed because she needed to think about her life.
    She said everything had happened much too fast, the years racing ahead of her while she ran after them, calling for them to wait. Now she was going to sit still and let the past walk before