There is no denying that because, even now, even after its mount was savaged by savages, his cherub sleeps. Riders never sleep, not even when they ride those marked by indolence and sloth. A man’s sins always cling to him, even when he slumbers. Like all married men, I sometimes spend time on sleepless nights studying the features of the woman who shares my life, and even when her own face is a peaceful mask buried by the false death of sleep, her rider is always peering over the tousled curve of her hair, miming its endless caricatures of all the waking woman’s sins. But in all these years Job’s cherub has never once opened its eyes. It has always hugged his back in gentle acceptance of all that befell him, its dozing features testifying to a soul as placid, and yet as possessed of great depths, as a vast becalmed sea.
This is not a state of being I understand, as I would track down those responsible for this outrage and carve their punishment from their own flesh, with even less mercy than they showed my son… but then my passenger has always borne the features that mark me as vengeful at heart, and Job’s has always borne features marking him as a boy who refuses to hate.
“Tell me their names. I won’t hurt them. I’ll just make sure they never hurt you again.”
He tells me, “I’m sorry, father. I forgive them.”
From deep in the surrounding crowd there’s a rumble of derisive laughter, the kind a bully makes when he dismisses a weaker soul’s right to conduct his life without fear. I recognize the laugh before I turn, and find myself cursed by the awareness that it comes from a man who either knows who beat my son, or happily participated. He is a man known to me, whose own boys bore bruises and furtive looks before they grew old enough and large enough to become, like their father, blights on the lives of any with the misfortune to know them. He says, “It is like they all say. Your son is useless.”
The man’s name is Kenneth. He owns a pig farm outside of town, but lives better than his income from that enterprise could explain were it not supplemented by extortion and theft. He has burly arms and a weather-beaten face marked by too many scowls and not enough smiles; his shoulder-length red hair and beard frame his harsh features, always unruly, always catching the wind in a manner like a corona of fire.
These are the things I know of Kenneth. I know that he is stupid, in the way that the worst cruel and bullying men are stupid: that he is incapable of considering any concerns but his own, and sees any objections to his conduct as a personal affront, demanding of punishment. I also know that he is crafty, in the way that the worst cruel and bullying men are crafty; that he knows how to hurt people, and when, and has an infinite imagination when it comes to breaking them. I know that his wife is little more than a despised slave, who rarely opens her mouth for fear that he’ll shut it for her. I know that he lives with four other women, each of whom joined his extended family while barely more than children, at least two of whom he simply took from their families and rendered utterly devoted to him by the simple method of alternating brutality with unexpected kindness until they were willing to do anything he asked of them if it guaranteed the latter. I know that he has punished their prior families for trying to interfere, that homes have been burned, and livestock killed. And I know that, even without his rider’s terrible visage, a mask of cruel self-satisfaction not all that much more offensive than Kenneth’s own, it would be just as easy to see it in the set of his tiny black eyes.
A couple of his younger sons, who are still not coarsened to the degree he wants, refuse to meet my eyes. The three eldest meet them with defiance, enjoying my hatred. All five of their riders grin at me, their demented faces as exultant in their evil as Kenneth has always been in his.
Whether they witnessed the beating or not, everyone in the crowd knows at once that Kenneth directed his sons to beat and rob mine: and that he doesn’t care that we know.
The old man sneers. “Your son’s a woman. If you took his trousers off you would find a hole where a boy should have a good strong rope. A true man would have dirtied his knuckles with the blood of at least one of the scoundrels who attacked him, or at least now had the stones to name them. This one’s less a boy and more a mushroom, planted in shit, born without backbone and doomed to wither as soon as the sun strikes him.”
Even as I stand, my hands curl into fists. But I know it’s no good. I cannot stand against Kenneth alone, let alone his sons. Nor will any of my neighbors stand with me; certainly not Job, whose gentle right hand even now reaches up to touch my wrist, to assure me as always that this is nothing, that he can bear it, that no wound can be inflicted on him that his infinite soul will not heal.
I have never wanted to kill a man so much, and I have never been as shackled to the cowardice that is the least of my sins. I burn from the awareness that my rider shows Kenneth both.
His look of answering recognition is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
“Leave him alone,” I say, “or I’ll kill you.”
He chuckles and gathers his sons for the journey back home. I have no doubt that were I to wade into them with angry fists, and by some miracle reduce them to as battered a state as they left Job, I would find in their pockets the money they took from him, and in their cart the goods they stole; and I know that were I to raise my voice and demand that the other onlookers aid me in finding justice for my boy, there would be no takers. Even those who hate Kenneth agree with him on this: innocence has made Job worthless, as far as defending himself is concerned.
Even so, the moment would not pain me quite so much if one of the two pretty girls tending Job did not stand up and leave him behind, to hop aboard Kenneth’s wagon and sit pressed up against one of his sons.
Three years later, Leah enters our life for the first time.
She has been brought to us by her father, a man whose rider marks him as a cheat and occasional petty thief, but there is nothing in its manner or in his that marks him as anything but a parent who loves and cares for his daughter. I might keep an eye on my coin purse, but I believe him when he says that his only concern is for her.
Leah is a fragile wisp of a thing, with skin so pale it is almost translucent and hair so blonde that it is almost white. I would mistake her for albino if not for the tracing of freckles that form a constellation across both cheeks and the tip of her nose. She has weak eyes, by which I mean that she refuses to meet mine, not even when I speak kindly to her, and not when I tell her, in all honesty, that she is a pretty girl and that I am charmed by her face. In truth I am even charmed by her rider—it is no cherub, like my son’s, but it is so unmarked by anything terrible that it might as well be, resembling an innocent babe in all ways but for a powerful stormy affront about its eyes. It is not a happy thing, but neither is she. I have seen riders like hers on the shoulders of other souls too sensitive for this world, souls so helpless at fending off the cruelty of others that they don’t even grow inured to the sharp and cutting places inside themselves. It is the look of self-hatred, which can be as great a sin as any other, a look that anyone would recognize as the mark of a possible future suicide.
Leah and her father, who are strangers to us, come from a village further down the coast and have spent weeks on the road, traveling here. The reason is of course obvious. It is often said that a marriage can only be happy if the rider of the man and the rider of the woman betray sins of equal weight. A man whose rider marks him as an epic monster will bring nothing but misery to the life of a woman whose rider marks her as one whose sins amount to little more than weakness. And certainly a woman of cutting tongue and demeaning temperament will always drain the life from a man whose rider embodies nothing worse that a shiftless soul. No man or woman seeking some semblance of happiness should ever join with anyone much worse than themselves, else they risk bearing the weight of their partner’s rider as well as their own.