Ode to Saint Drogo

Excerpt from "The Gentleman in Black Velvet," work in progress

by William Merovech Porquet

The situation, as I see it, is this: it's getting dark, I'm the only human for miles in the middle a field, I've eaten the wrong mushroom, and I'm going to die. The sun's going down and making the sky very red behind the white clouds. I'd better sit down and wait for night. There's nothing they can do for me now but find me dead. And as if this wasn't bad enough, I'm going to die seeing little spinning rainbows in the shadows and peacock feathers in the trees and the stars in the sky are making pictures. I've thrown up several times already, and I can feel the poisonous vapours clouding my brain. Well, if I must die at least it's an interesting death. Not a wheezing, coughing, family boo-hooing over the bedside kind of death. Shame it has to happen, though, since I'm figuring out a lot of constellations with all these lines zig-zagging across the sky. Some consolation.

Anyhow I'm only a shepherd. No great loss to the world. No one in the villages are left that will miss me. Except the cure', perhaps, but he was quite happy to see me take my shepherd's crook and beat a path to the fields and away from his village. Hopefully my body will be found and given a decent Christian burial before being picked clean by birds. No doubt the lord in his manor will eventually hear of my untimely death and hire some other poor schmuck in the shepherd band.

One of my fellow shepherds, Rene', always told me not to be ashamed of my calling. "Think of Jesus' birth, when mere tenders of beasts like us were to be invited first. In fields around Bethlehem, shepherds lay sleeping on the earth under the night sky next to their animal charges and saw an angel, of such glory as to strike terror in them. But the messenger told them not to be afraid, that they were to bear witness to the birth of a deliverer, an anointed lord, in the form of a baby wrapped in rags, humbly laying near a feeding trough with domestic animals in Bethlehem. Even you were born a better bastard than that. Everyone knows you're the cure''s natural son, or else he'd never have given a Christian tutoring to a widow Jewess' son. Don't let anyone tell you we aren't worthy to stand before the face of god. God's own servants take after us, the tenders of flocks. They even prod their lambs with their crooks like us. Shepherds have always been there for the birth of new gods and always will be. It's our sacred obligation to be there and spread the word. Heaven help the gods if we didn't get an invitation."

On rainy days my shepherd band puts the sheep in the barn and all of us sack out on the straw mattresses in our little stone hut on the hill. It isn't really ours, of course. It was a peasant's cottage a long time ago. Now it belongs to the local lord who owns our sheep and the land where we graze them. He lets us sleep in it in exchange for re-thatching the roof every season and preventing vermin worse than shepherds from taking up residence in it. We eat, drink, and play there when dusk comes. Sometimes before we sleep, Rene' will play his flute and I will drum. He calls me his Little Drummer Boy, after the shepherd who played for the infant Jesus, pa-ra-pa-pa-pa. That reminds me of a song...

"I saw the wolf, the fox, the hare
I saw the wolf, the fox getting drunk
It's me who yelled back at them.

I saw the wolf, the fox, the hare
I saw the wolf, the fox sing
It's me who scowled back at them

I saw the wolf, the fox, the hare
I saw the wolf, the fox dance
It's me who spun then around" (1)

Pa-da-da-pa-da-pa-da-tla. I wonder if some demon inside me made me pick the wrong mushroom? Maybe I wanted to kill myself. Why I should wander out into the middle of nowhere at dusk, get lost, and decide to eat mushrooms, I don't know. They were a little too reddish for puffballs. Definately the wrong red ones. Red mushrooms with white spots is narrenschwamm, fool-mushroom. Only a fool would eat them. Like me. From now on, I don't eat anything red. Except strawberries.

Assuming that I see the next strawberry season. Which, according to the reports of my head and stomach, I'm not going to do. I'm going to be stone cold dead just as soon as this damned mushroom gets around to killing me. And it seems it's taking its time. Well, maybe it is, since I can't really judge time. It seems like only a few minutes since I started feeling the stomach cramps, but the stars have moved quite a bit. Well, as much as they usually move, that is. I think. Wow, those stars make the figure of a man. Such colours... There's the wolf, the fox, and the hare, just like in the song. The poor hare is chased between the deadly wolf and the crazy fox. Just like my poor sheep would be, but for me. In the song, too, they get drunk and dance and run around in a circle. Like they're doing now. But I don't spin them, do I? They belong to the heavens. Why does that song remind me of something I heard at Mass? "Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeculum in favila teste David cum Sibilya..." They're the same song but for my drum beat. Hah! We stole it and didn't even know.

Maybe I'm already dead and my ghost is saying this. Maybe I'm still asleep in the hut and dreaming I ate the mushroom. I feel like Saint Drogo must have felt assisting at Mass and tending his flocks at the same time. Where am I? My body's shivering. Oh, I must be cold. I'll wrap my cape around me.

Anyway, yes, my untimely death. I nearly forgot I was appealing my case to the gods. Here I am, a mere sapling, not even twenty, and all I get for this country living is a handsome corpse. Assuming the ravens don't get it before the cure', as I said. What an image. Oy, it makes me shudder. You would think the gods would put a warning on creatures like bright red spotty mushrooms. Forget I said such a stupid thing. The poisonous vapours in my brain made me think it. Or did I say it out loud?

My life seems like such a short silly story. I barely remember being suckled by my mother, blessed be her memory, being weaned and wandering within my yard by the village, taught to make letters by the cure' of my village, rolling in the hay with the local girls, then becoming a shepherd... And the last couple of years have been just the cycle of the seasons: mostly leaning, sitting, and smoking. Luckily, nature has been good enough to provide me with a good smoke, since I can't afford any tobacco from the village. Which is fine since it only makes me dizzy and prone to coughing fits. The local smoking herbs relieves the long waits and discomforts. Rene' calls one of the plants "Pantagruelion." After some fellow named Pantagruel, I suppose. Maybe he was the first man to start braiding its fibres into rope. Rene' knows a lot, since he spent a few years working in a monastery before he became a shepherd. He never told me why he left. He learned to read very well while he was there, though. He knows at least as much of the Latin in the Mass as I do. I'll miss Rene'. He was the only bosom friend of all the other shepherds, the one I shared my mattress with. Come to think of it, he'll miss me too. The idea of dying was beginning to look convenient for a bit. In fact, I think I'll lie down and watch the stars and think of Rene'. All this thinking of death doesn't seem to help it come any faster. Such a great bolt of deep blue silk with diamonds sewn into it. And now my eyes are embroidering the great cap of the sky. Clouds over the moon. Maybe it will rain tomorrow. It would be a shame if I had to miss it.

Just yesterday it was raining. For us shepherds, every rainy day is a feast day. April 16, as Rene' told us, was even more special, since it is the feast day of our patron in heaven, Saint Drogo. Not that we ever need an excuse, but we put our money together and bought some bread, cheese and ale from the local innkeeper. It was someone's turn to put on a pot of rabbit-and-root-soup (it's a specialty of ours). And we smoked while it cooked. Oh, the smell - the salty, spicy, meatiness of broth in the air. Good smoking herb has a way of increasing the appetite and loosening the tongue. After several wooden bowls full of rabbit-and-root soup and a few more bowls of Pantegruelion, we'd all be in quite a state, lying about the fire on straw mattresses, telling stories, laughing, and wrestling.

It's on the rainy days that Rene' and I talk the most. The evening of the feast the rain was beating a dull roar ourside to the occasional bleat of a sheep. The other boys were sleeping off the ale while next to the fire Rene' and I watched the smoke curling from our pipes slowly and drifting to the floor. Warm, well-fed, slightly drunk, and barely awake from smoking, we talked for hours of big-breasted farmer's daughters, old gods, and the Church.

I can hear his voice now, saying how he was really a Christian, in spite of what the cure' accuses him of. "How could I not be a follower of any man who is The Good Shepherd? Even as a son of God, he was never too good for his humble birth. Unlike our friend the cure'. He's only the lord's son born on the wrong side of the blanket and secreted out of the manor in a pack-saddle. Even his education was on hush-money. We shepherds think differently than villagers, you know. We stand between the beauty and terror of God's nature. We live on the heath and sleep with only the starry sky as our night-cap, our only friends the fellow herders and the flock. To tend animals you see how the villagers live in herds with the cure' as their pastor. And somehow feeling protective and loving of a poor beast, even though it is your source of income, makes it qute clear that humans, too, are vulnerable creatures who need guides. As it is written in Psalm 23, the Lord may be your shepherd, and with him you may not want for anything. But after the brief life of peace that passes all understanding in green pastures, you, like all of the flock, are fleeced by fate of your worldly goods and led to slaughter by He for whom The Good Shepherd works. But even The Good Shepherd is the Lamb of God. He, a god in a man's form, willingly made the self-sacrifice, to endure the slaughter like his lambs. If only the priests and kings today started out as shepherds, like Saint Drogo of Flanders and King David of the Jews. Then the Sun King wouldn't have to shade his eyes in Versailles so as not to see his children starving in Paris."

"The people of the East Indies have a savior they call Crishne' who was raised by cowherds. He was a mischeivous fellow, would have made us look as well-behaved as the cure'. This Crishne' was born to a noble family and given to shepherds to raise to escape the wrath of a cruel king trying to hide from an oracle. This Crishne' fellow was the son of a god named Vitsnou, and took all the pretty cow-herding girls as his mistress. In fact, he could lay with them all at the same time, when he wasn't too busy killing dragons and things like that." I thought this was pretty impressive, even for a shepherd. Our patron Saint Drogo could only manage to be in two places at once.

"Before Crishne' left his human form and returned to Vitsnou, he was the coach-driver for the great general Arjune'. When Arjune' was in the biggest battle of his life, Crishne' showed him that the people he was fighting were all his kin. Then he showed Arjune' that he must not try to avoid his fate, but kill with a loving heart, as the gods must do."

And he told me how shepherds had been the ones the old gods asked to resolve arguments and start them. "Prince Paris, son of Priam, while he worked as a shepherd, was given a golden apple by Eris, goddess of discord, to give to the fairest of the three most beautiful goddesses of Olympus: Aphrodite, Athena, and Juno. The three offered Paris bribes, but only one of the bribes interested him. Her name was Helen, and Paris' taking of her started the Trojan war."

Next he told me about the Persian god of the sun. "Mitra, the friend in the red cap, was born out of an ancient rock. Like Jesus, his birth was witnessed by shepherds. We were there as shepherds before Mitra even got around to creating humans!" I couldn't understand how this could be.

Well, the best I can hope for now is to see one of Rene's gods soon. Although I really am wondering why I'm not completely dead yet. In fact, I'm not even mostly dead. I think I'm hearing things, though. I could have sworn I heard a sheep bleat. No, wait, it is a sheep. Poor little lamb, you're scratched from the brambles. Come here, little lamb. Rene'? Is that you, Rene', or am I seeing the man in the sky again?

"Jean-Marc! We were waiting all day for you. We feared you were dead. I was just looking for one lost sheep and found another." I am dead, Rene'. I just ate a narrenschwamm by accident. I had cramps in my stomach and threw up, but the poisonous vapours got in my brain. I don't even know if I'm really talking to you or if this is just a story I'm making up in my head. "How many did you eat?" Just one.

Rene' is laughing. Rotten bastard, my bosom friend laughing at my suffering. It must really be him, I wouldn't make up a story in my head this mean. "I hate to break it to you, but you're likely to make a complete recovery." He leaned against a tree and had another good laugh. "Quite the state you're in. Are the colours pretty?" What do you mean, I'm not going to die? Have you eaten narrenschwamm too? "Oh yes, all the time."

I don't know whether to punch him or embrace him. I'm not going to die? I'm almost disappointed, I had myself all set for the idea. Oh well, he found me, the least I can do is embrace him. I was going to miss you Rene'. Here's a kiss for for finding me. Just tell me one thing: how could we shepherds have been at the birth of Mitra before he made humans?

"Shepherds herd stories as well as sheep. We are storytellers and witnesses of creation. We can be present at the birth of gods even before the creation of humanity, because the story and the storyteller are one, and the story is as old as time. As your namesake, John Mark, wrote in his gospel, "In the beginning the Word already was."

---

(1) "J'ai vu^ le loup, le r'nard, le lie`vre," trad. French folk song, melody based on the "Dies Irae," translation mine.