The Plague Legends
"Saint Anastasius: his head as an amulet against plague and witchcraft." Wellcome Collection. She wears a red skirt. She is sometimes a goat. She is a hag. She is beautiful. She is two people: an old man and an old woman, or a boy and a girl. Her name, when she has a name, is Pesta.
She is the ferryman’s passenger and he recognizes her face. He pleads for his life. He is a kind man. She can see this. She relents. She says: I’ll see what I can do. She speaks in an upbeat, almost cheery voice. You’re probably not on my list anyhow. She unfurls her scroll. She scans the names. She comes to a stop.
He is on her list.
Oh, I’m sorry, she says, and she is sincere. But her hands are tied. She lifts her staff, points it at the ferryman’s heart. His heart stops beating. He falls. He is spared, not of death, but of suffering. So that’s something.
The scroll arrives on our doorstep on a Friday morning in March. Our neighbor, who is an artist, leaves it as a gift. In an email, he writes that he hopes this ream of blank paper will give my husband and me something to do with our two children while we are sequestered inside because of the pandemic. On the first afternoon, my daughter, who is nine, cuts a long sheath from the scroll and claims a corner of the kitchen floor to work, as far away from me and her little brother as possible. My son paints a mural of the school where he attends kindergarten, which has been closed for five days now. There are 80 windows on its façade. (We count them, not from memory but from an image that I find on the internet.) Now there are two schools in my home—one on the computer screen, and one taking shape in the mural that my son is painting. There is a third, if you include the slapdash homeschool I am running in an effort to keep
