her head is already cut short. She looks like a half boy, half girl in the picture, but the look she’s giving herself in the mirror isn’t confused—it’s determined.
She does all of it, everything the angels told her to do. She finds the rich guy, gets him to take her to the true king, convinces the king to let her lead his army, gets a suit of armor and a horse and an embroidered heraldic banner, leads ten thousand men into battle, plans surprise attacks, liberates the besieged city of Orléans. Overnight she becomes famous in France and infamous in England. The French call her the Maid, the Lark, and the Messenger. The English call her witch, cow, sorceress, and whore.
Secretly, I believed I was the new Joan. I could feel it inside me, my destiny—not to lead an army, maybe, but to do something big that would save the world. I was positive that before my twelfth birthday I would hear my own voices and get my own holy instructions. I tried to put myself into places where they would feel comfortable coming to me—gardens, athletic fields, big outdoor spaces. I waited to be told what God had planned for me to do.
Twice I was Joan for Halloween, in fourth and fifthgrade. My mother wouldn’t let me cut off my hair, but she did make me a helmet out of a gallon milk jug turned upside-down and spray-painted silver, and she helped me tuck my braids up inside it.
By the time I was thirteen, I realized they weren’t coming for me. I never heard anything directly from God, and I ended up not being able to be outside as much because my mother got sick and I had to be inside all the time, in hospital rooms, in hospital hallways, in waiting rooms, in parking garages, in diners, drinking Coke with lemon while my dad drank coffee and looked out the window.
In the end, she was burned. Joan. In the end she did everything a human being could do, everything her voices told her to do, and still the English captured her, tortured her, starved her, shaved her head, put her through a five-month show trial, and finally burned her at the stake in a public square. She died forgiving her executioners through the flames.
In the end, my mother chose to come home. She had been through years of treatments that felt more like punishments than cures—radiation and chemicals and surgeries and poisons—and she said she couldn’t bear to die of something that was supposed to heal her. She wanted to die comfortable and calm, in our house, with us. She wanted to let her body stop naturally. My father thought this was a terrible idea, and he was really badly behaved about it. He said a lot of cruel things to her that I’ll neverforget. He told her she was selfish, which was especially unfair. But my mother could be incredibly stubborn when she believed she was right. In the end, she got what she wanted. She was home for thirty days. She died in the temporary hospital bed we set up for her in the living room. Two days before she died, she told my father she forgave him for all the awful things he’d said.
My father couldn’t handle speaking at the funeral so I did it for him. I wrote a eulogy for her, describing the interesting, kind person she was and listing all the things I loved about her. I talked about the main things she liked to do: gardening, doing hair, reading, volunteering at church. I talked about her sweet voice, her soft hands, and how incredibly stubborn she could be when she believed she was right.
In the end, France was occupied until 1453, another twenty-two years after Joan was executed. But in 1920, they made her a saint.
7
Jesse
“It was all fine until right before the end,” Wyatt recounts as he tails Jesse, a brisk step and a half behind her, through the sunny autumn afternoon. Somewhere in the stacks of the Samuel Ezra Minot Public Library, two blocks away, Emily Miller is getting ready to go on break. When Jesse meets up with her at 3:30—ten minutes from now—in the third-floor handicapped restroom, it will
She does all of it, everything the angels told her to do. She finds the rich guy, gets him to take her to the true king, convinces the king to let her lead his army, gets a suit of armor and a horse and an embroidered heraldic banner, leads ten thousand men into battle, plans surprise attacks, liberates the besieged city of Orléans. Overnight she becomes famous in France and infamous in England. The French call her the Maid, the Lark, and the Messenger. The English call her witch, cow, sorceress, and whore.
Secretly, I believed I was the new Joan. I could feel it inside me, my destiny—not to lead an army, maybe, but to do something big that would save the world. I was positive that before my twelfth birthday I would hear my own voices and get my own holy instructions. I tried to put myself into places where they would feel comfortable coming to me—gardens, athletic fields, big outdoor spaces. I waited to be told what God had planned for me to do.
Twice I was Joan for Halloween, in fourth and fifthgrade. My mother wouldn’t let me cut off my hair, but she did make me a helmet out of a gallon milk jug turned upside-down and spray-painted silver, and she helped me tuck my braids up inside it.
By the time I was thirteen, I realized they weren’t coming for me. I never heard anything directly from God, and I ended up not being able to be outside as much because my mother got sick and I had to be inside all the time, in hospital rooms, in hospital hallways, in waiting rooms, in parking garages, in diners, drinking Coke with lemon while my dad drank coffee and looked out the window.
In the end, she was burned. Joan. In the end she did everything a human being could do, everything her voices told her to do, and still the English captured her, tortured her, starved her, shaved her head, put her through a five-month show trial, and finally burned her at the stake in a public square. She died forgiving her executioners through the flames.
In the end, my mother chose to come home. She had been through years of treatments that felt more like punishments than cures—radiation and chemicals and surgeries and poisons—and she said she couldn’t bear to die of something that was supposed to heal her. She wanted to die comfortable and calm, in our house, with us. She wanted to let her body stop naturally. My father thought this was a terrible idea, and he was really badly behaved about it. He said a lot of cruel things to her that I’ll neverforget. He told her she was selfish, which was especially unfair. But my mother could be incredibly stubborn when she believed she was right. In the end, she got what she wanted. She was home for thirty days. She died in the temporary hospital bed we set up for her in the living room. Two days before she died, she told my father she forgave him for all the awful things he’d said.
My father couldn’t handle speaking at the funeral so I did it for him. I wrote a eulogy for her, describing the interesting, kind person she was and listing all the things I loved about her. I talked about the main things she liked to do: gardening, doing hair, reading, volunteering at church. I talked about her sweet voice, her soft hands, and how incredibly stubborn she could be when she believed she was right.
In the end, France was occupied until 1453, another twenty-two years after Joan was executed. But in 1920, they made her a saint.
7
Jesse
“It was all fine until right before the end,” Wyatt recounts as he tails Jesse, a brisk step and a half behind her, through the sunny autumn afternoon. Somewhere in the stacks of the Samuel Ezra Minot Public Library, two blocks away, Emily Miller is getting ready to go on break. When Jesse meets up with her at 3:30—ten minutes from now—in the third-floor handicapped restroom, it will
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