Father lays a ribbon to mark his place and closes the parish registry. Yesterday’s birth has been added to the ledger. Another boy. “Fetch the ladder,” he says. “See what you can do about it. Have you been down to the pier yet?”

“No. The fishermen won’t be back yet.”

“Well, don’t wait to long,” he grumbles. “You need to be there when they return, otherwise they’ll cheat us out of our supper.”

The pier is the last place I want to go. It’s not even my duty to perform, but Father insists he is too busy to collect the tithe from the townsfolk. Liar. “Yes, sir.”

Father steps away and crosses to the side door that leads to the rectory, where we live. “Leandra said her husband netted a seal pup yesterday. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of red meat. Or anything besides codfish.”

“I thought it was bad luck to eat seal.”

“Says the man who fails to catch one,” he replies as he goes out the door. The Reverend Uriah thinks of himself as a man of high wit, but I have yet to hear anyone laugh at his quips. He believes this is because of his intellect and education, but in truth, he is simply a humorless, taciturn man. A man of the true faith, not of the people, as he often reminds me.

The ladder is a wobbly thing that looks as old as the church itself. Climbing up, I pray it doesn’t snap under me as I dab the bones with a damp rag. Up close, I can see how the sea monster is constructed; the various bones are lashed together with twine or fastened with penny nails. A patchwork of misaligned bone and tooth, fused together to form this bizarre holy relic.

How in the world did the carcass of a monster come to hang inside the church? The story, as it’s been told to me, hearkens back to the very founding of this village here on the craggy coast. A long, long time ago, this squalid settlement was bedeviled by a monster from the sea depths. It snatched men from their skiffs and slithered ashore to devour women and children in their sod huts. It ravaged the goats and swallowed horses whole. The old wives claimed that the beast, having had a taste of warm blood with that first unlucky fisherman, wanted no more cold fish from the sea. It lusted then for the creatures of dry land, especially those that strode on two legs.