The Boatmaker (19 page)

“And have you?” The young priest is attentive, confident.

“I don't know. I did have a dream, though. The other night, in the field, when I went out to kill the hare that's been eating the lettuces.” The boatmaker feels as if he is babbling. The priest flexes the globe of fingers and smiles to show that his patience is large, his spirit untroubled.

“And your dream?”

“I was in the springhouse.”

“The springhouse.” This is a new twist. But the priest knows the rest, at least in essence.

“There was a pole, like a telegraph pole, standing up next to the spring. A man was on it.”

“A man?”

“Tied to the pole. It was dark. I could only see his legs.”

“And what did you see?”

“There were cuts in his legs. Deep cuts. But no blood came out. Instead, fish were coming out of the cuts. Salmon. A whole school of them. The wall of the springhouse lifted up, and they swam out to the sea.”

The priest is quiet, listening; the boatmaker feels that his dream is foolish, that he has wasted the priest's time.

“And how did you feel in all this?”

“I could hardly move.”

“And after that?”

When the boatmaker is silent, the priest says gently: “Go on, my son.”

“I wanted to leave my body behind. Take it off, the way you take off your clothes. I wanted to be there with the salmon, swimming away. And then I was grateful. Very grateful.”

The priest leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, fingertips touching. All is well. He has found the needed fourth; the deep spiritual work can begin. He admonishes himself to avoid the sin of pride, reminds himself that he is merely a tool—and one of many, at that. It is little more than chance that he has been selected for this role, not a reward for any particular virtue. Unlikely as it might seem to the world, the priest thinks, the rough little man across the desk is far more important than the young and polished man of God.

In spite of these cooling and temperate thoughts, Father Robert cannot help the pride that warms and excites him. He is a fisher of men, a skilled fisherman. He has found them all, landed them, wriggling, at the end of his line in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are all different, these little men, each with his own strange twist. This one with his springhouse and salmon. Fish springing from His wounds! It is almost blasphemous. It
is
blasphemy.

Still, he tells himself, he cannot judge. He has not been entrusted with the full plan. But he has been given a critical role. And he has fulfilled what has been asked of him: He has found the fourth. The circle is closed. He has merited the trust of The Brotherhood, men who are powerful and wise in the ways of the world, who will help
bring the young priest's vision out of this monastery and into every corner of the kingdom.

The priest opens his eyes and smiles at the small man from the tiny island at the end of the world and says: “My son, I am pleased with you.”

After his visit to Father Robert, the boatmaker feels that the brothers are treating him differently. A zone of silence seems to surround him. And within that zone he also feels himself changing. Over a dinner rich with the fruits of summer, the words of Matthew now sound strange and ominous. The buzzing in his head returns. Only Neck remains the same, visiting the boatmaker in the field with his bucket to ask how he is faring.

The Sunday after the boatmaker recounts his dream, Father Robert preaches in the chapel. Bright summer light pours through the polar window behind him. Most of the thirty or more brothers are present, but even on Sundays there are chores that will not wait. As hymns are sung and the service proceeds, a few brothers make their way out and down the aisle; others enter from the fields to take their places. The boatmaker is sitting two-thirds of the way back, not wishing to draw attention to himself.

But as Father Robert begins his sermon, the boatmaker feels as if the priest is speaking directly to him. He
even feels the priest looking at him, though the brilliance of the round window behind Father Robert means that all the boatmaker can see is a dark form within a glowing aura.

“Despair,” Father Robert begins, in a voice so low the brothers must lean toward the round window to hear. “Despair is the greatest sin against Our Lord. Despair.” He pauses to let the words sink in.

“There are many other sins. Sins we have all come to the New Land to rid ourselves of. The love of money, which, as Paul says, is the root of all evil. The sins of lust, which are as many and varied as the folds of a leper's skin, turning a man into a creature as low as one of the fat worms that burrow through our rich soil on the New Land. Think of these worms: You know them.”

A rustle of recognition ripples through the congregation. Indeed, they all know the fat glistening worms, coated in translucent slime, that wriggle blind through the dark earth.

“You know these worms. They are wonderful—in their place. They aerate our soil, leave their waste behind and help us grow our crops. In a sense, they lie beneath everything we do in this community. And the Lord must love them, because He made them so well-suited to their task and made the efforts of us, his children, depend
upon them. For in their absence, our crops would be poor shriveled things.”

Father Robert bends down behind the lectern and comes up holding a glass jar of the kind the brothers use to preserve fruits and vegetables. The sun is higher, no longer coming straight in through the radial window, and the brothers can see that the bottom half of the jar is filled with fat earthworms crawling over one another. The priest unscrews the lid, reaches in, pulls out a long, fat worm and lets it dangle from his clean white fingers.

“Look, brothers. We know God must love these creatures. Without them the New Land would shrivel up like the Valley of Dry Bones. But look again! And ask yourself: Who among you would trade places with even the fattest earthworm?”

He shakes the long worm hanging at the end of his fingers. It curls and shakes, its slime glistening in the light from the round window.

“
Who among you would be one of these?
” He waits, but there is no response aside from a shuffling of sandals.

“Not one. Not one of you would be a worm in our soil.” He lowers the worm slowly back into the jar, screws the lid on, replaces the jar in the lectern, reaches into a pocket at the front of his robe, pulls out a large, clean white handkerchief and wipes his hands.

“And yet that is what lust makes of you: a worm, wriggling and crawling in your own slime. Nor is lust the only sin that reduces you to something far down the ladder of His creation.
Anger
. Your rage against your fellow sinners. Many of you are familiar with that sin from your former lives.
Drink
. Some of you know that one too. Many a man who sits in this sanctified place have I picked up in my arms in the streets of the great city in drunken unconsciousness, covered in his own bodily wastes, and carried to the New Land to be bathed, cleansed and risen into a new life.” The priest's voice has lowered and become that of a mother. Every man in this chapel can imagine being gathered in his arms, bathed and brought into the light.

“But none of these sins, bestial as they are, compare to the sin of
despair
,” Father Robert says, his voice rising and gaining strength. Now it is the voice of a father, not a mother.

“All the other sins may reduce you to the level of a beast, brothers. Sometimes to the level of a warm-blooded beast, with a pumping heart and a backbone. Sometimes all the way down to the level of one of our flexible glistening friends here—with no backbone, wriggling in excrement. That low, brothers,
even that low
, sin can take you. And any of these sins may lead you to
desecrate yourself, tear your family—your wife and loving children—to shreds.

“And yet, and yet . . .” He takes out his broad white handkerchief and wipes his hands. Then he grasps the lectern and looks squarely at his congregation, who are hushed and still, following every word.

“Yet despair is worse than any of these sins, brothers. Much worse. It may not seem so. After all, these other sins burn the sinner and his loved ones, scarring the landscape of his life like a forest fire raging out of control, leaving nothing but blackened, charred stumps. Despair, on the other hand, may seem small—quiet and innocent—meaning harm to no one. The man in despair may seem only passive and sad. Weak. Oppressed by himself. Worthy of our pity. Of the charity Our Savior offered even the weakest among us: not just a second chance, but a third chance, and a fourth chance, chance after chance until the end of time. Despair, the quiet man's disease,
would seem, then, to hurt no one
. And yet it is the gravest, wickedest sin of all.”

Father Robert pauses, reaches down into the lectern, brings up a glass of water and drinks, letting his words sink in before putting the glass away. His sermons are always full of passion. But he seems to be pouring his full power into this one.

“And why, brothers, is despair such a great wickedness, when it seems so harmless?
Because the man who despairs seals himself away from God, away from Our Savior's healing mercy.
The man who despairs is arrogant—with an arrogance greater than most of us sitting here can imagine. We can imagine lust, sloth, drunkenness. All of them—easily. But this arrogance is beyond the comprehension of most of us. Enfolded in himself, the despairing man substitutes his pitiful human personality for the Creator and His Creation. The despairing man says: I know Salvation is not possible. I know that only darkness is real. I know the universe is empty and dead—nothing more than an elaborate mechanism, beautifully carved furniture: finite and inanimate. The despairing man offers up these falsehoods as common sense when they are
the most outrageous lies. And we know them to be lies! We know Salvation, brothers! And we know that the entire Creation is alive with the light of Salvation!
”

The priest pauses, holding the edges of the lectern in a wrestler's grip, color rising in his face. Although the chapel holds the cool of the night long into the summer day, he is sweating.

“Unlike other sinners, whose sins are merely the weakness of Adam and can be repaired, as the burned forest regrows from seeds dropped into blackened soil from unburned trees nearby, the one who despairs sets his vanity,
his stubbornness and his spiritual pride, above the Mercy of the Lord, rejecting the priceless offer of Salvation. That is why despair is the greatest of the spiritual disasters that can possibly befall the human soul.” Now he is shouting, the words flowing straight from his wrestler's chest.

“And if there is any man here who feels the ice of despair forming in his heart, he must ask for strength from the Savior to melt that ice, ask that he be bathed in the blood of the Lamb: the hot, cleansing blood whose heat will melt the coldest of hearts, the hearts of sinners who think they are lost forever from the sight of God and condemned to drift forever in a dead, mechanical universe.”

The priest rests his forearms on the lectern, allowing his head to fall forward, showing lustrous blond hair. Then he lifts his head. He is spent, sweat running down his face. “Let us pray.”

After the concluding hymns, the brothers file out into the mid-morning sunshine. They walk out two by two in silence, returning from Heaven to earth. Cows must be milked, eggs collected, vegetables nourished. When they have finished any tasks that cannot be postponed, they will retreat to the refectory to read the Gospels if they can, pray silently if they cannot.

The boatmaker is in no hurry. He wants to spend time with his lettuces. He needs to be alone to turn things
over, as he would examine a piece of wood, the width and straightness of its grain, the knots where branches were born. He cannot shake off his sense that Father Robert's sermon was aimed directly at him. Almost all the lesser sins the priest described—lust, drunkenness, rage—are the boatmaker's own. And now that he is somewhat freer of those, at least while he lives on the New Land, he feels the weight of his stubborn despair.

Despite the dream of the springhouse, which seemed to promise salvation, the boatmaker feels he is a fraud on the New Land, not knowing how to pray, not knowing the meaning of being saved. He is a counterfeit banknote that looks like the real thing but comes from some hustle of Crow's rather than from the Royal Mint. He loves the lettuces, the humming of the bees, the rustling of the oak leaves. He is deeply grateful to the young priest and Neck for bringing him here. He knows it has saved his life. And yet, even wearing the robe of a monk, he cannot bring himself to believe in a larger way of being saved: a saving of his soul.

For a few days he keeps to himself, not speaking even to Neck. He avoids meals, taking a crust of bread and bringing it to the field in the pocket of his robe. He goes to and from the lettuces with his wheelbarrow, hoe and watering can, turning things over again and again,
struggling with the renewed buzzing in his head and the questions that have returned: about the Jews, money, the king. When he is not working, he walks the fields by himself, unable to find stillness.

Walking by the chapel, in the square between the church and the main building, he sees four of the brothers digging two deep holes. Next to the holes two poles lie in the grass, like the one the boatmaker saw in his dream of the springhouse, like the telegraph poles the king is bringing to the remote corners of the kingdom.