The Oblate's Confession (40 page)

But Victricius was blind to such notions, the temptations he might be causing me. Indeed, the way he told it, the destruction of the plow became the point of Father’s sermon. “We must burn our tools,” he said, in an accent identical to Father Abbot’s, “all of our possessions, and follow Him. When the Master places His cloak upon us, when He casts it over our shoulders and calls us His own, what right have we to a past, a livelihood, to anything at all? We are His; whatever we own, His by default. To cling to anything—mother, father, plow, past—is to deny Him, to say that there is some part of us that is not His, not wholly given, that a
part of us belongs not to Christ but to things corruptible, empty of worth.” How perfectly the furnace master remembered that speech! How perfectly, after all those years, he recalled our lord abbot’s theme! “I see how you shudder,” he declaimed, speaking not to me but to the crowd that had sat on the ground that morning, the boy in its midst. “The sun has risen, you cannot hide. You draw back, you shrink from my words, but this is your servitude, your slavery. You own not your plow, your oxen, your plot of land; they own you. Think what a gift it is our Lord offers you. Freedom. Freedom from all that weighs you down, from all that daily grinds your teeth and wrinkles your brow. Freedom to be what you were meant to be from the beginning of time. Men. Men of God, men of understanding. Throw everything away, He said, and follow me. ‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.’”

The speech was so grand, its delivery so faithful, that for a moment or two I lost myself in admiration of it and of the demand our lord abbot had placed upon those farmers. That they give up everything! That they turn their backs on all they valued, all they loved and cherished, and for what? To follow him! To wander off after what must have seemed a half-crazed priest into a life of certain hunger, hardship, self-denial. For the first time in my life I realized how mad we must seem to the world, how mad and how glorious! This was the life my father had given me, this impossibility, this obverse paradise. No wonder Eanflæd had been so impressed. How grand it suddenly seemed, how heroic, how fine!

Brother sat down. As if the speech itself had been the whole of his story, as if, having delivered himself of it, there was nothing left to say, nothing left to prop him up, bear him on, the furnace master sat down, gave a little sigh, became still. I noticed his quiet and, in my triumph, felt an unexpected compassion for him. I would reach out to Victricius. I who had given up everything to be here, had had everything—mother, father, family, home—stripped
from me to live here, could give up this little more to make him happy too, make even someone as lowly and unimportant as the furnace master feel wanted, interesting, a person of consequence. “And so,” I asked, pretending an interest I did not feel, “that was how you became a monk? You got up and went after him, you followed Father Abbot?”

“Yes. No.” More silence. “No, not right away. I was too young, my parents wouldn’t permit it, wouldn’t let me go. Which of course made me unhappy. I must have moped around, sackcloth and ashes, because I remember my father yelling at me—a pot had been broken, some clay set up improperly, I’m not sure what, but apparently I hadn’t been watching what I was doing.” Victricius stopped for a moment, then added, “That was the last time he ever spoke to me.” Another pause, longer this time. “Anyway. Anyway, it’s clear what he was angry about, the impudence, the suggestion that I was holier than he. Or.... Or maybe not. Maybe he just felt sorry for me. I don’t know. Whatever it was, he sent me away. I remember that, threw me out of his workshop, told me to take some water to the men in the fields, make myself useful.” A small laugh here. “So I was walking down the hill when I saw him. It’s funny I would have gone that way but I guess I was taking my time, wasting my time. And then I saw Father. He must have been talking to the brothers of Dalfinus because he was coming from their vineyard when I saw him, heading downhill, walking between the rows, working his way toward the village path.

“I’d known he was leaving of course, but I’d thought he was already gone. It was the purest of chances that I met him there.” Victricius hesitated as if expecting me to argue this point. When I didn’t, he continued. “So of course I ran to him. I mean what boy wouldn’t? I hid my yoke in the grass alongside the road and ran after him. I had to. He was like no one I had ever seen before, no one I had ever imagined.

“He acted as if he knew me. Funny, I never thought about it before, but I doubt he did. I mean I doubt he really knew me, recognized me. There had been plenty of boys there that morning, plenty of adult faces to hold his attention. But he let me think he
knew me, recognized me, and you cannot imagine what that did for me, how it made me feel. We walked along, me talking, him listening, smiling every now and then, probably wondering where this gangling boy got the idea he could someday be among his followers.” Once again the little laugh. “I suppose I cut a fairly comical figure. But, anyway, after a while, we came to the bridge. I knew I had to go then, I mean to let him go. It wasn’t permitted to cross the bridge. And besides it was late. But I lingered. I didn’t want to say good-bye. I kept talking, trying to hold Father back, hold him back with my words, telling him everything about myself, my life, my dreams, the sort of potter I would be, the fields I would work, wishing with all my heart that this could go on forever, that somehow I could be allowed to stand by this bridge forever and talk with this man.

“But of course it couldn’t. I mean it couldn’t go on forever and Father clearly knew that, looking at his feet, trying to let me know as politely as he could that he had to be off. And it was getting on in the day. The air had grown cold.” For some reason Victricius ran his hand over my arm as if fearful that day’s cold might somehow reach me. “Spring is like that where I come from. The days are warm but, by late afternoon, there is a freshness to the air, a chill. So, anyway, the sun must have passed behind a cloud or something because I shivered and it was then that it happened, that Father placed his mantle over me. Of course it was a perfectly natural gesture. I don’t think anyone can doubt that, that, by his nature, Father is a perfectly caring, paternal man and, therefore, the gesture itself was natural, entirely natural and spontaneous. I can still remember the way it felt, its heft, the smell of Father’s body in its wool, the roughness at my neck. And then of course it dawned on me. On both of us I suppose. He had placed his cloak on me.”

Once again Brother became still and I found myself growing annoyed with him, his apparent inability to get to the end of this tale. So Father Abbot had placed his cloak over him, so Brother had gotten to play the role of Elisha in Scripture, had gotten to run away, follow Father Abbot, I didn’t see that it mattered so very

much. After all, it wasn’t as if he had been such a great catch. It wasn’t as if the whole village had risen up, followed Father Abbot, become his disciples. Actually, when you thought about it, you could believe Father Abbot would have been disappointed. To have preached to an entire village and won but this single boy, this whelp, this potter’s dog. Father must have wondered what people would think of him, deliverer of children, messiah to the small and insignificant. “So that was it?” I asked, feigning even less interest now. “You crossed the bridge, went after him, followed Father Abbot?”

Victricius must have thought the answer to my question obvious because he went on as if he’d already given it. “You know,” he said, “I sometimes wonder about those buckets, if they’re still there. I can still see them, just as I placed them among the grasses, the water rocking a bit, reflecting the sky. I wonder if anyone ever found them.”

For some reason I shivered and again Brother touched my arm. “I wish I had something to put over you,” he said, “a cloak or something....” And then he stopped, laughed his little nervous laugh.

I didn’t laugh. I turned my back to the furnace master and pressed the bandage he had given me tight against my eyes. It was an unnecessary cruelty. He had meant nothing by the comment—I am sure of that—and when he had realized what he had said, he had laughed at himself. Yet I turned from him, made it clear how such a notion repelled me. After a moment or two, Victricius started up again, changed the subject, began to tell me about In-Hrypum, what it was like in the monastery at In-Hrypum. You would never have known I had slighted him.

As it turned out I was wrong about the depth of that snowfall. That was no mere drift that stood before our shed: it took two full days for the brothers to get to us, the sounds of their shoveling reaching us first, the strange unnatural clamor of their hellos. Of

course my eyesight returned as Brother had predicted it would. Only in recent years has it begun to fail me again so that now I must lean back from this work if I am to see it. Brother made no more mention of his early life that day or any other day for that matter. At least not within my hearing. And of course I never brought it up. I suppose all those stories are lost now except to God.

They say that, even when the weather is fair, those who live on the coast can tell a storm is coming if there is a change in the size and intensity of the waves that beat upon their shore. Likewise, even when to all outward appearances our lives seem calm and clear, nightmares may roll suddenly in upon our sleeping selves so that, by day, we find ourselves like anxious watermen looking out to sea. So now was such a time in my life—the dreams fell one upon another as if driven by some awful storm and, pray as I might, God was disinclined to relieve me of them or give me any sign as to their source or purpose. Then, finally, there came a nightmare that seemed by its very nature so preposterous I felt I could relate it to Father Abbot without fear of repercussion. Still, I was no fool. What oblate is? I decided to tell Father Hermit about it first.

Those of you who know of Father Gwynedd only by the stories that have grown up around his name may wonder at this. Is it true then, you ask, what has been suggested, that he was less than strict in his attention to the Rule, that his faith lacked orthodoxy, precision? Even as I have recorded these remembrances, I have found myself asking similar questions, remembering again the apparent ease with which he faced his life, the humor, the fun. But I believe it is wrong to think that way about the man. It was a different time, a different place, Redestone in those days—we forget how recently we had escaped both temple and grove. And Father was one of those who had made that escape possible. Surely we must grant him and his contemporaries the pardon of their times, their age.

Still I must admit—as I record these stories and remember the man I once knew and as yet so love—that I am beginning to see even at this stage in his life the first subtle signs of the entirely unsubtle change that would eventually come over him and so irrevocably transform our relationship. But of course at the time I
was, in the arrogance of youth, blind to such subtleties. Indeed, in my pride, I think I must have thought Father’s increasing failure to rise to the challenge of my transgressions, to condemn my failings as once he would have, an entirely appropriate, even long overdue, recognition of the fact that I was growing up, that it was long since past time for the bonds to be loosened, the strictures relaxed, that I was becoming an adult, a man, worthy not only of respect but of a certain latitude, freedom, the room necessary to move and venture out on my own. What indignities I must have heaped upon him in the name of emancipation!

But I stray from my subject. It is the dream I have set out to tell you about, the dream which, with only minor variations, occasionally visits me even now. The most important and initial sensation is always one of confusion, disaffection, the sense that, in some way I cannot understand,
I
do not belong here.
Of course this is ridiculous. I mean if anyone belongs to a monastery, it is an oblate. But, in the dream, though I know I
must
, I also know
I
do not belong here.
As if to prove this, as if to make it eminently clear,