The Oblate's Confession (50 page)

I turned around—too abruptly—smiled at him, eyes doubtless red, brimming.

“They say it’s the trees,” he said, smiling uncertainly, clearly doubtful this had anything to do with trees.

I nodded, laughed, caught myself, looked away, looked back at him, my smile all the while growing, becoming large, too large, unsustainable.

Father’s eyes narrowed like those of a man who notices something he has missed. He studied me a moment and then, almost imperceptibly, nodded to himself. Again he held a finger to his lips, but this time I did not cry. I was too tired to cry, too moved,

too in thrall now to that gesture to do anything other than wonder at it. Father nodded. Finger at his lips, he nodded, stood up, walked away. When he returned, he carried some tree limbs and a small stone. He smiled, knelt down, placed his stone against the one I had been pulling on, stood back up, inserted the longest of the limbs between the two rocks, pressed down on it. As if bidden, the big stone rose from its seat, rocked back and forth upon the axis of the limb. Father looked at me, his face serious now, urgent, demanding. I grabbed one of the smaller limbs, placed it in the gap opened between earth and stone, blocking the one from falling back into the other. Father smiled, released the pressure on the limb he held, bent over, reset the stone in the gap next to mine, re-inserted the limb, began the process again. Once more the stone rose and, shoving, Father drove the limb beneath it, lifted again, this time using only the strength of his back. The stone rose a further hand’s breadth, trembled upon the lip of its grave, fell out. I laughed. Of course I’d seen the thing done before— Brother Ælfric used a similar method to raise and lower the wagon when repairing its wheel—but today...today such a trick seemed exceptionally clever. I couldn’t help myself, I laughed.

Someone coughed.

Father’s face changed, looked over that way. He looked back at me, brought a finger to his lips, noticed the humor in the repetition of this gesture, laughed at himself soundlessly. He smiled, flicked a nod at the rock, held his hands out palms-up before him.

I stood up, understanding what he wanted, faced him over the stone. Together we bent and, with difficulty, lifted the rock between us. Then almost dropped it when we each started moving in different directions. Father smiled, indicated the direction we should take with a movement of his shoulders. I nodded and, walking in unison now, however gracelessly, we transported our rock across the mud of that field to the nearer of the big piles.

You know it’s interesting, isn’t it, how you can remember something like that so clearly, can remember duck-walking a stone across a muddy field, what it was like when, arms tired from the carry, you heaved the thing onto the pile, the disappointment you

felt as it landed lower than expected, slid miserably, unimportantly, to the bottom of the heap? But I suppose it’s always that way with the conversations we value in our lives, the ones our memories serve up to us again and again. We remember what led up to them, the particulars of the event itself—the hall, the fire, the direction in which we faced—yet very little of the actual conversation, its ebb and flow, what came first, what second. Only the lessons learned, the secrets divulged, that is what we remember, and where we sat when we learned them, who was with us, whether or not the sun shone.

The sun did not shine that day. It was cloudy, overcast. And when Father suggested a break, led me around to the far side of the pile, stretched out upon it, I beside him, the two of us lying on our backs, heads resting on our hands, it was at a lowering sky that we looked. I remember that. And I remember the pile itself, that it was tall, nearly as tall as a man, the rocks we lay upon dusty, dirty, covered with a thin and flaking skin of dried mud. A sort of fly, tiny, black, was for some reason attracted to this mud, had perhaps been spontaneously generated by its drying. None flew, I remember that, but they crawled back and forth in their countless hundreds, scurrying now left, now right, avoiding us, the area around our bodies, but otherwise moving indiscriminately over the rocks, gathering in the declivities whenever the wind blew, all facing the same direction, all adhering to some secret order, some strange and entirely unknowable rule.

Doubtless for a while we said nothing. It makes sense, we would have done that, enjoying the quiet, the feel of lying on our backs, muscles relaxing, recovering. And then, possibly without preamble (for he was like that—though he was no longer permitted to teach, our former prior retained the habits of a pedant), Father began to talk. He didn’t look at me as he spoke—I remember that well—looked instead at the sky, the dark and moving clouds, as if he spoke not to me but to the face of Heaven. His subject was, as of course it so often had been in the days when he was prior, monasticism, his calling, mine, but the way he spoke about it now struck me as different, unexpected. Before there had

always been something strained about Father’s lectures on the communal life, as if the man spoke not of something he knew but of something he wanted, something he hoped, through the force of his words, to coerce into being. But today, as I have said, things were different, the tone changed, as if, in some way I could not understand (I mean look at the man—the mud, the chapped hands, the unhealthy pallor), Father had achieved his dream, achieved the happiness he had always longed for. I remember he said it was the freedom that surprised him most, the freedom obedience gave a man from worry, anxiety, any and all forms of pride. Doubtless I remember this because I was so surprised by it, surprised to find Father surprised by it. After all it had been Father who had always preached so passionately on the subject, the supposed freedom conferred upon those willing to dispense with freedom, enter a monastery, submit their will to that of an abbot. But now he spoke of that freedom as if it were something he had never expected, as if, surprised by it, Father now took daily pleasure in its expression, as if even that day, even as he’d knelt in the mud, struggled with yet another crop of stone, his mind had risen free of care into the clouds, into Heaven, been permitted, finally, the peace and serenity it had so longed for. And none of this, he assured me, none of this would have been possible without obedience, without the God-given gift of obedience, the yoke which is no yoke, which is a taking-off of yokes, the yoke which places your body in harness to another that your mind might follow God, might be freed to follow God.

It began to rain, I remember that, a light rain at first, big drops falling wet and cold out of a dark gray sky. Behind us Brother Os-ric called everyone into the shelter of the trees, and I remember Father rising up on one elbow, the uncharacteristically mischievous grin that spread across his face as he peered over the top of the pile, checked to see if we had been missed. And I remember the way he lay back down too, lay back down as if this were all part of the same lecture, as if he’d done nothing wrong, had no need to explain why, having just praised obedience, he now played at its opposite, only laying a hand on mine to let me know that all was

as it should be, that our absence had gone unnoticed, we might continue to speak.

I think it was then that I raised the issue of Ealhmund, reminded Father that he had not always felt this way, that he had fought his superior on that, disagreed with him about that. And not even in Chapter. In the dortoir! In the unseemly panic of the dortoir that morning, Father Dagan, lowly Father Dagan, had raised his voice, raised his voice to champion an oblate, to challenge and contradict his rightful superior, his abbot, over something as pitiful and insignificant as the expulsion of an oblate. But Dagan only smiled, patted the hand his rested upon, smiling as if he had not only foreseen this objection but hoped for it, sought it as one seeks the last step in his argument, the final proof, his coda. He turned his head toward me, the face close now, teeth visible, eyes red-rimmed, tired, smiling. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I did do that, didn’t I? But of course I did so openly.” He looked away, looked back up at the sky, thought about it. “So long as you question your superior openly, in front of the entire community, there can be nothing wrong with it, nothing deceitful, for you submit your differences to his judgment, his review. You do so knowing full well he may punish you for challenging him and that such punishment would be right, proper, that you must live with it for it comes from your superior. And so, even in contradicting him, you are in a state of obedience, you submit to your superior, for you did not hide your differences from him.” Father nodded to himself. He turned to me, fixed those eyes upon me. “You must remember, Winwæd, everyone has a superior. You cannot avoid it. The farmer is subject to his lord, the lord to his king. The only difference between them and us is that we have chosen to follow one who seeks for his men not earthly glory but heavenly, not material goods but spiritual. That is why the world finds us so strange, our lives so contradictory, both revolutionary
and
hidebound, poor
and
immensely wealthy. This is our station in life, our cross to bear, and, like any cross, it is both burden and glory.” Dagan watched me for a moment. Then he looked back up at the sky, smiled. “But I did do that, didn’t I?” He chuckled, shook his head,

“I tried to keep Father Abbot from expelling Ealhmund.”

After that the wind picked up and the rain began to pelt down on us in earnest, God Himself trying to drive us from the rocks, drive us back into the shelter of the trees where we belonged. I remember Father rising up on his elbows as if to support himself against the wind, still patting my hand absently, beard blown back flat against his throat, a damp spot, then a second, appearing on the gray streak of dried mud that decorated his cheek. I rose up on my elbows too, blinked into the rain, looked around.

The flies were gone, had disappeared so completely you could believe they’d never been there, had been nothing more than a dream, something brought on by hunger. Broken bits of last year’s grass blew across the ground before us, hung up in the weeds at the edge of the ditch, pulled free, blew on. The rocks we sat upon were dappled now, a pattern of raindrops that grew and expanded even as we watched, spot linking up with spot, so that soon the pile would no longer be the gray and dusty thing it had been but something else entirely, something wet and shiny and dark. Father patted my hand again. I looked at him. He closed his eyes, nodded; it was time to go.

You know how it is after a rest: you stand up slowly, carefully, always surprised by the stiffness, to find yourself stiffer than you were when you lay down. And that is how I have always imagined the two of us, Father Dagan and I, getting up that day, the two of us climbing down carefully off the pile (fragrant now with the smell of wet earth, wet stone), two old men setting their feet cautiously amid the rocks, mindful of a fall. But I was not an old man;

I was a boy, and being the sort of boy that I was, my mind would have already begun to worry about what lay ahead of us, the uncomfortable silence that awaited us under the trees, the turned heads, the embarrassed clearing of throats. Which would explain why I didn’t see them at first, why Father had to nudge me, raise a hand, point. Even then I initially saw nothing, just a pile of damp reddish-looking rock, only one or two gray spots marring what had become an otherwise uniform surface of glistening wetness. And then there was a momentary sense of dislocation, even of fear, as

the two dry areas resolved themselves into something else, something recognizable, however wrong, truant, impossible. For there, resting on the rocks where we had rested, lay two shadow figures exactly like us, the upper torsos only slightly foreshortened, the one on the right stretching out an arm (touchingly thin, childlike) to the other. This must be what it is like when we die and look back on our deathbeds, the empty husks of our selves. It takes a moment’s getting used to. I am me, you think, I am he—and there is a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach.

It continued to rain. Even as I thought these thoughts—even as perhaps Dagan thought these thoughts—it continued to rain, the two quiet figures acquiring their own pattern of drops, the spots multiplying unhurriedly, dried mud going from gray to dark gray until, nearly saturated and decidedly reddish now, the two images began to lose definition, became almost indistinguishable from the rock they lay upon, the one on the right, Father’s rain-shadow, for some reason lingering longer than the other, yet still dissolving, disintegrating, until, finally, there remained only a meaningless alphabet of dry places, a broken and fractured script that, even as we watched, faded, continued to suffer strike after strike, faded and, eventually, disappeared altogether.

Father turned, smiled at me, pulled his hood up, squinting into the rain, smiled a last time, then turned and began to walk toward the field, the shelter of the trees. I watched him go. I stood where I was and I watched his thin gray figure walk away from me, recede into the rain. When he was at such a distance I feared he must notice my absence, turn and signal for me to follow, I threw one last glance at the place where we had lain. The rain had rendered the entire rock pile wet now, shiny, its reddish-brown hues relieved only here and there by a faint slip of ochre-colored clay. And for some reason this made me sad. Doubtless it was my age but, for some reason, looking at those rocks, I felt sad, lonely, as if something had gone out of me with the disappearance of those two figures, as if some part of my childhood, recondite, irretrievable, had gone with them, slipped away, departed never to return. I studied the rock for some proof they had been there, some
sign of their passing, but there was nothing. It was just a pile of rock now—wet, shiny, unimportant. I turned and, slowly, cautiously, I made my way back across the field.