The Oblate's Confession (25 page)

And then again the reality of what I was contemplating would set in. This was no story I was telling myself, this was real. I was
actually thinking of killing someone. If I had left some of the innocence of childhood behind, I remained as yet close enough to its certainties to have no doubt about this. Our Lord teaches that with faith you can cast a mountain into the sea; how much easier it must be then to kill a man. How much easier and how much more awful. Though I had always liked to pretend to manhood, to think myself the son of a great warrior, I was ashamed to discover that, in reality, the idea of actually doing physical damage to someone, hurting him badly, repelled me. Just the thought of saying the words, the actual prayer that would send Bishop Wilfrid to his death, terrified me.

So this was my predicament. On the one hand I could not disobey my father and, on the other, to obey him required an act of disobedience so monstrous as to be unimaginable. Faced with this imponderable, I would like to say I turned to Father Prior or Father Gwynedd for guidance, but I did not. Instead, like the equivocating adult so many of us eventually become, I arrived at a sort of vague and nearly unconscious compromise. In keeping with my father's wishes, I would ask the hermit to teach me to pray; but (and I liked this part immensely) I wouldn’t have to actually start praying for anybody’s death until
—as my father wished
—I had really gotten good at what it was the hermit was teaching me. The beauty of this plan was that it allowed me to tell myself I was following my father’s wishes even as, in reality, I was doing something all my other fathers would find perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy. Moreover, should the time ever come when I did feel comfortable with Ceolwulf’s objective (I imagined a distant future in which squeamishness would be shed like baby fat), I would then—thanks to my course of preparation—be equipped to carry it out.

There was another reason, too, that I was happy with this plan, a reason completely unrelated to Ceolwulf or the bishop or anything having to do with the power struggle then going on in Northumbria. For two years now I had served the hermit. I had brought him food, maintained his fire, shaved his head, mended his cloak, carried his messages, watched him pray. Mostly I had

watched him pray. There were times when it had bored me, times when it had fascinated me, and times when I had thought myself indifferent. But I was not indifferent. What servant ever is? Whether I watched him, ignored him, or went off by myself to track deer, a part of me always envied my master. Even in the middle of the week, my eye would stray from the weeds or the peas or whatever I was supposed to be doing to look up at Dacca’s crag. Even when I was in church I would sometimes look up through the walls at him, picture him there, sitting by his little stream, body perfectly still, settled, soul afloat. How nice it would be to be away from all this I would think, to escape the work, the endless chanting, the hunger. How nice to leave whenever you wanted, visit Paradise at a moment’s notice, sing to the Blessed Mother, find rest with the Father, salvation through the Son. That my father had asked me to do this, learn the hermit’s craft, made it all the nicer—I was merely being a good son, dutiful, obedient—but it was something I had longed to do ever since the hermit had first bowed before me, ever since first he had asked my name.

I am fairly certain it was that year, during the haying, that I met the woman.

I loved the haying—all the men working together, woolens kilted up around their thighs, big arms swinging back and forth. In those days we used to practice as we worked and our chant would pick up the rhythm of the scythes, back and forth, to and fro, deep and happy. The smell of the fresh-cut grass always brought back memories of previous years, previous hayings; it made you feel as if summer would go on forever, that there would always be plenty of food, plenty of sunlight, that no one would ever go hungry again. By the end of the day, when the corncrakes began to call, everyone would be covered with dust and chaff. Sometimes someone would laugh. Once or twice even Father Abbot laughed. I
always liked it when that happened.

One of our jobs was helping Brother Tunbert with the sheaves. I liked the haying, but putting up sheaves was miserable work. By midday the flesh along the inside of your arms was always covered with thin scratches that burned in the humid air. On one occasion I remember Ealhmund’s arms swelled up so badly Father Prior thought something had bitten him. And Tunbert wasn’t much help. I’m sure he was a good man but what I remember most about him was the way, when he checked your work, he would lean in too close and make disgusting noises in the back of his throat. All of which helps to explain why I think it was the sheaves I was working on when Brother Osric excused me to go get more water. Of course I always enjoyed the river—the coolness of the air down there, the shade, the smell of rushing water— but when I recall that day, I remember something more than that, a sort of guilty glee, which makes me think that even before I met the woman something out of the ordinary had happened, that by fulfilling my obligation to Brother Cellarer I had somehow escaped something more onerous. And so it is my guess that I had been helping Brother Tunbert with the sheaves.

The river at that time of year would have been running smooth and clear. Which, no doubt, interested me. The hermit had told me rivers mirrored the sky above—cloudy and full at spring, smooth and clear in summer—but I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him. The hermit had also told me everyone had a river inside him and who could believe that? Did he really think Father Abbot had a river in him, Father Prior?

I placed one of the buckets in the water, held its lip under, forced it to sink.

Of course I had to admit the hermit’s proof had been a good one. He had asked me to close my eyes and picture a river and then, when I did so, he’d divined as if it were nothing at all that the river I pictured flowed from left to right. Of course I’d been astonished but the hermit had only laughed. He’d guessed correctly he said because he knew which river was in me: the Meolch. Having grown up on its south bank, my inner river would forever flow—as
did the Meolch when viewed from that side—from left to right. Or something like that. I remembered for sure that a person acquired his river at birth, that the river we see when we close our eyes resembles the river we knew as a child because it is that river—no other can match it, no other run so pure or taste so sweet. Which made sense. But then he’d said the thing about his own river that made no sense at all. Father claimed his river also ran from left to right because—and I was sure I’d heard this right
—because he too had grown up on the abbey side of the Meolch.

A Cumbrogi child east of Modra nect. A Cumbrogi child on our side of the mountain. Even if it was Father Gwynedd, I didn’t like the idea. Cumbrogi children didn’t always grow up to be Cumbrogi hermits.

I pulled the first bucket from the water, placed it on the rock beside me, set the other in, forced it under. What was almost as strange, when you thought about it, was that my river should be the Meolch. I mean it wasn’t as if I’d been born at Redestone.

I thought about the old memories, pulled them up one by one: the blankets, the flickering shadows, a beautiful woman. Had she carried me with her when she went for water? Had I walked with her beside some unknown stream? I could picture such an excursion, the child slapping at puddles with its hands, the woman wringing out her laundry, pausing now and then to watch me at play. But was such a picture true? I had no idea. In fact I couldn’t even be sure the woman I remembered was my mother. For all I knew I’d had a nurse and the image I held so dear was actually that of a slave. Though I couldn’t really let myself believe that. It had to be my mother I saw when I closed my eyes (I had only the one memory), just as, I was forced to admit, it was the Meolch I saw when I thought about a river. How odd that a child named for one river and doubtless born beside another should find them all supplanted by this unremarkable Meolch, this commonplace stream that lulled me at Vigil, cleansed me at the lavabo, fed me at collation, and carried off my leavings at the end of the day. I should have preferred something a little less prosaic. Still, a part of me liked that the hermit and I had the same river in us. And he
was teaching me to pray like him too.

The bucket stared up at me from the bottom of the river. I jerked on the rope and the thing moved a little. I wondered what it would be like to live down there—the constant thrum of the water, the occasional knock of stone against stone. Out in the middle of the river you couldn’t see the bottom, but up close here I could make out every stone and, occasionally, the flash of tiny fish. A large rock protruded from the water not far from me, its upper parts dry, reddish brown, flecked with mica. Below the waterline, on the side of the rock in shadow, I could see several snails grazing its surface, the track they left behind them surprisingly straight, obvious, the animals trusting, I supposed, in the security of their shells. Farther out, as the water gained depth, its current began to smear the colors of the riverbed until, eventually, they disappeared entirely and all you could see was the undifferentiated green of flowing surface. The hermit had told me to concentrate on such a place. He said it would help me pray.

I pulled my bucket up, saw there wasn’t enough room for it next to its mate, set it down between my legs. I glanced over my shoulder, listened carefully. Nothing. They hadn’t missed me yet. I looked back out at the center of the river. There was nothing to focus on, nothing to see. I picked a spot at random and stared at it. Like the bottom colors, my mind tried to race off downstream but I brought it back, concentrated. I thought about the spot itself, the fast water, the color—a grayish green that seemed to grow lighter as I watched it. I thought about how wet it was, how cold and wet.

I wondered if the water tasted better out there. I thought about the sun. I thought about the Vigil, how it had droned on the previous night. I looked back up, found the spot again. Once more I concentrated, thinking about the river, about this single spot of water running constantly from left to right, every day the same thing: left to right, left to right....

When I opened my eyes again I found I had leaned so far over I had to catch my bucket to keep it from spilling into the Meolch. As it was, righting the thing, I emptied half its contents into my lap. But that didn’t bother me, I ignored the cold, for there had
been something else, hadn’t there, a noise?

As if my noticing it caused the animal some displeasure, the sound repeated itself, a sort of slithering rustling sound that seemed to emanate from the largest of the bushes on the bank behind me. I picked up a stick and, advancing bravely upon the bush, began to poke at its base. I was about a third of the way around the thing—feet well back, expecting at any moment the raised head, the seamless glide—when it happened: the far end of my stick rose of its own accord and what I took at first to be the coils of a snake changed before my eyes into fingers, an old and scaly hand wrapped around the end of my stick.

I was halfway up the bank running full tilt, skirts in my hand— all thoughts of water, yoke, buckets, gone—when the demon spoke.

A woman?

I hesitated, took another few steps, stopped again.

“Boy,” said the voice. “Boy!”

It was a woman!

I turned around slowly. No one seemed to have noticed what had happened. Monks weren’t pouring through the trees, Brother Osric wasn’t shouting orders, a cloud hadn’t passed before the sun. Was I the only one who knew there was a woman down here?

The stick I’d abandoned began to move again, forcing branches aside, revealing the bush’s shadowy interior. A pair of eyes appeared. A hand was produced. For a moment nothing happened (pig’s teeth did not sprout from the knuckles, vipers’ tongues did not flicker from the ends of digits), then—trembling slightly as if bothered by the sun—a finger was slowly unfurled, slowly retracted. The process repeated itself. I was being called. The woman was beckoning to me: she wanted me to join her beneath the bush.

I wouldn’t have crawled under that bush for all of Solomon’s treasure. But I didn’t run either. I stood where I was, thinking about what was hidden in the shrubbery, how close it squatted.

“Come here!” said the voice. “I won’t bite.”

I crossed myself. The bottoms of my feet grew cold. I did not
move. I was beginning to be able to see the woman’s face now and I thought there was the suggestion of a change upon it. “Well,” she said, “it’s like that then.” There was a whistle in her voice when she spoke and she held the hand with the stick in it up to her mouth as if she were ashamed of her teeth. “I suppose I must come to you,” she said.