The Oblate's Confession (35 page)

The hermit ignored the sarcasm. “You mustn’t fight it,” he said, “the river I mean.”

I looked at him. He was leaning out, hands braced on his knees, an old man perched on a high rock. “I mean it’s natural,” he said. “We are creatures of the world, however much we may wish we weren’t.”

Somehow the care, the obvious concern, made me even more unhappy.

Father nodded as if I’d spoken. “You must let the distractions float by, WinWord, but it’s even more important that you not blame yourself for them when they appear. They are only natural. We are a river at flood.”

“Of course.”

“I know, sometimes it’s hard.”

“I am trying to not think! You told me to not think, if I wanted to pray I had to empty my mind! But it’s impossible! No one can do it!”

“They’re just thoughts Winwæd, puffs of smoke, empty breezes. They don’t exist.”

“They’re maddening, I can’t stop them!”

“No, sometimes you can’t, can you? You can’t control them.” The hermit looked pleased with himself.

“It’s maddening!” I’d said that before.

Father nodded. “And the more upset you get, the more of them there are.”

I looked away, not pleased that he knew that, not pleased that my problems were so obvious, my person so transparent.

“Or at least that’s the way it is with me.”

I looked at him and the hermit laughed. “The trick is to not let them bother you, to just let them float by. If you blame yourself for the thoughts, get angry at them, angry at yourself, it just makes matters worse. Who can settle down, be still, when moment by moment they’re getting angrier and angrier?”

I didn’t say anything.

“And the beauty of it is that, by not blaming yourself, not bothering with that but returning to what is important, you are, in a sense,
forgiving
yourself.” Father thought about this. “It’s Godlike, isn’t it, forgiveness, letting things go? Holy in and of itself. I mean.... I mean you become more like Him when you forgive yourself, don’t you, forgive someone? You move closer to Him.” The eyes came back into focus, looked at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying, ‘closer to Him’? The act itself is a sort of communion.”

“I don’t know.” I looked away, looked back at him. “It makes me...I don’t know.”

The hermit nodded. “To persevere,” he said, “that’s the important thing. When all else fails, when the thoughts pass down your river like great warships one after another, you must not give up, you must persevere. Onslaught is prelude. Folian used to say that,
The onslaught is prelude.’ Satan doesn’t give up easily. But if you persevere, God will come to you. Eventually, after who knows how long, He will wrap a divine weariness around you, cover you with a fatigue the devil cannot penetrate. And within that fatigue, that tiredness, you will find peace. You will Winwæd, I promise, the most wonderful peace, the most perfect stillness.”

I didn’t say anything.

Father watched me for a moment, closed his eyes, opened them again. “Do you remember the fox’s cave, the sort of tunnel we found?”

Of course I remembered.

“Father told me a story about a similar passageway once, long ago. There was a boy, a little boy who got lost in the forest. It was dark and, no matter which way the boy went, he ended up in thick trees and brush. Finally, at some distance, he began to see a light far off through the wood. He ran toward the light and, as he got closer to it, it grew in size until he could see that it was a large open field, separated from the forest by a fence. He was excited.

Surely when he got to this field he would be able to see where he was, determine his way home. But when the boy finally reached the fence he discovered the forest had grown so close against it he could not break through. Desperately he pulled himself along through the tangle but to no avail—the light of the field remaining forever just beyond his reach. Finally, exhausted, he collapsed onto the forest floor. He had been lying there for a little time, too tired to breathe, too tired to move, when a bit of light attracted his attention. It was down low, near the ground. He rolled over, put his face close to the earth, saw that there was a place at the foot of the fence where a fox or badger had dug out a passage between the forest and the field. It was just large enough for him. The boy slipped through this passage, under the fence, and into the brilliant sunlight of his family’s own field.

“This is the way of prayer, Winwæd. Most of the time we feel like the little boy in the wood, our minds racing back and forth, trying to find God, trying to do it all on our own, finding nothing, only more forest, more meaningless thought. Eventually, more out of
dumb luck than anything else, we catch a glimpse of light, something perceived only dimly, flickering in and out of existence just beyond the furthest trees. But the harder we try to reach that light, concentrate on it, the further it slips away. Finally, if we are fortunate, we wear ourselves out, collapse in a heap. And it is then that—exhausted, empty, incapable of doing anything more on our own—we discover the fox’s tunnel right beside us. Without even thinking, without even trying, we’ve slipped through and come up blinking in the light.”

It had been a long time since Father had done that, said just the right thing. When I was a child he had managed the trick often, answers and explanations bubbling from him like spring-water, but, as I had grown older, he had seemed to lose the ability. Or so I had thought.

Father picked up a small rock, flipped it out into the air over the valley. “So who is it you wish to pray for?”

My mind drew a sudden and awful blank.

The hermit didn’t say anything, watched his rock fall, looked

back at me.

I glanced at the village, immediately away.

“Forgive me, I assumed you had someone in mind.”

“No, it’s all right. Ealhmund!”—the name having popped into my head like answered prayer. “Ealhmund. I want to pray for Ealhmund.”

“The oblate?”

“Yes.” I looked at Father, suddenly more sure of myself, liking the idea of myself as defender of the downtrodden. “Yes, Ealhmund. Anything wrong with that?”

The hermit shrugged. “Nothing, just surprised. I hadn’t expected it.”

That I could surprise the hermit did not surprise me.

“Well that’s good.” The eyebrows rose, fell, Father reconciling himself to the protector of the weak and innocent who now sat beside him. “You know he needs your prayers. I mean we all do, but.... Tell me, how bad is his face?”

“His face?”

Father nodded, looked at me. “The spots? The white pox?”

I had forgotten. When we were little, all four of us had come down with an illness that had caused a sort of pox. I had no real memory of this but had been told about it by one of the novices (who had himself fallen victim subsequently to the pestilence). According to this Dudda, Brother Baldwin had taken advantage of our illness to frighten half the monastery into believing we carried the red plague. If it hadn’t been for Father Prior, we would have been expelled. Dudda also claimed the pitting on Ealhmund’s back and face was a result of this pox, but that never made any sense to me. None of the rest of us had been scarred. Of course by now I was so accustomed to the marks on Ealhmund’s face I gave them no more thought than I would have his mouth or nose.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, they’re around his mouth mostly. Why?”

The hermit didn’t say anything.

“I mean I don’t think they hurt him or anything.”

Still the hermit remained silent, just looked at me, and I had to accept the fact that somehow, incredibly, he knew. About a year or two earlier, in the teasing sort of way he had, Waldhere had begun calling Ealhmund “Catfish.” He didn’t really look like a catfish, I mean the pox were concave, they didn’t protrude or anything, but there was something about their placement around his mouth that made the name seem funny, apt. Sometimes, when I was angry or tired of listening to his complaints, I called Ealhmund “Catfish” too.

I shrugged, tried to change the subject, “How do you know about his face?”

The hermit just looked at me which made the answer obvious. He never spoke about the tabula, what was in them, but that had to be it. Someone had decided the situation warranted recourse to the hermit. I felt myself blush.

“You know they used to call me ‘Foreigner’, ‘Cumbrogi Dirt Boy’, when I was little. My mother too.”

His mother.

“Can you imagine how that made me feel?”

I looked away—forgetting for a moment the incredible discovery that Father had had a mother—feeling bad, guilty, as if I had been the one to call him “Dirt Boy.”

Father straightened up, fingered his lower back, glanced over at Modra nect’s southern peak. It was his way of letting me know the subject had changed, that we need speak of this no more. “Who looks after the sluice-gate now?”

“The sluice-gate?”

Father looked at me, cocked an eye.

“Brother Victricius.”

He nodded, “The furnace master.” He looked up toward the head of the valley as if hoping to see the man, shook his head. “I hear it smells bad. I mean the works, his place? I hear it smells bad.”

“It does. It smells like something burning, something...you know, something that shouldn’t burn.”

Father nodded. “I can’t smell it up here.” He looked back at me. “So, anyway, when this Victricius opens his sluice-gate, what
happens?”

“The water runs through it?”

Father gave me a look. “And after that? After the water runs through the gate?”

I looked up the valley, thought about it. “Well, first, Victricius uses it.” I pointed. “Up at the furnace? Then, further down, it turns the mill and then....” My finger traced the water’s course as it turned before the church, burrowed beneath the western edge of the garth. “It fills the lavabo, clears Botulf’s drains, and then it....” I stopped, my finger hesitating at the far edge of the kitchens. “And then it goes on out and waters our fields and fills our ponds!”

Father looked at me, his expression amused, mildly interrogative. “And the little house...? What about the little house?”

“And it carries off..you know.” I looked away. He loved to tease me about the reredorter.

The hermit laughed. I looked back at him. He smiled. “Praying for someone is a lot like the work of Brother Victricius.” He hesitated. “It is
Brother
?”

“Yes, Brother.”

“Good. What do you suppose it is like when Brother Victricius opens his gate?”

I had never thought about it before, one moment the ditch was dry and the next the water ran through it like the Red Sea. And even that didn’t happen often, once in the spring when we cleared the ditch and otherwise only if something hung up in the mill or in one of Brother Kitchens’ drains.

“Have you ever opened one of the dikes at the head of a row?”

“Yes.” Brother Cellarer sometimes let us do that.

The hermit looked at me.

I thought about it, looked down at the fields, remembered what they looked like in the summer, the parched and dusty-looking plants, the grayish earth. You got to stand in the ditch when you did it, skirts up, water cold around your legs, feet unseen, hidden from you, underwater, toes doing things by feel, touch. It wasn’t hard. You pulled out the broken piece of crockery or whatever had been used to create the dike and then the water
did most of the work—the first break, rupture, and the water did most of the work, spilled through, poured through, the sun-baked clay dissolving quickly, like sand, becoming mud again, silt, the water pouring through, pouring through so fast it went from muddy to clear again in an instant, tumbling out, racing off down the row, home, back home to the river at the far end of the field. And you had done it. You stood there in the cold water and watched that tiny stream run straight and true, dark, down to the line of trees that marked the boundary between our fields and the Meolch, and you had done it. You did that. You stood up, straightened your back, watched it run. And then Father Abbot or Brother Osric or someone signed for you to move on, burst the next one, and you did, happy, resplendent, breaker of dams, creator of river-courses.

“And now think about what it’s like for Brother Victricius.”

Of course it wasn’t fair. Father didn’t know the furnace master, didn’t know what he was like. I had never actually seen Brother open the gate but I knew how he’d do it, properly, efficiently,
taking pleasure perhaps in the works, checking their operation, visually measuring the flow, and then moving on, skipping ahead, already thinking about the next task, already considering that, what he would do next. For Brother there would be no dark trip beneath the furnace path, he would not bend with the water as it entered the monastery proper, turned before the church, would not hear the subterranean rumblings, feel the pulse beneath his feet.

“There is a measure of fear I should imagine, the Meolch at his back, roaring, the spray.” The hermit was staring out at the South Wood, eyes glazed, seeing something he could not see. “And this one small gate, fragile, unassuming, holding it back, holding everything back. Before him, what? Nothing. Only the dark fall of the valley, alone, empty, the furnace master himself alone, perhaps a little afraid. It is cool up there as I remember it, the mosses, the pines, maybe he trembles a little as he stands there in the spray, the shadow. But then he does it, doesn’t he? He thinks about the mill and the fields, the kitchen and the drains, and he does it, sound or no sound, he bends over, pulls the board free,
and the mighty Meolch goes rushing through.”