The Oblate's Confession (38 page)

eyesight, looked at his pile of unbroken rock, looked back up at the long sloping mass of cloud. Before he began again to swing his hammer, he signaled for me to build a fire.

At the western edge of the furnace yard there stood a small structure we called the “woodshed,” though even such an unassuming name seems a little grand for a building that stood open to the elements on three of its four sides. It was in front of this structure that I built my fire, using its one wall and the firewood and charcoal stacked against it to shield me from the wind that now began to pour down the valley like a second river. Before me, Victricius continued to work. Woolens blown tight against him, tonsure flickering madly, he swung his hammer, swung his hammer, but the wind was so loud I could not hear the blows.

I had just thrown the first sizeable piece of wood on when the storm struck. I remember that because I can remember staring at it as it flew past my little fire, thinking maybe I had thrown it too hard, that maybe that could explain such a marvel. And then, with a shock that threatened to knock me into the fire, the wind became solid, filled with snow, and the tops of the trees behind me dangled before me like little upside-down toy trees.

I closed my eyes, opened them again, and the far side of the yard had vanished, tool shed, path, furnace, everything gone, buried behind a swirling curtain of snow. Victricius himself, though only a few steps from me, was like a figure seen through an ocean wave, watery, vague, indistinct. I started to get up, go to him, and, as I did so, I realized the fire was blowing away, individual pieces of kindling rolling away still alight, still burning, their smoke just another part of the wind, the snow. I yelled something, could not hear my own voice, reached back, grabbed something heavy from the shed, threw it on the fire. The log landed, fell to one side, began to roll away. I bent over, tried to protect the fire with my body, will it to stay in place. I prayed. Then, like something rising from the sea, Victricius was beside me, grabbing burning faggots with his bare hands, throwing them heedlessly into the shed, working faster than I’d ever seen him work before.

After that there is a period of time I don’t remember so well.

Though I don’t remember his doing so, Victricius must have gotten the fire going again because I remember that, can remember looking at it, noticing the fire, thinking how funny it was that it should be there, I next to it, and, despite this nearness, that I should be so cold, so dangerously cold, fingers like ice, the wind sucking everything—heat, smoke, even light—away from us, away down the valley, down into what had become a twisting howling gyre.

Of course I have heard the stories, how everyone says the snow, instead of falling from above, blew that day from side to side, how looking across the garth was like looking through the woof of a loom, how all the windows in the dortoir seemed curtained with lace. But it was not like that for us. Where we were the snow did not blow from side to side but from behind you to in front of you. With the shed at our backs, it was like sitting behind a rock in the middle of a flood. You could snap your fingers and the roar of the storm would deafen you to their snap. Surely the logs popped from time to time, but we heard neither hiss nor crackle. Looking back on it now I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised by the vagueness of my memories. Loud sound, no noise; big fire, no warmth—it was a strange world we occupied that day. Only the wind and the snow remained constant, and that maddening, inexact, nothing to hear, nothing to focus on, just the gray and swirling vortex of snow that seemed always to pour away from us down the valley. It was an odd property of that storm that the center of that vortex, always receding, always flowing away from you, seemed at the same time (regardless of where you sat or how you turned your head) to be always directly before you, creating an endless vexing center for your vision so that, sometimes, it was as if you were moving and it was holding still, as if, instead of sitting there in that cramped and freezing shed, you were actually rising rapidly, flying up out of the depths of some gray and murky well. Eventually it seemed as if everything had been sucked down that hole—sound, warmth, even time itself—the light growing dim, dimmer, as what we assumed was afternoon passed slowly into what we assumed was evening, only the snow itself providing any

clues, the swirling spots becoming gradually grayer, darker, coalescing, until finally they merged into a single black and moving night.

And still the wind howled, still the snow blew across our floor, still God tried to bury us.

I don’t remember falling asleep but I do remember being awakened. It was Brother Victricius and he was shaking me roughly. For a moment I was confused, uncertain why he should be there, if this was the Vigil, and then I remembered, became aware again of the roar, realized it had been no dream, that the wind still blew, the snow still fell, we were still trapped. Victricius shook me again, pointed at the roof. A section of thatch had given way and a portion of the charcoal was now covered with a white and glistening snow. Through the opening I could see more snow, a great blanket of moving snow that made me fear for the roof. Victricius held up two sturdy pieces of kindling, mimed their placement in the rafters, tipped his head up at the opening. I saw what he wanted, placed my hands under the sagging section of thatch, pushed upwards. Above me I could feel the weight of the snow give and, peripherally, I saw something fall from the top of the shed, turn white in the firelight, blow immediately away. Victricius slipped the two pieces of wood into the open space I had created above the rafters. He picked up four smaller pieces, slipped them through crosswise. He looked at me, nodded, looked back up at the roof. Carefully, ever so carefully, I lowered my hands. A small dusting of snow fell onto my shoulders but nothing more. The roof held. Victricius did not smile. He sat back down, tossed another piece of wood onto the fire, watched the roof. I sat down too, then lay back, anxious to return to the comfort of my dreams. As I drifted off I can remember a part of me thinking about Victricius, pleased that he was there, pleased that someone was watching over me.

When I woke up the furnace master had not moved and the shed was full of light. I turned over, looked out, had to cover my eyes. Before me a wall of snow, blue with shadow, rose nearly to the roof of the shed. In the crack between the roof and the uppermost layer of snow, light poured through so bright it hurt my eyes.

The wind had stopped. Everything was silent. I sat up, looked at Victricius, surprised that he had let the fire burn down. The good brother looked at me as if I’d done something wrong, as if the fire was maybe my fault. His eyes were red and, as I looked at him, he sniffed and rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand. He looked at his hand, wiped the back of it down the inside of his sleeve, looked back at me. He put one finger in the air, crossed it with another, then opened his fingers like a mouth singing. So that was the sort of morning it was to be. I nodded, held one finger up to indicate Matins could wait, then began to rebuild the fire. By the time I had it going again, Brother seemed to have forgotten about the office and was bent over staring morosely out through the crack between roof and snow, light draped over the upper part of his face like a mask, eyes empty, white.

I moved over next to him, looked out. You couldn’t really see anything. The snow had piled up so high in front of the shed that the only view between its crest and the roof was straight up. The sky was clear and blue and looking at it made your eyes water. I looked over at Victricius but he wasn’t looking at me, was for some reason studying his hand, thinking about something. I looked back out and noticed that the snow seemed to slope down toward the corner of the shed. Shielding my eyes from the glare, I took a step in that direction and the view improved. From the corner post itself I found I was able to see some distance across the yard. It was like looking up a narrow valley or trough. I moved around Victricius to the opposite corner and saw that here too a small valley shot out through the snow, following exactly the line taken by the previous day’s wind. Still there was little to look at. I told myself I was seeing the ridge where the furnace sat and the first of the trees by the path but I wasn’t at all sure. The snow had changed everything, made everything look different, strange, and it was very hard to look at. Still it was nice to be able to look out at all. The air in the shed was close and cold and stank of smoke and fresh-cut oak. Standing at one of the corners like this, at least you could breathe a little.

The furnace master touched my shoulder, indicated the yard

with rheumy eyes, pointed at my chest, the side of his head, then made a sign I did not recognize. I repeated it for him, something with the tips of one’s fingers, shook my head. He shook his, tried again. Still no good. “Rust,” he said, irritated by the state of my schooling. “Do you think it will
rust?”
I held out my hands, dumbfounded. The eyebrows flew up and Brother made a swinging motion with his arms, looked out longingly at the yard, back at me. The hammer. He was worried about his hammer. He’d left it out in the snow.

We did sing Matins as it turned out, and Prime and Terce in their turn, though we would hear no bells that day and had to guess at each hour by the position of the sun. Looking back on it now, it seems a little odd we didn’t try to dig our way out. Of course it wouldn’t have been easy. The snow stood level with the chest of a tall man and our only shovel lay buried along with the rest of our tools in the shed on the far side of the yard. But such a predicament normally would have served only as a goad to the furnace master’s sense of purpose. He would have devised a shovel from a piece of firewood, dug with his bare hands, maybe placed the fire closer to the snow itself. But not that day. That day, for some reason, he was content to sit and wait for the rescue he assured me was coming. Maybe it was the catarrh that made him behave so strangely. I can still remember the uncharacteristically extravagant gestures he used to describe our situation, how
fortunate
we were that we had
so much
firewood, the
wind
had stopped blowing, and the coming fast was going to be
so
good for us.... I don’t think I’d ever seen Brother use the sign for “fast” before.

The day wore on and, though the sun continued to shine, the walls of snow that hemmed us in were in no way that I could see diminished. Of course it was very cold. Even the snow that stood nearest the fire, instead of melting, seemed to become merely glassy as if, like clay, the heat of the flames served only to harden it, make it more firm. Victricius seldom strayed from his post by the fire, blowing his nose often and loudly and looking at me yearningly, like a man who wants to talk. I stayed as far away from him as I could, spending most of my time at one of the corners

where I could see out, staring up the little valleys, dreaming of the world beyond. For a while I remember worrying about the hermit. I felt little concern for the abbey or village, they could take care of themselves, but the idea of the old man up there on the mountain by himself worried me. Then I thought about other bad weather I’d seen him in, how he would sometimes wander out into a thunderstorm like a man wandering out into a field full of flowers, enjoying himself, and I worried less. He was probably already digging his way out, looking for prints, taking advantage of the snowfall to see what types of animal had visited during the night. Which got me thinking about the prints that might be in the snow around us. I covered my eyes, looked out. A breeze blew across the yard, raised a tiny whirlwind of snow, sent it sparkling up and out of the trough before me. Father and I had tracked in snow like this. Prints tended to fill quickly but they filled with a snow that was finer than the snow the print was created in. The finer snow reflected light differently and, as a result, filled prints showed up as slightly grayer stains upon the surrounding whiteness. It wasn’t easy track to follow but, if you paid attention, you could...just. Which, in turn, got me to thinking about the trough in the snow before me. Why hadn’t it filled too? As if in answer to this, another tiny storm of flakes rose from the floor of the trough, extended its arms and, sparkling in the sun, danced up and out onto the main surface of the snow. Was there something about this place that repelled snow, kept it from accumulating? I tried to visualize the shed and its attendant troughs from above and was immediately struck by the similarity of what I saw to a deer print. The mound of snow on the roof of the shed was like the turf pushed up before a hoof as it penetrates the earth, the pile of snow between the two troughs corresponded to the v-shaped cup of mud left in the center of a print by the hollow of the hoof, and the troughs themselves were the marks made by the two halves of the hoof as they struck the ground, even showing by their length and depth—shallowest on the far side of the yard, deeper here at the woodshed’s corner posts—the speed and direction in which the animal had travelled. What sort of beast would leave a print like that? As if time could

move backward, I heard again the wind, felt the snow at my back, watched from above as it blew through our yard, blew over and around the shed, piling up downwind of the shed as flowing water will sometimes pile up in a plume behind a rock, troughs defining the boundaries of the plume at each of the rock’s downstream edges. I blinked, thought about it. What looked like the track of a giant deer travelling in one direction, was, it seemed, the print left by a great wind travelling in the other. I smiled. Father’s methods worked even with snowstorms. I wondered if I should tell Victricius. That this might only be a drift...that, beyond the contours of this great sparkling hump-backed pile, the snow might be only knee-deep.... Wouldn’t they laugh at us if we hadn’t dug out of that!