The Oblate's Confession (48 page)

Of course he was excommunicated. Completely. Godwin didn’t even wait for Chapter. Clothes were brought, a sack filled with yesterday’s bread, and Ealhmund given till first light to be off abbey lands. Father Dagan protested but it did little good. The incidents had been going on too long now—the assaults on Botulf, the strange laughing from the back of church—and of course, by that time, many had come round to Maban’s way of thinking. They had seen what Ealhmund could do to a grownup, had themselves grown wary of him, stepped aside when he approached on the garth, avoided his kiss of peace. Doubtless some even thought the hunger itself might be alleviated by the departure of one such as this. But still it was sad when it happened. You should have seen the look on Ealhmund’s face when they set him before the gate, gave him that last little shove. You could tell he didn’t know what was going on. I think he thought someone was having a sort of joke with him.

Within a week Brother Thruidred had reported seeing Ealhmund at the kitchen gate. Soon such reports were a regular feature at Faults and Maban began talking about posting a guard. Before they could run him off for good, I decided I would like to see the boy again myself one last time. You may wonder at this. You may ask yourself why I would risk such a thing, seek out an excommunicate, a being any proper monastic should shun. A good question, but a question asked, I think, by one whose life has been different from my own. Those of you who came of age prior to your entry into the monastery cannot imagine what it is like for one
oblate to see another shown the door.

As it happened it wasn’t that hard to find Ealhmund. I came across the first print almost immediately after stepping through the kitchen gate. Thanks to the wet winter we’d been having the ground was muddy and the print clear and expressive. I could tell at a glance that Ealhmund had lost weight. Yet he still walked like a fat man: short little steps, toes out, heels in, most of what weight he retained carried on the rear and outer edges of his feet. It was funny, when you thought about it, and sad too in a way. Ealhmund even walked wrong.

Whatever he’d been doing up by the kitchens, the boy hadn’t lingered there, hurrying—I supposed at first light—from pollard to pollard down along the edge of the abbey path till he reached level ground. There he had abandoned the trees and climbed down into the ditch, walking for a little distance along its muddy banks. At about the point where the millet ends and the peas begin, he had hidden himself among the grasses that in those days grew along the ditch’s far side. I wondered what he had done there. Had he sat and watched as we marched, sleepily, woolens pink with sunrise, from church to Chapter? Had he listened to the sounds of our washing up, smelled the last of the day’s incense as it floated off to who knew where? I couldn’t tell. There was only the flat place in the grass where his bottom had rested and the two sharper depressions in the mud behind it, Ealhmund having leaned back for a while, braced himself upon his elbows.

Whatever daydreams had occupied him there, the boy had grown tired of them, for he had gotten up once more and, this time, wandered out into the orchard. There the print became more difficult to follow. Again and again I had to stop to make sure that I followed the right track and not one of the many, also left by Ealhmund (yesterday, the day before?), that crossed and recrossed this morning’s path at odd angles. Anyone who has ever worked a trail as confused with print as this will know how strangely captivating the experience can be, forcing one, as it does, to concentrate all his attention on a narrow strip of ground to the exclusion of all else. When, finally, you straighten up again, give

your eyes a rest, it is as if an immense obscuring wall has dropped away and the world appears suddenly overlarge and wide. Sometimes it is as if you saw with Adams eyes. You think:
This is real. He made this.
And then, even as you reach out to hold the vision close, grasp it to your breast, familiarity’s shabby net settles over Creation and everything becomes as it was, the ground just ground again, the trees trees, mountain mountain, and you find yourself wondering what you were so excited about. How could this old place—even for a moment—have seemed so grand?

It was, I believe, at such a point, as I cast about for something to distract me from the bleakness of our winter orchard, that I noticed what had, of course, been around me all along. Footprints. Ealhmund’s footprints. Not just the ones I’d been following for the better part of an interval but the others, the ones I had been working so hard to ignore. They were everywhere. The muddy ground was so littered with Ealhmund’s sign, both old and new, that to the untrained eye it might have seemed an entire herd of Ealhmunds had wandered here. But why? It didn’t make any sense.

Why would he want to spend so much time in our orchard? I mean it wasn’t as if there was anything to be found. The trees had been picked bare long ago and what fruit remained on the ground had long since ceased to be edible.

I walked through the orchard. With a growing sense of wonder, the feeling that I was in the presence of something exceedingly strange, I made my way across that vast sea of print. I no longer stopped to study the ground; I no longer needed to. As soon as I’d straightened up it had become obvious where Ealhmund’s track was heading. The center of the orchard. The very oldest part. His trail led right into it, came to a stop, as I soon discovered, behind one of the largest of the trees. There Ealhmund had stood, standing sideways to avoid being seen from the abbey. Bits of bark and tree sap littered the ground, evidence, I supposed, of the boy’s boredom. Or hunger.

For a while I stood, as Ealhmund had, behind the tree. It was cold. It was morning, the interval after Terce, and the day was cold, gray. It smelled of snow. I shivered. I stood behind the tree

and I shivered, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Ealhmund, standing here with nothing to do, no place to go, the cold, the hunger, the smell of snow. Would he recognize that smell? Would he know what it meant? Did everyone know such things, or had Father taught me that? I worried about this, standing where Ealhmund had stood, my prints registering atop his, obscuring them as my mind attempted to obscure with this small concern the larger one raised by the track before me, the sign on the other side of the tree that declared, however mutely, Ealhmund’s shock, the fear with which he had run from this place. The print was sloppy, abrupt. In making it, the boy had stepped from behind the tree, exposing himself to the abbey while still managing to keep the tree between himself and whatever it was that had surprised him.

I stepped from behind the tree, turned and looked as Ealhmund had. The view was unequivocal. Cherry trees in winter, the open ground between the orchard and the ditch, the ditch. I wondered at what point he had spotted me. As I studied his hiding place in the grasses? When I turned and, eyes intent upon his track, began to walk toward his hiding place behind the tree? Whichever it was, it hadn’t taken him long to make up his mind. Ealhmund had turned, taken one look at the South Wood and, without further hesitation, run headlong into it, great sloppy slir-rups of mud marking his passage.

The South Wood. Even as a child it had seemed a little less scary to me than the others, a little less threatening. For one thing the orchard was there, softening the forest’s nearer approaches, giving the place an almost civilized, cultivated appearance. And of course in winter the sun took its daily stroll across the wood’s far edge, turning its hinterlands into something buttery and golden, a hazy indeterminate place, distant, beckoning. But that, of course, was the view from the abbey, the view from up on the terrace where you could dream about such things secure in the knowledge you would never have to go there, that the abbey and its monks would keep you safe from ever having to act upon your dreams, test your ability to make them come true. But that wasn’t how it would have looked from down here. That wouldn’t have

been how it had looked to Ealhmund, to a boy who had lived all his life in the abbey, had never climbed Modra nect, knew nothing of Father Hermit, this wood, any wood, had never, so far as I knew, even ventured out onto Bishop Wilfrid’s bridge.

And suddenly I understood the track. Standing there as Ealhmund had, air smelling of snow and cherry tree bark, looking at the South Wood, thinking about the South Wood, I suddenly understood why the ground was so littered with Ealhmund’s sign. Of course the boy had wandered here, of course the ground was trampled with his print. Where else could he go? Redestone was his world, the wood the end of that world. I knew what that was like, could still remember the first time I had been forced to cross that border, had followed Tatwine over Bishop Wilfrid’s bridge. But Ealhmund had crossed no bridges. For how many days now had he huddled behind these indifferent trees? For how many nights had he wandered, aimlessly, back and forth across our orchard? And yet something had finally driven him into the wood. / had driven him into the wood.

As I crossed the open ground between the orchard and the forest, I caught a glimpse of something hurrying away from me among the nearer trees. I had forgotten they had given him a different set of clothes.

“Hello!”

Ealhmund stopped, looked around, his expression mildly distracted as though I had interrupted him in the middle of something important. “Oh, hello Winwæd.”

I took a few steps toward him then stopped, surprised to find myself suddenly shy in the presence of someone I had known all my life.

Ealhmund did not move. He stood at the edge of the wood and watched me, bending over once to rub a knee.

“So, how are you?” I asked, thinking, even as I spoke, how stupid the question sounded.

“Fine,” said Ealhmund, not really looking at me, looking off to the left as if expecting someone. “Fine.”

“Really?”

No response, though there was the suggestion of a movement among the boy’s fingers and he smiled as if apologizing for something.

“So, what are you doing?”

“Oh, you know.” Ealhmund looked off doubtfully through the orchard.

I didn’t say anything, took another step toward the boy, stopped when I saw that the movement seemed to frighten him. I looked around, thinking of all the things I had planned to say, how inadequate they suddenly seemed, how inadequate I suddenly seemed.

“You know,” said Ealhmund, then faltered.

I looked at him, urged him to go on, wished him to feel as he once had in my presence, happy, big-hearted, secure.

“You know,” Ealhmund began again, “I don’t
have
to do anything.”

I smiled, pleased that he had spoken. “No,” I said, “no, I suppose not.”

The boy frowned. “Really. I can hunt and fish and do anything I like. Live out here! In the forest!” Ealhmund threw a nervous glance into the darker part of the wood.

Again I smiled, tried to look encouraging.

Ealhmund didn’t say anything. He looked at me as if expecting me to say something and then, when I didn’t, he knelt down, pulled back his woolens, began to inspect a cut on his knee. Whatever the boy had fallen against, the violence of the blow had removed dirt as well as skin, leaving an abrasion that looked surprisingly pink and clean against what was an otherwise filthy knee. I found myself thinking about Oftfor, remembering the time he had pulled back his woolens like this, shown me the swelling on his groin. I wondered if Ealhmund had acquired his injury running away from me.

The boy noticed where I was looking, looked back down at the knee with renewed interest. “Could you bring me something?” he asked, head bent over the wound.

“What do you mean?”

Ealhmund looked up at me, back at the knee. “Oh, you know, some bread or something.”

What would you have done? I mean I know, you would not even have been there. But if you had been there, if you had been there and this boy you had known all your life had asked for bread, had asked you to risk your life that his might be saved, what would you have done?

I did nothing. I stood where I was and, doing nothing, waited, my legs growing weak beneath me, hollow.

It was Ealhmund who finally broke the silence. “It’s all right,” he said, nodding to himself, picking something from the cut on his knee. “It doesn’t matter. I was just wondering.”

For a while after that neither of us said anything. A chough flew over I think, emitted its one lonely call. A child’s voice rose in anger somewhere down by the village, was as quickly silenced by another, deeper voice. But otherwise there was nothing. The wind did not blow, the sun did not shine. I thought about Ealhmund. I thought about Ealhmund and I remembered him as he had once been, a little boy spinning round and round upon the garth, Waldhere beside him, the two boys laughing helplessly, eyes wild, expectant, waiting for the fall and laughing when it came, getting up only to fall again, still laughing, delighting in delirium. I had never been able to understand that, could find no pleasure in feeling dizzy, out of control. But they had. Waldhere and Ealhmund had. And now they had grown so far apart. Waldhere was fast becoming a little monk, his orbit bringing him every day closer and closer to the center of Holy Mother Rule; while Ealhmund, well it was obvious Ealhmund had finally spun himself out utterly beyond the reach of any rule. And where did that leave me? Somewhere in between? I could not fool myself, I who prayed daily for my bishop’s death—no, mine was no happy mean. And what that meant I thought, standing there watching Ealhmund as he knelt at the edge of the wood, his once great body reduced to skin and bones, well, what that meant I would rather not know.