The Oblate's Confession (55 page)

The sound, when it came, was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Flave you ever had a bolt of lightning strike very near you? It was like that in a way and not like that too. For before this sound, before I could hear anything, I
felt
something, a sort of premonition, as if the earth itself moved, trembled, at the thought of what was going to happen. And then it was on me, the sound was on me, and, for a moment, I could hear nothing, the sound so loud it was a sort of silence, the sound so loud it flattened the air around me, rendered it dead, broken, incapable of bearing sound. And then it was by me. In a long instant the sound was by me, air and eardrums springing back to shape, the great boulder of sound rolling off down the valley, concussion falling upon concussion, meaning upon meaning, until, finally, the monstrous thing grew small with distance, attenuated, and slowly, slowly, faded and, eventually, disappeared.

I stopped. I remember that, the whole thing having taken so long and, at the same time, passed so quickly, that I still had to stop, had to consciously draw myself up, relinquish my errand to the abbey, before I could approach, understand, see, that which had preempted it. For a moment, nothing. For a moment I stood there without a thought in my head, stood like an idiot waiting for someone, some adult, Father Dagan maybe, to walk up and relieve me of this, take care of things, wash it all away. Then, gradually, a sort of sense returned to me. I remember thinking about safety. Shamefully, selfishly, my first thoughts were of safety, my own

safety. If such a thing could happen, I thought, if such a thing could happen in a place as carefully run as the yard, then what about here, this wood, this path? How safe was I? How safe anyone? And then, oddly, idly, I thought about the hermit. For he must have heard it. And I wondered what he had thought, how an old man like that would have interpreted something like that, a sound as loud as that. And then, as if by introducing Father Gwynedd into my thoughts I could no longer avoid it, I thought about the thing itself. Carefully, gingerly, I walked up to the stone face that was the sound’s meaning and, with the tip of my finger, I touched its surface. And was immediately off and running again, my mind full of terrible images, off and running back toward the yard, the furnace, back toward where I had last seen Brother Victricius.

Of course everyone makes a great deal of the bellows, the fact
that the bellows were found closed. In all the discussions that took place afterwards, the endless Chapters, the pointless gossip, much was made of the fact that the bellows were found closed, that I had given testimony to the fact they were open when I left, that, indeed, Brother himself had stayed my final stroke, forced me to leave them open, full of air, ready to be discharged. But that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? I mean, who’s to say why they were closed? Maybe he thought the stack had cleared. Maybe he saw a puff of smoke escape from the stack and thought he could dislodge the obstruction, that a bit of vigorous pumping with the bellows might be all it would take. Brother never could resist the urge to fix something. Or, if we really want to be hard on him, we could go so far as to say he might have been impatient. He could have been. It happens sometimes, even to the best of us. Maybe Brother was impatient with the obstruction, irritated by this delay in his plans, his expectations for the day. You can see how that could have happened, how, not really thinking about it, he might have grabbed the bellows’ upper pole, forced it down,

driven a final blast into the furnace.
Take that!
he would have thought, maybe even picturing the source of his annoyance as he did so, the personage who had caused him all this anxiety, maybe even thinking about what it would look like to blow a great blast of heat up
his
skirts, cook
him
in the furnace. Anyone might have done that;
I
might have done that, probably had. But surely that is not sin, or at least not deadly sin. If thoughts and dreams, conceits and whimsy—not acted upon but merely imagined—can determine our fate, what chance have any of us? No. No, surely we will not suffer for the anger we feel when we stub a toe, crack a tooth. God cannot be as petty as that.

So the fact that the bellows were found closed can be shown to mean nothing. The fact that Victricius must have closed those bellows may very well mean nothing at all. Except that he died looking at the furnace. Except that he must have died bent over before the furnace like a supplicant before his master, the bellows thrust flat against the ground before him, no protection at all. Which means he died trying to make iron. Which means Victricius died trying to do exactly that which his abbot had ordered him to do.

But if even that is not enough, if even that does not quell the accusations, stay the tongues of those that would deny Brother heaven, have his body dug up, ripped, from consecrated ground, then I must point out one final—and I believe decisive—factor in his favor. He did not look at me. Think about that. When Victricius sent me off to the abbot, ordered me away from the yard, he did not look at me. Indeed, not only did he not look at me, but he stood with his back to me, eyes firmly locked upon the furnace. Now remember, after the departure of Agatho, I was as close to a companion as Brother had at Redestone. It was I who stood beside him when he pulled his illicit pots from the ashes, I who kept that secret safe. I was buried with him beneath the great snowfall, had been nursed by him, listened to his one and special tale. It was I, and I alone I believe, who understood what Brother lost when we lost Agatho, what that cost him, how unhappy he had become. And, finally, it was I who had shared the daily drudgery of
his work. How often had the two of us, standing there cold and tired or hot and tired, dripping with rain or sweat, how often had we stood like that, the unpopular monk and his unhappy servant, how often had we stood like that in his small stinking yard and, however desultorily, however discordantly, sung the office?
Ora et labora
, the two poles of our existence, this is what we had shared, this what we had known. And he did not look at me. He stood between me and the furnace, blocked with his own body the dangerously primed furnace, but he did not look at me. How many of you, if you had made that decision, if you knew these to be the last moments of your life, would not steal a final glance at the one, that special brother with whom you had shared so much? Yes, yes I know it is sin. Yes, I know such attachments are wrong, against the Rule. But I am not a fool, and neither are you. The Rule was made because men require a rule, because, by our nature, we form attachments. And so, despite our better judgment, there is always the one. And how many of you, in your frailty, in your earthliness, would not cast a final glance, however surreptitious, however profane, at that one part of the world you have so loved?
But Victricius did not look at me.

So it all came tumbling down—Victricius’s works, Redestone’s place in the land, Godwin’s dreams of glory. In an instant we had once more become what I suppose Abbot Folian had always intended us to be: a collection of rather insignificant men pursuing otherworldly goals in a part of the country of no particular interest to anyone.

For several weeks, as I remember it, a peculiar silence prevailed at the abbey. This was a silence unlike that demanded by the Rule. The air did not tremble with repressed communication, eyes did not meet, fingers did not fly. The brothers went about their daily round like men walking in their sleep, heads down, shoulders rounded, hoods often as not up. I think there was little prayer at that time. The office suffered. Brother Prior’s midday

practice was discontinued but it made little difference. The community was uneasy, frightened, unsure. No one knew what was to become of us.

Of all people, it was Godwin who brought us back to ourselves, got us working again, thinking, planning ahead. Though there are those who will claim he did so for purely selfish reasons, no one can deny that the weeks following the destruction of the furnace were among his finest. While the rest of the community seemed willing to give up all hope and even Prior Maban appeared lost, Father Abbot went about the difficult task of rallying his troops. Shrewdly, he began by feeding our fears. The clever Gaul was dead, he told us, and without him there could be no more iron. Over night we had become an unimportant outpost set in rugged country on a contested and dangerous border. No longer could we hope for assistance from the outside world. Without iron, we mattered not to them. And so we must fend for ourselves. We must make food. If we were not to starve this winter, we must make a great deal of food indeed.

It was, as I remember it, about a week later, and a full three weeks sooner than was then customary, that Father Abbot turned over nominal control of the monastery to Brother Cellarer. All demands upon our work-force, all decisions concerning time and the allocation of resources, were now weighed against Osric’s needs and the needs of the coming harvest. And it was into this new alignment, this accident of season and intent, that, like an angel from heaven, Brother Edgar now descended with his message from Modra nect. The hermit had grown feeble with age, he told Chapter, too feeble really to care for himself any longer. Someone was going to have to move up there with him. Someone was going to have to stay with him from now on, nurse him through what Edgar clearly believed to be Father’s final days on earth.

There had of course been discussion. Prior Maban, not surprisingly, had been outraged. That we should lose an able-bodied man at such a time was absurd, he declared, preposterous. Anyone could see that it would be better for the old has-been to be carried down the mountain, in chains if need be, that here at least he could be cared for properly, and not at the expense of one of our workers. But for once Maban had not carried the day. I’ll never forget the thrill I felt when Dagan rose to challenge him in Chapter, rose to remind the community in a voice not heard in that place for some time that the hermit’s removal from the mountain was not an act to be taken lightly, that Father Gwynedd lived upon Modra nect, refused to descend from it, as the result of a vow, and if vows were now to be so easily dispensed with.... Well, where would any of us be?

It had, of course, been an argument that could not be countered. Maban had sputtered and fumed but there was little he could do. And so it was that I now found myself once again climbing Modra nect, once more wending my way up familiar paths, looking upon scenes I had not expected to see again in this life. That I had been chosen for this mission as a sop to Prior Maban’s pride, that much had been made of the fact my loss would mean little to the harvest, that I had not yet achieved full stature, that I was, indeed, the smallest member of the community—these

humiliations, these indignities, for once, mattered little, mattered not at all next to the fact that I was here, free, upon the mountain. And that I was here to stay. That tomorrow I would not have to climb down, nor the next day nor the next. That I was meant to remain, had been
ordered
to remain up here day after day, week after week, until such time as....

But I would not think about that. The hermit had always been old, and sometimes he had been ill. Doubtless Edgar exaggerated. He was known for that. Brother Prior had said as much in Chapter. And even if it was true, even if Gwynedd had experienced some sort of decline, he was still Father Hermit, would still, I knew— knew without even having to think about it—love me, love me when I needed him to and, more important still, leave me alone when I did not. I could not have asked for a better outcome. All my prayers, all my dreams, had come true. That Maban had been taken down a peg in the process only added to my delight. It was as if God Himself had joined forces with me against the world, returned Redestone in an instant to its proper state, reproved evildoers, vindicated saints. The days—the days of unrestricted freedom and liberty—stretched out before me like a great and endless feast. All seemed wonderful, perfect, grand.