The Oblate's Confession (57 page)

Actually of course, he came and went. He was at his best in the morning. Sometimes, some mornings, I could almost believe him unchanged, that it was still the father I had known and loved that sat opposite me, smiled as I spoke, crunched into one of Brother Thruidred’s biscuits. But then I would ask him something, something simple like How did this pot get broken? or Where is your belt?, and such a look of doubt and confusion would come over him that I would have to look away. For it was difficult for me to see the man who had taught me so much reduced to such a state.

At other times (I will admit it here), I could become quite impatient with Father. The hermit I had known seemed then gone, entirely absent, and, in his place, I found myself servant to a senile old man, a senile old man who required my constant attention,

constant care. For Brother Edgar had been right, Father was now far too feeble to care for himself. If I had not been there to parcel out his food, I do not doubt he would have gone through his stores in a single week. If I had not mended his clothes...well... suffice it to say he would have brought shame upon himself. The office was of course utterly beyond him. Oh sometimes he would try to join in, climbing onto his feet as one would an unsteady table, teetering there, humming, so that I knew the old man planned to come in on the next antiphon. But he rarely managed more than a phrase or two, occasionally an entire verse, as if some ancient door had suddenly sprung wide, shed light upon some otherwise long-forgotten corner of Father’s mind, only to close again as quickly, Father’s eyes blinking in surprise, a small curious smile turning up the corners of his lips. And there were other things too of course. The usual problems associated with age. But, in Father’s case, exacerbated by his lack of memory, the utter surprise with which he greeted each of his failings as if—to my consternation—this were the first time such a thing had ever

happened to him.

Though that of course may have been as much a result of cunning as the forgetfulness of age. For the man who, to my way of thinking, had always been more than any other himself, unadorned and unaffected, became, in his dotage, something of a poseur, putting on whatever face his poor demented mind told him the present occasion called for. I’ll never forget the time the pilgrim visited us, the last, as it happened, of the pilgrims I ever saw come to that place. Though I did not know the man, it was obvious from the way he greeted the hermit that this was not the first time he had been there, that he easily recognized Gwynedd, saw nothing in his appearance to suggest debility. It was hard for me to watch that exchange, the farmer at first happy, ebullient, the hermit dissembling outrageously, assuming an unnatural air (a hill person’s idea of what a wise man might look like) in his bid to appear normal, still in command of his senses. For some reason (out of loyalty to the hermit, the holy man he once had been?) I found I could not bring myself to simply tell our visitor what the true situation was, pull the man aside and reveal Father’s secret. Still, it was painful to watch him discover it for himself—Father’s disingenuousness on display, the false conviviality, the clumsy attempts at conversation, the repetitions, the evasions, the speeches that began well only to trail off into unrelated remarks about the weather, the foliage, the taste of biscuits and honey.

Biscuits and honey. How Father could go on about biscuits and honey in those days. Weren’t biscuits and honey delicious? Why didn’t we have biscuits and honey more often? Do you suppose we could have some biscuits and honey now? Listening to the man you’d have thought the subject resolved some deep and powerful mystery for him, as if God Himself, the very nature of God, might depend upon a proper exegesis of biscuits and honey.

Which, truth be told, I rather liked. For—though I resented having to play cellarer to Father’s hunger, having to tell him over and over again that he could not have that which he so clearly desired—still there was something about this obsession of his that reminded me of the man I had known, the way he had looked

at life, the pleasure he had taken in it. Once, I remember, I even asked him why it was he went on so about biscuits and honey, what was it about biscuits and honey he liked so much, knowing full well such a question was beyond him but enjoying teasing him in this way, teasing him as once, when I was a child, he had teased me. But to my surprise Father took the question seriously, made a determined effort to answer it. Speaking slowly, his mind’s cart bumping down a long-unused track, he said, “Well, you know... you know I’ve never...I’ve never had a
bad
biscuit and honey.” That morning, for the first time in weeks, I laughed and laughed.

And so our lives progressed. Time passed slowly on the mountain, uneventfully. Once a week we received a visit from Brother Edgar: supplies were delivered, news of the abbey, but, nowadays, no tabula. Sometimes, when I could get away from the hermit for a moment or two, give him something to eat that I knew would keep him occupied for a while, I would run down to the crag, run down to the crag and watch as Brother wound his way back down the mountain away from us, away from me. And with each passing week it seemed the world Edgar returned to, the world of monks and order, Rule and discipline, became more and more distant, more and more removed, so that, in a way, it began to seem as though I watched not a brother walking away from me but Redestone itself, my life at Redestone, the boy I had been there, any obligations I might owe the place.

Which is not to say I didn’t think about my prayer, worry about the fact that it might as yet be, in a very real sense, abroad upon the land. But I had been, I believe, shaken by what I had discovered on Modra nect, the profound change Father Hermit had undergone, so shaken that any decision, any course of action, seemed now beyond me, that just getting through this day and the next was the most I could hope for. Now some will say (some
have
said) that this was only a blind, that I took refuge in a pretended shock to avoid doing that which clearly I should have done: return to the abbey, confess my sin, suffer the consequences. And there may well be some truth to this. I was terrified of expulsion, had seen the pain it caused Ealhmund. Still, you

must remember how close Father and I had been. This was the man whose Way I had followed. Did I now look upon the place to which it led me? What does it mean when the person you want to impress more than any other in the world can no longer remember your name, will never again be able to remember your name? When the man whose thoughts fill your tabulum has had his own effaced, what does anything matter at all?

Of course a great chorus of nameless monks rose from their graves to answer that question each time I asked it. “Faith!” they cried in the approved response, the word echoing across the centuries like an illustration of itself, empty of all but letters, affectionless, unsupported, emaciated, meaning absolutely everything or absolutely nothing at all. And this, I reminded myself, this was what Father himself had always wanted for me. “You must give up everything,” he had said, “if you want to win anything at all.” And now, surely, I had. All my hopes, all my dreams of becoming a holy man, my prayers, my devotions, all these seemed little more than self-indulgent fantasies before the fatherless reality I now faced. I told myself that this was true faith, that from this point forward I was on my own, whatever I accomplished, for good or ill, would be mine, that I would have no one to blame or praise but myself, that, indeed, by losing Father I now gained the solitude he had always wanted for me, that for the rest of my life I would know the true emptiness, the true reality: Creation bereft of all but Himself. But it was a lonely place I had come to. I suppose I had always known that it would be. And still I missed my Father Hermit.

These then were the thoughts, the worries, the concerns, that occupied my mind during that long wet summer’s end. And then one day Brother Edgar failed to appear with our supplies. At first, of course, I assumed I had miscalculated, that tomorrow was the appointed day, or the next day or even the next. But then I walked once more through my fingers, remembered the days one by one and realized that, as incredible as it seemed, I was right, had to be right, that this was the Sabbath, that Edgar—no not Edgar but Redestone, mighty Redestone herself
—Redestone
had failed in her obligations to me!

It is sad but true that this realization brought me not a little cheer. You cannot imagine how difficult it is for an oblate, the unerring rectitude of his elders, the feeling that, surely, no one as unworthy as himself (we are, after all, reminded of it daily) could live up to such perfection. And then to discover them imperfect, flawed, pierced by the same weaknesses with which we are riddled.... Well, it was as if a great load had been lifted from my shoulders; I could hardly wait to get down to the crag, look upon the shameful miscreant, watch as she blushed and writhed. But even as I thought these thoughts, felt this perverse joy, another part of me hesitated. For nothing like this had ever happened before. Ever. Not that I was really worried about the supplies. We had plenty of food, at least enough to get us through the next week. But, still, it was a commonplace in my life that the commonplace was fixed; it did not change: Prime followed Matins, Terce Prime, and Brother Edgar carried supplies to the hermit on the Sabbath. That this should not be so was like saying water might be dry or air edible. So it was that, even as I wanted more than anything else in the world to get down to the crag, see if I could determine why Edgar had failed to appear, still there was a part of me anxious about what I might find there.

It was nearly None by the time I convinced myself Brother really wasn’t coming, and by that time Father had already taken his nap. But, thankfully, I was able to persuade him otherwise (the man passed from waking to sleeping easily in those days, as though sleeping itself were his natural state and waking a condition difficult to maintain), and once I had him safely bedded down again, I hurried to the crag as fast as my legs would carry me.

Truth be told, I don’t know what I had expected to find there. Redestone entirely gone? The valley flooded perhaps or afire, an enemy host encamped upon our fields? Who knows what childish fantasies my mind had invented to explain Brother’s absence? But surely nothing could have been less expected (or more disappointing?) than that which did greet my eyes, Redestone sitting quiet and peaceful beneath an overarching sky, no writhing, no blushes, just the familiar intimate cluster of red-brown buildings,

green garth, surrounding fields. Why even God Himself seemed to smile upon the place, not a cloud in sight after all that rain.

And then I saw Father.

Thinking back on it now I realize he must have waited for just that moment, must have stood waiting for who knows how long beneath the eaves so that, when he saw me walk out onto the crag (as he must have known I would), he could step out into the sunlight of the garth and be certain his emergence would catch my eye. As of course it did. The man appeared (immediately recognizable in figure and gait as Father Dagan), moved purposefully to the center of the garth, and then—in a movement that sent a chill up my spine—cocked his head back and looked directly at the place where I stood. After all those years spent spying on the valley, someone had finally returned my gaze.

At first he did nothing. For what seemed a long while but in truth could not have been more than a moment or two, the two of us just stared across the distance separating us, our roles in a sense reversed, the one on high meek and trembling, the one below awful and mighty. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it were the reason he’d gone out there, stood at the center of the garth, Father raised his hand, raised his hand and shook it in the air like a man trying to shake water from his fingers. And as if there really had been water on his fingers, something glinted in the air, something caught the light, glinted in the air just beyond Father’s outstretched hand. And I saw what it was.

But my mind rejected that.

My mind rejected that, began immediately to turn the thing Father brandished into something else, a pot perhaps or a lamp or maybe even (could it have been?) the distended and glistening stomach of a lamb. But then Father swung the thing again and I could no longer fool myself. The censer. Yes, yes of course it was. Which could mean only one thing. On only one other occasion had I seen them cense the garth, cense, for that matter, anything outside the church. They did it to ward off evil, to replace an evil air with that which was good, pure, holy. And instantly I knew why Brother Edgar hadn’t come, why, doubtless, Brother wouldn’t be

coming again for some time, would, perhaps, never come again. The pestilence was among us. Father Dagan was censing the garth which meant—could only mean—one thing:
the pestilence was among as again.