The Oblate's Confession (59 page)

“You don’t mean it!” Father making conversation now, inserting an exclamation where his mind told him exclamation was required.

“Yes, Abbot Godwin took away my right to.... He assigned the task of supplying you to Brother Edgar. That’s when Brother Edgar began coming here.”

“Brother Edgar?”

“Yes, you remem.... It doesn’t matter. I wanted to come here. I missed you, I missed this place.”

“And I missed you too!” the old man serious now, the part of him that remained Father Hermit flaring up, recognizing a need in me and responding to it whether or not he knew my name, had any idea who I was.

I smiled.

Father smiled. He’d already forgotten what had led to these expressions but he liked smiling, always had. It was remarkable really. You could destroy the man’s body, ruin his mind, and still the holiness endured, still it glowed from within him, alive, pure, inextinguishable. I suppose I should have taken off my sandals and covered my head in its presence. I suppose I should have knelt down before it, worshipped at its feet. Instead, stubbornly, I went on.

“My penance,” I said, as if nothing had happened. “You need to give me a penance, Father.”

And the light went out. Leaning out over the stream, trying to get a better look at me, eyes cloudy with years, the smile vanished from Father’s face, disappeared, was as quickly replaced by something else—the blinking eyes, the trembling lip, the shaking head of old and vacuous age.

“You’ve heard my confession and now you have to give me a penance,” I said, trying to hurry him along, embarrassed now by what sat before me, the part I had played in its creation. “You know, a penance, something I can do to atone for my sin.”

“A penance.” Father nodded. “Yes, of course, a penance.”

I waited.

The old man didn’t say anything.

“Father?”

“You know I think I’m getting hungry.” He glanced up at the sky. “Isn’t it about time to eat?”

I shook my head. “In a moment Father, first we have to finish this. Remember, you’re hearing my confession? I’ve just confessed that I prayed for Bishop Wilfrid’s death and now you’re go-ing to give me a penance.”

“Say a Pater Noster and be mindful of the phrase Thy Kingdom come’” Father blinked, looked at me, clearly as surprised as I by the ease with which this chestnut had sprung from him. It happened sometimes; if you poked and prodded hard enough, the coals of Father’s mind would produce a little light.

“But Father,” I protested, “a Pater Noster...? I mean I prayed for someone’s
death
, the death of my rightful superior. I need more than a mere Pater Noster, give me something really hard to do.”

“There’s nothing
mere
about a Pater Noster. And besides,” Father less certain here, “that’s the penance I always assign, isn’t it?”

Well, yes. I couldn’t argue with him there. But still....

“Now make an act of contrition so we can eat.”

“But...?”

The eyes grew large, Father’s hunger brooking no dissent.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Father smiled. “‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the...’ What was the

rest of that?”

“You taught me that prayer, Father.”

“I did?”

I nodded, smiled.

Father looked down at his lap. “So...” he said, noticing the patch again, picking at it experimentally, “may we eat now?”

I almost laughed. He was like a child really, a little boy, and at that moment I felt an almost paternal regard for him. “Yes, we can eat Father. But first you have to absolve me of my sin.”

The face came up, looked worried.

“It’s all right, I’ll help you. Remember, ‘God, the Father of mercies’?”

“God, the Father of mercies....”

“‘Through the death and the resurrection of His Son....’” “Through the death and....”

“Resurrection.”

“Through the death and resurrection of His Son....”

“Has reconciled....”

“Has reconciled the world to Himself and sent...and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins....”—this last said quickly, Father spitting it out before he could forget it again.

“That’s right, very good! Now, remember the rest? Through the ministry of the Church....’”

A small frown. “Through the ministry of the Church....” Another smile. “Through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I...and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

And it was done, the Names invoked, my confession made, Father’s absolution given. It might not have been canonically correct but, under the circumstances, it was—I honestly believed— the best I could hope for.

Eanflæd. Eanflæd. Do you have any idea what it is like for me to commit that name to writing, to finally confess to the fact of her existence, to the fact of our.... Well, what name should I give the utter nothing that has connected us all these years, the meetings that never took place, the messages that never got sent, the gestures that figure—wild and fantastic—only in my mind? Like some anxious spirit I have hovered over her life, caught glimpses from the terrace of someone who might or might not be she, listened for reports of her in Chapter, celebrated her successes, mourned her losses, prayed for her soul. And is it possible...? Do you suppose Eanflæd has ever thought of me?

Yes. Yes I know, I am a silly old man, the worst kind of monk—a dreamer, a mountebank, one whose vocation is little
more than façade. Yet I cannot help myself, I do wonder.... Does she ever think of the boy she visited once beneath a cherry tree, the oblate with whom she shared, if not an afternoon, at least a portion of one? Does she fare well? Does her husband love her? Does he care for her as he should? Is her larder well-stocked? Does her complexion remain, as it does in my mind, soft, pure, lit from within? Does she sleep well? Or, now that we have drawn so much closer to its door, does the house of the dead once more figure in her dreams? If it does, I hope that it has become less frightening, less dramatic with age. I hope that, were the two of us to meet again, sit beneath a cherry tree, share its fruit, we might laugh over the things that bother us now, our knees, how they refuse to bend, our eyes, how they fail to see, our friends, how they insist upon dying. She would tell me about her children. She would cry, perhaps, over the two she lost. I would share with her that I have prayed—and continue to pray—for all five of them. And then, maybe, if the moment suited, we would talk again of her dream, that place, the house where bodies refuse to lie still, where the dead turn and trouble one another, trouble us, and how, with age, even that agitation loses some of its terror, seems, if just as real, less awful, more familiar, a bogeyman grown almost, if not quite, ridiculous with time.

The other day a novice said something to me about the “forest path” and it took me a moment to realize what he was talking about, that somewhere along the line he’d mistaken the word “forest” for “furnace” and now that path which once signified so much to me, means nothing to him, has become only a way through a wood. How long before such a mistake becomes common usage, before all that we have known and loved passes, arcane and archaic, into dead and empty past?

So many stories are told now of the death of Father Gwynedd, of how he asked to be carried down to the stream where it had been his habit to pray, and how, sitting there, singing God’s

praises, meditating upon the blessings he had received in this life, the good man passed peacefully into the next. And I would not deny such an account for, in its essentials, it is true, and has doubtless set a pious and helpful example for many that have followed after him. Still, as with most such tales, the event itself was both simpler and more complicated.

It was not long after Father heard my confession that his health took a turn for the worse. His feet began to swell, which (though it seemed a minor complaint at the time) clearly made the hermit uneasy. Indeed, if I did not watch him closely, the old man was liable to remove his sandals to relieve the pressure they caused him and wander thereafter barefoot about his camp. This I should not have minded were it not for the fact that, as unsteady as he was, I worried he might veer toward the fire and step upon a coal. Now it was a peculiar feature of this illness that whenever Father lay down, and especially if he lay down with his feet raised, the swelling subsided. But even this afforded the poor man little comfort for, just as the pressure in his feet abated, Father would begin to experience difficulty breathing—the two events falling so quickly one upon the other that one could believe them related, that whatever ailed Father’s feet ran—when those parts were elevated—down to contaminate and congest his lungs. Needless to say this inability to lie down comfortably made sleeping difficult. Many’s the night I moved seamlessly from nightmare to nightmare, one moment the furnace huffing and hissing at me dangerously, the next the hermit himself, lips drawn back in a sort of snarling rictus, eyes staring big at me over the fire, uncomprehending and childlike, desperate, afraid. At such times the only remedy was open air. I would gather up our blankets and lead Father down to the little stream that ran below his camp. There, the night’s terror already behind him, forgotten, Father would fall into a fast and easy sleep. But not I. For then it was that I lay awake, my memory sound, triumphant, teasing me with visions of things to come.

As any of you know who have nursed a brother through such an illness, the evil that first dares enter your patient only at night,
soon grows bold and advances upon him by day. And so it was that, within a very short time indeed, the hermit began to have difficulty breathing regardless of the hour. Then, as if he retained some physical memory of the solace it had provided the night before, Father would repair to his little stream. At the time I assumed he found the air down there more congenial to his lungs, the waters soothing to his feet, but it may well be that the associations he had with the place, the prayers he had prayed there, also played some role in the comfort it now gave him. Whatever the cause, sooner or later, no matter where he had begun the day, I would find the old man sitting down there, staring contentedly at the little flow of water, apparently finding its vagaries as diverting as you or I might those of a mighty stream. Sometimes I would join him and—though by this time Father had as much difficulty remembering the names for things as he did those for people—still he would point out those that caught his eye, a pretty leaf, a shiny stone, the object likely as not called by a quality as its name— ““green” perhaps or “slippery”—the man unable, even suffering from a deficit of words, to keep the silence, stifle his desire to share, to teach, to communicate his fascination with all that went on in the world around him.

Those were good days. When I look back on them now, I realize they were very good days indeed. But they did not seem so then. Then I followed a strange round, my hours devoted not so much to praise as to worry, my intervals to endless desperate calculation. Would our food last? Had my confession worked? And if it had, did that mean the prayers I now prayed daily also worked? Did He relent? Was it possible that, even now, the livid stream cooled, withdrew back up the valley whence it had come, the pestilence in turn slinking off down river, its source, its inspiration, dissipated, gone? And if that were true, if everything had turned out as I wished (realizing even as I considered the possibility how immodest and unlikely a proposition it was), did that mean that the most crucial of our needs would also be met, that at this very moment someone might be climbing up to relieve us, climbing up the mountain to bring us food, to feed and save us?