The Oblate's Confession (60 page)

For if someone did not come soon—come very soon I prayed— we would begin to starve.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, what God sends us in our extremity? We cry out for a religious, some priest or brother to come help us, come save us from the dangers we face, and instead of the grownup we’ve prayed for—the man of mettle, the abba, the
rabboni
, the hero, the saint—we get Stuf—Stuf the charcoal-maker, Stuf the heathen, Stuf the clown.

I’ll never forget the day he wandered into our camp, what it felt like to look up and see him standing there, the scare it gave me. Looking back on it now I realize this must have been Stuf’s intention, that the man must have enjoyed causing these little sensations, for he seemed always to arrive like that: suddenly, mysteriously, as if materializing out of thin air. I wonder, did he study his approaches? Do you suppose he sat and waited for just the right moment, the instant when he knew he could really startle a person, catch him with his guard down? Whatever, he was certainly good at it. Normally, at that time of year, when the leaves lie thick upon the ground, you can hear someone coming long before he actually trudges into view. But that day I heard nothing. I was working down by the stream as I remember it, cleaning a pot maybe, maybe some bedclothes, when Father moved in a way that caught my attention, made me look up, follow his glance toward the wood. At first I saw nothing—saplings still dark from last night's rain, leaf litter fawn-colored, glowing faintly—and then suddenly, too abruptly, unrelated things began to move, join, commingle, so that what had seemed to be nothing, an emptiness between edges, became instead something, extricated itself from its surroundings, tree becoming trunk, limb leg, leaf eye, Stuf stepping from among the saplings like a man stepping from behind a wall—a little spin to celebrate the fact, a wink to say I told you so.

I was, as I remember it, appalled—appalled and overjoyed. It was everything I could do to keep from running to the man, running to him and bowing down before him, washing his very feet.

Which, as it turned out, was—at least according to Stuf— exactly how the hermit had greeted him when first he’d visited that

place.

I never did find out if that was true. You know you have to be careful with the hill people: they’ll lie to you just for the sake of lying, just to make a story sound pretty or give it a fancy ending. And Stuf was no different from any other. The man loved to put on airs, affect a station and dignity out of all proportion to his own. Yet, truth be told, it wouldn’t surprise me if the hermit really had greeted him that way, greeted him as he would have Christ. Pagan or not, Stuf was a man; and I never saw Father deny any man his company or the comfort of his hearth.

For his part, Stuf treated the hermit with an elaborate and uncharacteristic respect. If Father stood, Stuf stood (and could not be prevailed upon to sit again). If Father did not care for his food, Stuf did not care for his either (and looked at me as if I had done something wrong). And then there was the way he listened to the man. By that time, by the time the charcoal-maker found us, began to deliver us from our hunger, Father had reached a point where language itself was now often beyond him. He would look at you, eyes alert, brow creasing and uncreasing as he spoke, for all intents and purposes the image of a man making some difficult but important point, yet what he said, what actually came out of his mouth, was little more than noise, a series of sounds that in form and cadence mimicked speech but, in truth, never attained anything like its meaning. And Stuf loved it. When Father spoke like that, utterly nonsensically, the charcoal-maker would sit up and pay attention as you or I might sit up and pay attention to a great prophet or holy man.

At first (I will admit it here), I was taken in by this. When Stuf explained that men like Father were, quite literally,
touched
, that some one or some thing had reached down from heaven and dealt them a glancing blow, granting them in the process a vision so astonishingly clear, so utterly at odds with our own, that they were rendered incapable of ordinary speech, I wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that the Father I had known still existed, that if I but listened to him closely, attended to what he had to say, I might regain that which I had lost, find again the Father I had known, the

Father I had loved, the Father I missed so much.

But of course it wasn’t true. Again and again I did as Stuf bade me, and, again and again, sitting by the hermit, listening to his garbled speech, I heard not wisdom but dementia, saw not a prophet but an old and feeble man. For Father had taught me too well. I knew his sign, could not ignore it, and where Stuf saw meaning in the creasing of that brow, I saw worry, a glimmer of the reason that as yet resided there; and it frightened me, it frightened me to think that somewhere deep inside him, somewhere so deep it could not get out, a part of Father did in fact still exist, and, existing, knew, understood, that the sounds coming from his mouth were not right, that they did not mean what he wished them to mean, meant, in fact, nothing at all.

I went often to the crag in those days. There was no need for me at the camp now; Stuf was there, Stuf could watch over Father. So I went to the crag. I would sit and look out over the valley and I would think about things. I would think about Father and I would think about the things he had said to me, the things we had done together, the places he had shown me. And sooner or later, no matter how much I tried to avoid it, I would think about the day he had taught me to love tracking, the day when we had lain together and awaited a vixen’s return, what it had been like to curl up beneath his arm, to know myself safe there, the feel of his woolens rough against my face, the smell of cook-fires embedded in them, the smell of cook-fires and breakfast and, further down, faint but real, the smell of Father himself, the aroma of the man, his hair, his skin, his sweat, the heart that kept it warm, the heart that kept me warm.

Once, years before, the hermit had spoken to me of death. I had been talking to him about the pestilence as I remember it, what it had been like for us down in the valley during that first visitation, and, in particular, I had been telling him about Oftfor, what it had been like to watch my fellow oblate die—making of course the most of myself in the telling, turning myself into the uncomplaining hero of my tale. But, as he always did, Father took me at my word. His brow softened, I remember, and he reached for me,

touched my hand. There was, I believe, something in the man that responded to suffering, bent toward it as a physician bends to a wound; and it embarrassed me. I was ashamed to see my invented grief taken for real, the bereavement I affected worried over, commiserated with. But looking back on it now...well, who’s to say? Maybe he was right. Maybe I felt the boy’s death more keenly than I realized. Certainly I’ve never forgotten what Father said to me that day, the way he refused to explain away what had happened to me, what had happened to poor little Oftfor. “God is wild,’’ he told me. “God is uncontrollable. We cannot appease Him with our prayers or drive Him with our sacrifices. He does as He pleases. And what pleases Him is beyond our ken. He takes what we love most—mother, father, friend, child—and rips them from us brutally, without warning or care. There is no succor. They are gone. He has taken them. And He is silent. You stare across the field and the wind plays at your face and there are no answers, only wildness. We are helpless. We either accept Him as He is— wanton, willfull—or we lose all hope and grow bitter and sad. We continue to live and love at the whim of an unknowable Being. We take comfort in the beliefs and rituals we have built up over the years to placate Him but, in the final analysis, they are like straws before the wind. The first blow and they are gone. The wind roars where it will.”

Of course, at the time, I was terribly shocked by this. I even, I remember, considered reporting the hermit. I had only recently begun visiting him then, and the picture of myself standing before Faults, denouncing the man’s heterodoxy as I had been taught to do, an oblate true to his station and the Rule, pleased me. But of course I didn’t report him. I had, I believe, even as early as that, begun to love the hermit a little, to love him and to appreciate the way he sometimes spoke to me as an equal—however much what he said might frighten me. And besides, I could always tell myself it was just his grief talking, the sadness he felt over the death of Brother Ælfhelm. You must remember that this was a time when the horror of the pestilence, the memory of it, was still fresh in our minds. It was not at all uncommon in those days to see grown

men beating their breasts as they prayed, to hear an eerie wailing rise up at night from the village. Once, I remember, I even saw a brother overtaken as he walked upon the garth. He was near the church as I remember it, and, despite the fact he turned his face to the wall, pulled his hood up over his head, you could tell the man was in the grip of some strong emotion, that his shoulders went up and down like that because something was happening inside him, something was perhaps breaking inside him, something deep and dark and irreplaceable. So it seemed acceptable to think the hermit’s outburst had been just that, an outburst, the expression of a perfectly natural and even humble grief.

Or at least that was what I told myself when first I heard the hermit’s speech. But later, later when he was dying, later when I sat upon the crag, looked out over the valley (the green of the garth disturbed by fresh diggings), I wondered. Maybe Father had been right. Maybe the God I knew, the God of the cloister, of order and discipline,
was
just a human invention, that we followed the Rule so assiduously not that we might conform ourselves to His image but that He might be conformed to ours. I thought about the times I had prayed as Father prayed, the prayers of silence and emptiness, and I thought about the God I had encountered in those prayers, and there was no denying He was different from that of the cloister. Truly, He was wild and free and utterly unknowable. And now that Mystery had cast a pall over the man who had brought me to Him, had rendered all I had ever learned or loved of Him suspect, doubtful—His herald, His envoy, ruined like this, destroyed. I sat upon the crag and stared out over the valley, and, as promised, there were no answers, only the bite of the wind, its icy taste, the feral scent of distant weather.

At other times my mind seemed of its own accord to turn from such a view of things. I would be sitting there, looking out over the valley, thinking my sober thoughts, when suddenly and without warning I would find myself diverted, would find myself remembering for some reason my confession, the way Father had leaned out over his little stream to get a better look at me, the image floating before me once more effigy-like, the absurd bob of the

head, the dreamy eyes, that silly hopeless smile. And as if it were all real, as if Father really did float on the air before me, really did approve of what he saw, I would find myself smiling back— pleased, happy to remember Father pleased, the man taking pleasure in my company, the man taking pleasure in anybody’s company, enjoying himself. The one thing all us hermits have in common, he used to say, the one trait all hermits share, is their love of company. And then he would laugh and laugh, laugh that big laugh of his, the one that went so deep and carried so far, the laugh that both frightened me (for surely it must draw the entire Cumbrogi nation down upon us) and convinced me I had nothing to fear (for how could anyone be afraid of anything in the company of a man who could laugh like that?).

Once, a year or two before the coming of Godwin, Father had said something that, at the time, surprised me. I no longer remember the exact circumstances—the time of day, the part of the mountain we were on—but I do remember that we were in a good mood, that there had been a fresh fall of snow the night before and, as a result, we were both feeling happy, light-hearted, the tracking easy, full of interest. Then, quite unexpectedly, we came upon a spot where six or seven deer had congregated beneath a cedar tree. For a moment I remember we didn’t say anything, struck dumb as it were by the obvious meaning of the place, the crush of print, the cedar stripped of needles, the stains upon the snow, the bristly-looking scat. It was Father who finally broke the silence. “Who knows the deer better,” he asked, “the man who sees a picture of one in a book, or the man who never sees the animal at all but follows its track through a snowy wood, finds a place like this, sees, knows, what it means, the hunger that drove these animals, the food they were willing to eat?” I didn’t say anything. There was no need to answer Father (we both knew who knew the deer better), and, moreover, there was something about the scene before us, its quiet gravity, that made all talk seem suddenly superfluous, even cruel. As if he understood this, knew what I was thinking, Father spoke again. “The world is God’s sign,” he said, “you must look at it, observe it, without fear or judgment. If

you’re brave enough to do that, Winwæd, if you can really see the world as it is.... Well, then you touch
His
print, smell
His
musk, hold
His
spoor in the palm of your hand.”

So what then was I to make of this sign, this spoor—on the one hand the God who gave me Father, gave me the man who laughed and played, the man who loved me, cared for me, watched over me from his mountaintop; and, on the other, the God who took that man away, took Father away, killed him, killed everyone?