The Oblate's Confession (61 page)

I was working by the fire when it happened, I’m sure of that, for I remember noticing the wind shift, the flames flickering in a new direction, the jolt of presentiment that sent through me; and then I remember turning and seeing—as I had known I would see—that it had found him, that once again the smoke had found Father, and that despite this, despite the fact that smoke now streamed over and around the man as water will stream over and around a rock, he wasn’t coughing, despite all that smoke Father wasn’t coughing, was, in point of fact, just sitting there, apparently indifferent, immune; and if such vigor wasn’t frightening enough, there was also something about the way he was sitting there, something about his attitude, the tilt of his head, that did not look right, that did not look right at all.

By the time I got to him he was of course gone, had, doubtless, been gone for some time now. But his eyes were still open. Glassy, sightless, they stared at the water, stared at the little trickle of water that was Father’s stream, had always been his stream, his place. For a moment I remember I did nothing, just stood there, taking it all in, trying not so much to undo it as to understand it, to actually see what I was seeing. Then I sat down. I sat down and, absently, I began to stroke Father’s hand. Of course a part of me must have known what would happen, what my fingers would find there, but still I remember it coming as a shock, the scar that rode the back of Father’s hand, the scar that had ridden the back of

Father’s hand ever since a little boy, an oblate, had sought to test him, to see if, in his ecstasy, the old man could feel anything, know anything of the world around him. Finding it, touching it, remembering everything, I began to cry.

Of course Father showed up the very next day. As if God had wanted to make it perfectly clear who was in charge, had wished to leave no doubt as to His purpose, that He had been waiting for just this moment to answer my prayer, to lift His siege, send relief, it was the very next day, the day
after
Father Gwynedd died, that Father Beorhtfrith appeared at the edge of our camp bearing his weight of news and supplies. And how equally suspicious, when you think about it, that they should have sent Beorhtfrith. I mean Brother Edgar must have had to draw him a map. So far as I know, until that day, the furthest Father Beorhtfrith had ever ventured from the abbey was the occasional walk down to the fish ponds, and even then he probably had to be led. Certainly he’d never climbed Modra nect before. Yet he is the one they chose.

Doubtless they were thinking about the harvest. Doubtless they were thinking they could spare him, that, at a time when every able-bodied man was needed to salvage what could be salvaged from the remains of that pitiful harvest, they thought they could spare Beorhtfrith, that poor perpetually ineffectual Beorhtfrith was perfect for this task. As, of course, he was. For who else could have delivered that news with such aplomb? Who else could have told me what had happened below—who had lived and who had died—without for a moment thinking of anything other than himself, listening, as I believe he must always have listened, to only his own voices, the ones that told him what
he
thought of this, how
he
felt about what had happened. And so it was that, however poorly I may have dissembled, however much I may have grown pale at what he had to tell me, Father never noticed a thing, remained, throughout his report, blithely ignorant of all but his own internal mutterings. And I was left to digest the news on my own, spared the curiosity and questions I might have endured had God chosen to send someone else.

Abbot Godwin was dead. Prior Maban was dead. Everyone was dead. Everyone, that is, who was new, all those that had never known the old days, the days of Agatho and Folian, all those that had come only after Godwin had come, had sworn allegiance only to him and his master; they were all dead. My prayer had cut through them like a scythe. Moreover, they were the only ones dead. No one who had survived the pestilence the first time it struck Redestone had succumbed to this its second visitation. Or, in other words, the old world, the world my wicked prayer had sought to resurrect, the world of Dagan and Waldhere, Osric and Baldwin, this was the world that had survived, this the world that had, indeed, in however perverse a sense, been resurrected. And not only was it resurrected, but In-Hrypum herself now lay in a state of near ruin. As if to leave no doubt as to the cause of all this, Wilfrid’s seat at In-Hrypum, which previously had always escaped the pestilence, was, this time, brought low by it, the community there decimated, reduced, it was said, to gleaning for its food.

Father Beorhtfrith, I remember, told me this last as if it somehow bore upon his character that such a malady, one that had claimed even a bishop’s see, should have spared him. Then, whispering lest he wake the monster, provoke it to still further mischief, the good father went on to assure me the worst was now over, that we could all breathe easier for the miasma was most certainly gone, had drained (forever, he prayed) back into whatever fetid swamp had first produced it.

Which meant God
had
heard my confession,
had
placed His bow in the sky, sent His dove, His Spirit, to redeem the face of the earth. But only after He had killed everyone, killed all of them, all those associated with my removal from the hermit’s service, all those associated with that first and lasting fall from grace. All of them, that is, but Wilfrid. Some final justice in that, I suppose, that the one I had sought first, the one I had most wished to destroy, should be the only one left standing.

We buried Father on a piece of high ground overlooking his little stream. They tell me the place is well marked now, that there is even a sort of unofficial shrine on the site, but at the time there was nothing special about it, just a quiet place with a good deposit of soil. Good soil is hard to come by on the mountain, soil deep enough to bury a man. But we found it there. As, of course, had the trees. I remember we had to wrest Father’s grave from the grasp of a particularly large and tenacious oak. Doubtless those roots have long since grown back, long since encircled the man, their tendrils now his winding sheet. For some reason I find the image strangely comforting.

After we closed the grave, Stuf left. He had no reason to tarry, Beorhtfrith having made it perfectly clear he did not care for the man, crossing himself whenever Stuf so much as brushed against him. And of course our Christian rites had been a trial for the charcoal-maker. Not that he hadn’t tried to appear respectful, hadn’t tried to stand up straight, nod now and then as if following the service closely. But unlike Beorhtfrith, I had been able to see where Stuf hid his hands behind his back, the way they jogged up and down as we chanted, the one finger tapping against the others

as if ticking off the moments till he could be gone. I find it interesting now, when I think back on it, that he should have been in such a hurry. Was he really anxious to be off, or merely anxious to seem so? You must remember you are dealing with a hill person here. Their concerns, their motives, must always remain obscure. Thinking about it now, and bearing in mind what I knew of the man, I believe it quite possible Stuf crept back there after Father and I left, that he said his own obsequies, performed quite probably his own rites, his own office, over Father Hermit’s grave. Not that it really matters. Such devilry, I have long since grown convinced, can only find itself helpless before the benign indifference of a soul like Father’s.

So Stuf left. As soon as the last of the earth had been replaced, the charcoal-maker set aside his spade, turned and, without so much as a fare-thee-well, walked off up into the wood. I remember I watched that small back grow smaller still and, watching it, found myself strangely reluctant to see him go, reluctant to see our time here come to an end like this, Stuf wandering off by himself into the wood. And so I ran after him. Like some overwrought postulant, I ran after the charcoal-maker, caught up with him, walked with him for a distance. And, incredibly, I think Stuf himself, even poor benighted Stuf, may have felt something like what I was feeling, for he greeted my appearance at his side that day with none of his usual mischief. Indeed, as I remember it, he showed an almost monastic decorum, inviting me to join him with a small bow and a nod of his head, the two of us walking on together in companionable silence, heads down, arms at our sides, for all intents and purposes just two old friends out for a stroll.

Of course it couldn’t last, and, interestingly, I think it was Stuf who brought the thing to a close. Certainly he was the one who spoke, he the one who tried to sum it all up, give the day a proper benediction. “Remember how he used to laugh?” he said, not really looking at me, looking at something else, hearing, I think, something else. Then, shaking his head once, still clearly in awe of what he had remembered, he turned and walked away—no dancing, no spins, no winks of the eye, just that final question, the last

shake of his head, and Stuf the charcoal-maker, his business with Redestone complete, disappears from this and all histories of our land.

As for myself, I was in for a surprise. For weeks I had watched Father’s decline, watched as, again and again, Death had come to take his measure, lean upon his door. And with each of those visits, with each step in that decline, I had grown ever more frightened, ever more unsure. For this was Father Hermit. I was watching the man I loved more than any other, needed more than any other, fall toward something unimaginable, the place from which no one I knew had ever returned; and I was powerless to stop that descent, powerless to help him, to save him; powerless, finally, to do anything other than watch as (unwitting and innocent of all that lay before him) Father fell toward his doom.

And then it happened. The thing I dreaded more than any other actually happened; and I found myself on the other side of it alive and well and feeling unaccountably good.

Of course there is nothing like a death to make us think of life.

We watch the one thing become the other as quietly and unobtrusively as thought, and we marvel at the ease with which it is done. Small wonder we grow giddy round the deathbed, for there we know—however momentarily,
we know
—how close we stand, how thin the wall that separates us. And that may be all the explanation necessary for the strange sense of exhilaration I experienced in the days following Father’s death. But I think there was more to it as well. I think there was something about Father’s death, something about death itself, that I had not known before, had not understood, probably could not have understood until I saw that death, watched that man die.

Of course it all seems rather banal now. How many times had I been taught that death was just a door, how many times had I watched the community gather round the bed of a brother about to cross over? But this was the first time I had stood so close, this the first time it had been my Father Hermit doing the crossing, and though I shouldn’t have been, I was unprepared for the power of the metaphor. He was here. A moment ago he was here, a man

complete and whole unto himself, and now, in an instant, he was gone. And there was something about that, something about standing there looking at that dead and empty body, that called out to me, declared itself. I knew this, recognized it. No one could look at those staring eyes, that heedless yawn, without seeing them for what they were. This was sign. This was a body stunned and staggered by the speed of its abandonment.
I could read this.
I was unalone.

Yes. Yes I know, one does not necessarily follow from the other. Yet at the time it did. Somehow—looking at those unseeing eyes, that jaw hanging loose as if broken—I knew, knew, that what half-sat, half-slumped, on the ground before me wasn’t Father, that this was merely rain-shadow—the proof, the evidence, that someone had been here. Father wasn’t here. Father was somewhere else. Father was. God was. The goose flesh ran unimpeded up and down my arms.

And it didn’t go away. Unlike the shameless glee that sometimes disgraces deathbed scenes, the sense of exhilaration I experienced upon seeing Father Hermit dead persisted. All through that winter it stayed with me. I stepped onto the cold floor of the dortoir and it bothered me not; my stomach growled for want of food and it was all I could do to keep from laughing. Reality was changed, transformed, transfigured: God and Father Hermit
with me
, carrying me, buoying me up. I exulted. I gave thanks. Life was good, life was holy, life was chant.

And then, slowly, as spring bled into winter, stained and eventually overcame it, the work once more imposing itself upon our lives—the aches and pains, the fatigue—this happiness, this neareuphoria, naturally enough began to fade, and, with it, the feeling that Father was ever with me. And I let him go. With very little regret, I let the hermit go. Father had himself taught me that I should, that such consolations are only distractions, that Creation in and of itself must suffice, prove miracle enough. Still, I never was the contemplative he was, never will be; and so I do enjoy my memories, the smiles that, from time to time, rise of their own accord to my lips. Which, of course, does not go unnoticed. On
more than one occasion Father Abbot has had to point a finger at me in Chapter. But that doesn’t matter. Father Hermit doesn’t mind. He just leans out over his silly little stream, bobs that big old head at me and smiles and smiles.