We are, he thinks, born of earth; it is what we are. Vessels of clay, formed of dust made pliable by blood and tears. In the earth that is us falls the seed of God, his living word. And the roots of Christ’s tree, the rood of our salvation, quest their feeling fingers down into the humble stuff of our mortality, and hold it strong.
He always starts this early. It takes a while to milk eight cows, however practised you are – then the milk has to be strained and the churns stacked in the barrows, the beasts let through to their yard with its byre, and the milking shed swilled down. Milk is only one end product of all that rich pasture and its stream-fed stone trough. The rest is the most spectacular splattering mess.
He takes his time. Rushing undoes itself, in Brother Stephen’s opinion. The root of wellbeing is taking life gently; not shirking, just letting it find its own rhythm, its own way.
They know their places, find their own way in, stand waiting, one blowing out breath, one stamping a foot. He ties them and sets down feed in the mangers in front of them. Then he goes from cow to cow, washing them down, milking with practised, methodical hand, the stream of milk squirting hard against the side of the bound wooden pail. By and by, all are done. He unties the loose ropes from the row of forged iron rings fixed to the walls, and the big beasts back from their places, their chosen leader going first – an abbess cow, Stephen supposes, Mother Mary Matriarch. Our Lady of the horned and humble house-cow, pray for us. He fastens them into the foldyard, leaving them with hay in their nets in the byre. Water springs in all sorts of places up here in the hills, so the water trough looks after itself.
As he often does, lugging the milkpail through repeatedly, lifting it to tip into the churns, hefting them up onto the barrow, then filling the pail three times from the spring to swill the place clean, Brother Stephen thanks God for his body’s strength. Nobody could call him a scholar, and his singing almost makes Father Gilbert cry. His lettering’s not worth the waste of ink, and much preaching goes in one ear and out the other. But he does know the husbandry of beasts and the care of the land. He can recognize honey fungus and the first signs of foot rot. He can assess the quality of grain and select good animals for breeding. Weather wise, he knows when to put in the sickle and when to wait. The fields and flocks alike thrive under his care. And this is his worship, his service to God. This – his whole life – is what he lays on the altar stone, the bedrock of his being, his heart’s love. Daily, faithfully, unquestioningly, he walks between foldyard and cloister, up and down this track that he loves, times beyond counting. Because he is sound in wind and limb, strong and able, knowledgeable, he has something he can contribute, a gift to bring. He feels secure in who he is, and aspires to nothing else. All Brother Stephen hopes and prays for is to be granted leave to spend his span of allotted days exactly like this; and at last, when life is done, to be laid to rest in the abbey’s burial ground on the hillside, under the grass he and Brother Tom have mowed with their scythes, bounded by the wall he and Tom have patiently mended when it tumbled, under the tossing clouds, in the free air, in the rain and sunshine. There, he believes, he will sleep easy until Christ comes again.
His way down the hill, trundling the handbarrow with its churns, taking care to avoid any ruts that could throw it off balance or trap a wheel – though he and Tom are careful to fill in the big ones with stones – takes him past the infirmary buildings.
Glancing across as he goes by, he sees Brother Michael helping some old man to his feet – someone who has been sitting out in the sunshine these last golden days before the storms come and the year moves down into darkness. Father Gerald, it looks like from here. And Brother Stephen thinks how the curve of a life is not unlike the round of the year – you have your spring, your high summer, and you’d better make the best of it. If you have no harvest to bring in come Lammas, well, the frosty days and black nights ahead look almighty bleak. What sweetens the winter days is the warmth of a fire from wood you chopped earlier, a hot bowl of gruel or pottage from provender grown in the summer and set by. But then, he thinks, there’s more to it than that. For how can you sow a field that isn’t ploughed? Where will you build your fire with no house and no hearth? It’s not only what you do yourself alone, it’s what men before you built and laid down, how they lived – and it’s what we all pull together to do. One man alone is very limited, however skilled and strong. Anyway, where would he get his skills from, or for that matter his tools, without those who walked before him and beside him? Life is short, very short. Not long enough even to provide for yourself without help.
Maybe, even, you could say a life is like a day – then by heaven, is that not a lottery? All of us have our morning and our noontide before the shadows lengthen and the night comes down – but some of us bask in sunshine while others have to hunch along through driving rain. What’s with that? Without sun and rain, wind and weathers, no life can be. He’s heard there are frozen lands where nothing grows, beyond even where the Vikings came from who settled in Yorkshire, ploughed it up, and sowed the seeds of their language everywhere. He’s heard there are melting hot lands where rain never falls, where the earth is bare desert, and they travel along on camels like the Three Wise Men, their heads wrapped in cloths to protect from the merciless sun.
By the Mass, he thinks, as he stops his barrow on the flags near the kitchen door, I’m glad I live in England. I’m grateful I’ve had the day and the life I have. It’s the right one for me.
Indoors, Brother Conradus is busy with his preparations for community supper. So Stephen carries the churns in for him to the kitchen dairy. It’s at the back there, on the north-east side of the kitchen building. It has thick walls, small windows, and stone shelves, so everything stays cold, even on a warm day like this. It’s all scrubbed clean in here, as neat and orderly as you could possibly wish. Conradus, thinks Stephen, is an excellent kitchener. He sets the churns of milk in the usual place on the Yorkstone flags of the floor, collects the scoured and rinsed empty ones from the morning left waiting for him by the door, loads them onto the barrow, and sets off on his last trip to the farm before Vespers.
Chapter
Eighteen
Colin can hardly believe how much of a dogsbody a postulant has to be. Having been settled in no particular obedience, it sometimes feels as though thirty-one men share a consensus view that he obviously has nothing to do. Every request is courteously made – but firmly; nothing diffident or shy. “Colin, could you just take this laundry list across to the guesthouse… Colin, Brother Michael needs these tinctures I’ve made up; are you free to take them down to the infirmary?… Colin, of your charity, would you mind running over to the porter’s lodge with these letters from Father John – he thinks someone will be coming by this afternoon who could take them for him… Colin, Brother Benedict has sent up some clothes from the infirmary needing alteration – will you be so kind as to trot upstairs to Father James and see what he can do?… Colin, Brother Boniface has hurt his foot. Nothing serious, but I’ve sent him to the infirmary for Brother Michael to take a look. Brother Conradus will be short in the kitchen, getting ready for supper. If you have time to give him a hand that will be a blessing… Ah, Colin, thank you so much for coming to help me – what a Godsend! Would you mind taking this list of things we need across to Brother Cormac? He’ll need it before the end of the day, or I’d take it myself. God reward you – I really am most grateful.”
“Oh, don’t mention it! Shall I go right away?”
So here he goes bearing the kitchener’s list of necessities across the abbey court towards the checker. As he approaches the door he hears the sound of conversation within; and hesitates. It sounds not entirely happy, has the abbot in it, and he thinks his intrusion with his errand might be unwelcome. It isn’t that he means to be eavesdropping; he’s only trying to assess what the proper course of action might be. After all, Brother Conradus did say the cellarer needs this before Vespers, and it won’t be so very long before they’re ringin
g the bell. What to do? So he listens carefully to the exchange between the abbot and the cellarer, trying to make up his mind whether to interrupt. Or not. And if not, what to do?
“I only ask you” – this is the abbot’s voice, firm and level – “because I cannot help noticing the portions of poultry and fish served to the community are becoming smaller, and fewer; likewise the servings of cheese. Seeing this, I enquired in the infirmary, and I find their special allowance of beef tea has been halved. So I went back to Brother Conradus to ask why, and he tells me it is because less beef is made available for him to make it. Then I went across to the guesthouse – same story. Less cheese – but, oddly, no less butter. Half the capons they used to be provided with, half the chickens. No ducks and no mutton at all. Today when I asked for something to be set aside for men coming home late, I’m told we have plenty of bread, but not cheese, or cold chicken. Can you tell me what’s going on? I mean, I can guess, but I want to hear you explain it yourself.”
Calm. Kind. Colin can just imagine those steady brown eyes pinning the cellarer in place. He wonders if staying to listen is even more intrusive than dropping off his list and legging it out of there; but now he wants to hear the cellarer’s answer. Abbot John may be able to guess what it’s all about, but Colin can’t. He presumes it must be an exercise of frugality. Maybe the money is short. For several moments, holding his breath and straining, agog, to hear, he finds himself listening to silence. And when a voice picks up the conversation, it’s the abbot’s again.
“Let me help you. I suspect this is no oversight in the ordering, nor shortage in our own supplies. Heavens, the place is fluttering with pigeons. Neither have you waxed unduly parsimonious. It’s that you don’t want to slaughter the animals or the birds. Am I right?”
Fascinated, Colin steals closer to the door, clutching his list and keeping well back by the wall where he cannot be seen by the men inside the small building. He glances briefly over his shoulder to be sure he’s unobserved, but at this hour everybody’s scrambling to finish off the day’s work – the abbey court is deserted. He hears an indistinct murmur from whoever is not the abbot – Brother Cormac, presumably – then Father John again.
“Brother, you cannot do this. The obediences of the common life are not an opportunity for men to impose a personal philosophy on everyone else. The brothers need the strength and warmth that is in fowl and fish to stay fit and well. The frailer men in the infirmary need their beef tea to build them up. I understand how you feel about the taking of life, but you know, everything dies. While they live, we husband them kindly – they are fed, they have shelter and space. They do not bear the anxious search for safety and succour of wild birds and beasts. And the fish – well, glory! A fish will eat his neighbour’s entire brood of offspring in one nonchalant gulp. They are not delicate in their sensibilities.
“Besides, even suppose we ate nothing but vegetables and grain – do you think there would be no cost of life? Did you imagine the men in the kitchen treat tenderly the caterpillars on the cabbage, the blackfly on the beans, even if you do? And have you deluded yourself the field mice would all escape the trample of the mowers and the blade of the scythe?”
From where Colin stands listening, the abbot seems to be talking entirely to himself. His reasonable, persistent arguments meet only silence. At this point, he would give a lot to be able to see Brother Cormac’s face. The silence lengthens. Then, the abbot again: “And what’s with cutting down on the cheese, for heaven’s sake?”
Finally he discerns – low, unhappy – a reply from the cellarer.
“It’s the calves. They’re just babies. There’s no point stinting our own milk, our own butter, is there? We have it anyway. But surely we don’t need to buy in extra cheese, Father? Our cheese, our milk, our butter, our curds-and-whey – they come at the expense of a calf’s death. Bad enough that we sell our own bull calves for veal; can we not leave it at that, and keep a little back for our beef tea – make what we have go round? Couldn’t we be content with what our own cows give, and with things like apples and bread and beans?”
Colin’s jaw drops. Their cellarer is a tough, uncompromising man. Nobody argues with him. His blue eyes, flinty, drill into you like gimlets. But here – and the voice is recognizably his – the pleading tremble of vulnerability is unmistakable.
“Cormac, I cannot let you go on with this.” The abbot’s voice is gentle. Colin feels the kindness of it like a pain. “Let me see your order books, Brother. Where is the list from the kitchen?”
With a guilty start, Colin looks down at that list clutched in his hand. The last thing he hears as he turns to go is the cellarer, humbly saying, “I’m sorry, John.” There is something in the childlike sincerity of it that moves him more than he would ever have expected; it just catches at his heart. With absolute stealth, he backtracks to the middle of the abbey court, then re-approaches the checker, loudly humming his part to the Gloria.
He treads with determination up to the open door, walks in with the most guileless air he can muster, then stops, as if surprised, waving the list in his hand: “Oh! I’m so sorry, Father Abbot, Brother Cormac – I hope I’m not interrupting. Brother Conradus asked me to bring his list across from the kitchen.”
He feels acutely the abbot’s gaze on him as he says this; feels himself blushing to the roots of his hair. But what holds his attention most is the thing he wanted to see – the expression on the cellarer’s face. Brother Cormac is not one to dissemble or put on appearances. Colin sees quite plainly the raw defencelessness still completely evident. Here is a man, he thinks, who would never pretend; and how rare is that?
Cormac leans forward, holding out his hand for the list. “Thank you,” he says quietly, and Colin can see the uncovered soul in his face. He wants to comfort him, considers admitting he heard the conversation – but can all too well imagine how welcome that would be. As he puts the small sheet of vellum into the cellarer’s hand, he remembers all of a sudden something Father Theodore said in their teaching circle no more than a few days ago: that there are times when silence is the best form of love. So he doesn’t say anything more.
He remembers, just before it’s too late, the small bow of respect due to his abbot. And then he leaves.
Walking slowly back towards the church, seeing as the Vespers bell will begin to ring any time now, Colin goes back into the conversation he has just heard. Like a man finding himself in a mysterious woodland, walking between the old trees, touching them, marvelling, hearing them sigh and stir, feeling their profound inner silence, so his mind explores the interaction, intrigued and wondering. He senses that he has come upon something intensely alive in the overheard encounter. His ordinary life before he came here included a lot of banter and repartee, and a great deal of activity. He had his work every day, and when that was done he would meet with friends, drink in the tavern – one song capping another, roaring laughter, jesting, clapping on the back. There were the lasses with their sidelong glances, finding it necessary to lean close over him, or looking back over their shoulders, tantalizing; and the lewd commentary replete with lively suggestions that followed them, among his associates. So much colour and vigour, so much to occupy body and mind in each brimming day; but nothing like this. He could not remember ever seeing a man’s soul in his face as he had just seen Brother Cormac’s. Nor ever hearing anything that touched him so deeply as the humble simplicity of the cellarer’s apology to his abbot.
And then the abbot – watching Colin come in, quiet, observant. Pushing through his point with the cellarer, but never raising his voice, gentle.
Like someone putting out his hand for his finger-ends to touch and test the texture of an unknown substance, tasting it, gazing on it, Colin explores into what he has beheld. So small and fleeting, so unusual.
And he thinks back to his meeting with Father Chad; and the conversation with his novice master earlier in the day – the point at which he left. The bleak face, the glitter of sorrow
in his eyes, the self-disciplined set of his mouth. Scientem infirmitatem,20 Father Theodore had said to them, more than once, about Jesus – speaking to them of the immensity of those words, which he said could be rendered, perhaps, “immersing oneself in a course of study in what it means to be broken”. He talked to them about it in the teaching circle, where he comes back again and again to the cost of the committed life; the treasure of faithfulness, and its agony too. The pain of loving, self-surrender.
An uneasy awareness begins to stir in Colin’s viscera that if he goes ahead with his plan to make common cause with these men, he will be getting into something deeper than the wildest dreams his life has so far entertained. But if he doesn’t, if he backs off it – too intense, too serious, way too holy – he will be losing something inestimable that he honestly believes he’s unlikely to ever find again. Once more he comes back to the utterly humble simplicity of the cellarer’s “I’m sorry, John”. Its defenceless candour makes him squirm, makes him want to run away. He cannot imagine being that open with anybody.
A Day and a Life Page 13