The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  We’d been using the necessarium ever since Hlothberht caught us digging graves behind the lavabo. I had no idea why Oftfor took such pleasure in searching out and finding the dead animals, but, whatever the reason, the resulting funerals had provided something of a diversion. Or at least they had until now. Now that we knew what each of these deaths signified, how much closer they brought us to Dudda’s full bowl of water, I was—I think for understandable reasons—less interested in make-believe. A few brief words, maybe a priestly gesture or two, and then I was going to tip whatever bundle of fur and bones Oftfor had found this time down the nearest hole and eat that bread!

  Oftfor took up a position by the window, arms firmly at his sides, neither bread nor beast in evidence. Something about his posture made me think he was planning on being the priest, but— food or no food—I wasn’t going to let that happen. Heretofore Waldhere had filled that role; this time it was my turn.

  Oftfor raised an arm.

  Before I could stop him or object, Oftfor raised an arm and— his sleeve slipping down toward his shoulder—the little room filled suddenly with a bad smell.

  “What’s that?!”

  The skin on Oftfor’s forehead drew taut like the skin of a drum. He pointed at the inside of his elbow.

  I took a hesitant step closer (the smell was really quite offensive) and was able to see a small dark spot where Oftfor pointed. The thing looked too black to be part of his skin.

  “Did you burn yourself?”

  Oftfor shook his head.

  I came closer still, breathing through my mouth. “Did something bite you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well cover it up and we’ll show Father Prior.”

  Oftfor pulled his sleeve down and I turned to go, the bread crowding once more into my thoughts, making me a little angry with Oftfor, this smell, the fact that now, hungry as I was, I was going to have to go without, help him with this.

  “Wait.”

  I turned around, ready to say something.

  The skin on Oftfor’s forehead drew taut once more, then, abruptly, curdled. Looking at me, never taking his eyes off me, he reached down and jerked up his woolens.

  I turned away in disgust.

  A small hand grasped my sleeve.

  More disgust, and, with it now, the first touch of horror. I jerked away. Was there something wrong with Oftfor? Did he think he needed me to stand guard while he made water? I jerked away, spun around, the look on my face daring him to try that again.

  Oftfor appeared as shocked as I, eyebrows raised in a show of almost comic fright.

  I stared at him.

  Oftfor glanced down and, despite myself, despite the fact I knew I didn’t want to, that I would do almost anything to avoid looking down there, I followed his gaze. Along the crease created where Oftfor’s left leg joined his body, a small line of welts stood out like the sting of a whip, rebuke to my curiosity.

  “A rash?” I asked, my voice sounding suddenly different, wrong, a voice belonging to someone else.

  “I don’t know. They weren’t there yesterday.”

  I shrugged, anxious now to leave, to get out of there, the room suddenly too small, its roof too close, the once pleasant sound of rain on thatch now become something else entirely, a mad irreligious chant.

  Oftfor looked back down at his groin, woolens held up around his chin like a bib. “I don’t know Winwaed,” he said, shaking his head like an old man shaking his head over an apple gone bad, “but I think I’m going to die.”

  V

  In my memory of that night the moon makes a sound as it rises. I know that cannot be, that it’s impossible, but that is the way I remember it. The thing is big, too big, and it seems to make a sort of noise as it rises over the Far Wood. In a fever you can sometimes get a noise like the noise I am remembering. It is a steady sound, constant, irritating, as though someone were humming beneath his breath right behind you. But in a fever of course no one is really humming. You can stop your ears with your fingers but it will make no difference for the sound is not in your ears, it is in your head. This is the sort of sound I remember hearing that night as we came out of Vigil. I don’t think we really heard it. I don’t think it was possible we could have heard the sound that soon, that far away. But that is the way I remember it—the garth, the moon, the mindless sound of someone humming.

  And then of course we entered the dortoir and whether or not we’d really heard the humming out on the garth we certainly heard it then. Though Eadnoth sat at the far end of the hall, there is no doubt in my mind that we heard the humming from the moment we first stepped through the door. And that nothing happened. For that is another strange thing about that night, the fact that, so far as I can recall, no one did anything about it. No one said anything or went down to where Eadnoth sat to remonstrate with him. No one even seemed upset by the fact that Brother had so clearly missed the Vigil.

  Which, looking back on it now, makes a sort of sense. I mean, when you think about it, you can see how this could have happened. The older monks, all the senior monks, certainly all the obedientiaries, would have been keeping the long watch: they would still have been in church, praying. The community that marched with me across the garth that night would have been young, novices and postulants for the most part—children really, children unprepared for such a thing, children taught daily to do as they’d been told, to follow orders, not give them.

  And so they went to bed. Despite the sound, despite the sound and the vision of what sat at the far end of our hall, the grownups did nothing, behaved as though all of this were perfectly normal, knelt, said final prayers, went to bed. I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget what it was like to walk down that hall (longer then than at any other time in my life), dim figures on either side of me casually going about their business, moving in and out of the moonlight, the firelight, climbing into bed, pulling the covers up, while down at the end of the hall, down where all could surely see him, (down where I must go)—Brother Eadnoth sat covered with spots, humming to the moon.

  Later that night others came down with the illness. I came down with the illness. At some point someone must finally have sent for the obedientiaries, or at least for Brother Sacristan, for I remember that, remember the sweet scent of incense blooming suddenly upon the air of that place. I think it was then that Brother Hewald stood on his bed, stretched his arms out like the Christ’s, began to pray aloud. I had never seen anyone pray like that before and so I remember it—the unsettling scent (wrong, out-of-place), Brother standing on his bed, back to the wall, legs and feet bathed in moonlight, upper parts vague, indistinct, something as much imagined as seen.

  I remember little else from that night. We must have gotten up for Matins, chanted, returned to bed—but I don’t remember doing so. At some point I slept. I know that for I remember waking, remember the odd sense of dislocation I experienced, the smell, the feeling that something was not right, that something was out-of-place, missing; and then the even stranger sensation when I realized what it was. Except for the sounds one expects to hear at the end of the interval (the rustling of bedclothes, the quiet tread of feet), the dortoir had returned to its normal state of silence; Eadnoth had stopped humming. I looked over at his place but was not surprised to find him gone. Father Abbot must have him. Father Abbot must have him and now everything would be all right.

  There would be punishments of course. There would have to be— punishments, expiation, Faults—but that was as it should be. And everything would be all right. Eadnoth would be well again. He had stopped humming.

  It wasn’t till we were outside, lining up for Prime, that I saw what had really happened, saw the two bodies leaning up against the wall of the dortoir. It had begun to rain again. After the clear night, it had begun to rain again, and I remember how strange it was to see Eadnoth and Sigeberht sitting there like that, side by side, staring down at the water pouring off the roof onto their feet.

  I th
ought they might say something. To my childish mind it seemed likely they might speak. They looked that way. Their faces I mean, they looked as though they might say something, as if, after all those years of quiet forbearance, now, here, sitting with their feet in the rain, they might have something to say.

  But it was Ealhmund who broke the silence. As if struck himself by the nature of the dead men’s predicament, Ealhmund— poor slow-witted Ealhmund—laughed.

  And we turned on him. Anxious, wet, afraid—Waldhere, Oftfor, and I spun around there at the end of the line, glared at the most junior member of our company. But Ealhmund was unimpressed by our disapproval. Laughing shamelessly, he raised a finger, pointed it at me.

  But I hadn’t done anything! I spun back around, faced the rest of the community: I didn’t do anything!

  A movement, a jostling further up the line, brothers stepping aside, making way for someone, heads bowing, whole bodies, monks stepping out into the rain, hoods up, heads down; and then Father Dagan was among us, looking from me to the corpses, to Ealhmund, then back to me again.

  I started to raise my hands but before I could sign to him, make my lord prior understand that it wasn’t me, that I hadn’t done anything, he took hold of my chin as one might take hold of something that belongs to one and, not ungently, turned it to the side, exposing a portion of my neck.

  I reached up.

  Father flinched, but I reached up anyway, touched what he had exposed. There was a crust. There was a tumescence. I released it. Repelled, I released what I had touched and, even as I did so, felt it respond, resume some sort of loathsome shape.

  Father smiled. Not looking at me, still studying that which he had found, Father smiled, acknowledged what we both now knew.

  I turned my eyes from him. Telling myself I did not care, that it was all right to have one’s head held like this, that Father knew what he was doing, that I could trust him, I turned my eyes from him, stared down at a puddle bubbling in the rain.

  But it wasn’t true; I did care. And for once I wasn’t entirely sure I could trust Father Prior. I was afraid he was going to tell me I must die. I was afraid he was going to make me go and sit next to Eadnoth and Sigeberht.

  Father released my chin. He looked at me, smiled in a way that did not seem quite right. “You’re going to be all right,” he said, pulling my hood up, smoothing it down around my face. “But I want you to go back to bed now.” He nodded as if in answer to some question I had not asked. “It’s all right,” he said, “well say the office for you.”

  I assumed custody of the eyes, bowed, turned, stepped back toward the door. Though I knew I shouldn’t, though I knew Father would think it an impertinence, I nevertheless glanced down one last time at Eadnoth as I passed over the threshold. On Brother’s neck lay a black and crusty-looking excrescence.

  VI

  After that the memories become vague, confused, Vespers following Vigil, the Vigil Prime. I awoke at midday, again at dusk, slept through the night, perhaps the next day, only to awaken again in full dark, febrile colors, shapes, moving about the dortoir, the smell of incense mingling uneasily with that of disease. I saw things. I heard things. What dreams I had swam so far beneath the surface of sleep—and I had to rise through so many layers to escape them—they seemed upon waking more like memories than dreams, something that happened long ago in a world both wrong and, at the same time, somehow, moaning.

  Still, the memories persist. The suggestion of a correspondence—a sound, the scent of incense detected in the wrong place at the wrong time—and I am back there again, the memories as fresh and vivid, as unavoidable, as the air one breathes, the sin one is born with. And some of them, surely some of them, are true. What happened to Oftfor for instance—other people saw that, other people were there, can, and readily will, attest to what I record here. But as for the rest, well, who’s to say? I think these things happened. At the time I was almost certain they were happening. But now...well, now all I can say for sure is that when I call them to mind, dredge them up from wherever it is such things live, they look like truth, bear, if not its conviction, at least a good imitation of that virtue's manner and dress. I remember well, for instance, the way my eyes ached when I opened them that day, and how, more than anything, I wanted to close them again, to bathe them in sleep, forgetfulness, but that I couldn’t,couldn't, because, it seemed, someone was there.

  But that was impossible.

  I opened my eyes again, forced myself to look.

  And there did seem to be someone there.

  So maybe he was dying. Maybe Oftfor was dying and

  someone had already been sent to keep watch by his bed, to wait and see if he saw anything, reported anything, as he passed over.

  I pulled myself up on an elbow and—though my head ached—I could see that it was true, that there really was someone lying on the floor by Oftfor’s bed. Though it couldn’t be, it looked like Brother Baldwin.

  I lay back down, looked up at the ceiling, watched as, one by one, the rafters took flight, began to turn slowly in the air over my bed. I closed my eyes and the rafters were replaced by the spaces that lay between them, pale ghostly rafters that took up the dance precisely where their partners left off.

  I opened my eyes again, tried to focus on the far wall. As if leveling my gaze also in some way leveled my spirit, the spinning came to a halt and my eyes rested on the figure of Oftfor. For some reason something about the way the boy lay on his bed touched me and I found myself subject to an unexpected emotion.

  I sat up a little, looked once more at the tiny body lying across from my own. Oftfor’s eyes were closed but I could tell by the way his lips were moving that he was saying his prayers. I remembered the time he had woken half the dortoir calling out for his mother in his sleep and I hoped that now, in his delirium, he wasn’t praying aloud. A part of me wondered if I should get up and go over there, warn him of the danger that lay listening on the floor by his bed. But the thought itself fatigued me. I lay back down, closed my eyes, was pleased to discover the spinning now entirely at an end. I told myself I would rest for a while, regain my strength, and then—then I promised myself—I would get up and go over there, warn and protect my fellow oblate.

  But the next time I awoke, I was surprised all over again to discover Brother Baldwin lying on the floor by Oftfor’s bed.

  I don’t know how many times this happened, how many times I awoke to make such a discovery, but memory tells me it was often, a succession of like images repeating themselves down a long dark corridor. Of these, one in particular still haunts me, still holds the power after all these years to shock and, vaguely, to repel me. For I seem to have seen the skin at the back of Brother’s tonsure move. Now I know this is unlikely. Surely no one—not even a child whose senses have been enhanced by fever—could hope to have seen so fine a movement at so great a remove. Yet that is the way I remember it, the old man’s shoulders raised slightly as if bracing himself against some effort, the delicate muscles at the back of his tonsure causing his scalp to shift and wrinkle slightly. At the time it looked for all the world as if Brother were chewing on something. And though I knew such a notion preposterous, still I couldn’t help thinking I’d caught him in the act, that, even as I watched, the good brother was worrying at something he’d found on the floor there by Oftfor’s bed, trying to lap it up quickly, furtively, before anyone else could steal it away.

  “You’re going to live! Oftfor says so, you and Ealhmund too!”

  I smiled.

  “He did, Brother Baldwin told us.”

  I smiled, went back to sleep.

  Someone shook me. “Did you hear me?”

  It was Waldhere. Waldhere was sitting on my bed. He was talking about something.

  “Did you hear me?”

  I shook my head.

  “I said you’re going to live. Oftfor says you’re going to live.”

  I’m going to live.

  “Baldwin told us about it but Oftfor sa
id it.”

  I just looked at Waldhere. He had said I was going to live.

  “Yes, Baldwin. He likes him now. I mean I think he likes him now. You can tell, because he spends all his time over there on the floor by his bed.”

  By his bed?

  “Like a supplicant.”

  “A supplicant?”

  Waldhere nodded and I knew immediately there was something wrong, that there was something wrong with everything he was telling me (including, perhaps, that I should live) for Baldwin couldn’t be a supplicant. Supplicants were bad monks. Supplicants had to crawl from table to table like babies and beg for their food. But not Brother Baldwin. Brother Baldwin never had to do anything he didn’t want to do.

  Still, there had been something like that once. A dream or something. I pulled myself up on an elbow, looked across the hall. The floor by Oftfor’s bed was empty.

  Waldhere smiled. “Sext,” he said, as though he were used to people being unaware of the time. “I don’t have to go anymore.”

  I looked at him.

  “I don’t, Father Prior said so. Except for Mass. Someone’s got to look after things.”

  The way Waldhere said this scared me. The way he looked down the hall as if he were Father Dagan when he said it scared me. For the hundredth time that day, I touched the lumps beneath my arm. “He says I’m going to live?”

  For a moment I thought Waldhere might be scared too, but then he smiled and nodded. “And he’s seen heaven. Baldwin says so. He says everyone’s there, everyone who’s died ”

  “But I’m going to live?”

  “Yes. Yes, you’re going to live but...” Waldhere looked across the hall. Oftfor was asleep, the shape of his arms just visible through the bedclothes. “But he’s going to die. Everyone else is going to live except Oftfor. He told Baldwin. He said he still has to die.”