The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  Mornings on Modra nect were my favorite time of day. Though he wasn’t supposed to, Father usually let me sleep through the Vigil, and, as a result, I always woke up feeling reinvigorated. Of course I should have been sent directly back down the mountain, but I never was. Rarely did I leave before Sext, and even then it was my own decision, not Father’s. He treated me more like a monk than an oblate; and of course I didn’t complain. Until that spring every day of my life had been defined by the hours. From the moment I woke up till I put my head down again at night, I always had some place to be, some chore I was meant to be doing. But now, once a week, I found myself, incredibly enough, with time on my hands. I could lie in bed as long as I wanted, or I could jump up and play in the sun, and no one, not Father Prior, not Brother Baldwin, not even Father Abbot, could do anything about it. I loved those mornings on Modra nect. The thought of them pulled me from sleep like the smell of something good cooking.

  Still, there was little for a boy to do around that camp. I made up small games for myself but of course I had to be quiet: the hermit was always working. Sometimes he scratched at a tabulum.

  Sometimes he read from one of the books Father Prior sent him. Sometimes he busied himself with supplies. But, mostly, he prayed. The man had a capacity for prayer that was truly extraordinary. He could sit for entire intervals without moving—eyes closed, lips still, hardly even breathing.

  Father Prior had ordered me not to think the hermit special, his prayers any different from any other monk’s, but in this I had long since disobeyed him. No one could look at the way this man prayed, the length of his prayers, without realizing he was different, that what he did was different. And by then of course I had heard the tales. Living trees would bow toward the hermit as he prayed, dead ones sprout new growth. His water would attract butterflies, his night soil salamanders and snails. Doves would build nests in the eaves of any structure he built. Coals from his fire could cause stones to burn, water to burst into flame. I was told to watch him closely when he prayed, that he might float like a cloud, the air above his head fill with lights. And if that was not enough, there was the attention I received as his servant. Monks waylaid me on the garth, knelt by me as I weeded, woke me in the night; they whispered, cajoled, pleaded for a moment of the hermit’s time, a prayer, a special blessing, a little help with “something I haven’t wanted to bother Father Abbot with.” Even Father Prior stopped me once in the peas and asked that the hermit say a prayer for him. He didn’t tell me why. Indeed, I think he wanted me to think it perfectly normal, merely a matter of courtesy; but of course I didn’t. You must remember that I was very young. The idea that grownups ever did anything out of the ordinary was entirely foreign to me. That they did, or seemed to, for this one reason, impressed me more than anything else.

  And so, morning after morning, I sat opposite the hermit and waited as he prayed, certain I would see something miraculous. And—morning after morning—I saw nothing. Once there was something, a swirling in the air over the hermit’s head as if a cloud of midges had suddenly been attracted to that place, circled for a moment, then as quickly departed. But, otherwise, nothing. No concourse. No angels dressed in white, no voices singing.

  Nothing at all really. The man just sat there. He might have been asleep for all I knew.

  It was Waldhere who first suggested the hermit might be sleeping instead of praying. Of course at the time I thought he was just jealous of the attention I was receiving, but, as week after week passed without any miracles, I too began to have my doubts. Looking back on it now, I suppose it was inevitable I should get into trouble.

  It was foggy that morning—as most mornings on Modra nect were—and concentrating on the empty air over the hermit’s head had made me dizzy. Waldhere and Ealhmund sometimes made a game of dizziness, spinning and spinning until, unable to spin anymore, they staggered around like drunken beggars, wide-eyed and laughing at themselves. But I didn’t like it. Being dizzy made me feel sick, and I didn’t like anything that made me feel sick again.

  I opened my eyes and the hermit was still sitting there: eyes shut, head drooping—looking for all the world like a monk asleep in choir. It was irritating when you thought about it, and not very smart. Didn’t he worry someone might tell?

  Unseen in the fog overhead, a tree rubbed against another, creaked and groaned. When I looked back down again I was surprised to see a small leaf, purple-red in color, resting on the hermit’s forehead. For the first time that morning I felt a little excitement. Now he’ll move, I thought, now he must move!

  But of course he didn’t. I waited and waited but, though I had to scratch my own head in sympathy, the hermit never so much as twitched. It was like watching a dead man pray.

  The thought brought the predictable response: there again sat Eadnoth, rainwater pouring off the roof onto his feet. I looked away, tried to think of something else, and found myself thinking instead of the similarities, the resemblance between that image and this. Here sat Gwynedd, perfectly still, oblivious even to the fall of leaves, and there in my mind sat Eadnoth, equally still, equally oblivious to the rain. And maybe that was it. Maybe that was why I hadn’t seen anything. Maybe I hadn’t seen anything because there was nothing to see...here. Maybe, like Eadnoth, the slack-jawed, loose-skinned thing sitting before me now wasn’t so much the hermit as it was the carcass he’d left behind, a skin shed and waiting, like me, for the return of its master.

  Goose flesh ran down my arms. I was lying on my back in front of the hermit, my head resting on my hands, feet nearly touching his...and yet, possibly, not his. If I was right, those feet were empty, no more than cast-off shoes, those hands as lifeless as a pair of gloves. It seemed impossible but possible too. It would explain so much. Nothing escaped the hermit’s notice. He could name the singer before I even realized a bird had called. Yet when a limb fell in the wood while he was at prayer, he never so much as flinched. Truthfully, it was as if he wasn’t here.

  The wind shifted toward the north and smoke began to get in my eyes. I got up and walked around to the other side of the fire, hardly bothering to be quiet now. The hermit remained perfectly still.

  I found a stick and played for a while at plowing the campsite, one eye on the hermit.

  Of course Waldhere wouldn’t believe it. You could count on that. Not even that the hermit had remained still. Everybody moves, he’d say, sooner or later, even Father Abbot.

  But he was wrong. Father Hermit didn’t move. Even now, wood smoke streaming past him like water around a stone, he didn’t move. Didn’t even cough. And that was something, when you thought about it, the fact that he didn’t cough. Like Shadrach and Abdnego.

  I had never seen Victricius’s furnace, but on clear days I sometimes saw the smoke it produced. I imagined it was like Brother Kitchens’ oven only bigger and hotter. Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace would have been even bigger still. I looked at the hermit’s fire, trying to imagine what it would be like to stand in its middle, and then I looked at the hermit again.

  Still thinking, I placed the end of my stick in the center of the fire. At first not much happened: the dirt and moss adhering to its plow-end turned brown, flamed up momentarily, turned white, then dropped off into the coals. I waited, a little shocked by the idea forming in my mind.

  It wasn’t long before the stick itself caught fire, but when I held the thing up to look at it, the flame went out. Still it was hot, you could tell, the burnt end papery and white. And smoking. Even the end I held in my hand felt warm. I looked over at the hermit, who remained as he had been, back to me, oblivious to my thoughts as well as the smoke. Which was just as well really; this didn’t have anything to do with him. This was for Waldhere. This was to show Waldhere.

  The yell, when it came, seemed louder for being so unexpected, as if, instead of the hermit, the skin itself had cried out at being treated so. Of course a part of me had known he would feel it, had known as soon as I had smelled the hair, seen the skin blanch and peel back,
that no one could be touched like this, be burned like this, and not feel it. And yet still I was surprised— surprised and amazed—by how loudly he screamed, how easily he cried out not like a man or even a boy but like, and the thought astonished me, like a girl. And then, before I could recover from that shock, I was even more surprised to discover that terribly, and apparently uncontrollably, I had begun to cry.

  “It’s all right,” the hermit gasped, “it’s all right, it just surprised me.” But for some reason the sight of the hermit holding his hand, eyebrows raised in concern for me, made me cry all the harder.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just that...just that...” but the excuses caught in my throat. I blinked, took a great gulp of air, and then—looking at the hermit as if to say, See what you have done?—gave in to the crying, not even caring anymore, because it was over, I’d burned the holy man, the saint, and I’d done it because he was holy, because.... But I would never be able to explain that. No one would listen to me, no one would believe me. Tomorrow, maybe even today, I would be expelled from the monastery, unloved and unregretted, gone like poor little Oftfor. And for some reason the thought of Oftfor made me cry even harder, his loss suddenly as important to me as anything, as if Father Prior had died or Father Abbot.

  And it was then that—for the first time in my life—the hermit held me. One moment I was standing there, alone and afraid, and the next I was against him, the smell of wood-smoke and old man in my nostrils, scratchy wool against the skin of my face. I was so shocked I stopped crying instantly. I looked up. The hermit looked down at me, smiled at me from out of his beard. Beneath my chin, his stomach rumbled.

  Afterwards—after he had patted me and given me some tea and assured me a hundred times that all was forgiven, forgotten, not to be worried about—the hermit asked me, gently, why I had burned him. “Were you angry with me?” he asked, and he looked at me as if it really mattered, as if he were really concerned he might have offended me. He was always like that. The man’s capacity for prayer was equalled only by his capacity for charity. It shamed a person. At the very moment when you most deserved rebuke, the hermit assaulted you with love. Later, when I was older, this could make me angry, but on this first occasion it merely made me shy. I equivocated, not mentioning Waldhere at all but repeating how sorry I was and explaining I hadn’t meant to harm him, that I had honestly believed he wouldn’t feel anything, that, somehow, when he prayed, he would be impervious to pain. Of course the hermit had laughed at this, but that didn’t surprise me. Whatever the secrets of his prayer, I couldn’t expect him to share them with an oblate.

  After that, as I remember it, I sat and sipped my tea, the enormity of what I had done—and what the hermit had done in response—silencing me entirely. Father busied himself about the camp, selecting the tabula he wanted taken back down the mountain, packing my scrip. When he was finished, he suggested a walk. He said he had something he wanted to show me.

  Oddly enough I can still remember that walk. Of course I know now we didn’t go far, couldn’t have, yet I remember certain aspects of that journey as you might those of a longer trip, a pilgrimage that, for whatever reason, impresses itself upon you—the white bloom of the fog, the sense of a morning cast adrift, time unimportant, forgotten, trees looming suddenly into view, monstrous boulders, everything silent, mysterious, the world afloat; and then the unexpected halt, Father grinning as if he’d found something wonderful, asking if I knew where I was.

  I shook my head. “We left the trail back there, didn’t we? By the stream?”

  “Yes, very good.” Father frowned, thought about it. “Now the fog’s breaking up, you should be able to see it even better on our way back. But what do you see up there?”

  I had already been looking up the path but could make no sense of what I saw, dark trees before a lowering sky. Had we come upon a meadow?

  The hermit nodded. “You go ahead, but be careful. It’s Dacca’s crag.”

  Dacca’s crag! I could see....

  “You can see Redestone from out there.”

  Thankfully something stopped me. Maybe the hermit yelled, maybe a peripheral awareness of the height intruded upon my

  mind, maybe God took my hand, but something, something firm and not to be denied, reached out at the last moment and stopped me before I could run out onto the rock. I clung to a tree at its edge and waited for the hermit to catch up, afraid to move, afraid even to look down.

  “It is quite safe.”

  “Sir?”

  “The crag. You can walk on it.”

  “Oh. Well. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you want to see Redestone?”

  With one arm wrapped securely around the tree, I glanced once more at the rock, its rounded surface stretching out before me like the back of a great fish. Above and beyond the crag, clouds raced from right to left so that, in turn, the crag itself seemed to be moving ever so slightly from left to right.

  “I don’t think so. It’s nice though.”

  The hermit smiled. “Really Winwæd, it’s quite safe.”

  I didn’t want to look at the clouds again, so I looked down at

  my feet.

  “I’ll be right here in case anything happens.”

  “You’re not going?”

  The hermit only smiled.

  “Why not?”

  “There really is nothing to fear.”

  “Then why won’t you come with me?” A part of me very much wanted to see Redestone, to look down at Waldhere, and now, by refusing to accompany me, it had become the hermit’s fault I couldn’t.

  “My vow....”

  “But Father says you can’t go below Dacca’s crag. On it isn’t the same asbelow it.”

  The hermit’s smile was tired. “You go on. You’ll be fine.”

  Again I looked at my feet. My own indecisiveness made me edgy and, for want of anything better to do, I stuck a foot out and tested the surface of the rock.

  It was cold. Cold and pocked like old iron.

  I leaned a little further out and, still holding onto the tree, pushed down. There was no movement. The rock held steady.

  The hermit smiled and I realized that, having seen me test the rock, he was already thinking how brave I was.

  I took a quick step out onto the crag, fingers stretched out toward the tree behind me. For a moment clouds and view flew about like excited birds, then, thankfully, resumed their natural positions. I took a breath, looked around, arms held out at my sides for balance. I had done it: I was out on the crag, sky all around me, rock firm beneath my feet. This wasn’t going to be so hard after all.

  Then the wind hit me.

  It wasn’t much, just a breeze, but I swayed as if struck by a plank. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Father move but before he could get to me, I regained my balance.

  “Maybe all-fours wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he said, “just this first time.”

  And so it was that I made my first trip to the end of Dacca’s crag on my hands and knees, sweaty palm-prints fanning out behind me like prayers. But it was worth it, whatever shame and embarrassment I felt were worth it because, at the end of the crag, when, finally, I reached the place where rock stopped and air began, there was Redestone, the abbey and its lands spread out before me like a map of itself.

  For a long time I remember I just lay there, chin on my hands, feet stretched out behind me, delighting in what I saw. It was like lying at the end of a great log hung up on the lip of a waterfall. Overhead, the sky rolled and tumbled. Below, rock and pine fell away toward the river, tattered patches of fog rising up like spray. And beyond, just the other side of the Meolch, so close and so perfect I could almost touch it, was Redestone, the place I had lived practically all of my life.

  Looking at it from above was both wonderful and strange. At one and the same time, everything looked familiar yet different, unchanged yet entirely new. Walls which all my life had bound my vision, hold
ing it safe and close, now opened up, joined others to form buildings, enclosures, the outlines of a plan. Fields which at best had been next to other fields, the orchard which had always been over there, the forest which had simply been the end of all things, these places now lined up in their proper order, took on meaning in relation to one another, contracted and expanded according to their true natures. The fields for instance became small, manageable (for the first time I saw why Brother Cellarer did not look at them and despair), while the forest, which had always threatened, grew now immense, nightmarish, out of proportion to, and clearly in danger of overwhelming, the world I lived in, the tiny world I had always thought large, magnificent, safe and enough.

  In a way I suppose I had always known these things would arrange themselves in this manner, would perhaps have even been able to draw a poor image of such a place. But now I actually saw it. For the first time in my life I saw the place where I lived not as an idea, something I held in my mind like an article of faith, but as a fact, something I could see and point at, something I could understand, almost touch. It was like learning to speak a new language in an instant. Everything was changed, everything different. To this day, when I think of home, I picture what one sees from Dacca’s crag.

  As I have said, it is much smaller than you think. Our monastery is surrounded by a great forest. What we call the Far Wood and the Great North Wood are, in reality, a single wood, separated only by the river. Beyond the orchard they join the South Wood to form an enormous waste that covers the land around us and swamps the distant horizons. Our abbey sits on the high ground at the base of Modra nect looking out over this forest like a tiny lighthouse looking out over a vast sea. The Meolch, which drains the mountain at our back and seems so straight when you stand next to it, actually curves as it passes us by. Our lands lie on the inside of this curve, the monastery and the terrace it sits upon at one end, the village at the other, our fields in between. Beyond the village the river straightens out again before entering the Far Wood, falling through a series of short rapids which, at midday, sparkle from the crag. It is here, in the pools just this side of the rapids, that the women do their wash.