The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  “We say He speaks or writes because it is the only way we have to describe the Father. The Christ Himself is a sort of metaphor for God, or His story is. But it is not a metaphor when I say we must wait upon Himabsently. That is real. That is true humility, to empty one’s self of one’s self—of one’s thoughts and feelings—before God. We humble ourselves before Him, which is to say we present our selves before Him without excuse or embellishment. We are quiet. We let Him take us as we are.” The hermit shook his head, looked off down the mountain. “We let Him take us as we are.”

  Father said no more after that. Though I waited respectfully, did not fidget or prod, he remained quiet, withdrawn. Over time I would learn this was typical of the hermit. About plants or track he could go on at great length, but when the subject was prayer, the bow of prayer, our lessons were often truncated, abrupt. Sometimes it made me wonder about him. When he did talk of prayer, he often did so hurriedly, as if, having thought of something, he wanted to spit it out quickly before the idea got away from him, before that particular well ran dry. The silences that followed these proclamations I found worrisome. I had seen such behavior before, grownups who, when questioned directly by an oblate too innocent to know better, would abruptly lose their taste for instruction, begin a fluttering and inconsequential display of sign language—protestations of fatigue, overwork, of being pestered by foundlings. Father Hermit never complained like that but, as I have said, he often grew quiet and—it seemed to me—a little sad. “They call me a ‘master’,” he once said, “but I think that is only because I am old. I am not a master. Far from it. Every day I’m struck by how little I know. From one morning to the next I am uncertain even where to begin. I start each day like a novice, a desperate frightened novice: ‘God,’ I cry out, ‘where are You? Speak to me, I beg you, give me a sign!’ There are no masters but the Master. The only wise men I know are those who know nothing. Nothing. We are fools, all of us fools, calling into the night.”

  Funny how much I miss him now. And how wrong that assessment of his seems after all these years. I have told this story as stories must be told—with a beginning, a middle, and an end— but that is not how I think of it, that is not how I remember it. In my memory there is no talk of the meaning of prayer, there is no reticence, no uncertainty; there is only the image of Father sitting there by his fire, waving his tabulum back and forth; and then that final graceful display of smooth wax. It seemed a perfect movement, elegant, sublime, and remembering it, remembering the way he looked as he did it, I find myself once more charmed— charmed and bereft—for he was a master (his own doubts and those of lesser men notwithstanding), and I miss him so very much.

  XIX

  How old was I when I was given to the furnace master? At the time I remember thinking I was young, too young for such work, but looking back on it now I find myself doubting that. Surely Father Abbot wouldn’t have assigned me to the yard if I was unequal to the demands of the place. It’s a pity Osric’s gone, he would know for sure, and there is no other record to consult. Vellum, as they say, requires a death. So I must admit to being uncertain, though I would guess I was fairly young. Most work in those days began fairly young.

  I was envious. I remember that well. In some ways I suppose Ealhmund received the best assignment. He was given to Botulf, which, as it turned out, meant all the food he could eat and no one to beat him for the offense, as Brother Kitchens took an unusual liking to the boy. Still it was Waldhere’s assignment that bothered me most. Father Abbot had given him to Brother Sacristan. Now normally the abuse Waldhere could expect from that quarter would have pleased me no end, but in this case there was, of course, the obvious difference: sacristy, Baldwin, and church meant Father intended Waldhere for the priesthood; while I was left to endlessly grab and pump, grab and pump, Victricius’s mindless bellows.

  Victricius. What an odd monk he was. While most of the brothers went to some lengths to appear serene and detached, Brother Victricius was the exact opposite, always moving, always intent upon doing something, fixing something, making something work better. In Faults he used to excuse such conduct by claiming it to be a sort of discipline, age quod agis, but everyone knew he just liked to be busy. Brother could fiddle with a broken piece of harness or a loose ax handle from dawn to dusk and never notice the day had passed him by. And who knows, there may have been a spiritual dimension to it. Certainly I never saw the man unhappy or discouraged, at least not until the end. No matter how difficult the task, how many times he jammed a finger, barked his shin, Brother remained the same monk he had been when he commenced his labors, determined, self-assured, ready for whatever duty God or Father Abbot placed before him. And he was very good at it. The other monks may not have cared for him but they knew his worth. Afterwards, after he was gone, we all felt his absence, things lying about broken, no one to repair them, the furnace in ruins.

  A part of me feels sorry for him now, looking back on it. When the brothers used to draw together after collation, forming small knots upon the garth, Victricius’s lone figure inevitably marked the spot from which they had withdrawn. I suppose it was his manner that made him appear so unattractive, the way he had of standing there by himself, a small smile on his face, patting his foot as if keeping time with some other, some unknown and probably better, choir. He didn’t seem to need us, behaved as if he found all of us, in a way, vaguely ridiculous. And so we pretended to not need him, made jokes at his expense, shunned him as if possessed of a like and possibly even superior knowledge.

  Needless to say, I wholeheartedly concurred in my community’s opinion of the man, and deeply resented being assigned to him. I was the hermit’s boy, the one everyone was supposed to turn to when they needed Gwynedd’s prayers, yet here I was bowing and scraping before this outcast, this foreigner who couldn’t even speak properly, the unwitting clown who never seemed to realize how silly he looked, face streaked with soot, eyes and nose sometimes running black with the stuff.

  Still, in a way, that soot was a mark of Victricius’s importance. As you can well imagine, any other monk appearing for Vespers in such a state would have been sent immediately to the lavabo, a curt abbatial warning ringing in his ears. But not Victricius. Despite the contempt they felt for the man, the monks of Redestone took great pride in his work; and the absurd face that occasionally stared out from our choir’s otherwise pristine ranks seemed a small price to pay for the prestige that work brought our abbey.

  But not all the soot adorning that countenance was the result of a monk’s legitimate labors. I—and I alone—knew Victricius had a secret, a dark and awful secret he kept buried at the yard.

  I may be uncertain of my age at the time I was given to the furnace master, but I know it cannot have been before I was admitted to Chapter. I know this for I remember well the shock I received when first I saw Victricius’s fire-pits, first realized the extent of his offense, the horrible punishment he risked. For I had been present when Brother asked if he might build a kiln, had heard Father Abbot tell him—all of Chapter had heard Father Abbot tell him—that under no circumstances was he to begin such a project, that he was to focus all his energies (as our lord bishop had ordered) upon the making of iron.

  To be separated from the community, shunned, made to crawl from table to table, bowl in hand, begging for your food—this was the fate Victricius courted, this the power his secret, and my knowledge of that secret, gave me over him, a power that at once both tempted and terrified me. I could not imagine denouncing the man (for separation from the community exemplified the worst of my oblate fears); I could not imagine not denouncing him (for by failing to report him, I knew I risked the very thing I most dreaded). So—as was fast becoming my practice when faced with such imponderables—I did nothing, all the while telling myself I was biding my time. Then came a day late one cold and windy spring.

  The upper part of the valley receives little sun in the morning, shielded as it is by a shoulder of the ridge that, further down, u
ndergirds our garth. We would have arrived at the yard, as we did most days, to a work-place still sunk in the light of predawn, all surfaces damp, all sounds muted, the air an odd mix of stale and fresh—burnt earth, burnt shell, wet pine, falling water. Brother would have been in even more of a hurry than usual, though I wouldn’t have known why. Still he would have found time to check his pits. The man was inordinately proud of his fire-pits, though I wasn’t that impressed. They were just holes in the ground, little more than postholes really, each just wide enough and deep enough to hold one of Victricius’s modest pots. The furnace master would have made four or five of these fresh the day before—as he did every day—would have placed one in each pit, packed the space around it with whatever fuel he was then experimenting with (I saw him use everything from wet leaves to dry manure), then sealed the pit with a thick layer of mud. A small hole—like the smoke hole in a roof—was always left at the center of this layer of mud so that, at the end of the day, a single hot coal could be introduced into the otherwise airtight chamber. The pits were then left to burn through the night.

  On that morning, as I remember it, we arrived to find two of the pits still burning. This was not that unusual. On one occasion I remember we arrived to find them all still burning, the ground around the furnace smoking alarmingly and, every now and then, emitting unearthly pops and groans. But even the pits that seemed to have burned out could still hurt you. Brother would have made me stand back, would have squatted by each, a gardener inspecting his plants, running the palm of his hand over the ground, testing for warmth. Doubtless I stood and watched as I did most mornings, wondering why the man still bothered. Burning or not, the results were always the same—broken pottery, dust, ashes.

  Victricius stood back up. Pursing his lips in a way I always found mildly repellent, he indicated the pit he wanted me to extinguish, then picked up his shovel and went to work on the other one. We only had the one shovel; I got the hoe.

  It made sense to smother quickly those pits still burning: inevitably their contents had long since been reduced by the heat to fragments and you might as well rid yourself of the smoke. Of course none of the pits ever produced a whole pot. But Victricius kept trying. He was nothing if not patient. And it didn’t seem to worry him that I had discovered what he was up to. Probably he told himself that digging pits wasn’t the same as building a kiln, that strictly speaking he wasn’t in violation of the abbot’s ruling. But he never bothered to explain that to me. The monks were like that. They did things in front of us oblates they would never have done in front of a grownup. But they shouldn’t have. I was admitted to Chapter now, Faults, I could stand up as easily as anyone.

  I scraped a little more dust into the fire-pit, making a sort of game of it, seeing how much I could work into the vent before it quit smoking; and I thought about the similar game Victricius was playing: obeying the abbot, not obeying him, a little dust goes in, a little smoke comes out. Then—as if he’d divined what I was thinking and wished to put an immediate stop to it—Victricius was suddenly beside me, slinging great banners of earth across my pit and, incidentally, my feet as well. Of course I should have been used to such discourtesy by now (if you came between the furnace master and something he wished to do, he could shove you aside as easily as a farmer might his most obstinate cow), but I wasn’t. I stepped back and watched Brother work, thinking about what I could do to him if he wasn’t careful, what I very well might do to him.

  Not surprisingly, given the strength of Victricius’s assault, my pit quickly gave up the ghost. I expected the furnace master to turn next to one of those that had burned out during the night (Brother being forever anxious to examine their contents), but on this occasion Victricius surprised me, beginning instead to clear a spot of ground next to the rock-pile. A small thrill ran through me: a visit from the charcoaler! I picked up my hoe, began to help Victricius rake the place clean. I always liked it when Stuf showed up.

  In the old days, before the pestilence, the monks had made their own charcoal. I had witnessed this, could still remember the gangs of men marching off into the Great North Wood with their sharpened axes, their sledges, the lowing oxen. But it had been a long time now since the abbey could spare such numbers and we had come to depend upon men like Stuf to supply our furnace with fuel. Which, when you think about it, says a great deal about our circumstances, for normally we would never have employed a pagan, not even for work as miserable as charcoaling. Of course no one had actually come right out and told me Stuf was a pagan—then as now people seldom spoke of such things openly—but like all oblates I knew how to read the signs; and with a man like Stuf such signs were legion. Here was a fellow who never bothered to cross himself or bow his head when the Name was mentioned, a filthy inhabitant of the hills who nevertheless refused to show Victricius the respect due a solemnly-professed monk. Why Stuf had even been known to wink at me when the furnace master mispronounced a word! Yet despite this, despite the fact the man was so obvious a cur, a part of me always looked forward to his visits, looked forward to seeing someone behave so outrageously.

  Brother set his shovel aside, straightened up, placed his hands on the backs of his hips and, stretching his back, surveyed the space we had cleared. An uninformed observer might have been excused for thinking there was a reason for such attentiveness, that Victricius wanted to make sure this section of yard was swept clear so he could better appreciate the size of the load Stuf would dump there; but in this such an observer would have been wrong. Stuf’s payment was based solely on the number of loads he delivered, their size having been predetermined by that of the dosser we gave him to transport them in. Victricius wasn’t worried about measuring anything, he was simply vain of the appearance of his yard, didn’t like to think of even a pagan finding fault with it.

  As if to emphasize this, Brother now nodded at a small drift of dust and pine needles, mimed raking it up with a hoe.

  Contemptuously, I swept the stuff away.

  When I looked back to see if there was anything else the good brother wanted me to do, the expression on my master’s face gave me pause and I assumed custody of the eyes. After a moment or two, Victricius’s feet moved out of my field of vision and, looking back up, I was pleased to see the danger passed, Brother already intent upon something else, kneeling by one of his pits, beginning to break apart the outer covering. Watching him, I found myself thinking (as I had before) how different the furnace master was from Father Abbot. Here were two men who both came from the same country, both spoke with the same accent, used the same peculiar gestures, yet Father’s ways always struck me as worldly, a sign of broad experience and sophistication, while in Victricius the same manners seemed proof of the opposite, that this was a man out of his depth, a foreigner unequal to the noble culture in which he found himself. And what was more, Father Abbot was considerably taller than Brother Victricius. Of course I knew I should attach no importance to this, but I could see no reason why I shouldn’t someday be tall myself; after all, Ceolwulf was.

  It was as I was thinking these thoughts that Victricius’s back straightened suddenly. He cocked his head, seemed to study something in the pit before him, then bent once more to his work. With little else to do, I stepped closer, wondering what had caught the fool’s attention this time.

  The ground around my master’s knees was littered with broken bits of fired earth—the remains of the pit’s covering. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that, in removing this, he had exposed an uncommonly fine layer of dark gray ash. Like a man clearing the water before he drinks, Brother was now brushing at this ash with his fingertips. At first I thought the care with which he did this just another of my master’s pointless preoccupations, but then I noticed—at the very center of the ash—a fiery slip of color. As Victricius brushed at this, the pinkish color grew, blossomed grotesquely outward, became the dome of a child’s head; of course I knew what it really was—the furnace master always placed his pots upside down like this to conser
ve heat—but, still, this was the first one I had ever seen come out perfectly whole.

  Taking care not to injure what he had made, Victricius pulled his pot from its bed of ashes, singing a little piece of psalmody to himself as he did so, “‘You will give me life again, you will pull me up again from the depths of the earth....’”

  Instinctively, I sang the antiphon: “‘I will thank you on the lyre, my ever-faithful God, I will play the harp in your honor, Holy One of Israel.'”

  Victricius’s head spun around, eyes wide, blinking. For a moment he looked at me as if surprised to find himself unalone, then, tentatively, he sang back: “‘My lips shall sing for joy as I play to you, and this soul of mine which...'”

  A loud noise and a horribly painted man stood at the edge of the yard, arms back, ready to hurl a....

  Stuf?

  I opened my eyes again.

  And it was Stuf. Stuf the charcoal-maker was standing at the edge of the yard, eyes closed, fingers massaging his forehead thoughtfully. On the ground behind him lay the dosser, a telltale cloud of dust still hanging in the air around it.

  I looked back at my master, hoping to find him ready to berate the filthy pagan for scaring us so. But, typically, Victricius’s mind had already moved on to the day’s next order of business; the man climbing awkwardly to his feet, the pot still cradled in his arms.

  “Why don’t you set that down first?” said Stuf. He looked at me, rolled his eyes.

  I looked down, embarrassed for everyone.

  When I looked back up, Victricius’s pot was nestled among the canes of the shed’s roof and Brother was once more sweeping the place he and I had already swept earlier. The charcoal-maker seemed amused by this, the smile on his face making it clear what he thought of a man who swept clean a spot soon to be dirtied by charcoal. I liked the shells. Stuf had sewn a number of snail shells onto the front of his jerkin, their colors alternating between brown and white. The man often decorated his person in this way with things he’d found in the wood. Once he’d even shown up wearing a hat made entirely of mud and leaves. As if remembering this himself, the charcoal-maker now rubbed his forehead, looked at his hand, rubbed it again. Even relieved of his dosser, the man stood in a sort of crouch, head back, arms hanging down in front of him as if still countering the weight. I wondered what it would be like to carry such a load suspended like that across your forehead. Waldhere said it made your eyes pop out, that that was why Brother Egric’s bulged so, because he’d carried such heavy loads before coming to the monastery, but I wasn’t entirely sure I believed Waldhere about this. Still I had to admit such a weight must constrict your thoughts...which probably explained why Stuf remained so stubbornly heathen.