The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  The girl stopped, a look of surprise animating her face. She put a finger to her lips, smiled, shook her head. I was reminded of something, someone. My mother? Had my mother hushed me like this?

  “I will call you ‘Brother’,” she said, whispering for some reason. “If that’s all right.”

  I nodded. Of course it wasn’t. I mean I knew she mistook the situation, my status, but I could not have corrected her had I wanted to; so I nodded, the smile on my face feeling better now, more relaxed, almost natural.

  The girl became sober, serious. “You are so thin,” she said, shaking her head, “all of you, so very thin.”

  Of course I had noticed the difference between us already, how full she looked, brimming, but I hadn’t really thought about how I must look by comparison. I wanted to assume custody of the eyes, knew I should have earlier, but found myself too embarrassed to display even so simple a courtesy. I did try to pull my woolens down, the cloth suddenly shorter than I remembered, my knees sticking out in a way I’d never noticed before, obtrusive, embarrassing.

  As if she understood all this, knew exactly what I was thinking, the girl nodded. “You do it for us,” she said.

  I glanced out at the orchard, adopted an expression I hoped looked wise, understanding. In my mind Brother Baldwin signed angrily, Deny the flesh that the soul might live! I had no idea what the girl was talking about.

  When I looked back at her, she was smiling again, her cheeks flushed, rosy. She glanced down at my basket, back up at me. “May I have one of your cherries?” she asked.

  I blinked, felt myself blink again. They weren’t my cherries, not really my cherries at all. I swallowed, fought the urge to look around, see if anyone was watching. I looked at her. She looked at me, the question blooming in her eyes, doubt returning. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t nod or say anything outright but, staring at her as if, together, we crossed some inconceivable threshold, I offered her the basket.

  Eanflæd ate slowly. She made a sort of game of it. Instead of tossing her stems away as I would have, she stacked them neatly in the grass at her side, each vine-red length lined up perfectly with its neighbor. While a part of me was hardly there, floating along like a man in a dream, another began to think, function, ponder. Was this perhaps a characteristic of girls, this neatness, this attention to order? I noticed how, instead of trying for distance, Eanflæd spit her stones carefully into her hand, concealing the action with a slight tilt of her head. When, later, her fingers relaxed, un-cupped, the additional pit was revealed as something new and unexpected, a little miracle in the palm of her hand.

  Eanflæd smiled, touched her lips as if indicating how good the cherries had been. Carefully she deposited the stones on the grass at her side, stones on the right, stems on the left. Girls were becoming less of a mystery to me.

  She sat up, looked at me, her skin suddenly different, pale, freckles and hair contrastingly darker. “I have something to say,” she said, though of course I already knew that, could see it in her eyebrows, the way her lips bunched as if holding something back. Stuf couldn’t conceal such things either.

  She shook her head, closed her eyes as if visualizing what she wished to say, opened her eyes again. “I have had a dream,” she said.

  I nodded, thinking about the eyes, thinking about how dark they were, the lips, the hair, like water in shadow.

  “I said I had a dream.”

  I sat up, nodded again, tried to appear attentive.

  Eanflæd hesitated for a moment, then began again. “I mean,” she said, “I want to tell you about it, tell a monk.”

  This was what came of deception. It was a hard world that made you face such things so young, but I told myself I could do it, would do it, for her, for Eanflæd. I straightened my back, stuck out my chin, broke the silence. “I am not a priest,” I said.

  Immediately I knew how wrong I’d been, the girl’s hand going to her lips, trying to hide the amusement she so obviously felt. I looked away, cheeks burning.

  “No it’s my fault,”—fingers on my knee (the big embarrassing knee), apologizing, touching me. “I didn’t mean a confession. At least not that kind of confession.”

  I looked at her, the hand already gone, the feel of the fingers still there. She was smiling, wanting to see me smile, wanting it badly. I looked at her. I was an oblate, a member of the community at Redestone, I knew how to hide my feelings.

  The girl looked down. Like a brother assuming custody of the eyes, Eanflæd looked down, hesitated, and immediately I regretted what I had done, the resentment that had caused it, the wounded pride. I smiled but it was too late. Eanflæd wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was looking at the ground.

  “It was really more of a nightmare than a dream,” she said. “I was a little girl. In the dream I mean, I was a little girl. Maybe eight or nine, and Acca and Deor were still alive.” She looked at me. “Acca and Deor?” I smiled but I didn’t know the names. “They were friends of mine, little girls I used to play with?” I nodded, still smiling. Eanflæd shrugged. She closed her eyes. I felt bad about not knowing the names.

  “We were jumping rope. First Acca and I would hold the rope and Deor would jump, and then Deor and I would hold the rope and Acca would jump. For some reason I remember I was afraid it was going to get dark before it would be my turn. Actually it was still very light, but for some reason I remember being afraid it was going to get dark before they let me jump. I kept begging and begging them to let me take my turn but they wouldn’t. They’d laugh and say, ‘You’re next! You’re next!’ but they never let me jump. And then a cloud must have passed in front of the sun because it got dark.” Eanflæd paused and, as if a cloud really had passed before the sun, she rubbed her arms. I looked around. No one was coming.

  “Well,” she continued, “I began to gather up the rope, thinking how unfair everything was, how unfair Acca and Deor had been. And then one of them said, ‘Look!’ and I looked and, instead of being in the field back of our house, we were deep in the wood.” Eanflæd shut her eyes and I remembered the first time I went into the forest, how close I had kept to Brother Tatwine’s heels. As if she remembered this too, Eanflæd shuddered, opened her eyes, looked at me. “So, anyway, we started to hunt about, tried to find our way home. But of course we couldn’t. I mean we had no idea where we were, what wood this was, and for a long time we just wandered. Sometimes there seemed to be a path and then sometimes there wasn’t. Most of the time we simply pulled our way through the forest, everything clinging to us, messing our clothes.

  I lost my father’s rope. And it got darker and darker but it never seemed to become full night.

  “Eventually we came to a sort of clearing. There was a house in it, all shuttered, bolted up, and it looked different from the houses in our village. Acca and Deor wanted to try to get inside the house before it got too dark, but I didn’t. Even with night coming on, there was something about the place that frightened me. I didn’t want to go in.

  “And then a funny thing happened. I was wishing I could see into the house, wishing I was up on the roof, you know so I could look down through the smoke-hole, see if there really was anything inside the house to be frightened of, when, suddenly, for no apparent reason, I was on the roof. Acca and Deor were still down on the ground, calling up to me, begging me to come down and enter the house with them, but I was way up on the roof.” Eanflæd looked at me. “You know how dreams are. It’s only later, when you wake up, that you realize how strange everything was, that you wanted to be on a roof and then, suddenly, you were. But in the dream it all seems perfectly natural. And so I didn’t think about it. I began to crawl along the roof-line, thinking that now I would be able to look down through the smoke-hole. But, as it happened, for the longest time I couldn’t seem to get there. I kept crawling and crawling but the smoke-hole never got any closer. Below me, down on the ground where I had left Acca and Deor, I heard the door open and, at the same moment, a lot of noise coming from inside th
e house. It sounded as if they were having some sort of feast in there. I remember I heard Acca laugh, then the door closed and it was immediately quiet again, the noise gone, the house and its clearing still, not even a bird calling.

  “By the time I finally reached the smoke-hole I no longer wanted to look in. I knew what I was going to see. Dead people. I don’t know how, but I just knew...I was on top of the dead people’s house.” Eanflæd hesitated, looked away. “Still I had to see.” She looked back at me. “Have you ever found something dead?” she asked. “Not a person I mean but an animal, something, I don’t know, furry. You know what I mean?”

  I shrugged, recalled Oftfor’s tiny corpses.

  The girl nodded, her mouth turned up in an odd mix of excitement and revulsion. “Then you know how it is, how they look stiff, the hair all stiff and dusty and dry. And then you turn them over and underneath, on their undersides? It’s just the opposite, isn’t it? Wet, soft, and the worms? How everything’s crawling with those little worms?”

  I just looked at her.

  “That’s how it was!” The hand touched me again, touched my knee. “That’s how the house was, on the outside fine, normal, all right, but when I turned it over, I mean when I looked down through the thatch....” Eanflæd closed her eyes, shook her head. “It was full of them.” She opened her eyes but still didn’t look at me. “Bodies. More bodies than I’d ever seen—naked, pale, crawling over each other, bumping into each other, faces touching things, knees, backsides—not seeing, not caring—mouths touching.... I thought I was going to be sick.

  “And then I was sick.” Eanflæd smiled. “I vomited and my mother was there, holding the pot. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. Evil in, evil out.’” Eanflæd gave a little laugh. “Mother always knows what to say. She wiped my forehead and kissed me and I guess I believed her. I mean I felt better. God forgive me, Acca and Deor were dead, but I wasn’t, and I felt better. Wonderful. I was going to live and they were dead. I felt like singing.”

  Eanflæd held herself quiet for a time, staring out through the orchard. When she spoke again it was in a different, abstracted voice. “It was only the summer wobbles,” she said. “I was helping with the carding the next day. But it stayed with me, the dream I mean. All those bodies.” Eanflæd closed her eyes. “It’s death,” she said, her voice soft now, resigned. “I, Eanflæd, Ealdgyth’s daughter...I am afraid of death.”

  A breeze moved suddenly through the trees around us, leaves whispering to one another, branches rustling. I looked away. “All those people will rise again,” I said, not wanting to think about it, not really sure I wanted them to.

  “Yes,” I heard her say, “yes, I suppose so.” I didn’t look at her, didn’t have to look at her to know she wasn’t pleased with this, was probably studying her hands, maybe looking off through the trees.

  “But it’s not them I’m thinking about, it’s me.”

  I looked at her and I had been wrong, she was looking at me. “Doesn’t it ever scare you?” she asked, wanting it to, wanting me to be as scared as she. “Being sewn up in a sheet? Being dumped in a hole, buried?”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say.

  “You can’t breathe down there you know. You can’t see anything or feel anything, except, maybe...” She hugged herself, looked away, bit her lip. I thought about Oftfor, poor little Oftfor, lying up there beneath the cloister garth.

  Eanflæd shook her head, thought about something, changed her mind. She looked at me. “But at least we have you.”

  You have me?

  She nodded. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, why I had to talk to you, to a monk?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Eanflaed smiled and, as if I had said something, had said something beautiful, her eyes filled suddenly with tears. “You know they call it Redestone? The village I mean. Outside the valley they don’t call it ‘the village’, or ‘Wilfrid’s village’. They call it ‘Redestone’.”

  I nodded uncertainly, never having thought about it before, not seeing why it should matter what people outside the valley called the village.

  Eanflaed closed her eyes, lashes dark and wet against her cheek. “Redestone,” she said, as if the word itself were something special, sacred. She opened her eyes, looked at me. “We’re part of the monastery, as much a part of the monastery as your fields or this orchard. You look after us, take care of us. You have to. It’s what you’re here for.”

  Not according to my father.

  But I didn’t say that. I just looked at her and smiled, an uneasy feeling taking root in the pit of my stomach.

  Eanflæd looked away, stared off through the trees, holding herself tight, upper body bobbing in apparent agreement with something. “You’re heroes,” she said, nodding to herself, “heroes.” She looked back at me, cocked an appraising eyebrow. “Of course you don’t look like it. I mean you don’t look like heroes, but that makes it even better, doesn’t it, grander somehow, more heroic?” She smiled. “I mean you stand up there unarmed don’t you?” She indicated the abbey with a tilt of her chin, looked back at me. “That’s what Mother says. She says all you have is your prayer, and your chanting and fasting. I mean those are all the weapons you have. But it's enough. Just enough. You stand up there and hold Him off you hold off God. You keep Him from getting us, keep Him from coming too close.” The girl looked at me as if expecting something, as if expecting me to say something, and when I didn’t, couldn’t, had no idea what to say, she began to cry, the tears spilling from her like something she was giving me, something she wanted me to have, an offering, a gift. “That’s what I wanted to say,” she said. “That’s what I came for. To tell you thank you. I want to thank you. I Eanflæd, Ealdgyth’s daughter, thank you for your prayers, for your sacrifice.”

  I cannot say with any certainty what I did then. Probably I blinked, looked away, tried to appear once more wise and understanding. It is the way of children. But in truth, of course, the only wisdom I possessed was a certainty that this girl was wrong, deluding herself. Not that we didn’t pray for them. We did, then as now. In Chapter Father would tell us of their woes, the weeping wound, the torn palate, and we would pray for them. And in church too, when we offered up prayers for the work, the harvest, we prayed for the village as well, the people who lived in the village. But it wasn’t the same. I mean I knew that. We prayed for Dextra too, during her final illness, and for the sheep. But that wasn’t why we were here. We were here for us. To save us. It wasn’t the same. But I couldn’t say that—the girl so clearly wanting to believe otherwise, wanting to think herself and her family a part of the monastery, that, in some way, we were there for them, that we held God at bayfor them. How could I contradict her? Have you ever looked a young girl in the eye? When they want something, when they want something badly, their eyes have a considerable power. And so I did the easy thing, telling myself it was the right thing, that even Father Abbot would have approved in the face of so tenuous a faith, I nodded. I looked at the girl as if she had said something profound, and I nodded.

  The girl smiled. I remember that. As if she knew, as if at some level she knew how unlikely her view of things was, how great an effort she had required of me, she smiled, seemed relieved, bowed her head. I think she might have wanted to kiss me. Or at least my hand. I remember I had that impression. I don’t know what I would have done if she had, don’t know how I should have responded, turned her from such a course, but, as it happened, she did not. The moment passed.

  And then a strange fancy came over me. Father Gwynedd had told me about it, the way the monasteries used to be, the way he said some of them still were, mixed, men and women living together—chastely of course but together—and a sudden vision of us as old religious, Eanflæd and me, came over me, our hands worn with the work, knees swollen from praying, the two of us sitting side by side in Chapter, not saying anything, not needing to say anything, just sitting there, quiet, together. I lo
oked at Eanflæd and, outlandish as it was, found the idea suddenly reasonable, apt, and, fool that I was, I acted upon it, I ventured a suggestion. “You should think about entering a monastery,” I said, “a community like ours.”

  The look again, the same look as before, so that, for a moment, I thought I might never speak again, might never be so stupid as to give voice to my thoughts again. “Oh no,” she said, smiling as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if I had missed the fact she had dark hair instead of light, was a girl and not a boy. “No,” she said, “I want to have babies.” She laughed a little. “You know, lots and lots of babies.”

  I assumed custody of the eyes.

  “No, really, I’m sorry,” the hand on my knee again, the weight of it, the warmth. “It’s just...” she leaned forward so she could look up into my face. “It’s just that I want to have...well...children.” She smiled, the hand already gone, no longer touching me. “You understand. I want to have children.”

  I nodded, trying not to look at her, trying to avoid her eyes, those intense, those demanding, eyes.

  “I just....” Eanflæd sat back up, withdrew. “When Mother told me about you, I don’t know. I thought about it. I did. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how fortunate I was, we are, to have you praying for us, protecting us.”

  I looked up, but Eanflæd wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking at the sky, had leaned back, braced herself, hands flat out on the ground behind her, so that she could look directly up into the sky. “I wanted to thank you,” she said, “thank someone, for all you do for us.” She closed her eyes, opened them again, pupils white with light from the sky. “You really are wonderful you know, just...wonderful!”