by William Peak
It’s funny how people talk of the furnace master now. If a novice or postulant asks about the old days, what it was like when we were rich and our abbey well known, the answers they receive invariably make mention of a strange monk who came from across the water, an odd-looking man, often as not covered with soot, who spoke poorly if at all and was possessed of an uncanny ability to mend things, to turn broken bits of rock into fine steel, worthless clay into creamy ceramic. And if they listen closely, if the novice or postulant is as alert to the nuances of speech and gesture as most young men are, they cannot help but detect a note of disapproval, the suggestion that there was something not quite right with this man, this foreigner, that, perhaps, it would be best if we did not speak of him again. We are, after all, a fallen race. We must justify ourselves, our histories, excuse whatever slights we may once have bestowed, come to terms with our current decline.
I have been, I suppose, as guilty as the next.
But Victricius deserves better than that. He may have been a hard master, he may have worked me in all weathers, been short with me when I erred, shown little gratitude for my efforts, but he never asked more of me than he did of himself. He never once struck me. He was strange, it is true. He was a foreigner. Contrary to the Rule, he sometimes spoke of things—the charcoal, the hammer, even the yard—as though they were his. He was proud. His behavior in the matter of the fire-pits is, of course, inexcusable. But he was not without good qualities. If he sometimes moved too quickly, focused too closely on the temporal, how can we be sure he did not believe, in so doing, he best served both abbot and Church? And on that day, that strange snow-blind day when I lay in the midst of so much light and could see nothing at all, Victricius was a true brother to me. He watched over me. He tore a strip of cloth from his own woolens, laid it across my eyes. He fretted over his inability to give me something to drink, trying even to melt snow in his bare hands. As the day wore on and I sensed my eyesight returning, he refused to let me open my eyes, endanger them at a time when he judged them still feeble, susceptible to influence. And he spoke to me. That is the thing I remember best from that day, lying there, eyes closed, the unfamiliar sound of Brother’s voice filling the spaces in my head with pictures, images of a place where vineyards draped the hillsides, herbs grew underfoot, and every step scented the air with rosemary and thyme.
His father had been a potter, I remember him telling me that, and though I can’t remember now why, there was something about this that was both good and bad. Good, I suppose, because it must have been good to be the son of a craftsman, someone with a trade, but bad too in some way I am no longer sure of. Did they shun him perhaps, the other boys, shun him as our monks did now, because he was different, aloof, the potter’s son? There were sighs too, long pauses, when he spoke of the agricultural work, the fields, the vineyards. Unlike Deira, the wells in Victricius’s homeland were, it seemed, unreliable. As a boy he was sometimes sent by his father to take water from the village to the men in the fields. He spoke of those trips as you or I might a still-remembered teacher, a long-dead friend, how the men would crowd around him, clapping him on the head and sipping loudly from his ladle, how the earth had smelled, the grapes, how the sky had been blue, the sun had shined. I lay with my eyes closed and in my mind I saw the places he spoke of, the long days, the cool shade, and I dreamt that I was the furnace master, that it was I who had a father that made things, lived in a village, sent me with water from the well.
My mind must have sailed along like that for some time, catching whatever breezes pleased it, ignoring those that did not, because I can remember being surprised when I realized the wind had shifted, that Brother Victricius was talking about something else now, some holy man that had wandered into his village one morning when he was still little more than a boy. I smiled to let him know I was still listening but beneath my bandage I wondered what Brother was so excited about. Holy men might be rare in his part of the world but they certainly weren’t in ours, wandering in whenever the weather turned cold, often as not hungry and unkempt, clothes stinking of leaf mold and pitch. But then Brother referred to the fellow as Father and there was something in the way he said it, something familiar in the way his voice dipped as he pronounced the title, that I recognized. With a shudder I realized who this was that Victricius was talking about, that this was not some holy vagabond wandered in from the wood but our own Father Abbot, that I was being vouchsafed an image of Father Abbot as he looked when Victricius first saw him, as he looked when he was not yet Father Abbot but merely Father Agatho, young, virile, a priest, a missionary, just like anyone else.
I sat up a little, thought about this, wished I could look at Victricius, see the expression on his face. But there was little need. From the tone of his voice I could tell how happy he was, how even the mention of Father’s name in this context—a personal remembrance, his alone—pleased him. For some reason I found myself thinking about the way he had looked when that first pot came out of the ground without crack or blemish. There were, I realized, memories, experiences, that only the furnace master and Father Abbot knew, stories they could share with no one else in all of Northumbria.
A small crowd gathered. I remember him telling me that, that despite the fact most of the men had already left for the fields, there had been enough women and children remaining in the village that morning to create something of a crowd. They offered the priest food and water. They brought him a beaker of wine, a garland of flowers. They vied with one another for the honor of having him sleep beneath their roof. Such was their isolation and the respect accorded holy men in that country that they would have done anything to make him feel welcome, at home. But Agatho was unmoved. Victricius said he stood in their midst like a great stone and said nothing. And, finally, the people grew still, hushed. And it was then that he began to speak.
He began, appropriately enough, at the beginning, how our Lord’s advent had been predicted, how the stars and prophets had foreseen His coming. By midmorning he had reached the annunciation and, by mid-day, the Sermon on the Mount. He quoted it word for word, as if giving it himself, and Victricius told me he had lain on the ground and listened, chin on his arm, and felt neither ground nor arm. It was so clear, he said, so obvious. After the Sermon on the Mount, the miracles—the lepers touched, the sinners spared—by nightfall Jerusalem. As the last of the men streamed in from the fields, so Jesus and His disciples entered the holy city, anthems rising from every corner, all Heaven singing. By
the time of the betrayal, they had all moved into one of the farmer’s houses, everyone gathered around the fire, Father foremost, seeming to talk to each singly and all at once, eyes red in the firelight, the enormity of what they had done becoming real, the pain Christ had suffered for them. And then, finally, the end.
Father must have arranged it all beforehand because, when he said the words and the temple curtain was torn, a way was made clear for him and he disappeared into the rear of the house. One moment he was there, and the next he was gone. The people of the village had expected a feast, it apparently being the custom on such occasions, but there was to be none that night. The holy man was gone. The story was over. They all made their way home in the dark, hungry and, as Victricius remembered it, a little afraid.
The next morning Father Agatho was up before everyone else.
I remember a note of pride in Brother’s voice here, some pleasure he still took in the fact that his abbot, his holy man, had risen before everyone else, been up before all those farmers and their women. But the farmers and their women did get up. Victricius said they stumbled from their homes that morning like people walking in their sleep, bleary-eyed, confused, trying to understand what the noise was, what it was that had awakened them, whether it was dangerous, and what it might mean for their world. Brother stopped here, paused, and I remember the urgency in his voice when he started up again, asked, demanded, if I remembered the first time, the very first time I had heard the chant. And before I could an
swer, before I could remember or think of anything, he was off again, remembering himself. It was, he said, like nothing he’d ever heard before, and, at the same time, it was like something natural, something so perfectly natural and proper he had wondered if it might be natural, might be some everyday part of the dawn he’d simply never been up early enough to hear before. And the people had been drawn to it. Mysteriously, ineluctably, it had pulled them from their beds, pulled them from the safety of their village and out into the darkness at the edge of the fields.
The holy man was there of course, they could tell that by the singing, but they could not see him. At first at least, it was so dark, they could see him only by not seeing him, the darkness that blocked out the stars, the standing singing figure that moved between them and the stars like something wild, like something that had crept in out of the forest during the night and now stood before them singing and wild at the edge of their fields. Then, slowly, long after they had taken their seats on the ground around him, long after their bottoms had turned cold and hard against the hard and freezing ground, the silhouette slowly began to change, gain substance, form, the sky to lighten, sky and field still one in the predawn darkness, trees floating in the mist like dreams. And, finally, Father began to speak. As if no time had intervened between the previous night and this, as if he had paused only to catch his breath, the holy man opened his mouth and out came the rest of the story, the next chapter, Christ’s burial, the posting of the guards.
The women came and, in the stillness of morning, found nothing, the tomb empty, their Lord taken away. A man approached and asked Mary of Magdala why she was crying.
Thinking Him the gardener, she wondered if He had removed the body, asked Him to show her where He had placed it. And then, as if on command, the sun rose.
Victricius said it was like no sunrise he had seen before. He said the earth itself seemed to sigh with relief, the hills to tremble at that first touch of light. And as if he too had waited for this moment, as if the sun itself imparted some necessary strength, it was then that the holy man first quoted the risen Christ. “Mary,” He said, and she recognized Him. “Master,” she replied in the language of that day. Master.
Brother Victricius became quiet after that. I remember him speculating about Mary of Magdala, wondering if she might have been confused by the sun, if it might have been the sun coming up behind our Lord (as it had behind Father Agatho) that explained her failure to recognize Him at first. But, aside from that, he was silent. As was I. I lay in my darkness, comfortable and warm now, and I reveled in the story he had told. It was perfect. It always was. No matter how many times I heard the tale, no matter how many times it was drummed into me, I liked it. It made me happy.
After a while Brother began speaking again, something about the rest of that day, the Mass Father had celebrated, his homily. I found Agatho’s choice of text, the story of Elijah and Elisha, annoying. I often had trouble with those names when reciting. But Victricius didn’t. As he told the tale his foreigner’s tongue curved around those like-sounding syllables with an oily dexterity I found disagreeable. Once again I allowed myself to dislike the man a little, blaming him for the story Father had chosen to tell and wishing we could just be quiet now, rest in the peacefulness created by the earlier tale. Still, a part of me had always enjoyed the idea of a boy’s adoption by a great prophet and, in particular, the story’s remarkable conclusion. You remember the lines.... “Leaving there, he came to Elisha son of Shaphat as he was plowing behind twelve yoke of oxen, he himself being with the twelfth. Elijah passed near to him and threw his cloak over him. Elisha left his oxen and ran after Elijah. ‘Let me kiss my father and mother, then I will follow you,’ he said. Elijah answered, ‘Go, go back; for have I done anything to you?’ Elisha turned away, took the pair of oxen and slaughtered them. He used the plow for cooking the oxen, then gave to his men, who ate. He then rose, and followed Elijah and became his servant.” There was something about that ending with its suggestion of filial disobedience and the ease with which a child might turn his back on family and obligation that had always secretly appealed to me.
But Victricius was blind to such notions, the temptations he might be causing me. Indeed, the way he told it, the destruction of the plow became the point of Father’s sermon. “We must burn our tools,” he said, in an accent identical to Father Abbot’s, “all of our possessions, and follow Him. When the Master places His cloak upon us, when He casts it over our shoulders and calls us His own, what right have we to a past, a livelihood, to anything at all? We are His; whatever we own, His by default. To cling to anything—mother, father, plow, past—is to deny Him, to say that there is some part of us that is not His, not wholly given, that a part of us belongs not to Christ but to things corruptible, empty of worth.” How perfectly the furnace master remembered that speech! How perfectly, after all those years, he recalled our lord abbot’s theme! “I see how you shudder,” he declaimed, speaking not to me but to the crowd that had sat on the ground that morning, the boy in its midst. “The sun has risen, you cannot hide. You draw back, you shrink from my words, but this is your servitude, your slavery. You own not your plow, your oxen, your plot of land; they own you. Think what a gift it is our Lord offers you. Freedom. Freedom from all that weighs you down, from all that daily grinds your teeth and wrinkles your brow. Freedom to be what you were meant to be from the beginning of time. Men. Men of God, men of understanding. Throw everything away, He said, and follow me. ‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.’”
The speech was so grand, its delivery so faithful, that for a moment or two I lost myself in admiration of it and of the demand our lord abbot had placed upon those farmers. That they give up everything! That they turn their backs on all they valued, all they loved and cherished, and for what? To follow him! To wander off after what must have seemed a half-crazed priest into a life of certain hunger, hardship, self-denial. For the first time in my life I realized how mad we must seem to the world, how mad and how glorious! This was the life my father had given me, this impossibility, this obverse paradise. No wonder Eanflæd had been so impressed. How grand it suddenly seemed, how heroic, how fine!
Brother sat down. As if the speech itself had been the whole of his story, as if, having delivered himself of it, there was nothing left to say, nothing left to prop him up, bear him on, the furnace master sat down, gave a little sigh, became still. I noticed his quiet and, in my triumph, felt an unexpected compassion for him. I would reach out to Victricius. I who had given up everything to be here, had had everything—mother, father, family, home—stripped from me to live here, could give up this little more to make him happy too, make even someone as lowly and unimportant as the furnace master feel wanted, interesting, a person of consequence. “And so,” I asked, pretending an interest I did not feel, “that was how you became a monk? You got up and went after him, you followed Father Abbot?”
“Yes. No.” More silence. “No, not right away. I was too young, my parents wouldn’t permit it, wouldn’t let me go. Which of course made me unhappy. I must have moped around, sackcloth and ashes, because I remember my father yelling at me—a pot had been broken, some clay set up improperly, I’m not sure what, but apparently I hadn’t been watching what I was doing.” Victricius stopped for a moment, then added, “That was the last time he ever spoke to me.” Another pause, longer this time. “Anyway. Anyway, it’s clear what he was angry about, the impudence, the suggestion that I was holier than he. Or.... Or maybe not. Maybe he just felt sorry for me. I don’t know. Whatever it was, he sent me away. I remember that, threw me out of his workshop, told me to take some water to the men in the fields, make myself useful.” A small laugh here. “So I was walking down the hill when I saw him. It’s funny I wo
uld have gone that way but I guess I was taking my time, wasting my time. And then I saw Father. He must have been talking to the brothers of Dalfinus because he was coming from their vineyard when I saw him, heading downhill, walking between the rows, working his way toward the village path.
“I’d known he was leaving of course, but I’d thought he was already gone. It was the purest of chances that I met him there.” Victricius hesitated as if expecting me to argue this point. When I didn’t, he continued. “So of course I ran to him. I mean what boy wouldn’t? I hid my yoke in the grass alongside the road and ran after him. I had to. He was like no one I had ever seen before, no one I had ever imagined.
“He acted as if he knew me. Funny, I never thought about it before, but I doubt he did. I mean I doubt he really knew me, recognized me. There had been plenty of boys there that morning, plenty of adult faces to hold his attention. But he let me think he knew me, recognized me, and you cannot imagine what that did for me, how it made me feel. We walked along, me talking, him listening, smiling every now and then, probably wondering where this gangling boy got the idea he could someday be among his followers.” Once again the little laugh. “I suppose I cut a fairly comical figure. But, anyway, after a while, we came to the bridge. I knew I had to go then, I mean to let him go. It wasn’t permitted to cross the bridge. And besides it was late. But I lingered. I didn’t want to say good-bye. I kept talking, trying to hold Father back, hold him back with my words, telling him everything about myself, my life, my dreams, the sort of potter I would be, the fields I would work, wishing with all my heart that this could go on forever, that somehow I could be allowed to stand by this bridge forever and talk with this man.