by William Peak
“I suppose I had better be going.”
Ealhmund looked up at me, looked toward the abbey, lip
protruding as if I had presented him with an interesting problem. “Sext,” he surmised.
“Well, not yet. But I probably ought to be getting back.”
A single nod here, abrupt, dismissive.
“You take care of yourself.”
Ealhmund didn’t say anything, seemed to have found something interesting to look at on the ground in front of him.
I raised my hand to wave, thought better of it, turned and began to walk back toward the orchard, embarrassed now by the sign that seemed to shout up from the ground all around me, glad Ealhmund hadn’t noticed it, couldn’t see how dumbly it proclaimed his fear, his hopelessness, for all the world to see.
When I reached the first of the cherry trees the urge to say something more, some last thing, came over me like a sort of hunger. I took one or two more steps and then, unable to stand it any longer, turned and, without thinking about what I was going to say, yelled, “So you’ll know, just so you’ll know? It really isn’t as bad as they say it is. The forest I mean. It’s not nearly as scary as
they say it is!”
Ealhmund was looking at me. At the sound of my voice he had glanced quickly toward the abbey and then back at me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t nod or shake his head. He looked at me. I looked at him. Then I nodded and, feeling for some reason better about myself, as though I’d done something helpful, generous, I turned and began to make my way back through the orchard toward the abbey path.
That was the last time I ever saw Ealhmund. He was sighted a few more times up by the kitchens, but even that stopped when Brother Wictbert began sleeping by the gate. After that the boy’s print became rare around Redestone and, eventually, such sign disappeared altogether. I have no idea what became of him.
XXXII
That was the year our annual shipment to In-Hrypum was waylaid, the bishop’s man brutally murdered, and an entire year’s production of iron carried off. Most people, naturally enough, blamed the outrage on one of Northumbria’s traditional enemies, and when an arrow fletched in the Mercian manner was found at the site such suspicions seemed confirmed. Still there were those who pointed out that Ecgfrith failed to mount any punitive raids in response to the attack, and that, almost simultaneously, his smiths ceased to clamor for iron.
The loss was a great one for Redestone. After the failure of our wheat Godwin had assured us we would not starve so long as we had Victricius’s iron to offer. But now there was no iron. For the first time in the history of the abbey, Brother Cellarer was forced to barter among our neighbors against future harvests for our food. For a community with such a long tradition of self-sufficiency, this was a bitter blow. And, as it is said, when one is offered humility for his fare, one tends to blame the cook. So it was that everyone now spoke of the transfer of men from Brother Cellarer to Brother Furnace, how Godwin had ignored Osric’s requests for additional help when the rust first got among the crop, how the new abbot had jested that, so long as we had Victricius, we could “eat iron.” Well, we couldn’t eat iron now. And the grumbling was become nearly universal. Even Maban was heard to blame Godwin for the decision, saying it was none of his affair, that he had cautioned against the transfer, had offered to help Osric himself but Godwin would hear none of it. Well Godwin would hear of it now. There would be no second failures. That spring everyone from prior to oblate was commandeered for the planting. Tellingly, even Brother Victricius was sent into the fields. I remember watching him as he went about his assigned tasks, the smile that played over his face every now and then when he did something wrong, moved in
some way that showed how unaccustomed he was to such labor. Though no one spoke to him, no one sought out his row to work in, his company, Brother seemed—for the first time since Agath-o’s departure—content, even happy. I wondered if, bent over our soggy Northumbrian soil, he saw something else, scented, perhaps, a drier, more fragrant air.
Upon being relieved of his responsibilities as a member of the hierarchy, Father Dagan had been placed under Brother Cellarer’s authority, which meant that no special order was required to send him into the fields. But it was, I believe, Maban who saw to it he was assigned stone removal. Of course no one likes stone removal, but you cannot imagine how bad it was in those days. Back then, when many of our fields had only recently been cleared, the rocks seemed to rise from the ground each spring like mushrooms after a good rain. Dragon’s eggs, the hill people called them, and, like all such superstitions, there was a grain of truth to it. For there was something perverse about those stones. No matter how many you carried off one day, a like number seemed always to greet your return upon the next, the gray-red piles of discarded rock growing big-bellied at the edge of our fields, slithering and cracking in the heat of the afternoon like big overfed adders.
None of which seemed to bother Father Dagan. Whatever task I had been assigned, setting stakes, digging seedbeds, I would glance every now and then toward his part of the field and always find him still at it, the man who had been prior down on all fours now, red with the red of our earth, Maban’s dutiful servant, breaking his fingers upon yet another impossible stone. Oddly enough I think I wouldn’t have minded so much had he shown a little more enthusiasm for the work, thrown himself into it as once he would have, intent, even in so menial a task, upon setting an example for those who labored alongside him. But Father showed no such inclination. He seemed content only to do as he was told, in all appearances so like the other workers, both lay and religious, that it was only with difficulty I could distinguish his sweat-stained back from among the many that clambered that spring over the rockier parts of our fields.
It was on a particularly wet and dreary day, as I remember it, that I was sent to assist our former prior. I don’t know what I had done to deserve such an assignment, but I do remember that it was Brother Osric who ordered it, the good cellarer staring at me with eyes made dull by hunger, not even bothering to admonish me, just signalling the rocks with his hands, then returning doggedly to whatever task it was that then occupied that extraordinary mind. Though I have no memory of it, I would have walked slowly to where Dagan and the other men worked. I did everything slowly in those days. Likely too I noted with displeasure the buildup of mud on my feet, cast a disapproving eye over the blackened stumps as yet protruding from that part of the field. I was a difficult boy in those days, willfull, feckless, aggressively sullen.
Father didn’t say anything when I walked up. Well, he wouldn’t have, would he? Maban was there and, except in his own defense, Maban was always very strict about the silence. But he did smile. I remember the smile because I remember how stricken I was by it. That Father too (even Father!) should look at me like this, grin up at me as all the others did now, trying to conceal the dismay the thought of my company so clearly caused them with these insincere smiles, these wanton invitations to partake of whatever pleasure was then at hand—in this case, as it happened, stone removal.
I knelt down next to Father without looking at him, without signing anything. The stone he was working on didn’t look like much to me. You could see that recent frosts had already had an effect upon it, heaving the thing up at night, lowering it again at sunrise, so that now the stone sat in its socket like a tooth loosened by much fingering. Surely it wouldn’t take much to dislodge that.
I glanced over at Father, expecting to see a similar assessment on his face, and was surprised to find his brow furrowed, the eyes dark, uncertain. To think that I used to kneel before this man, this man who now kneeled—utterly stymied—before a lump of mindless stone. I leaned forward, placed my fingers in the space between stone and earth, probed, gained some purchase, pulled.
Nothing happened. Well, that was to be expected. I went forward on my knees, giving myself a better angle, dug my fingers deeper into the earth, not thinking about what might be there, thinking instead abou
t how much I hated this work, Brother Cellarer for sending me here, Father Dagan for smiling at me like that. Again I pulled and this time, pulling very hard, I very nearly pulled myself off my knees, catching myself at the last moment before smashing face-first into the object of my efforts. I sat back, looked at the rock. Stupid thing. Mindless stupid thing, staring up at me with its mindless stupid face. Red. Red like all our rocks. Redestone. And angry now, inspired, I grabbed the thing again, pulled with all my might, pulled as if this were Redestone, as if, with one great effort,
I might remove from this field, my life, this existence, all that I hated about this place: Maban, Godwin, the Rule, everything.
And of course managed only to strain my back, the stone still staring blandly up at me from its hole, unmoved, unthinking, ignorant even of the stupidity I attributed to it.
I glanced over at Father, anxious lest he laugh at me. But
Father wasn’t laughing. He was looking at the stone, hands resting cold and still on his knees. For the first time I noticed how tired he looked, the strain on his face, the place where, in wiping an eye, he’d left a track of reddish mud across his cheek, drying now to gray. I glanced down at the hands that had made that track and was surprised to see how old they looked—the skin cracked and dry, stained red with earth, the fingers bent, nails bloodless, pale, outlined in red.
Father felt my eyes on him, looked over at me, the head turning slowly, the neck apparently stiff.
I placed my hands at the sides of my head, index fingers pointed upward, raised my eyebrows.
Father shook his head, No. No, we will not need the ox. He smiled, brought a finger to his lips, signalled patience.
And tears sprang to my eyes. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense to me even now, but something about the gesture, the smile upon that chapped and broken face, brought everything back, the time before this time, before Maban, Godwin, before
even Gwynedd, when Father was neither Dagan nor prior but just Father: the big man in the big clothes who smiled down at me, held a finger before his lips, played with me in the snow.
And I had to look away, swallow hard, the feelings coming fast and furious, sweet and painful. That once I had felt such things, known such things! I looked away. I looked away and I closed my eyes, shut them tight against this day, my tears, the difference between then and now. When I opened them again, the field before me appeared strange, bleary, gray figures walking upon a reddish sea. I sniffed, wiped my eyes, realized, vaguely, someone was looking at me, someone over by the wagon. I looked away, down toward the village, saw the house I thought Eanflaed’s, had to close my eyes again, beat back the emotions, embarrassed now by the fatigue that seemed to be letting this happen, the strain which, once released, permitted such a display.
“Winwæd?”
Would it never end?—the sound of my name upon his lips suddenly enough to wring my heart, send it bleating off toward
some distant heaven.
I held a hand out, begged a moment’s patience, rubbing my eyes against the other arm, the familiar scratchiness of my sleeve for some reason helpful now, sobering.
“The season...” It was Father again, whispering. “It can do this, the season. The eyes I mean, make them water. Autumn can too.”
I turned around—too abruptly—smiled at him, eyes doubtless red, brimming.
“They say it’s the trees,” he said, smiling uncertainly, clearly doubtful this had anything to do with trees.
I nodded, laughed, caught myself, looked away, looked back at him, my smile all the while growing, becoming large, too large, unsustainable.
Father’s eyes narrowed like those of a man who notices something he has missed. He studied me a moment and then, almost imperceptibly, nodded to himself. Again he held a finger to his lips, but this time I did not cry. I was too tired to cry, too moved,
too in thrall now to that gesture to do anything other than wonder at it. Father nodded. Finger at his lips, he nodded, stood up, walked away. When he returned, he carried some tree limbs and a small stone. He smiled, knelt down, placed his stone against the one I had been pulling on, stood back up, inserted the longest of the limbs between the two rocks, pressed down on it. As if bidden, the big stone rose from its seat, rocked back and forth upon the axis of the limb. Father looked at me, his face serious now, urgent, demanding. I grabbed one of the smaller limbs, placed it in the gap opened between earth and stone, blocking the one from falling back into the other. Father smiled, released the pressure on the limb he held, bent over, reset the stone in the gap next to mine, re-inserted the limb, began the process again. Once more the stone rose and, shoving, Father drove the limb beneath it, lifted again, this time using only the strength of his back. The stone rose a further hand’s breadth, trembled upon the lip of its grave, fell out. I laughed. Of course I’d seen the thing done before— Brother Ælfric used a similar method to raise and lower the wagon when repairing its wheel—but today...today such a trick seemed exceptionally clever. I couldn’t help myself, I laughed.
Someone coughed.
Father’s face changed, looked over that way. He looked back at me, brought a finger to his lips, noticed the humor in the repetition of this gesture, laughed at himself soundlessly. He smiled, flicked a nod at the rock, held his hands out palms-up before him.
I stood up, understanding what he wanted, faced him over the stone. Together we bent and, with difficulty, lifted the rock between us. Then almost dropped it when we each started moving in different directions. Father smiled, indicated the direction we should take with a movement of his shoulders. I nodded and, walking in unison now, however gracelessly, we transported our rock across the mud of that field to the nearer of the big piles.
You know it’s interesting, isn’t it, how you can remember something like that so clearly, can remember duck-walking a stone across a muddy field, what it was like when, arms tired from the carry, you heaved the thing onto the pile, the disappointment you
felt as it landed lower than expected, slid miserably, unimportantly, to the bottom of the heap? But I suppose it’s always that way with the conversations we value in our lives, the ones our memories serve up to us again and again. We remember what led up to them, the particulars of the event itself—the hall, the fire, the direction in which we faced—yet very little of the actual conversation, its ebb and flow, what came first, what second. Only the lessons learned, the secrets divulged, that is what we remember, and where we sat when we learned them, who was with us, whether or not the sun shone.
The sun did not shine that day. It was cloudy, overcast. And when Father suggested a break, led me around to the far side of the pile, stretched out upon it, I beside him, the two of us lying on our backs, heads resting on our hands, it was at a lowering sky that we looked. I remember that. And I remember the pile itself, that it was tall, nearly as tall as a man, the rocks we lay upon dusty, dirty, covered with a thin and flaking skin of dried mud. A sort of fly, tiny, black, was for some reason attracted to this mud, had perhaps been spontaneously generated by its drying. None flew, I remember that, but they crawled back and forth in their countless hundreds, scurrying now left, now right, avoiding us, the area around our bodies, but otherwise moving indiscriminately over the rocks, gathering in the declivities whenever the wind blew, all facing the same direction, all adhering to some secret order, some strange and entirely unknowable rule.
Doubtless for a while we said nothing. It makes sense, we would have done that, enjoying the quiet, the feel of lying on our backs, muscles relaxing, recovering. And then, possibly without preamble (for he was like that—though he was no longer permitted to teach, our former prior retained the habits of a pedant), Father began to talk. He didn’t look at me as he spoke—I remember that well—looked instead at the sky, the dark and moving clouds, as if he spoke not to me but to the face of Heaven. His subject was, as of course it so often had been in the days when he was prior, monasticism, his calling, mine, but the way he spoke about i
t now struck me as different, unexpected. Before there had
always been something strained about Father’s lectures on the communal life, as if the man spoke not of something he knew but of something he wanted, something he hoped, through the force of his words, to coerce into being. But today, as I have said, things were different, the tone changed, as if, in some way I could not understand (I mean look at the man—the mud, the chapped hands, the unhealthy pallor), Father had achieved his dream, achieved the happiness he had always longed for. I remember he said it was the freedom that surprised him most, the freedom obedience gave a man from worry, anxiety, any and all forms of pride. Doubtless I remember this because I was so surprised by it, surprised to find Father surprised by it. After all it had been Father who had always preached so passionately on the subject, the supposed freedom conferred upon those willing to dispense with freedom, enter a monastery, submit their will to that of an abbot. But now he spoke of that freedom as if it were something he had never expected, as if, surprised by it, Father now took daily pleasure in its expression, as if even that day, even as he’d knelt in the mud, struggled with yet another crop of stone, his mind had risen free of care into the clouds, into Heaven, been permitted, finally, the peace and serenity it had so longed for. And none of this, he assured me, none of this would have been possible without obedience, without the God-given gift of obedience, the yoke which is no yoke, which is a taking-off of yokes, the yoke which places your body in harness to another that your mind might follow God, might be freed to follow God.
It began to rain, I remember that, a light rain at first, big drops falling wet and cold out of a dark gray sky. Behind us Brother Os-ric called everyone into the shelter of the trees, and I remember Father rising up on one elbow, the uncharacteristically mischievous grin that spread across his face as he peered over the top of the pile, checked to see if we had been missed. And I remember the way he lay back down too, lay back down as if this were all part of the same lecture, as if he’d done nothing wrong, had no need to explain why, having just praised obedience, he now played at its opposite, only laying a hand on mine to let me know that all was