The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  Absently, I let my eye wander on up the valley. At a little distance above the abbey mill, a spill of rock from the mountain’s flank joins the river and the forest briefly changes character, becoming mostly sycamores. Here I lingered, regarding for a moment the spot where once I had been in the habit of praying, associating it in my mind with my present location, the lessons Father Hermit had taught me. A prickling, the suggestion of an anxiety, and I moved on. Still farther up-river I was able to pick out the break in the trees that marked the yard, and was relieved to see no evidence of the accident that had taken place there. I thought

  about Victricius, missed him. In an odd sort of way he and I had been very much alike—both of us sometimes awkward, uncomfortable in community, certainly different, set apart. True, his had been a difficult service, but he had never beaten me. I could have done worse. Indeed, I found myself thinking I would pray for Brother during my sojourn upon the mountain, that his cause would become mine. The thought cheered me. I rather liked the idea of myself as Victricius’s champion. From now on people were going to have to answer to me if they wanted to say anything against the little man from Gaul.

  Above the furnace, the wooded bank of the river is marked by an unnaturally straight line cut through the trees. This line marks the path our race follows as it rises to meet its source at the falls of the Meolch. Thinking about Victricius, I now directed my attention to this spot, remembering a time when, after a particularly bad flood, Brother and I had hiked up there to check on the gate. The thing I remembered best from that day was what it had felt like to stand at the top of the race and stare down its line of sight toward the yard. With the air around me full of vapor and the sound of the falls, it had been easy to imagine what had happened during the flood. Upon encountering the open sluice-gate, the swell of water had turned a portion of its fury upon the path thus exposed, roaring down the race toward our work-place. This secondary torrent had then ignored the way the race bends at the yard and, instead, plunged straight ahead, back down to the river, in the process ripping out flags, undermining the furnace, and carrying off the greater part of our charcoal. Eventually of course the waters had subsided, but not before they’d gouged out an entirely new channel back down to the Meolch, a channel down which our race continued to uselessly pour. At a time when all the world gave evidence of an excess of water, Redestone went without: the mill did not turn, the moss on the lavabo had grown dusty and dry, Brother Kitchen’s drains did not drain, and the ditch had begun to smell. Victricius, I remembered, took one look at the sluice-gate— half-buried in silt and sand—and pronounced it salvageable. Without so much as a glance at the rest of the wonderful destruction

  wrought by the flood, he had turned and begun the march back down to the yard. “Come on,” he’d called back to me, “we’ll need shovels!”

  Above the falls the river turns behind a long ridge and is no longer visible from the crag, though the valley that carries it can still be followed as it rises into the mountain. At a point hazy with distance, a pale ochre scar is just visible against the dark green of the valley’s far wall. I can’t remember what this really is—a cliff, the opening to a cave, I’m not sure—but I do remember Father Hermit telling me that it was a forbidden place, that the hill people still sometimes visited there, believing it to be the lair of a particularly strong demon. Above this, the valley continues to rise, narrowing as it winds up into the mountain until, having risen till it can rise no more, it buries its snout in the saddle that connects Modra nect’s southern and northern peaks. Here it was that my praying self had once perceived a great and flimsy dam, had reached for it and, in my arrogance, pulled it down.

  Perhaps it was my memory of the damage caused to the sluice-gate by the flood, or maybe it was just the opportunity provided by the crag to reconstruct something which, heretofore, I had only seen in my mind, but, for whatever reason, I now found myself absently retracing the route God’s wrath would have taken as it poured down out of the mountain. I thought the high valleys would have filled first and, thinking it, watched as, one by one, they did, the red-hot vein of God’s displeasure creeping slowly down Modra nect’s brow. At the pagan site the livid stream flared momentarily as if undecided about its course, then, however reluctantly, moved on, great swaths of forest catching fire as it passed, rocky outcrops losing their grip upon the mountain, sliding off to join and swell the flood. A final turn and the leading edge of the flow swept into view; hot and roaring, voracious, engulfing rocks and rapids, it raced toward the falls.

  And then I saw it. Sitting there on the crag, legs dangling beneath me, the wind still playing at my woolens, I saw it, saw what would have happened next, the pale thin line cut through the trees, the path provided, the easy slope, the yard, the furnace, Brother

  Victricius.

  But that was absurd!

  I looked away, down toward the village, refusing to see what I had seen and yet seeing it still, the sluice-gate, the sudden arrival of the flow, the inevitable diversion, the inevitable consequence. Was it possible? Could my prayer—unatoned for, unconfessed— have routed God’s fury toward Victricius? No! No, I would not have it! I had prayed against Wilfrid, not the furnace master!

  Still a part of me would not leave it alone. Who, I found myself thinking, who had stood the most to lose from Victricius’s death? And silently, almost serenely, the answer rose before me like a dark unwanted sun. Wilfrid. Yes, Wilfrid surely. Without our furnace master, Redestone could produce no iron. And without Redestone’s iron Wilfrid became, at least so far as Ecgfrith was concerned, next to nothing, powerless. The king could and had attacked him openly. There was even said to have been advantage in it. Many still remembered the forced expulsions, the shame of the Roman tonsure, the appropriations of land and title, the insults, the pride. Without iron, Wilfrid had few friends, many enemies. The latest reports had him in full retreat, hounded and harassed from country to country just as (and here I could no longer pretend otherwise) I had prayed he might be.

  And if that were true, if it really had been my prayer that had brought all this about, then what might not be next? What else lay in the path of God’s destruction—the terrace, our crops, Eanflæd, Father Dagan, Redestone itself?!

  And I was up and running, up and running toward the hermit and his camp, toward the one priest, the one father I knew who— without threat of exposure or expulsion—could absolve me of all this, save me and the world from all that I had put in motion.

  The camp that day, when I finally reached it, looked exactly as it had the first time I’d seen it. There was Father’s hut, tumble-down and forlorn, Father’s pots, Father’s fire, and there, sitting by

  the stream like an old stump, like something that never moved, was Father himself. Of course I should have waited. If my life on the mountain had taught me anything it was this, that I should not disturb the hermit when he was at prayer. But I couldn’t help myself. Forgetting everything in my relief at seeing him, forgetting even my prayer, the confession I had to make, I ran to him, ran to him and threw myself down on the ground beside him. “Father!” I shouted. “Father, it’s me, Winwæd! I’m back!”

  I’ll never forget the look he threw me, eyes wide in astonishment, face pale, almost comically distraught. But he pulled himself together for my sake, visibly composed himself. “Yes,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to discover me sitting on the ground beside him, “Yes, of course it is you.” Then he looked away as if he’d heard something, a bird maybe.

  I followed his gaze impatiently, saw nothing. “Father, I have to talk with you,” I said. “You have to hear my confession.”

  Again the old man’s head spun around, again he looked at me. For a moment he hesitated, frowning, then, in a voice full of suspicion and disapproval, he said, “You’re not Edgar. Where’s Brother Edgar with my biscuits and honey?”

  XXXVII

  Actually of course, he came and went. He was at his best in the morning. Somet
imes, some mornings, I could almost believe him unchanged, that it was still the father I had known and loved that sat opposite me, smiled as I spoke, crunched into one of Brother Thruidred’s biscuits. But then I would ask him something, something simple like How did this pot get broken? or Where is your belt?, and such a look of doubt and confusion would come over him that I would have to look away. For it was difficult for me to see the man who had taught me so much reduced to such a state.

  At other times (I will admit it here), I could become quite impatient with Father. The hermit I had known seemed then gone, entirely absent, and, in his place, I found myself servant to a senile old man, a senile old man who required my constant attention,

  constant care. For Brother Edgar had been right, Father was now far too feeble to care for himself. If I had not been there to parcel out his food, I do not doubt he would have gone through his stores in a single week. If I had not mended his clothes...well... suffice it to say he would have brought shame upon himself. The office was of course utterly beyond him. Oh sometimes he would try to join in, climbing onto his feet as one would an unsteady table, teetering there, humming, so that I knew the old man planned to come in on the next antiphon. But he rarely managed more than a phrase or two, occasionally an entire verse, as if some ancient door had suddenly sprung wide, shed light upon some otherwise long-forgotten corner of Father’s mind, only to close again as quickly, Father’s eyes blinking in surprise, a small curious smile turning up the corners of his lips. And there were other things too of course. The usual problems associated with age. But, in Father’s case, exacerbated by his lack of memory, the utter surprise with which he greeted each of his failings as if—to my consternation—this were the first time such a thing had ever

  happened to him.

  Though that of course may have been as much a result of cunning as the forgetfulness of age. For the man who, to my way of thinking, had always been more than any other himself, unadorned and unaffected, became, in his dotage, something of a poseur, putting on whatever face his poor demented mind told him the present occasion called for. I’ll never forget the time the pilgrim visited us, the last, as it happened, of the pilgrims I ever saw come to that place. Though I did not know the man, it was obvious from the way he greeted the hermit that this was not the first time he had been there, that he easily recognized Gwynedd, saw nothing in his appearance to suggest debility. It was hard for me to watch that exchange, the farmer at first happy, ebullient, the hermit dissembling outrageously, assuming an unnatural air (a hill person’s idea of what a wise man might look like) in his bid to appear normal, still in command of his senses. For some reason (out of loyalty to the hermit, the holy man he once had been?) I found I could not bring myself to simply tell our visitor what the true situation was, pull the man aside and reveal Father’s secret. Still, it was painful to watch him discover it for himself—Father’s disingenuousness on display, the false conviviality, the clumsy attempts at conversation, the repetitions, the evasions, the speeches that began well only to trail off into unrelated remarks about the weather, the foliage, the taste of biscuits and honey.

  Biscuits and honey. How Father could go on about biscuits and honey in those days. Weren’t biscuits and honey delicious? Why didn’t we have biscuits and honey more often? Do you suppose we could have some biscuits and honey now? Listening to the man you’d have thought the subject resolved some deep and powerful mystery for him, as if God Himself, the very nature of God, might depend upon a proper exegesis of biscuits and honey.

  Which, truth be told, I rather liked. For—though I resented having to play cellarer to Father’s hunger, having to tell him over and over again that he could not have that which he so clearly desired—still there was something about this obsession of his that reminded me of the man I had known, the way he had looked

  at life, the pleasure he had taken in it. Once, I remember, I even asked him why it was he went on so about biscuits and honey, what was it about biscuits and honey he liked so much, knowing full well such a question was beyond him but enjoying teasing him in this way, teasing him as once, when I was a child, he had teased me. But to my surprise Father took the question seriously, made a determined effort to answer it. Speaking slowly, his mind’s cart bumping down a long-unused track, he said, “Well, you know... you know I’ve never...I’ve never had a bad biscuit and honey.” That morning, for the first time in weeks, I laughed and laughed.

  And so our lives progressed. Time passed slowly on the mountain, uneventfully. Once a week we received a visit from Brother Edgar: supplies were delivered, news of the abbey, but, nowadays, no tabula. Sometimes, when I could get away from the hermit for a moment or two, give him something to eat that I knew would keep him occupied for a while, I would run down to the crag, run down to the crag and watch as Brother wound his way back down the mountain away from us, away from me. And with each passing week it seemed the world Edgar returned to, the world of monks and order, Rule and discipline, became more and more distant, more and more removed, so that, in a way, it began to seem as though I watched not a brother walking away from me but Redestone itself, my life at Redestone, the boy I had been there, any obligations I might owe the place.

  Which is not to say I didn’t think about my prayer, worry about the fact that it might as yet be, in a very real sense, abroad upon the land. But I had been, I believe, shaken by what I had discovered on Modra nect, the profound change Father Hermit had undergone, so shaken that any decision, any course of action, seemed now beyond me, that just getting through this day and the next was the most I could hope for. Now some will say (some have said) that this was only a blind, that I took refuge in a pretended shock to avoid doing that which clearly I should have done: return to the abbey, confess my sin, suffer the consequences. And there may well be some truth to this. I was terrified of expulsion, had seen the pain it caused Ealhmund. Still, you

  must remember how close Father and I had been. This was the man whose Way I had followed. Did I now look upon the place to which it led me? What does it mean when the person you want to impress more than any other in the world can no longer remember your name, will never again be able to remember your name? When the man whose thoughts fill your tabulum has had his own effaced, what does anything matter at all?

  Of course a great chorus of nameless monks rose from their graves to answer that question each time I asked it. “Faith!” they cried in the approved response, the word echoing across the centuries like an illustration of itself, empty of all but letters, affectionless, unsupported, emaciated, meaning absolutely everything or absolutely nothing at all. And this, I reminded myself, this was what Father himself had always wanted for me. “You must give up everything,” he had said, “if you want to win anything at all.” And now, surely, I had. All my hopes, all my dreams of becoming a holy man, my prayers, my devotions, all these seemed little more than self-indulgent fantasies before the fatherless reality I now faced. I told myself that this was true faith, that from this point forward I was on my own, whatever I accomplished, for good or ill, would be mine, that I would have no one to blame or praise but myself, that, indeed, by losing Father I now gained the solitude he had always wanted for me, that for the rest of my life I would know the true emptiness, the true reality: Creation bereft of all but Himself. But it was a lonely place I had come to. I suppose I had always known that it would be. And still I missed my Father Hermit.

  These then were the thoughts, the worries, the concerns, that occupied my mind during that long wet summer’s end. And then one day Brother Edgar failed to appear with our supplies. At first, of course, I assumed I had miscalculated, that tomorrow was the appointed day, or the next day or even the next. But then I walked once more through my fingers, remembered the days one by one and realized that, as incredible as it seemed, I was right, had to be right, that this was the Sabbath, that Edgar—no not Edgar but Redestone, mighty Redestone herself—Redestone had failed in her obligations to me!

  It is sad b
ut true that this realization brought me not a little cheer. You cannot imagine how difficult it is for an oblate, the unerring rectitude of his elders, the feeling that, surely, no one as unworthy as himself (we are, after all, reminded of it daily) could live up to such perfection. And then to discover them imperfect, flawed, pierced by the same weaknesses with which we are riddled.... Well, it was as if a great load had been lifted from my shoulders; I could hardly wait to get down to the crag, look upon the shameful miscreant, watch as she blushed and writhed. But even as I thought these thoughts, felt this perverse joy, another part of me hesitated. For nothing like this had ever happened before. Ever. Not that I was really worried about the supplies. We had plenty of food, at least enough to get us through the next week. But, still, it was a commonplace in my life that the commonplace was fixed; it did not change: Prime followed Matins, Terce Prime, and Brother Edgar carried supplies to the hermit on the Sabbath. That this should not be so was like saying water might be dry or air edible. So it was that, even as I wanted more than anything else in the world to get down to the crag, see if I could determine why Edgar had failed to appear, still there was a part of me anxious about what I might find there.

  It was nearly None by the time I convinced myself Brother really wasn’t coming, and by that time Father had already taken his nap. But, thankfully, I was able to persuade him otherwise (the man passed from waking to sleeping easily in those days, as though sleeping itself were his natural state and waking a condition difficult to maintain), and once I had him safely bedded down again, I hurried to the crag as fast as my legs would carry me.