by William Peak
“There’s nothing mere about a Pater Noster. And besides,” Father less certain here, “that’s the penance I always assign, isn’t it?”
Well, yes. I couldn’t argue with him there. But still....
“Now make an act of contrition so we can eat.”
“But...?”
The eyes grew large, Father’s hunger brooking no dissent.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
Father smiled. “‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the...’ What was the
rest of that?”
“You taught me that prayer, Father.”
“I did?”
I nodded, smiled.
Father looked down at his lap. “So...” he said, noticing the patch again, picking at it experimentally, “may we eat now?”
I almost laughed. He was like a child really, a little boy, and at that moment I felt an almost paternal regard for him. “Yes, we can eat Father. But first you have to absolve me of my sin.”
The face came up, looked worried.
“It’s all right, I’ll help you. Remember, ‘God, the Father of mercies’?”
“God, the Father of mercies....”
“‘Through the death and the resurrection of His Son....’” “Through the death and....”
“Resurrection.”
“Through the death and resurrection of His Son....”
“Has reconciled....”
“Has reconciled the world to Himself and sent...and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins....”—this last said quickly, Father spitting it out before he could forget it again.
“That’s right, very good! Now, remember the rest? Through the ministry of the Church....’”
A small frown. “Through the ministry of the Church....” Another smile. “Through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I...and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
And it was done, the Names invoked, my confession made, Father’s absolution given. It might not have been canonically correct but, under the circumstances, it was—I honestly believed— the best I could hope for.
XXXIX
Eanflæd. Eanflæd. Do you have any idea what it is like for me to commit that name to writing, to finally confess to the fact of her existence, to the fact of our.... Well, what name should I give the utter nothing that has connected us all these years, the meetings that never took place, the messages that never got sent, the gestures that figure—wild and fantastic—only in my mind? Like some anxious spirit I have hovered over her life, caught glimpses from the terrace of someone who might or might not be she, listened for reports of her in Chapter, celebrated her successes, mourned her losses, prayed for her soul. And is it possible...? Do you suppose Eanflæd has ever thought of me?
Yes. Yes I know, I am a silly old man, the worst kind of monk—a dreamer, a mountebank, one whose vocation is little more than façade. Yet I cannot help myself, I do wonder.... Does she ever think of the boy she visited once beneath a cherry tree, the oblate with whom she shared, if not an afternoon, at least a portion of one? Does she fare well? Does her husband love her? Does he care for her as he should? Is her larder well-stocked? Does her complexion remain, as it does in my mind, soft, pure, lit from within? Does she sleep well? Or, now that we have drawn so much closer to its door, does the house of the dead once more figure in her dreams? If it does, I hope that it has become less frightening, less dramatic with age. I hope that, were the two of us to meet again, sit beneath a cherry tree, share its fruit, we might laugh over the things that bother us now, our knees, how they refuse to bend, our eyes, how they fail to see, our friends, how they insist upon dying. She would tell me about her children. She would cry, perhaps, over the two she lost. I would share with her that I have prayed—and continue to pray—for all five of them. And then, maybe, if the moment suited, we would talk again of her dream, that place, the house where bodies refuse to lie still, where the dead turn and trouble one another, trouble us, and how, with age, even that agitation loses some of its terror, seems, if just as real, less awful, more familiar, a bogeyman grown almost, if not quite, ridiculous with time.
The other day a novice said something to me about the “forest path” and it took me a moment to realize what he was talking about, that somewhere along the line he’d mistaken the word “forest” for “furnace” and now that path which once signified so much to me, means nothing to him, has become only a way through a wood. How long before such a mistake becomes common usage, before all that we have known and loved passes, arcane and archaic, into dead and empty past?
So many stories are told now of the death of Father Gwynedd, of how he asked to be carried down to the stream where it had been his habit to pray, and how, sitting there, singing God’s
praises, meditating upon the blessings he had received in this life, the good man passed peacefully into the next. And I would not deny such an account for, in its essentials, it is true, and has doubtless set a pious and helpful example for many that have followed after him. Still, as with most such tales, the event itself was both simpler and more complicated.
It was not long after Father heard my confession that his health took a turn for the worse. His feet began to swell, which (though it seemed a minor complaint at the time) clearly made the hermit uneasy. Indeed, if I did not watch him closely, the old man was liable to remove his sandals to relieve the pressure they caused him and wander thereafter barefoot about his camp. This I should not have minded were it not for the fact that, as unsteady as he was, I worried he might veer toward the fire and step upon a coal. Now it was a peculiar feature of this illness that whenever Father lay down, and especially if he lay down with his feet raised, the swelling subsided. But even this afforded the poor man little comfort for, just as the pressure in his feet abated, Father would begin to experience difficulty breathing—the two events falling so quickly one upon the other that one could believe them related, that whatever ailed Father’s feet ran—when those parts were elevated—down to contaminate and congest his lungs. Needless to say this inability to lie down comfortably made sleeping difficult. Many’s the night I moved seamlessly from nightmare to nightmare, one moment the furnace huffing and hissing at me dangerously, the next the hermit himself, lips drawn back in a sort of snarling rictus, eyes staring big at me over the fire, uncomprehending and childlike, desperate, afraid. At such times the only remedy was open air. I would gather up our blankets and lead Father down to the little stream that ran below his camp. There, the night’s terror already behind him, forgotten, Father would fall into a fast and easy sleep. But not I. For then it was that I lay awake, my memory sound, triumphant, teasing me with visions of things to come.
As any of you know who have nursed a brother through such an illness, the evil that first dares enter your patient only at night, soon grows bold and advances upon him by day. And so it was that, within a very short time indeed, the hermit began to have difficulty breathing regardless of the hour. Then, as if he retained some physical memory of the solace it had provided the night before, Father would repair to his little stream. At the time I assumed he found the air down there more congenial to his lungs, the waters soothing to his feet, but it may well be that the associations he had with the place, the prayers he had prayed there, also played some role in the comfort it now gave him. Whatever the cause, sooner or later, no matter where he had begun the day, I would find the old man sitting down there, staring contentedly at the little flow of water, apparently finding its vagaries as diverting as you or I might those of a mighty stream. Sometimes I would join him and—though by this time Father had as much difficulty remembering the names for things as he did those for people—still he would point out those that caught his eye, a pretty leaf, a shiny stone, the object likely as not called by a quality as its name— ““green” perhaps or “slippery”—the man unable, even suffering from a deficit of words
, to keep the silence, stifle his desire to share, to teach, to communicate his fascination with all that went on in the world around him.
Those were good days. When I look back on them now, I realize they were very good days indeed. But they did not seem so then. Then I followed a strange round, my hours devoted not so much to praise as to worry, my intervals to endless desperate calculation. Would our food last? Had my confession worked? And if it had, did that mean the prayers I now prayed daily also worked? Did He relent? Was it possible that, even now, the livid stream cooled, withdrew back up the valley whence it had come, the pestilence in turn slinking off down river, its source, its inspiration, dissipated, gone? And if that were true, if everything had turned out as I wished (realizing even as I considered the possibility how immodest and unlikely a proposition it was), did that mean that the most crucial of our needs would also be met, that at this very moment someone might be climbing up to relieve us, climbing up the mountain to bring us food, to feed and save us?
For if someone did not come soon—come very soon I prayed— we would begin to starve.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, what God sends us in our extremity? We cry out for a religious, some priest or brother to come help us, come save us from the dangers we face, and instead of the grownup we’ve prayed for—the man of mettle, the abba, the rabboni, the hero, the saint—we get Stuf—Stuf the charcoal-maker, Stuf the heathen, Stuf the clown.
I’ll never forget the day he wandered into our camp, what it felt like to look up and see him standing there, the scare it gave me. Looking back on it now I realize this must have been Stuf’s intention, that the man must have enjoyed causing these little sensations, for he seemed always to arrive like that: suddenly, mysteriously, as if materializing out of thin air. I wonder, did he study his approaches? Do you suppose he sat and waited for just the right moment, the instant when he knew he could really startle a person, catch him with his guard down? Whatever, he was certainly good at it. Normally, at that time of year, when the leaves lie thick upon the ground, you can hear someone coming long before he actually trudges into view. But that day I heard nothing. I was working down by the stream as I remember it, cleaning a pot maybe, maybe some bedclothes, when Father moved in a way that caught my attention, made me look up, follow his glance toward the wood. At first I saw nothing—saplings still dark from last night's rain, leaf litter fawn-colored, glowing faintly—and then suddenly, too abruptly, unrelated things began to move, join, commingle, so that what had seemed to be nothing, an emptiness between edges, became instead something, extricated itself from its surroundings, tree becoming trunk, limb leg, leaf eye, Stuf stepping from among the saplings like a man stepping from behind a wall—a little spin to celebrate the fact, a wink to say I told you so.
I was, as I remember it, appalled—appalled and overjoyed. It was everything I could do to keep from running to the man, running to him and bowing down before him, washing his very feet.
Which, as it turned out, was—at least according to Stuf— exactly how the hermit had greeted him when first he’d visited that
place.
I never did find out if that was true. You know you have to be careful with the hill people: they’ll lie to you just for the sake of lying, just to make a story sound pretty or give it a fancy ending. And Stuf was no different from any other. The man loved to put on airs, affect a station and dignity out of all proportion to his own. Yet, truth be told, it wouldn’t surprise me if the hermit really had greeted him that way, greeted him as he would have Christ. Pagan or not, Stuf was a man; and I never saw Father deny any man his company or the comfort of his hearth.
For his part, Stuf treated the hermit with an elaborate and uncharacteristic respect. If Father stood, Stuf stood (and could not be prevailed upon to sit again). If Father did not care for his food, Stuf did not care for his either (and looked at me as if I had done something wrong). And then there was the way he listened to the man. By that time, by the time the charcoal-maker found us, began to deliver us from our hunger, Father had reached a point where language itself was now often beyond him. He would look at you, eyes alert, brow creasing and uncreasing as he spoke, for all intents and purposes the image of a man making some difficult but important point, yet what he said, what actually came out of his mouth, was little more than noise, a series of sounds that in form and cadence mimicked speech but, in truth, never attained anything like its meaning. And Stuf loved it. When Father spoke like that, utterly nonsensically, the charcoal-maker would sit up and pay attention as you or I might sit up and pay attention to a great prophet or holy man.
At first (I will admit it here), I was taken in by this. When Stuf explained that men like Father were, quite literally, touched, that some one or some thing had reached down from heaven and dealt them a glancing blow, granting them in the process a vision so astonishingly clear, so utterly at odds with our own, that they were rendered incapable of ordinary speech, I wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that the Father I had known still existed, that if I but listened to him closely, attended to what he had to say, I might regain that which I had lost, find again the Father I had known, the
Father I had loved, the Father I missed so much.
But of course it wasn’t true. Again and again I did as Stuf bade me, and, again and again, sitting by the hermit, listening to his garbled speech, I heard not wisdom but dementia, saw not a prophet but an old and feeble man. For Father had taught me too well. I knew his sign, could not ignore it, and where Stuf saw meaning in the creasing of that brow, I saw worry, a glimmer of the reason that as yet resided there; and it frightened me, it frightened me to think that somewhere deep inside him, somewhere so deep it could not get out, a part of Father did in fact still exist, and, existing, knew, understood, that the sounds coming from his mouth were not right, that they did not mean what he wished them to mean, meant, in fact, nothing at all.
I went often to the crag in those days. There was no need for me at the camp now; Stuf was there, Stuf could watch over Father. So I went to the crag. I would sit and look out over the valley and I would think about things. I would think about Father and I would think about the things he had said to me, the things we had done together, the places he had shown me. And sooner or later, no matter how much I tried to avoid it, I would think about the day he had taught me to love tracking, the day when we had lain together and awaited a vixen’s return, what it had been like to curl up beneath his arm, to know myself safe there, the feel of his woolens rough against my face, the smell of cook-fires embedded in them, the smell of cook-fires and breakfast and, further down, faint but real, the smell of Father himself, the aroma of the man, his hair, his skin, his sweat, the heart that kept it warm, the heart that kept me warm.
Once, years before, the hermit had spoken to me of death. I had been talking to him about the pestilence as I remember it, what it had been like for us down in the valley during that first visitation, and, in particular, I had been telling him about Oftfor, what it had been like to watch my fellow oblate die—making of course the most of myself in the telling, turning myself into the uncomplaining hero of my tale. But, as he always did, Father took me at my word. His brow softened, I remember, and he reached for me,
touched my hand. There was, I believe, something in the man that responded to suffering, bent toward it as a physician bends to a wound; and it embarrassed me. I was ashamed to see my invented grief taken for real, the bereavement I affected worried over, commiserated with. But looking back on it now...well, who’s to say? Maybe he was right. Maybe I felt the boy’s death more keenly than I realized. Certainly I’ve never forgotten what Father said to me that day, the way he refused to explain away what had happened to me, what had happened to poor little Oftfor. “God is wild,’’ he told me. “God is uncontrollable. We cannot appease Him with our prayers or drive Him with our sacrifices. He does as He pleases. And what pleases Him is beyond our ken. He takes what we love most—mother, father, friend, child—and rips them from
us brutally, without warning or care. There is no succor. They are gone. He has taken them. And He is silent. You stare across the field and the wind plays at your face and there are no answers, only wildness. We are helpless. We either accept Him as He is— wanton, willfull—or we lose all hope and grow bitter and sad. We continue to live and love at the whim of an unknowable Being. We take comfort in the beliefs and rituals we have built up over the years to placate Him but, in the final analysis, they are like straws before the wind. The first blow and they are gone. The wind roars where it will.”
Of course, at the time, I was terribly shocked by this. I even, I remember, considered reporting the hermit. I had only recently begun visiting him then, and the picture of myself standing before Faults, denouncing the man’s heterodoxy as I had been taught to do, an oblate true to his station and the Rule, pleased me. But of course I didn’t report him. I had, I believe, even as early as that, begun to love the hermit a little, to love him and to appreciate the way he sometimes spoke to me as an equal—however much what he said might frighten me. And besides, I could always tell myself it was just his grief talking, the sadness he felt over the death of Brother Ælfhelm. You must remember that this was a time when the horror of the pestilence, the memory of it, was still fresh in our minds. It was not at all uncommon in those days to see grown
men beating their breasts as they prayed, to hear an eerie wailing rise up at night from the village. Once, I remember, I even saw a brother overtaken as he walked upon the garth. He was near the church as I remember it, and, despite the fact he turned his face to the wall, pulled his hood up over his head, you could tell the man was in the grip of some strong emotion, that his shoulders went up and down like that because something was happening inside him, something was perhaps breaking inside him, something deep and dark and irreplaceable. So it seemed acceptable to think the hermit’s outburst had been just that, an outburst, the expression of a perfectly natural and even humble grief.