The Rule of Sebastian

by Shelter Somerset

  His lips ached with dryness as he whispered God’s instructions. He recalled Christ’s chapped lips when he entered the place of the skulls, where his crucifixion awaited. He’d rejected the wine soldiers had given him to drink, refusing to even moisten his lips with it. Casey’s suffering was a trip to a theme park in comparison. But to his young soul, pain wielded no prejudice.

  At the end of his recitation, he slipped off his sandals and scapular and climbed into bed, still cloaked in his tunic. Let them sleep clothed and girded with cinctures or cords, St. Benedict proclaimed. Often Casey wanted to strip the garment from his body and sleep nude, the way he had back home in Kansas. He supposed it was for the best. Temptation came less often without fidgety fingers finding his warm flesh.

  Did Brother Sebastian, alone in his cell, ever strip off his tunic and falter with temptation?

  Was he doing it now, while thinking of Casey?

  Or did he picture the beautiful dark stranger in the infirmary?

  Casey rolled to his side, wrapped his tunic tight around his body. The usual moldy smell, along with the darkness, engulfed him. Whichever way he turned, the same stale barrenness met his wide gaze. At only eight thirty at night, he still had difficulty falling off to sleep right away.

  Outside, the snowstorm raged on. The windowpane rattled above his small desk, where he stowed his theological texts and chanting guides. The shadowy shape of his flute case rested on top. He squeezed his slender pillow, biting into the cotton. Had he lost Sebastian before ever embracing him?

  He tossed and turned the night, until giving up on sleep about two hours before Brother George’s signature rap on each of the cell doors to rouse them at three in the morning for Vigils. Restless, he sat at his desk and read Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints under the faint glow of his desk lamp.

  He took refuge in the saints. They sought a life grander than the status quo that Casey had lived. They found caves and deserts, away from civilization, far more accommodating than the world of man. Casey often wondered if any of them had been gay. Outcasts longing for acceptance from a greater power.

  Wind continued to wail outside while he drew inspiration from his choice saints. At least the snow had stopped for a time. He rested his eyes a moment, and was about to switch off the lamp and try to salvage what remained of sleep when he heard the alarm ringing in the corridor. Only once since his stay had the emergency bells heralded them, when an electrical fire had broken out in the kitchen the day before Thanksgiving.

  What now? he thought, snapping his book shut. Without bothering to pull on his scapular or slip on his sandals, he peeked into the corridor.

  The other monks were gathering outside their cells in various states of sleepiness. Brother Hubert’s tunic draped over his hunched body, uncinched, and for a moment Casey stood staring in shock and amusement. He noticed Brother Sebastian’s strong calves while he struggled into his sandals.

  Panic etched their faces. They gazed about, expressing concern that a fire might force them into the snowstorm. Sebastian calmed them above the din of the bell.

  “No need for worry until we find out what’s happening,” he said.

  Right then the bell stopped, and Brother Rodel scurried up to them from the bowels of the abbey.

  “He’s gone,” he shouted, hands clenched by his sides in anguish. “He’s gone! He’s gone from his bed! The stranger is gone from the infirmary!”

  “Are you certain?” Sebastian asked.

  “Brother Jerome and I searched everywhere. He’s gone!”

  Chapter Four

  BROTHER RODEL hurried them to the infirmary in a flood of white tunics. The hard slap of many sandals and the squeal of Brother Giles’s wheelchair sounded odd to Sebastian in the darkest morning hour. Their shadows chased them—and then seemed to surround them in mockery. Once inside the infirmary, they stared in disbelief. Brother Rodel had not mistaken a bad dream for reality. The stranger’s bed sat empty, the bodiless IV pushed against the far wall, the tube dangling like a dead snake. Brother Jerome’s wide, moist eyes exposed his fears and shame.

  “I was asleep in the bed next to him,” he said, his eyes tearing behind his crooked glasses. “I didn’t hear him get up at all. Didn’t hear a thing. It was Brother Rodel who woke me.”

  Father Paolo and Brother Lucien, the last to reach them, breathed heavily by the door. Both appeared frazzled. Brother Lucien, in the process of cinching his tunic, glanced about, dazed-looking and flushed. Brother Rodel laid pleading eyes on the abbot.

  “It’s my fault,” he said. “I’d been awake, sitting in a chair by his side watching over him, since he’d been stirring so much. I worried he might pull out his IV. I went to use the bathroom for no more than ten minutes. When I returned, he’d vanished. Just like that.”

  “We looked everywhere,” Brother Jerome added. “When we realized there was no finding him, we pulled the alarm.”

  “What could’ve happened to him?” Brother George said, wringing his hands. What remained of his brown hair sat mussed atop his round head. “He couldn’t possibly have gone back outside, you think. Not out there again, in all this snow?”

  “What should we do?” Brother Micah asked while looking in Sebastian’s direction.

  “Let’s break up and look in every nook and cranny,” Sebastian said.

  “What if he’s dangerous?” Brother Rodel’s eyes expanded. “What if he’s an escaped convict like I feared, and he’s hiding, waiting to jump us?”

  The brothers flinched. Brother Hubert shook his head, and tears fell from under his dark-framed glasses. “I don’t want to believe it,” he said.

  “We have nothing to fear in God’s house,” Father Paolo said. “Now let’s begin our search before we may never find him.”

  The brothers’ long shadows fanned around them as they spread throughout the abbey. Heavy sighs and grunts traveled along the cavernous corridors. Brother Giles wheeled about on the wings of a phoenix on a desperate mission, hesitating only when he turned sharp corners. The squeal of his chair ricocheted off the walls. Some of the brothers even looked inside baskets and drawers too small for a lapdog. Delores kept close by Sebastian’s side. Urgency for the hunt shone in the St. Bernard’s big brown eyes.

  “Find him, girl, find him,” Sebastian whispered, hoping the eight-year-old hadn’t lost her instinct to track and retrieve. She’d proven to be a master at catching the abbey’s numerous mice, especially in winter when they took refuge indoors from the cold and snow. Certainly she’d uncover a grown man.

  He searched in the six vacant cells, as well as in Brother Augustine’s at the far end of the corridor, where he appeared undisturbed and asleep on his bed, peered into the two toilet stalls in the bathroom, looked around the dining hall alongside Brothers Rodel and Micah. Not even the mousetraps went undisturbed. In the sacristy, he pushed aside the storage boxes until Brother Hubert rushed in, glancing about, lost and aimless.

  “Anything?” Sebastian asked him.

  He shrugged, his eyes still moist with fretful tears and the blood vessels on his nose ready to explode. “Nothing at all.”

  “Come on, girl.”

  Moving stealthier than a cougar, Sebastian hugged the perimeter of the cloister while he peered into the darkness of the snow-riddled garden. When nothing turned up, he ordered Delores to follow him into the library. He ran from arched window to arched window, halfheartedly straining to look for the stranger lying in the snow the way Casey had first discovered him, realizing he’d have no such luck.

  Then an idea struck him.

  “Let’s go, old girl. Follow me.”

  With Delores close by Sebastian’s hip, her tail wagging like the rotors of a windmill, Sebastian sprinted off, swinging right then left through the long stretches of corridor. He was about to switch on the kitchen light by impulse, but curtailed the movement. Mulling over an idea, he restrained Delores by the fur on her neck and whispered for her to stay quiet. Lingering aromas of Brother Mica
h’s tomato soup made the hunt seem like a game.

  Sebastian glanced into the dark. Residual light from the corridor highlighted the pots and pans hanging from hooks and the kitchen knives stuck to the magnetic wall strip. He wanted to chastise himself for ensuring none of the knives went missing and worried that Brother Rodel—and he—might have been right about the stranger’s criminal intentions.

  Inhaling a heavy breath, he squatted by the St. Bernard’s melon-sized head and whispered into her floppy ear, “Find him, Delores. Go ahead. Find him, girl.”

  Delores, comprehending her best friend’s order, scuttled about the kitchen, stopping only to nibble on crumbs on the terracotta tiles missed by Brother Micah’s broom. She left smear marks from her nose on the stainless steel cabinet doors, and seemed little interested in what was behind them. But near the pantry she scratched at the door and let loose a high-pitched whimper. Sebastian scurried over. He opened the door carefully. Darkness prevented seeing even the cans and boxes stored on the high shelves. Without any further deliberation, he switched on the pantry light. He jerked back, gaped.

  In the corner, curled in a tight ball and clutching a box of saltines to his chest, the stranger shook like the branches of an aspen in a stiff breeze. And he was naked.

  Sebastian did not wish to frighten the stranger any further. He pacified his shock with a smile, kept his left hand still by his side while he grabbed Delores’s neck with his right.

  “Did the alarm frighten you?” he said, using his softest tone. “Don’t be afraid. You’re safe here. Don’t worry. No one will hurt you. We were only worried where you ran off to.”

  Thin streams of dried blood streaked his naked body, from when he must have ripped the IV tube from his arm. Sebastian could imagine the horror the man must’ve experienced upon gaining full consciousness and finding himself lying in a strange bed inside what to many outsiders appeared to be a prison.

  Sebastian spotted a chef’s smock someone had tossed on top of a sack of brown rice. Mindful to avoid upsetting the stranger, he gingerly reached for it, squatted to the man’s eye level, and handed it to him. “You can use this to cover yourself. Go ahead.”

  The man stared at Sebastian with large black eyes. Slowly, he took the smock from Sebastian with a trembling hand and draped it over his body.

  “There. That’s better, isn’t it?”

  Brother Micah stopped short behind Sebastian. In a flash, he gasped and dashed off, calling for the others to come to the kitchen. Seconds later, the brothers herded by the pantry door, gaping at the shaking stranger.

  By then Sebastian had already shuffled closer to ease the young man, and was whispering for him to remain calm, doing the best he could to ignore the brothers pushing behind him.

  “You’re in a Trappist monastery,” he said. “Mt. Ouray at Monfrere in Colorado. You’re safe here. We wish to help you.”

  The stranger held up the smock to his neck and pivoted his shoulders away from Sebastian’s hand. Sebastian pulled back.

  “We found you outside, lying unconscious in the snow. You’ve been recovering in our infirmary. Would you prefer to go back there and rest? We’ll take you. You have nothing to fear.”

  “He must want more than crackers,” Brother Eusebius said, his baritone voice a sudden blast in Sebastian’s ears.

  “I’ll get him some vegetable broth.” Brother Rodel scampered off, followed by cabinets opening and shutting and pots and pans banging.

  “What made you think to look for him in here?” Brother Micah asked Sebastian.

  “I guessed he’d be hungry after his long sleep and follow his nose to the kitchen.”

  “That’s ingenious,” Brother Micah whispered.

  “It was Delores who found him.” Sebastian patted the hound’s head as she squirmed to get closer to the stranger. Casey, using a cracker that had fallen to the floor, lured her out of the pantry. Behind Sebastian, Father Paolo cleared his throat.

  “Let’s get him to his feet and return him to the infirmary,” he said. “It’s not proper to allow him to eat on the kitchen floor like a dog.”

  THE stranger spooned the steaming vegetable broth into his mouth while the brothers hovered around his bed, layering him in shadows. They gazed upon him as if he were Lazarus raised from the dead. In many ways, he was. Brother Jerome had instructed Brother Rodel to reconnect the IV to his arm, and the tube rustled while he ate. Once he had acclimated to the broth’s temperature, he laid aside the spoon, which captured the lone ray of light between the brothers’ fused shoulders, and gulped from the bowl.

  “Steady now,” Brother Jerome said. “You don’t want to overstuff yourself. It’s best if you eat slowly.”

  “How are you feeling?” Brother George asked.

  The stranger nodded while he tried to slow his gulps. “I’m good, I guess. Am I…. Am I really in a… monastery?”

  “You are indeed,” Brother Giles said. “You’ve been with us for two whole days now.”

  Brother Rodel took the emptied bowl from him. “Would you like some more?”

  The young man looked at him, almost pleadingly, and his ebony eyes emanated shame and desperation. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not a good idea.” Brother Jerome held Brother Rodel by his sleeve. “He can have some more later, perhaps at lunch, when he’s stronger. Too much right now will make him sick.”

  Sebastian worried about the state of his health, but he couldn’t help but wonder more who lay in their infirmary. The Lord knows the thoughts of men, proclaims Psalm 94.11. The Lord, but not Sebastian Harkin. “What brought you to us in the dead of winter?” he asked. “We’ve been anxious to learn.”

  “Yes, please tell us,” Brother Hubert echoed. “Why did you come?”

  The stranger swallowed and seemed to fall into a daydream. His black eyes stared beyond the brothers’ merged shoulders, through the wall into the corridor. “I… I don’t know why I came here.”

  “You can’t recall,” Sebastian said, his forehead pained with wrinkles, “or you traveled here with no clear reason?”

  “I can’t recall,” he said.

  Brother Eusebius mellowed his deep voice. “You can trust us now, son. Isn’t that why you came to us? To seek help with something? Don’t fear confiding in us. Tell us why you came.”

  The stranger shook his head. “I told you. I can’t remember.”

  The brothers shot each other puzzled glances.

  “Are you sure?” Sebastian said.

  “All I seem to remember are the initials JC. Maybe that’s my name or a nickname. Or maybe it’s where I’m from. I can’t remember anything.”

  Father Paolo drew his hands to his chest. “You can’t remember anything else?”

  “I swear, that’s it.”

  “What about your age?” Sebastian asked. “Your hometown? Your family? Can you picture any of it in your mind?”

  “Not really. I know I’m not from here, though. But then maybe….” He dropped his eyes to his knees beneath the heavy blankets and sighed. “How would I know if I can’t remember?”

  The brothers observed him, allowing him time to gather his thoughts.

  Brother Micah broke the contemplative silence, a leer seared into his insipid voice. “Why can’t he remember anything?”

  “He’s got amnesia.” Brother Jerome folded his arms across his white tunic, which was still askew from when he’d awakened in a hurry. “It’s not uncommon when one regains consciousness after a lengthy period. The high altitude might have made it worse. It’s been known to happen.”

  “Amnesia?” Brother George frowned. “Now we’ll never learn anything about him.”

  “Most likely it’ll be short term,” Brother Jerome assured. “He’ll remember things, I’m certain. I’ve seen it before in my day. He’ll snap out of it.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” Brother Giles asked.

  “I suggest we give him some added rest and breathing room,” Broth
er Jerome said, urging his fellow brothers back with a flounce of his arms. “Sleep is the best thing for him now. I’ll keep watch over him.”

  “We’re in time for Vigils,” Father Paolo added, ushering everyone to the door. “Let’s do what Brother Jerome requests and fetch our cowls before withdrawing for the chapel. Come along. You too, Brother Rodel. Our guest is in fine hands. Give him room.”

  Sebastian lingered behind. The young man who could only remember the initials “JC” peered at the ceiling, frozen in a daze. Reluctant obedience stole Sebastian’s breath when he obeyed the abbot’s command and turned to leave, although he longed to stay and ask the stranger a million more questions.

  “GLORY be to the Father,” the brothers sang out, following each of Father Paolo’s readings from the cantorum. Next they stood and intoned the canticles. Their droning voices rubbed against the chapel’s acoustical walls, wispy, like smoke from an extinguished candle. Wafting aimlessly and with finite expectation. Their voices flowed over the awareness that the stranger who now resided in their abbey home was fully conscious. And in the midst of winter, without any means for him or any of them to get off the mountain, in an odd way, he was their prisoner.

  Or was it the other way around?

  Vigils ended, and each monk returned to his private lectio divina. Sebastian hoped to find clues to the stranger in his thoughtful reading of Scripture. They had waited on a bed of nails to learn something about him. The mysterious man had awakened. The answers to his identity and for his arrival at the abbey still slept deep inside him. Sebastian had never imagined he’d suffer from amnesia. Little to do now but wait until the young man’s memory improved.

  As the morning progressed, Father Paolo permitted the monks to cater to the stranger’s needs whenever Brother Jerome or Brother Rodel requested help. Sebastian noted the excitement in their eyes, shimmering in the abbey’s recessed lighting, whenever Brother Jerome or Brother Rodel gave the signal they needed someone to fetch food, drink, or toiletries for their patient.