The Oblate's Confession (47 page)

Stuf’s mouth, “day fades, First One sleeps. He dreams...lunacy, nightmare, creeping death.” The charcoal-maker’s eyes popped open. He looked around, found me, smiled as if he’d done something funny. “Of course he
will
wake up again, someday. He must.” Stuf shook his head, chuckled to himself. “And when that happens...well, when that happens, that will be the end.”

A light sound, a sound scarcely recognizable as a sound, something just above the sound of the water, the whisper of the breeze, floated in upon us and, as quickly, disappeared. Stuf glanced up toward the abbey, no more disturbed by this reminder of holy office than he would have been by the chatter of a squirrel or the roll of distant thunder. I shuddered, thinking of what I was about to do, how, at one and the same time, it seemed both inconceivable and unavoidable.

“But what if you had help making the charcoal?” I asked again. “What if, well, what if I came up there to help you? What if you had me?”

Stuf looked at me and for the first time in my life I saw him as

he really was, an older man, perhaps as many as thirty winters behind him, all the days he had lived through, all the afflictions, and in that instant I knew, knew as clearly as I knew his name, that Stuf was no fool, that, for all his childish antics, he would no more take me under his wing, risk the wrath of those he did business with, than he would knowingly build his clamp on bad ground, light it before a rain. Heathen or not, I was the child and he the adult, I the novice, he the solemnly-professed monk.

“The reason I came down here,” he said, “was to find you.”

A flicker of hope—the idea that he did want me, that this statement signalled deliverance—flared within me and was, as quickly, extinguished. “The hermit sent me,” said Stuf, his voice calm, unhurried, an older man sharing a casual moment with a child. “I have a message for you.”

I looked away, embarrassed. “Yes?”

“He asks,” said Stuf, “that you pray for him.”

Looking back on it now I sometimes wonder if the failure of the wheat didn’t have something to do with it. It was bad enough that there was discontent, that the community had not failed to notice that its abbot did not eat with them, would not join with them in the work of the fields. But to have an oblate remain fat and oily despite their admonitions to the contrary must have seemed, in the face of impending famine, an affront to their authority that neither Maban nor Godwin could safely ignore. If one such nonentity could so blatantly flout convention, what might not the rest of the community contemplate?

And how easy it was, under such conditions, to direct attention away from their failing and onto Ealhmund. When everyone was hungry and grumbling about their hunger, how satisfying it

must have been for Brother Prior to point out the fat boy at the end of the row, the one who, despite an otherwise universal shriveling, still managed to find enough to maintain his own bulk, in the process insinuating that, in keeping with the logic of want, it might be Ealhmund alone who, in his secret raids upon the larder, deprived the rest of us of our rightful share, and that therefore, both literally and figuratively, we all suffered for Ealhmund’s sins.

Of course what this really meant was that Ealhmund suffered. He was made to beg for his food, crawling on his knees from table to table, his bowl held out before him, forbidden to speak, to sign, to do anything other than look up at us with those large uncomprehending eyes of his, those eyes that seemed to ask to be beaten even as they begged to be fed. I remember him lying on the floor before Faults. He had never been allowed in Faults before, but Maban allowed him in for that. He was too fat to lie comfortably on the floor and, after a while, his belly would make strange noises. Maban used to laugh when that happened, ask, as if genuinely concerned, if Ealhmund were hungry, if there were anything he could get him, some honeycakes perhaps? When this, as I suppose it was meant to, elicited still more sounds from the poor boy’s abdomen, Maban would poke him with his shoe. Not hard. Never once did I see Maban actually kick Ealhmund. But he would poke him with the point of his shoe as one might poke a recalcitrant dog.

I would like to say that my fellow oblate drew comfort from his suffering, grew wise, accepting, detached. We are taught that, aren’t we, that in suffering we become Christ-like, that through suffering we have the opportunity to redeem, if not the world, at least our selves? But what if suffering is just suffering? What if the one who suffers finds neither nobility nor reason in his pain? What if there is only confusion, hurt, loss? We do not expect a horse to learn from its suffering, a cow. Why then a boy like Ealhmund?

He began to prey upon his former master. Not viciously or vindictively but childishly, lashing out at him as a child lashes out at its playmate without thought or cause, knowing only that it

wants something and hasn’t got it. Of course there were those who said Botulf had only himself to blame. Botulf had been the first after all, in his capacity as Brother Kitchens, to encourage Ealhmund’s gluttony, pouring treats down the boy as one pours scraps down a pig to ready it for slaughter. For some time before the arrival of Godwin this had been a minor, if constant, concern. Ealhmund had been whipped for his sin and Botulf required to explain himself before Faults. And the kitchen master had promised to mend his ways. But of course he hadn’t. He seemed incapable of changing. Brother Botulf was in those days like a wren with a cuckoo’s chick in its nest: standing on the foundling’s massive head, cramming still more food down its throat, ignoring any appeal to common sense.

But, with the advent of Godwin, all this changed. There were no second chances under his leadership. Maban was not a man to tolerate backsliding. Brother Botulf and his servant Ealhmund were summarily removed from their posts and sent to work in the fields under Brother Cellarer. The quality of the food served in refectory declined markedly and, to the surprise of everyone, Ealhmund remained obstinately fat. Indeed, if anything, he grew larger still, his chest and shoulders swelling out under Brother Osric’s regime to almost equal the size of his belly.

Of course, as there always is in a monastery sworn to silence, there was talk. Everyone had their theories as to how such a thing had come to pass. Some said a devil dwelt within the boy, others that it was a tumor and that soon it must burst. The only thing everyone agreed upon, Maban’s accusations notwithstanding, was that, if it was pilfering that sustained Ealhmund’s girth, he must have an accomplice, that no boy wearing such a look on his face could be capable of out-and-out thievery.

Then came the first of the attacks on Brother Botulf.

Oddly enough I vaguely recall having witnessed this attack. Or at least one of them. Of course I distrust the memory. I spent most of my days at the yard then, which makes it far more likely I only heard tell of the incident. Still I do remember something, one of those high clear perfect days in late autumn when the sky is so
blue it hurts your eyes to look upon it. The day wasn’t hot—I’m fairly sure of that—but it was dry, had, I believe, been dry for some time, for even now I can see the quiet bursts of dust that rose from Ealhmund’s feet as he made his way across to Botulf’s row, the pinkish haze that rose into the air behind him vaguely tinting, staining, a lower portion of that otherwise faultless sky. No one said anything. It had become a commonplace, the boy seeking out his former patron, the low mumbling that issued from that corner of the field accepted and consented to as though in corporate protest against the new regime. And then, as if our sins truly did cry out against us, a sudden cry from that part of the peas, Ealhmund’s voice continuing out the other side, louder now, insistent, demanding, the two men starting up, Ealhmund towering over the man who had been his master, apparently doing something behind the screen of plants that has made Botulf bend like that, an expression of utter terror on the older man’s face, eyes wide, beseeching, looking up at his former protege as if at a stranger, as if he has found himself suddenly and irrevocably in the hands of
an unknown and entirely hostile stranger.

I remember nothing more after that, the sudden cry, the two men locked in their strange embrace, the one looking down, the other up, and then nothing, my memory washed as clean and featureless as polished stone. Doubtless someone separated them. Doubtless someone else (Was it you Waldhere?) reported the incident to Faults. Doubtless there were punishments. There were always punishments. But they must have done little good for the one thing I am sure of, remember well, is that, from that time forward, Botulf lived in fear of his former charge. Whenever the two met, the smaller man would cringe and turn away, nature turned upside down, youth taking precedence over age, master bowing down before slave.

As it happened, an equally intense and only mildly less violent change took place in my relationship with Ealhmund. The boy had always liked me. Or at least since the days when I had begun to pray for him, he had liked me. But now, as if to counterbalance the disrespect he showed Botulf, Ealhmund’s fondness for me grew
out of all proportion to a proper fraternal regard. I never knew when his great moon face would rise up before me, looming over the partition in the reredorter, smiling down at me during Mass. Once, right in the middle of the garth, he hugged me from behind so tightly it took my breath away. I remember standing there, half bent over, little whooping sounds issuing from my chest, the cloister suddenly alive with gesticulating and wide-eyed monks, and Ealhmund just standing there, beaming down at me, the big shiny cheeks, that strange oily smell, utterly blind to the pain he has caused, the embarrassment, apparently waiting only for me to recover that he might the sooner hug me again.

And then there came that morning in the dortoir. Perhaps I would have reacted differently, perhaps I would have done something to save the boy, had it not been for the fact that this was not the first such morning. I had, on at least two previous occasions, been wrung from a deep sleep by just such a presentiment, just such a notion that something was wrong, perhaps terribly wrong. Each time I had been at first shocked and then infuriated to discover that it was only Ealhmund, that Ealhmund stood by my bed like some mad and overgrown child, grinning down at me, smelling of bedclothes. Which explains, I pray, why, on that particular morning, I did nothing, why I was able to convince myself that this was only one of those waking dreams, real mixing easily with unreal, that if I opened my eyes again I would find the boy stood not before the fire as it had seemed but by my bed as he had before, the same idiot grin on his face, the same confused excuses springing to his lips. It made me angry, even half asleep, and I held my eyes shut tight, refused to open them. Why should I wake up just because Ealhmund was lonely?

“Father!” It was Brother Baldwin calling out to someone.

“Father!” And it wasn’t Brother Baldwin but Brother Egric, and he really was calling to someone. I blinked and the scene didn’t change. I blinked again and Ealhmund still stood by the fire, still desperately tried to stop himself, to pull himself in. I looked away and the vision remained consistent, brothers coming awake, startled, looking at each other, looking toward the fire, Maban

demanding, aloud, that Father Abbot be sent for, Brother Alhred hurrying on unsteady feet (as he did every morning, as he would, I was sure, on Judgment Day) toward the reredorter, and over all of this the other thing, that awful thing, scent of madness, scent of nightmare. Which meant I wasn’t dreaming. Which meant that right now, right there—I couldn’t help myself, I looked again— Ealhmund stood urinating into the fire.