The Oblate's Confession (24 page)

Ceolwulf looked out toward the Far Wood, became silent. I looked out that way too. It made sense in a way, when you thought about it. Why else did we always have to eat so little, even when we weren’t fasting? Why else was the work so hard? Why else was there always so much porridge, never any honey? Why else the canes that cut my hands, the cold in church, the bad smell by the ditch? Why else Baldwin? In a place that was so good and kind and loving, where did all these evils come from? Unless there was someone out there, someone bad, someone whose prayers worked against us, someone who turned fresh to sour, made Father cranky, rain cold, the ox mad. I looked at the fish ponds and
thought about that. It made you wonder.

“Of course Oswiu died after that.” Ceolwulf was still looking at the Far Wood. “Probably the disappointment that killed him. All his plans, all his dreams.” He shook his head. “And then, as if that weren’t enough, this.” Ceolwulf made a vague gesture toward the orchard. He frowned, looked back at me. “You know they’re going to tell you he gave it to him, don’t you? I mean if they find out. Don’t tell them. You mustn’t tell them, Winwæd, it’s our little secret, all right? What we’ve talked about today? Is our secret, father and son. If you tell them, if your prior or abbot finds out anything about what I’ve said, it will hurt me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded, terrified to think that something I knew could hurt my father.

“It will hurt me, it will hurt your family. And they’d only lie anyway. I mean they’d have to, wouldn’t they? I mean they have to do whatever Bishop Wilfrid tells them to do, don’t they?”

Lie?

“Of course they would. Because that’s what he claims, what Wilfrid claims, that Oswiu gave it to him on his death bed.” Ceolwulf chuckled. “Claims he gave it to him in return for Wilfrid’s promise to take him to Rome. Can you imagine? Oswiu’s dying and suddenly he wants more than anything in the world to go to the one place in the world he hated more than Mercia. Certainly! And of course he wants to go in the company of the only man in the world he ever hated more than Penda. Of course! And in return for this promise, what does Wilfrid expect us to believe Oswiu gave him? My land. Why not? I mean it is only the last bulwark between him and Mercia, what better property to give your sworn enemy and Mercia’s favorite ally. Of course Wilfrid, we believe you, with his dying breath Oswiu made you a gift of my land! Trees can talk, pigs can fly!”

I looked away. I was unaccustomed to seeing someone so visibly angry, so I looked away. Besides, I didn’t need to look at Ceolwulf anymore, it was obvious what he wanted. I mean it should have been all along but I hadn’t seen it up until now. I wasn’t used
to this. I wasn’t used to grownups wanting something from me, trying to talk me into something. Usually they just told me what I was to do. I looked away. I could feel Ceolwulf looking at me but I looked away, I looked out the window. Below me Brother Wictbert was doing something in the pollards but I didn’t look at him. I looked at the orchard. Though it was too far away to actually see them, you could tell that the buds had swollen during the night because of the haze. Father Cuthwine had taught me about this. If you looked at a single tree you saw nothing, but if you looked at all the trees together, a sort of reddish haze became visible among the limbs. It meant that spring was coming, that the buds would soon open, flower. But still it seemed funny. I mean it seemed funny that there was something you could see and could not see at the same time.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“You’ll do it?”

“I will pray for you. I’ll learn how from Father Gwynedd and then I’ll pray that you keep the land and Bishop Wilfrid loses it. I’ll
do that. I will pray that you win and our bishop loses.”

Ceolwulf smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I knew you’d say that. The moment I saw you I knew you’d say that, that you were my son, you wouldn’t desert us.” For the second time that day my father reached out, touched my head. “But of course that’s not enough, is it? You’re a warrior’s son so you must know that. I mean a part of you must know already that’s not enough, that it isn’t as easy as that. You don’t just push your enemy back, win a little breathing room, push him back some more. Deep down inside I think you must already know that. I mean I think you must already know what you have to do. I am asking you to pray for our enemy’s death, Winwæd. I am asking you to ask God to kill him, to kill Bishop Wilfrid.”

 

I am fairly certain I never actually replied to Ceolwulf’s demand. I remember him telling me what he wanted me to do (I
remember the way his face looked as he said the words), and then I remember Father Prior rejoining us. I don’t remember anything else in between. Father Prior bundled me off to work or lessons, what-have-you. The man who was my father completed whatever business he had with the abbey, packed his things and rode off as he had come in, my brother walking behind him. Perhaps he hadn’t really expected me to say anything, would have thought a response unnecessary, redundant, my compliance understood. Honor thy father and thy mother. Or perhaps he saw something in my face that made him think an answer unlikely, that I was too stunned by what he asked to say anything. I have no idea what he saw in my face. Or, perhaps, he just thought that it was best not to push it. That he was more likely to get what he wanted if he gave me time, time to think it over, time to miss him, to remember him fondly, to come to think of him as a true father, as a man I knew instead of a man I had merely met. Possibly that is it. Possibly he was smart enough to know that, inevitably, a time would come when I would do anything in my power to defeat the fathers I knew in favor of the father I only thought I knew. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that, except in my dreams, I never saw Ceolwulf again.

Though my memory is not now what it once was and I sometimes confuse one year with another, I have no reason to believe that spring was any different from those that came before or after it. There would have been days when the air was light and fresh and it was a joy to be alive, and there would have been days when the air was cold and damp and our fingers cracked and bled. I’m sure we dug seed beds, pulled weeds, planted and hoed. Doubtless we thought the world was starting over again, that life was good, fresh, new. We think that every spring.

I do remember the trouble I got into. We feed on stories, don’t we, we monks? The woes of Abraham, the exploits of David, Daniel in the Lion’s Den—these are our daily bread. Small wonder then that, at least at first, the tales I had learned in the abbot’s
lodge brought me a sort of following among the younger members of our community, postulants and novices for the most part, to say nothing of my fellow oblates. But fame may be more than fleeting, it may be perilous as well. Overnight I went from fairhaired boy to pariah, brothers turning away from me on the garth, looking down their noses at me. It was Waldhere of all people who saved me, warned me of the fate I risked. Though no one had yet dared report my stories to Chapter, word of their subject-matter, the scent of profanity, a whiff of our impious past, had drifted up to the abbot’s chair. And Father was not pleased. Indeed, he was so displeased he had threatened anyone found repeating such tales—attempting, as he put it, to resurrect the thing buried at such cost beneath our garth—with separation from the Body of Christ.

So I shoved my stories down inside me, buried them next to Ceolwulf’s commission in the place I now constructed for such things. And it was in this, I think, that this spring differed from all others. There were no comets that year, no new stars. The sun
rose and set as it always had. But, for the first time in my life, there were secrets. And isn’t it with secrets, the keeping of secrets (and by this I mean true secrets, secrets that carry weight, have the potential to harm, to cure) that childhood comes to an end? Before there are secrets, before we hold a portion of ourselves aloof, separate from the community, then, by definition, we simply are what we are. Food is food, Father Father, and God resides not in Heaven but all around us. But when we begin to keep secrets, we begin also, I think, to step away from Him. Not entirely. Only Hell can separate us entirely from the Kingdom. But with secrets It is placed at a remove. A sort of sundering occurs between our selves and our souls. Where before He was ever-present, now there is this thing, this bad place we carry around inside us like a wall, a bit of rough masonry that stands between us and Creation. Looking back on it now, that spring was different. From that time forward my actions could no longer be trusted—not by me or anyone else. I was my father’s son, I was my bishop’s. And what that meant, I had not a clue.

Not that I didn’t try to work it out. I went about my daily round as before. I worked in the fields, I visited the hermit, I sang the office. But I thought about Ceolwulf almost constantly. I thought about his visit. I thought about the request he had made of me. I wondered what I would do about it. That he was my father I could not deny. Prior Dagan himself had called him so, and now I too found myself emphasizing the relationship, reminding myself again and again of his kindness, how he had cared for me when I felt faint, how he had touched my head, how he had loved my mother. At night I would lie in bed and remember the story he had told of the old man who waited each day by the door for the return of his son, how my father had liked that story, how he had liked the man, liked to watch him, to see the way he greeted his son when he came to take him home. Sometimes, as I drifted off to sleep, unaware of the shift from thought to dream, Ceolwulf would become the man, eyes catching the last of the day’s light, happy, contented, delighted by the return of his son.

But then, sometimes, I would wake up terrified, sweaty, certain
I had already done it, that I had prayed as my father wished and it had worked, he was dead, the bishop was dead, and I had killed him. I always woke up just after it had happened, just after I had dropped the bishop from Dacca’s crag, fed him some sort of poisonous stone, driven a hoe into his chest. Once—I must admit it here—I had even eaten a portion of him. I had killed the bishop—I can’t remember how now—and then, in my hunger, I had sliced off a piece of his side (which, in the way of dreams, immediately became like a serving of fish) and eaten it. For three days after that I could keep no food down. Father Prior thought it was the porridge, that I had stolen and eaten some of the porridge Botulf had thrown out, but I hadn’t. Everything tasted of flesh—everything was rotten, corrupt, my fault, the evil
in me
as surely as, in my dream, the bishop had been
in me.

But he was my father. I was supposed to love him just as I was supposed to love the bishop. Indeed I found it easier to love Ceolwulf. I knew him, he was flesh and blood; I had touched him, smelled him, sat by his fire. What could I say of this bishop that was causing me so much trouble, who haunted my sleep with his screams and his blood and his grasping fingers? Nothing. He was as distant and removed from my experience as Oswiu or this new king, Ecgfrith. I could no more conjure up an image of him than I could of God. Indeed, when I thought about it, I realized that even in my dreams it wasn’t the bishop I killed, not really. I had no idea what the bishop looked like. The man I killed was his man, the brother he sent each year for the iron. I hadn’t realized I even remembered what he looked like but I did. I could see him now, staring up at me as he fell toward the Meolch, fingers outstretched, mouth open, screaming. Even he, even this stranger, this foreigner whose name I did not know, was more real to me than the man my father wanted dead. How hard could it be to do something like that, to pray for the death of a man you had never seen for the good of a man you had? How hard to honor your father at the expense of your father?