The Oblate's Confession Read Online Free

Ælfhelm was up to. Not that it really mattered. Apostate or spy, the man had broken the Rule—one of the adults, one of the spotless ones, had a spot, a secret, and we all now knew it.
    For weeks after that I thought about Ælfhelm, pictured him as he made his way down the abbey path, passed beneath the refectory window. I could imagine what it would be like, the sounds that would come from that window, the voices—maybe Prior Dagan asking a question, Father Abbot clearing his throat, saying something you couldn’t quite hear. It was pleasant lying in bed and thinking about that, picturing Brother Ælfhelm, secure in the knowledge that he (and he alone) would suffer the consequences of his actions. Many’s the night I drifted off dreaming of trespass and the great North Wood.

IV

    I suppose the bad times really began with the furnace master’s speech. I mean, when people think about the bad times—if they allow themselves to think about them at all—that is probably what they think of first, the speech, the fact that it was the furnace master who told them what was going to happen. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if that was the beginning of Victricius’s own personal bad times as well. It makes sense. No one likes to hear such news, and especially not from a foreigner. But I write under obedience. I must record only what I can attest to, and I cannot attest to this. I was still too young for Chapter then; I never heard the famous speech. No, when I remember the bad times, I think not of the furnace master but of the little one, of poor little Oftfor. And not for the reasons you think. I remember Oftfor not for what he became but for what he was, the boy I knew, the living breathing child.
    That was a wet year. The rains came early that spring and continued well into the haying. When it rained hard we knelt in church and prayed for better weather, and when it rained less hard, we pulled our hoods up, gave thanks to God, and marched out into the peas, our woolens still weighted with the previous day’s mud. By the end of that summer there were brothers whose feet were so swollen and white from the damp it was said they looked more like fish than feet. Brother Tunbert lost some toes.
    Still, when I think of that year, the end of that summer, I think first not of bad weather but of good, of a day that dawned so bright and clear it seems now to mock all that came after. I remember colors—turf, lichen, moss—I remember a high blue almost winter sky. I remember Oftfor. Oftfor stands in the angle created by sanctuary and apse, russet walls steaming at his back, sunlight everywhere, sparkling. The boy raises an arm. He must have been wearing woolens too big for him for, in my memory, as he raises his arm, the opposite shoulder (frail, bony, white) always slips incongruously from the neck of his garment. He smiles. As if embarrassed, as if unsure of the importance of what he has to show me, Oftfor smiles. It’s a squirrel. A dead squirrel. Oftfor is standing in the angle created by sanctuary and apse and he is holding a dead squirrel up by its tail. The thing hangs in the air by Oftfor’s left ear, its eyes caked, useless, perfect little feet clutching at nothing.
    And then, always, whether I like it or not, a second memory intrudes upon the first. This time we are in the reredorter and I am feeling disappointed. Despite myself, despite conscience, the horror of what Oftfor has shown me, I am thinking of myself, realizing that I’ve been tricked, betrayed, that this had nothing to do with food, that I shall not be gorging myself anytime soon on illicit food.
    Not that it began in the reredorter. No. No, of course it didn’t. It began in the dortoir.
    Which probably explains Waldhere and Ealhmund’s absence. I mean we must have left them in the dortoir. Doubtless I didn’t want to share, doubtless this too reflects an essential poverty of spirit. Still, if that is true, if they were there—convenient, handy— why choose