Remember Me

by Penelope Wilcock

  “It’s what the good thief said that I’ve been turning over and over in my mind: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’

  “The same words, d’you see? ‘Remember me’.

  “The cross as an instrument of torture pulls you apart. You hang on your arms. They dislocate unless you shift your weight to your nailed feet. The soul of a young man is not ready to leave his body. It takes something severe to tear the living soul out of a strong young man—he does not die easily. This really was a dismembering; the man was being torn apart—his soul ripped out of his body, his body dragged apart as his strength ebbed away. And he asked Jesus, ‘Remember me when you come into your kingdom.’

  “Jesus promised him, of course, that he would that very day be with him in paradise. He did what the man’s community seems to have been incapable of doing—he forgave him. He healed him of his sin and its consequences, laid it to rest, finished with it, stopped its power right where it was, so that it could not follow him and make a hell of his eternity.

  “So the story holds out to us a hope that even if this life tears a man apart, dismembers him, the power and grace of Christ will re-member him, make him whole, heal him entirely, on the other side of the grave. That’s a wonderful hope. It feeds our brothers in the infirmary here as they gradually relinquish their strength and ability to the decline of illness or old age. As they feel their vitality ebbing away, they lay hold on the good hope they have in Christ, knowing that once the labour of dying, like the labour of being born, is over, they will have all things in the One who has gone ahead of them, redeemed them, won them by the steadiness and the sacrifice of his love.

  “But as I pondered this and turned it over and over in my thoughts, looking at it, looking into it, I found myself thinking, Wait on! There’s something more here for us in this story; this is not just about the final healing of death. It’s about another kind of healing that finds us right here.

  “The good thief said, ‘Remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ That says to me that wherever and whenever Christ comes into his kingdom, we can confidently expect people will be healed. They will be remembered. What they have lost will be restored—innocence maybe, or humility, or generosity, or faith, or hope; men lose those things along the way. They don’t mean to, but life hurts them, events are too much for them, and before they know it, sourness and cynicism, aridity and unbelief have grown over the eyes of the soul like the cataracts that cloud the eyes of an old man. And the things that came apart, that they looked down in horror and saw dismembered, will be made whole again—a sense of vocation maybe, or their good intentions, or wholesome discipline and faithful practice of their calling. Those things unravel easily enough, and we discover, dismayed, that we cannot put them together; we have nothing in us that can glue what is all unstuck and good for nothing anymore. We need making whole again. We need re-membering. And where Jesus comes into his kingdom, that can begin.

  “So—where does Jesus come into his kingdom then? When I asked myself that, I saw that we don’t have to wait until we die. We don’t have to watch the atrophy and withering of what we might have been, as the harder realities of life obtain their hold on us and knock out of us the hope and innocence we once had. We can start now.

  “Jesus comes into his kingdom wherever and whenever a human heart says he can—it’s as simple as that. We can’t finish the kingdom in what we choose and build and practice here—but we can surely begin it.

  “Wherever we choose to be honest with each other and allow our vulnerability to be seen, wherever we choose to be gentle when we could have been exacting, wherever we choose to forgive when we could have borne a grudge—the kingdom of Jesus grows, his reign extends, hope and life are raised up in us, and the grip of all that sours and diminishes us is weakened.

  “It is as we are faithful, as we are gentle, as we are humble and kind, that we remember the human and open the way for the kingdom of Jesus. So I—or you—can be the good thief in our fragile and faltering humanity, begging him: ‘I am lost, I am broken, I am done for. Please put me back together again. Please heal me. Forgive me. Please remember me.’ And in so doing we also open the way for the kingdom to begin.”

  As always, when he had finished speaking John folded his hands into his sleeves, closed his eyes, and allowed his brothers to sit for a while with what he had said to them. He found this a difficult discipline, as though he attached weight to his words when he thought really they were not worth much of anyone’s attention. But Father Theodore had said he must do this, must give the brethren space to stay with the teaching he had brought them—and he remembered that this had been Father Peregrine’s practice always—so he did it, too.

  The monks sat in choir in the order of their arrival into the community. So it was that Father William occupied the stall at the end of the row of solemnly professed brothers on his side of the chapel. Father Theodore, as novice master, sat immediately opposite him with the novices sitting in the stalls below William’s and Theodore’s.

  Loving what John had said to them, Theodore sat in quiet contemplation, his chin resting on his hand, exploring the spiritual territory his abbot had left them in. The novices for the most part sat in exemplary reflection, eyes closed, hands folded into their sleeves, some thinking, some feeling hungry, some daydreaming, some just waiting for the sound of the community rising for the Credo. Brother Robert, sitting directly next to Father Theodore, knew that this proximity diminished his novice master’s capacity for surveillance, too near to know if Robert’s eyes were open or shut or what expression he had on his face. Provided Robert did not fidget enough to attract his novice master’s attention, there was freedom in his location in the chapel. Sometimes he looked up at the rich blues and rubies of the stained glass in the great east window. Sometimes he scanned the faces of the monks who sat across the chapel from him, wondering about them—not his brothers in the novitiate whom he felt he knew all too well by this time, but the fully professed brethren in their remote existence. Today he was watching Father William’s face (as he often did, sitting almost opposite him) with idle curiosity.

  William would close his eyes in this time of silence after the homily. On this morning Robert watched with increasing fascination as he noticed the beams of light, subdivided by glazing bars in the windows, reflecting on a steady trickle of tears rolling down William’s face. Tears were commonplace in the novitiate, as were infectious tides of laughter. Father Theodore told them it was because of fasting sometimes, and from sleep always disturbed for the night office. Only occasionally, he assured them, did the easily triggered weeping arise from personal difficulties or challenges to the spirit. Brother Robert wondered if this remained true for the fully professed brothers. He thought they would surely have come to terms with the life by the time they took their solemn vows—reached a substantial equilibrium in their inner walk. What was wrong with this man then? There was only so much that filtered through to the novices, so much they conjectured (with or without adequate basis for any informed conclusions), and that left so much they simply did not know.

  It happened again. This quite often happened. As he watched Father William, intrigued and interested, suddenly he found himself looking into William’s unsettling eyes.

  Robert, never a sensitive man, had not the wit to see that those eyes full of despair and brimming over with tears were saying to him, “Please… please don’t watch me… please don’t look at me…”

  William bent his head so that his cowl shadowed his face, affording a degree of privacy. Even then, Brother Robert could see the tears still fell, and William simply let them fall. Robert wondered if his nose was running, too. He couldn’t see but he thought it must be. Personally, when he cried he felt urgently the need to blow his nose. He thought it must take an unusual level of indifference or restraint to sit unmoving and just allow the tears to fall. He wondered which it was. And then he heard the knock of Abbot John’s ring against the wood of the abbot�
�s stall, and the community rose as one to join in the Credo. As the brothers turned to face the high altar, Brother Robert caught out of the corner of his eye a momentary, discreet f lash of William’s linen handkerchief.

  At the end of Mass, the novices reverenced the presence of Christ in the reserve Sacrament behind and above the altar, then waited their turn and followed the professed brothers out of the choir—more in file than procession, for though they followed their order precisely, it was done with no pomp or ceremony; the monks handled the holy routines of prayer as unaffectedly as a housewife carded wool and set it up on the spindle. Brother Robert stole a curious glance again at Father William as he left his stall. Pale and distant, that face bore no visible trace of emotion anymore. He just looked very, very tired.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  November

  It was needful to light a candle in the checker now when work commenced again after the office of None. Between Vespers and Compline only the moon and the stars lit the velvet sky. Abbot John made his way with care across the abbey court this November night, for it was very hard to see anything at all. Inside the little building, William reached up his hand to shield the candle flame as he heard the latch click; the day had been blustery, and the draft from the door would blow out the light.

  “Brother, what are you doing here?”

  John closed the door behind him, and William let his hand drop to the table again.

  “You should not be working at this hour—especially not on concerns like these. You need a fresh mind for accounts. And it’s too cold in here.”

  William looked up at him. The kindness in John’s face twisted like a knife in his belly, unbearable. Sometimes, just because he loved him, he wanted to tell him everything, tell him he had no vocation now if he ever had one at all, tell him he wanted Madeleine more than anything and that love suffered and festered in his viscera, wearing him away day after day, like a shackled prisoner covered with sores hidden out of sight in the darkness of the dungeon under the house. He wanted to tell him it didn’t matter how late he worked or what occupied his time; it was all the same.

  “I’m all but done,” he said. “The last of the Michaelmas rents are in, and Ambrose has left the chits out for me to enter the details. Not everything tallies—as usual—and if I have to chase up any underpayments and pleas of hard times, it has a better chance of success if I do it sooner and don’t wait until they’ve relaxed in the delusion that I won’t have noticed, spending all their money meanwhile on more attractive options than paying rent. There’ll be monies to find for grain; I was sick at heart to see so much lying smashed down in the fields when we had those sudden rainstorms early on. It still comes before my mind’s eye when I think about it. And I was mortified that we hadn’t the spices to embalm Oswald. His family would have preferred to be present when we buried him. Still, on the bright side, when I explained why we buried him so quickly, they sent a handsome gift—which was generous because he refused to send any kind of word to them to let them know where he was; didn’t want them to see him mutilated. I wrote and told them all that had happened, and I think they were a bit shocked that they’d thought he’d died but he’d been alive all this time, but they only found out he was alive from me writing to say he was dead. They were grateful, though, that we’d taken care of him. I’ll show you the letter. Sorry, I should have brought it to you before; it just slipped my mind. So anyway, some money in from them, thank the Lord. Oh—and the lace—I got back the price of the lace, amazingly.”

  His abbot listened to all this, taking in what was being said to him, and quietly watching and assessing while he listened.

  “Are you quite well?” he asked when William finished speaking. William blinked in surprise. “Why? Am I not making sense?”

  “Perfect sense. But you’re worn to a wraith. There was never that much of you, but you’re a bundle of bones now. Your face looks hard and drawn and lined—kind of desperate. You’ve aged. You have a grim, dusty look about you; the whole light about you is grey. Your eyes are red, and that’s the only colour left in you.”

  “Try the soles of my feet,” responded William, “you’ll find they’re a lurid shade of yellow. But I’m pleased to hear I am so easy on the eye.”

  Even as he offered this banter in reply, he could feel his belly tightening in panic. What if by some unimaginable miracle he found a way to offer himself to Madeleine, and she saw a haggard old man at her door for whom she felt nothing but pity?

  “You were never easy on the eye.” John took up his jest. “But you haven’t always looked as frankly terrifying as you do now. Are you eating properly, William? Are you sleeping well? I expect the truth, mind!”

  William groped for some quip to turn aside the unwelcome exposure these questions threatened, but he could think of none. He shook his head. “Not really,” he muttered.

  John frowned, and William felt extremely uncomfortable under the thoughtful probing of his gaze. At least John’s putting a distance between himself and William had kept William safe from the perspicacity of those kind, brown eyes. William wished they were not considering him so very carefully now.

  “Is it that you are troubled about the money, or is it still Madeleine—or both?”

  William averted his face, his lips compressing into a tight line. He didn’t want this conversation.

  “I see,” said his abbot. “Both, then. Is there anything you should be telling me?”

  Then William met his gaze, and despair flashed like anger in his face. “I am doing my best, all right? I am doing my best with everything! I pray and I work and I struggle! I’m trying as hard as I can, and it may not be good enough, but what more can I do?”

  “Eat,” said John, “and rest. I’ll ask Michael to sort out some herbs to help you. No—don’t just dismiss it like that. You will break your health permanently if you go much further down this path. You eat your supper and take your ease by the fire in the warming room in the evening, and I’ll ask Michael for some doses that will send you to sleep at night. And if you will not cooperate with this, shall I tell you what I will do? I’ll have you out of here for a month in the infirmary and leave the accounts to Brother Ambrose, and I’ll give you into the special charge of Brother Conradus to be fattened up. You think I’m jesting, don’t you? Well, I’m not. Leave this now. It’s an account, not a boiling pot of stew or a sheep with an obstructed labour. It won’t have altered between now and tomorrow morning. I will sit down here and wait just while you pack that lot away, and then I want you out of here. And you’re coming across with me to the infirmary for some sleep herbs.”

  William continued to look at him.

  “The warming room?” he said. “Did you mean that?”

  “I did. Is that—that’s a comfortable, friendly place to be—is that difficult?”

  He saw the horror around William’s mouth. “You would rather avoid the warming room?” John asked. “Is it haunted?”

  It was a clumsy, feeble jest and found no answering gleam of humour.

  “I cannot bear the idea,” William answered him simply. “I never go in there—well, only occasionally to check the fire irons and make sure the benches and tables have no worm and all the joints are good.”

  “You don’t like the idea of relaxing with your brothers in community?”

  “Relaxing? God in heaven! I am here on sufferance, John! I was despised when I came, I have caused nothing but trouble, I have all but destroyed the whole future of the common life—oh, face it my brother—they do not love me.”

  It was a confession not lightly made. John looked at the worn-out face and hollow eyes that regarded him with such tired resignation. He knew he had to bring some healing here, but he had to tread carefully. William would detect any half-truths and prevarication with effortless ease.

  “I don’t see,” he said finally, “how anybody could really know you and not love you. Part of building your future in this community is allowing the brothers to get to know y
ou. That’s all it would take for them to love you.”

  William felt the welcome touch of kindness on the soreness of his soul. But John’s words also brought home to him that he did not want to build his future in this community. He had to be here, that was true. But the thought of consciously shaping and working for a future that severed him from Madeleine and cauterized the wound of separation opened a dizzying glimpse into a holocaust of despair.

  Puzzled, John watched the parade of ghosts and shadows that crossed his friend’s face. He wanted to reassure him, release him from the obligation he had laid on him. But instead he said, “Not every evening. But three times a week anyway. You have allowed yourself to be too much alone. This is a community, my brother, and you are part of it.”

  William nodded, and the look of misery intensified. “I know,” he said.

  “Well, come now; you should not still be working at this hour—I want to set you up with some medicine in the infirmary before we go into silence. These things will still be here in the morning.”

  John wished he had brought a lantern as they went out into the blowing dark. A fitful rain fell in a fine wind-flung spume, and the damp night felt raw and discouraging. William hunched his thin shoulders against the dismal weather as he felt for the keyhole, inserted the big iron key, and locked the door of the checker. He had given up returning the key to Brother Ambrose—he always got there before him and worked until Compline every night, obsessively examining accounts and calculating possibilities.

  The wind flapped and snatched at their habits as they crossed the court and dived into the cloister buildings for a moment’s relief from the wildness of the night before they came out on the other side and made their way to the infirmary. The path from the cloister to the infirmary John could have walked with his eyes shut. William lagged behind him a little. It was of no use trying to follow a man in a black habit on a dark night; the path was familiar enough to him too, but he was glad of the glimmers of moonlight on puddles and stones.