by Daniel Mills
His absence haunts me. The memory of those inner mansions toward which I flew when first I was taken in chains. And found them empty: marble tiles gleaming, fires banked and roaring. The supper table was laid for the wedding with bread and meat and the finest of wines, but there were none to partake of them, and the musicians, too, had gone. They had left their instruments scattered about the room, but with the ghosts of songs upon them, melodies clinging like perfume to the strings. I floated past the supper table and crossed the threshold to the inner room, where the wedding bed was readied, piled with sheepskins and furs. Here the Bridegroom had come and from here again he had departed. His scent of myrrh lingered in the manner of songs just played, and the Bride, who remained faithful, lay herself down among the furs to wait. She looked up to the pine rafters as if to glimpse the sea of stars beyond. She grew anxious. At last she slept and did not dream, and when she woke, the fires were out. The house was cold, the wedding bed. His scent had faded from the air, faint as longing.
But the Bride was not content to wait. The inner mansions were deserted, but I went out from myself in the one way that was open to me. This was December, the killing time, and ice had formed in bands down the walls of the cell. I stood upon the bed. I strained my mouth toward the window and sent my voice soaring out into the night when everything round about was stillness. Where have you hidden yourself, Beloved? I asked, and the words ran together into a song. One of my jailers heard and came running. He was tall and thin and spidery, his flesh riven by old wounds. He was once a soldier, now a husk of scar tissue. He threw back the door and peered into the cell, haloed by the light he carried. I continued to sing, could not stop. He took up the filth bucket from its place in the corner and hurled it across the room. It struck the wall over my head and upended, dousing me with cold urine, clots of frozen excrement. The pail clattered to the ground. The noise shocked me into wakefulness and I realized that I was not singing but moaning, screeching like an animal in the agony of its abandonment. I fell quiet. The door slammed shut. The jailer departed and I was alone with the night, my mother, her weeping.
Mother, I am sickening. My dreams have become as one fever. Night after night, my body falls away from me and I rise untethered from the bed, breaching the ceiling to drift over the city with its black walls and spires, houses lit by candle flames. Last night the wind was up. Floating, I spread my arms like wings and allowed the breeze to carry me north from the city through hills and canyons lit by the moon. The landscape was familiar. I recognized the sweep of grass and wildflowers, the low mounds of sleeping sheep. There was the clearing where the mad shepherd camped. His broken voice drifted up with the smoke from his fire and spread itself in the same way till there was nothing left of it. Into this hush I fell, slowly, turning over like a leaf to see the stars behind me fade and slip into the dawn.
The Feast of Saint Lawrence. I was roused by the sound of the door, the bolt shooting back. The thin jailer entered, followed by the limping friar. The first man glared at me. Get up, he said, and I did, assisted by the friar who helped me into the hall. The door to an adjacent store room stood open, lit by a casement which overlooked the top of the monastery wall. The friar nodded slightly as we passed then walked beside me down the stair to the chapel with its windows lit up like jewels and the tabernacle locked against me. The Prior was there. He faced the altar with arms upraised and called for me to approach. I obeyed. I removed my scapular and stripped away my habit and shift. The fabric clung to my back, stripping away scabs and causing the warm fluid to wash down my spine. Blood mingled with corruption, the odor of living decay, and in this guise of death, I knelt before the altar. The Prior murmured a brief prayer and produced the rod that was my penance. Will you take it? he asked, softly, as is his way, but I was too weak to answer. I sprawled forward, sliding my belly over the stones. They were cool beneath my skin, blessedly cool, and I think I must have drifted off because I felt myself rising, as in my dreams, floating and weightless. Then the first blow fell across my back and shocked my scars to life. I plunged toward my body, becoming one with my wounds as I vomited and convulsed upon the floor. The Prior struck me again and again. He wielded the rod not with hatred or with malice but with a suitable solemnity bordering on sadness. My wounds, opened, sprayed at each blow, and when the agony was over, the Prior said another prayer for my repentance. His features were sheened with blood and sweat and with white flecks of sickness like shattered bone.
Later. Evening? Again I floated from the room. I left behind my body and city and drifted north to the hills where I beached upon a mountainside. The valley spread before me, emptier for the dawn that rose behind it, gray and sapped of all warmth, and the sky itself was thinning, insubstantial as the smoke from a shepherd’s fire. I listened for birdsong, but there was none, and the eye of the moon was on me in my nakedness. It sounded me to my soul's center: formless and boiling as the heavens above. The moon shone from those depths as from a black water and with a light like the chill that precedes life, the silence that follows a death. From the mountain, I watched the sun climb into the east, dragging the shadows behind it, waves after a fisherman’s boat, and the moon did not retreat but recast dawn in its own image, rendering all devoid of color, as was the world before the world, before the Word was uttered. I waited, growing colder all the while. I listened for the Word of Light, but there was no god there to speak it, and all the sweep of time was revealed to me in this unfolding of the waves.
Canticle of Flesh. Song of songs, which is suffering. We enter into it as babes and endure it as we can and we do not leave it behind us until we are dead and the earth shoveled over us and none are left alive to mourn our passing. The fever is worse, I think. The days go by. The walls drip with heat and the sweat pours from me, dampening my robes. The weather will not break. My hands are shaking and greasy, useless. The window permits of too little illumination to read from this breviary and I cannot stand to reach the light. The limping friar brings me bread to eat but my throat is dry: I cannot swallow. The reed of my voice is broken. My tongue flaps against my gums but makes no sound. The lash-wounds fester and rot.
This night, the longest of nights, my mother came to me and dressed my wounds. I could not see her for the darkness but remembered her scent of bread dough and opened earth. She undressed me, habit and shift. The latter stuck to my back but she massaged the strands of fabric loose and washed the sores with water from a jug she had brought with her. She bathed me, scrubbing the grime from my skin with a damp cloth, the same as she had when I was an infant. I tried to speak, but she hushed me into silence and helped me to sit up as she changed the bed coverings beneath. She lifted my hands above my head and guided them into the sleeves of my habit. The scapular came next and I lay down against the bed feeling wonderfully cool and clean. Her voice came from the darkness, a whisper. She spoke to me the words of the master in Matthew’s parable: Well done, my good and faithful servant. Her shoulder shook gently. She was weeping. The chapel bell sounded Compline. She limped to the doorway and went out.
The cloister is quiet. The moon is down and still I write. I cannot see the page before me. Dawn is far off, but I am thinking of my mother and of the vision that was granted me. I have no doubt but that it was a vision, for she was a simple woman, and could not read. She could not have quoted scripture to me for all her faith was cut from stronger stone than mine, and even this availed her nothing when her husband died and his family rejected her. Mornings, she left the house while we slept and did not return till dusk with pieces of moldy bread or scraps of firewood, bones to boil into broth. Where did she go? I asked my eldest brother, who said that he would show me. The next morning, my brothers and I sneaked out of the house behind her. We followed her from church to convent, where she pleaded for alms they would not give. Afterward she sought for shade in the town square and sat down heavily with the begging bowl between her knees. I was young, barely three, but old enough to know shame as I watched her grasp at the cloak
s of men who passed her by and paid no heed. One man lingered, a younger man, but it was only to look at her in a way I could not understand, and afterward, I heard them together in the street outside our house when we were meant to be asleep. He beat her. We woke to find our mother in the bed with us, cocooned in the rags of our blankets. Her right eye had swollen up, sealing itself closed, but she smiled to see me awake and offered thanks to God when we sat down to break our fast of many days. My eldest brother would not join us, being too proud, but she did not resent him his pride any more than she begrudged the Lord her suffering, even after her second son succumbed to his weakness, and the cart came to fetch him away. My brother went after it. He ran with the tears down his face, but my mother merely lingered in the doorway and did not stir until sunset when the shadows lengthened and she murmured a prayer to the Virgin before going inside. We lay down together. She lay awake beside me while I pretended to sleep and did not cry out, or curse God, or scream for the pain inside her, but again tonight she was weeping, and I did not know why.
The night is passing. In the last hour of dreaming, I found myself adrift. Freed from my prison, I drifted south toward the coast and joined the birds in their migration. We flew across the sea, the seas of time, while the heavens seethed and divided to form the void that was the storm, its open eye. Tempest winds whipped at us, ripping the birds free of their wings and dragging their shrieks into the stillness overhead. The Holy Land was below me, the city of Jerusalem with its hill of Calvary, its three crosses. I hurtled toward them, dropping from the sky with the weight of a child spat, kicking, from its mother’s womb. The Bridegroom was there, the one for whom I had searched. He had left his Bride on the night of their wedding, exchanging the promise of ecstasy for the cross to which they had nailed him and on which he had been abandoned in his turn. He dangled from the bar with the stink of death upon him, blood dripping from his wrists and feet. From above I noted the crown upon his head and the lash marks down his naked flesh like words in a foreign tongue. The hour was late: the crowds had dispersed. His followers, too, had deserted him, so only a few remained. The men among them were silent, while the women wept openly, without shame, all but for his mother who concealed her face behind her hands. She could not see me as I plunged to earth, falling toward the broken body where we were to be joined together, Bridegroom and the Bride, in this, our crucifixion.
Of course her face was hidden. She wept for her son on the cross as she has wept for me these nine months, as she weeps for all men in our suffering. Even now I hear her, though my fever is breaking. The long night past, I wait for night. Terce, and I am beginning to understand. Waking from the vision, I felt the bedclothes twisted up beneath me. From under my scapular I extracted a mass of stained and bloodied wool which I recognized as my old habit. It had been torn into strips and looped together with the remnants of the soiled bed coverings to form a crude rope, fifteen feet in length, which had been secreted under my scapular for me to find. I thought of my mother, who had limped when she left me last night at Compline and of the old friar, who had always been kind. I heard footsteps in the hall. His footsteps, I thought. But the door opened to reveal the thin jailer with eyes like dead coals. He squinted at me through the semi-darkness.
Please, Brother, I said. Where is the old friar?
He is no longer among us.
I do not understand.
He has gone to his reward.
Surely—it cannot be true.
He was old. The end came quickly.
It has just happened, then?
Yesterday at Sext he fell into a swoon. He did not awaken.
Thank you, Brother. For telling me.
I am not your brother, he said, and left.
Descendit ad infernos: he descended into hell. When the procession reached Golgotha, the soldiers drove nails through his wrists and feet and raised his cross high in the air so his flesh dragged on him and the blood drained from his wounds as from a butchered calf. The women gathered below him to weep while the emptiness loomed overhead, a silent storm. In his agony he cried out to his father, but the air swallowed his words, and gave no answer. He died, unable to breathe at the last, his lungs crushed by the weight of his own body, which was heavier than any cross. We are the same, Bridegroom and Bride. I am thirty-five and still the flesh defines me for all my yearning after heaven. This body breaks me with its aching, its awful weight, and even in dreams, God hides his face from me. Nine months have passed in this way, but everything is changing. The day is at hand, as the Apostle writes. In dying he smashed the gates of hell as I kneel now before the door to my own prison, my hands at the lock. My fingers grasp at the iron housing, taking hold. I pull myself up, hang my wasted carcass from it. The nails strain with the weight, then snap. The housing twists away into my hand and I fall, hard. The floor stones smash the breath from my lungs, but the lock is broken, the bolt exposed. A window in the next room gives onto the outer wall, and the rope is in my hand.
It has begun. Once begun, it must go quickly. This prison settles into itself, into a stillness like the void to which he cried, as I did, and with one word from his lips he turned the dark to light. I listen for it now, the voice of my Beloved. The quiet is complete. His Word, as yet unspoken, can be heard only in the silence of the night. Draw me: we will run. Through valleys and vineyards, where grapes grow fat upon the vine, to the hills with their fields of lilies and no steps visible among them, so light our feet upon the air.
“I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.”
The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile
PART ONE
The wind is up. It rattles the shutters, the roof-slates. The stovepipe moans, making music of its breathing to join the cries of wolves from outside. They are close, gathered beyond the orchard with snouts upturned and jaws slavering. With one voice they shriek to the half-hid moon and only me to hear them. Judah is asleep, his head on his paws. He does not stir with the howling or even with the singing which comes from upstairs. Every night it is the same. Her voice is high and thin and sad, the melody familiar. Mother Ann’s Song. Here at the end of myself as it was at the beginning. The high notes shimmer and ache, little louder than the scratching of my pencil, the dripping eaves. Mud is everywhere, the earth wet to its bones in this dead season. The soil cracks and thaws to flood the streams and sap is running in the maples.
The spring delays. Mornings, the ground is hard with snow or frost and the days are short, the woods gray-brown with dead leaves, naked bark. Game is scarce. The deer starve, weakening, and the wolves feast on them.
This morning was the same as any other. My sleep was poor, troubled by dreams of green shoots and black earth and trees hung with queer blue flowers unfound in any country. I woke with the singing or perhaps the memory of it. Judah was at the door, sitting with his back to me and tail thumping the boards. I rose from the chair and kindled the stove.
Breakfast was yellow cornmeal boiled into pottage. There is little else: the mountains are as yet impassable and the last of the meat long gone. No coffee, either, so I warmed myself with water heated on the stove and stepped outside with the rifle strapped cross my back and the cartridge box at my hip.
The house faces east, perched on a slight rise with the stillness of the wood at a hundred paces’ distance. Judah joined me on the stoop. The sun was coming up over the trees, screened by low clouds shot through with colors as bright and unreal as those in my dreams. I waited as shadows appeared on the ground then on the house behind us, churned up like water by the swish of Judah’s tail beside me. He waited too with snout upturned, eyes beseeching. I nodded and he bounded off round the corner of the house.
I stepped down. The earth had formed into frozen ridges dusted by the night's snow. Its surface gleamed as glass does and would not yield to the weight of my boots and body. Judah,
too, left no prints, though I knew well enough where to find him.
He was behind the house seated upright under the cherry tree where last night I had set a snare. Now a half-starved squirrel hung by its leg in the noose I had fashioned. The thing was grotesque, all patchy fur and bulging eyes. It chittered when it saw me and bent double to scrabble at the thin rope, teeth and claws gnashing.
I struck with the rifle-butt. The squirrel, stunned, ceased to struggle. Its body swung from side to side like a pendulum and I hit it with the rifle til the life was gone from it.
Judah whined. He pawed at the ground with his foreleg, sending up snow. I slipped my gloves into my mouth and with fingers bare unhooked the squirrel from the noose. Its hands opened, closed, small as the hands of a child born early. I threw it away from me. Judah went after it, though I called him back, and he tore it to pieces as I looked on.
