bookends 5: perfect bread, perfect toast
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. The motto of Peter Donne’s confessor when he entered the monastery, thirty-nine years old, hot-headed, clever, bereaved.
The Abbot at Lunsford had taken particular interest in him, as perhaps he ought, Peter being his nephew. He had persuaded Peter to come to Lunsford and then assigned him Barnabas for his confessor.
“He’s tried to harm himself,” the Abbot told Barnabas.
“With intent?”
“I fear.”
Barnabas intertwined his fingers and exhaled. “Will you permit the Norwich Discipline?”
The Abbot hesitated, a qualm for his nephew, but then nodded, recognizing what could be the only hope for his novice.
Days for Peter began an hour before anyone else rose. Barnabas woke him and supervised his milking of the cows. In that bleary-eyed hour, Barnabas exacted a kind of confession as he demanded an account of the night’s dreams. Confession and discernment of spirits, combined with milking—the ultimate monastic efficiency, Barnabas claimed.
“I saw her again,” Peter said one dark morning—his third month? thirteenth? what difference, really?
“Yes?”
“Her body warm and unclothed against me in our bed, soft, so alive…”
“Yes.”
“I knew she was dead, that this was a visit from beyond the grave, but her arms wrapped around me so…”
“Did you make love?”
“Not this time. But…I asked her to use her magic eyes, to… bring something good to me. ‘You can’t want me to live my whole long life without you and alone,’ I said.”
“And now?” Barnabas asked. “Mind the bucket!”
Milk sloshed across the dairy floor. Peter winced, knowing his confessor’s answer to inattention at milking.
“We’ll deal with that later,” Barnabas said dryly. “For now, finish, please. Your report, and your cow.”
“There was a later part, in the refectory here. I had just arrived, with the boys.”
“Your boys, or the boys you used to teach?”
“A blending, I think. I was worried over what they would eat and was bustling about trying to find them what they’d like. Then the Abbot reached over my shoulder and dropped two pieces of toast on my plate. They were hot, hot enough to melt the butter between them, and it was toast with the kind of bread she used to make, the best bread, the best toast.”
“Perfect toast.”
“Yes. And I wanted to blub because of the toast, and because of the fact that he’d been watching me all along, when I’d been busy with the boys, and he’d taken it upon himself to drop on my plate–no word, no fuss–the perfect toast.”
Barnabas nodded but said no more until later that morning–after Matins, after morning work, after Peter’s particular exercises–when Peter stood before him in the confessional cell, struggling as usual with the submission his confessor requested. Barnabas waited, as usual, without speaking, without removing the birch from its bucket until Peter had prepared himself. When the time came, he applied it with the force of radical mercy, until the fight left, and a bit beyond.
After saying the absolution and allowing the novice to rearrange himself, Barnabas fished a tin from his habit, an incongruous, luridly colored object containing ginger pastilles. He opened it and held it out to Peter Donne, who seemed to regard it as a sinister trap.
“Go on,” Barnabas said.
Sweets of all kinds were forbidden at Lunsford, and almost every other indulgence forbidden to Peter under the Norwich Discipline.
“No, thank you.”
“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of what will happen if you have it.”
Peter braced himself to deny it, but then shrugged.
“You aren’t the author of your life,” his confessor said.
“No,” Peter replied, as if he were only just realizing it.
“Someone else is writing your book.”
Peter frowned as if he had received crushing news.
“Someone who watches you. Someone who, unbeknownst to you, has taken time to prepare perfect toast, from perfect bread, and to drop it on your plate.”
The novice fell back to his knees, tears pouring suddenly from his eyes: “Please, Father, change me. Make me a man who no longer asks to have her back.”
Barnabas rested a hand on Peter’s head. “He is changing you. Your book is being written, even now.”
“And what does it say, this page?”
“This page?” Barnabas placed the open tin on the kneeler. “So I did sit, and eat.”
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Note: Bookends will be suspended for the month of November due to NaNoWriMo, as explained here.
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