The Oblate's Confession by William Peak Page A

were empty, no more than cast-off shoes, those hands as lifeless as a pair of gloves. It seemed impossible but possible too. It would explain so much. Nothing escaped the hermit’s notice. He could name the singer before I even realized a bird had called. Yet when a limb fell in the wood while he was at prayer, he never so much as flinched. Truthfully, it was as if he wasn’t here.
    The wind shifted toward the north and smoke began to get in my eyes. I got up and walked around to the other side of the fire, hardly bothering to be quiet now. The hermit remained perfectly still.
    I found a stick and played for a while at plowing the campsite, one eye on the hermit.
    Of course Waldhere wouldn’t believe it. You could count on that. Not even that the hermit had remained still. Everybody moves, he’d say, sooner or later, even Father Abbot.
    But he was wrong. Father Hermit didn’t move. Even now, wood smoke streaming past him like water around a stone, he didn’t move. Didn’t even cough. And that was something, when you thought about it, the fact that he didn’t cough. Like Shadrach and Abdnego.
    I had never seen Victricius’s furnace, but on clear days I sometimes saw the smoke it produced. I imagined it was like Brother Kitchens’ oven only bigger and hotter. Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace would have been even bigger still. I looked at the hermit’s fire, trying to imagine what it would be like to stand in its middle, and then I looked at the hermit again.
    Still thinking, I placed the end of my stick in the center of the fire. At first not much happened: the dirt and moss adhering to its plow-end turned brown, flamed up momentarily, turned white, then dropped off into the coals. I waited, a little shocked by the idea forming in my mind.
    It wasn’t long before the stick itself caught fire, but when I held the thing up to look at it, the flame went out. Still it was hot, you could tell, the burnt end papery and white. And smoking. Even the end I held in my hand felt warm. I looked over at the hermit, who remained as he had been, back to me, oblivious to my thoughts as well as the smoke. Which was just as well really; this didn’t have anything to do with him. This was for Waldhere. This was to show Waldhere.
    The yell, when it came, seemed louder for being so unexpected, as if, instead of the hermit, the skin itself had cried out at being treated so. Of course a part of me had known he would feel it, had known as soon as I had smelled the hair, seen the skin blanch and peel back, that no one could be touched like this, be burned like this, and not feel it. And yet still I was surprised— surprised and amazed—by how loudly he screamed, how easily he cried out not like a man or even a boy but like, and the thought astonished me, like a girl. And then, before I could recover from that shock, I was even more surprised to discover that terribly, and apparently uncontrollably, I had begun to cry.
    “It’s all right,” the hermit gasped, “it’s all right, it just surprised me.” But for some reason the sight of the hermit holding his hand, eyebrows raised in concern for me, made me cry all the harder.
    “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
    “It’s just that...just that...” but the excuses caught in my throat. I blinked, took a great gulp of air, and then—looking at the hermit as if to say, See what you have done ?—gave in to the crying, not even caring anymore, because it was over, I’d burned the holy man, the saint, and I’d done it because he was holy, because.... But I would never be able to explain that. No one would listen to me, no one would believe me. Tomorrow, maybe even today, I would be expelled from the monastery, unloved and unregretted, gone like poor little Oftfor. And for some reason the thought of Oftfor made me cry even harder, his loss suddenly as important to me as anything, as if Father Prior had died or Father Abbot.
    And it was then that—for the first time in my