Page 11 of Sanguine
My breath is sawing in and out of my body. A storm-laden wind is yanking impatiently at the trees. Beyond them, just past the edge of my vision, a creek is rushing, glutted with recent rain. And from two miles away, I hear the faint toll of the bells from the basilica.
No, there is no silence here. Not in the truest sense of the word. And yet, it’s somehow the utter opposite of noise.
I came from a world of noise. Of phones ringing, laptops humming, fingers tapping on iPad screens. Of cars and planes and clinking glasses of airport beer. Of voices—arguing, negotiating, cajoling. Of myself—loud and giddy and wild.
But there is only one phone here, shared by all of us, and only a handful of computers, used specifically for abbey business. There is beer, but it’s drunk with pure pleasure, not desperation, and there is no negotiation, no wheeling and dealing, no hustling.
The silence here is birdsong and creeksong and wind in the trees. It’s singing, praying, chanting, the ringing of bells and the drone of the organ. The whirr of tractors going up to the barley fields, the chirr and ruffle of the printing machines. The clink of rosary beads and the whisper of Bible pages and the echoes of music from places unseen.
It’s the sound of Brother Patrick’s life, not Aiden Bell’s.
I drop my ax and wipe my forehead with my forearm, listening to the bells tolling for lauds. Normally, I would do what I’ve done every day for the past two weeks and say my daily office on my own. And then resume clearing the deadfall around the hermitage and turning the fallen trees into usable lumber to be hauled off to Brother Andrew’s woodshed. But I’m still shaken from my dream, and I feel at loose ends with myself.
I’m worried that if I stay here alone, my thoughts will go back to him.
I lift my eyes to the hills.
I have just enough time to wash up and trot the two miles to the basilica before lauds begin, and I make it to the sanctuary just in time to bow towards the altar and slip into my choir stall before my brothers begin singing the first hymn. The smell of incense is heavy in the air, but I still catch the scent of fresh wood and damp soil and hard work on myself, even though I’d shucked my clothes and pulled on a fresh habit to wear to prayer.
I hope to escape notice, but even before I look up, I know it’s impossible. Our basilica is built so that the chairs for the lay congregation face the altar, and the choir stalls in the chancel face each other. Which means when I look up, the first thing I see is not the altar or the crucifix behind it, but my former novice master Father Harry glaring at me. Glaring because I am unexpected or late, I’m not sure. It could be merely that he’s never liked me. Not when I was a postulant, not now when I’m less than a year away from making my solemn vows.
But when I look across the aisle at my mentor, Brother Connor, and at Abbot Jerome, they both look like they’re trying not to smile. And then I see Brother Titus and Brother Thomas giving me twin grins, and I relax a little. I haven’t been late to lauds since I was a novitiate, and I’ve worked hard to scrub away all traces of Aiden Bell, the eternal disappointment. Aiden who was always late, always scrambling, always putting out his own goddamn fires.
Brother Patrick does none of that. Brother Patrick is on time for everything. Brother Patrick rarely speaks and even more rarely laughs. He is responsible and hard-working and serious. He oversees the monastery’s accounting, he helps wherever he’s needed, he’s never a burden on anybody.
Brother Patrick isn’t late for lauds, and he certainly doesn’t come in his sheets dreaming of his ex-boyfriend.
My fingers tighten briefly around my liturgy as I remember dream-Elijah’s face as I nipped at his fingers. My body tightens too, pressure coming from the cage I’m still wearing around myself, and a heat settles low in my belly. It matches the heat in my chest, that eternal lance of longing for him.
How will I make it through another year of this? Throughfortymore?
But Mount Sergius provides the answer, as it always does. My fellow brothers move into the first psalm, and the singing forces my breath to keep moving in and out. Forces my eyes across the page, my mouth to move, my lungs to expand and contract. Song fills the air just as the morning sunlight does, consoling in its timelessness. The sun has always been here, and so it seems, has the song.
The sound of my own voice is near-alien to me after the two weeks at the hermitage. Rough with disuse, still husky from my two-mile jog here. I’ve grown to like the sound of my voice less and less over the years—and I used to be the asshole who dragged friends and clients to karaoke bars at the end of a long night without a shred of contrition. I used to fill up entire meetings with bullshit, jokes, gossip, proposals, pitches, apologies, promises. I used to talk so much that Sean would hang up on me sometimes, so much that when I was in junior high, my mother started wearing headphones when she drove me to basketball practice because I wouldn’t shut up about why Kansas City deserved a pro team.
One of the things I craved when I came here was to learn how to be silent, how to listen. To be purified and refined like precious metal, all my dross burned away, and I wanted to burn it by any means possible. Prayer, routine, labor, isolation, anything—anything all. Just make me a good man.
Fuck, please. Just make me a good man.
After some more psalms, canticles, and prayers to St. Catherine of Siena—it’s her feast today—Lauds ends. I close the liturgy still feeling restless and tight. Itching inside of my skin. Usually the Divine Office grounds me: the hymns, the remembrances to saints, the prayer not only with thoughts, but with bodies too. With our breath and muscle and bone.
But I’m not grounded now. And I don’t feel like a good man, because I came here to leave my past life behind, I came here to live entirely for God. But Elijah keeps blooming in me, and I can’t seem to stop him. I can’t stop the tender shoots and slender, seeking roots of him, and I am his garden, his soil, his place, and it would be wonderful if I wasn’t supposed to be the garden of my god instead.
Since I’m already here at the abbey, I eat breakfast with the others. We observe the Grand Silence until after our morning meal, and so the refectory is filled only with the the slow clank of coffee mugs and the rustling of habits on the floor.
A central theme to monastic life is being present int he moment. When you are eating toast, you are only eating toast, you aren’t also answering an email while waiting on a car and listening to your administrative assistant run through your schedule and also wondering if you can sneak off after your one-thirty meeting for a quick screw. It’s something I’ve worked hard to grow in myself since I came here, this capability for mono-tasking, for being wholly intent on one thing. Chopping wood when I’m chopping wood, singing when I’m singing. Eating toast when I’m eating toast.
Which is why I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin right now, because my mind is miles away from my homemade bread and black coffee. Instead I’m reliving every breakfast at the splintering table in my fixer-upper farmhouse, reliving the morning light catching the amber flecks in Elijah’s eyes and illuminating the previous night’s marks on his throat. I’m remembering that weekend we spent in Chicago, fucking against a hotel window while a pink dawn crested over Lake Michigan.
I’m aching for the way he used to trace circles on the inside of my wrist while we scrolled through the morning news on our phones.
I finish breakfast before everyone else and take care of my dishes as quickly as I can. As suddenly as I decided I needed the company of my brothers, I decide I can’t bear anything but solitude right now. Those tendrils of Elijah are twisting around my ankles and twining up my throat, and I don’t know whether I need to pray or chop wood about it, but whatever I need to do, it’s not here, it’s not with other people around. This is between me and God.
But when I leave the refectory, I see Brother Connor waiting for me, his hands folded together in front of him and his lips creased in a kind smile. “Brother Patrick,” he says warmly. “Will you walk with me?”
Chapter 2
Even though allI want to do is to go swing an ax until I can’t move any more, I nod and fall into step next to him as he begins walking.
