Page 24 of Saint
He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, and with the sun at his back, his normally amber eyes are dark and unreadable.
But then instead of speaking, he presses his lips together and reaches for another sample of ale.
We drink the rest of our beer in silence.
* * *
Monday doesn’t go much better.There’s not much left to see, so I take Elijah around the grounds again so he can interview the different brothers about their tasks and trades, as well as their reasons for choosing such a strange life.
Elijah is an excellent interviewer, and he’s as polite and charming as ever with everyone he talks to, but I can tell he’s restless. Or bored. Or frustrated. As he listens to people talk, he uncrosses and recrosses his ankles. As we walk, he keeps looking around the monastery with something like disbelief narrowing his eyes. As he sits in the church for prayers, he stands and sits with the congregation, but he doesn’t sing, and I don’t think he prays either. Instead, he stares at the crucifix as if he’d like to ask God some questions, on the record, of course.
And at night, I hear so much sighing and chair-scooting from his side of the wall that I can’t actually fall asleep until long after dark. There is no more soothingtap-tap-tapcoming from his cell.
Onlytap-SIGH-tap-SCOOT-tap-LOUDER SIGH.
And then something that sounds an awful lot like the delete key being hit over and over again.
When I meet him at breakfast Tuesday morning, he’s visibly fraying a little. I’m not sure if anyone else could tell, because outwardly, he’s still all cool smiles and lifted brows. But there’s a certain agitation to the way he rips the skin off his orange. A brittleness to his mouth as he looks at the dining room where we all sit silently at our trays, eating our toast and fruit and mass-made scrambled eggs.
After breakfast ends—and with it the morning silence—I ask Elijah where he’d like to go today.
He scrubs at his hair and lets out a soft laugh. “Is there anything here that I haven’t seen already?”
I think he means it rhetorically, but I still answer in case he’s really asking. “Have you seen the hermitage yet?”
“The hermitage? I don’t think so, no.”
“It’s two miles down the eastward path,” I say. “By the creek. I could take you there if you’d like.”
He stares at me. I’ve gotten better about looking at him over the past three days—partially because I’ve let my stubble thicken and I think it hides the worst of my flushing—but when he stares at me like this, like I’m the next thing he’s going to write five thousand words about, I can’t handle it. I look away to the cloister, where brothers are already dead-heading roses and pulling up weeds.
“I want to see someplace that means something to you,” Elijah says suddenly. “I want to see the place where you wish you could spend all your time.”
“Well, then,” I say. “We ought to go to the hermitage.”
* * *
It’s early enoughthat the walk is warm but not oppressively hot, and the wind has settled down enough that my habit behaves as we wend our way through the woods. I show Elijah the path that branches off toward the labyrinth at the base of Mount Sergius, and then I show him the bridges over the creek I’ve built since I came here. And finally we get to the hermitage itself, a small cottage made of limestone and salvaged windows with the creek burbling nearby. No one is staying here currently, and so I show Elijah the inside, which does have electricity and running water but is fairly rustic otherwise.
He stands in the middle of the small room, turning in a slow circle. “So you come here,” he says carefully, “to retreat from the abbey. Which is already a retreat from the rest of the world.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that feel a little like needing a vacation from a vacation to you?”
I dare to look at him, since he’s wandered over to a window and is peering out at the creek. “The original monks lived alone,” I say. “Monastic life, in its original form, was utter solitude. Total deprivation. The desert fathers found God in that life.”
Elijah turns back to face me. He’s wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt, and the top two buttons are unbuttoned. I can see the notch of his clavicle like this.
Fuck me.
“And that’s what you want?” Elijah asks. “To live in the desert and write proverbs?”
“Yes. Well, not the desert literally,” I explain at the look on his face, “but a desert in every other sense. I want to be alone with God.”
“How alone do you need to be?” Elijah demands, turning all the way toward me. “God is the radiant dawn and the shepherd who finds every lost sheep—are you telling me that you can’t be alone with him in your cell? Or in a farmhouse, say? He can only find you in the middle of nowhere while you’re off playing Thoreau?”
It stings to hear the private hopes of my heart talked about like this. Like they’re ridiculous.
