Page 50 of Saint
“But it didn’t feel far away after you quit.”
He shakes his head again, this time with a smile. “No. In a way, I have you to thank for that. After you left, I had so much I wanted to write about, so much Ineededto write about, that suddenly it was the only thing that mattered. I started pulling together a portfolio of writing samples and submitting to places.Modewas my first choice, and they took me freelance at first, until a staff position opened up. And that’s how I got here today.”
“Of course they took you,” I say. “You’re the smartest person I know.”
He looks over at me, his mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes. His throat bobs in a small swallow. “It doesn’t always feel that way,” he says.
I drop my eyes to my beer, not sure what he means, but it’s probably not good.
He clears his throat, continuing. “AtMode, they send me to cover stuff I really care about too. Yes, I have to write the listicles and fluff pieces sometimes, but I’ve also gotten to cover protests and legislation that needs paying attention to. They love that I’m active on social media—and so many of their writers are too, which means it’s not just me out there. I get to use my voice frequently. Intentionally.”
“It’s your vocation,” I say. “Only out in the world instead of in a medieval cloister.”
“It is a vocation, isn’t it?” He chews on his lip a minute, his stare directed at the monastery roofs in the valley below. “And it is. Itis. That difference between my jobs is the same one you found—I went from meaningless work to work that has meaning, at least most of the time. And I love it and want to keep doing it. But—”
He lifts the beer to his lips but doesn’t drink, letting the bottle sink back into his lap instead. “But I’m tired sometimes, I guess. Of always having to have a response to whatever is happening, of always having to think about it and thinkfastand then frame those thoughts into something incisive and deep within a few hours. Sometimes I want to think slowly. Sometimes I want the space to be wrong about something. Sometimes I just want quiet and the absence of...I don’t know. Production, I suppose. I want to have meandering thoughts and conversations and words that don’t go anywhere, that don’t always end up having a point. And sometimes I wake up and look at my phone and I’m almost upset that it hasn’t bricked itself overnight. I walk into my office, and I see my computer, and I’m angry that it hasn’t had some electrical issue and caught on fire. It’s been almost four years now, and I’m burned out. I want to keep writing what I write because itmatters, it matters so fucking much, but I also don’t know how I can go on like this without needing to eventually buy one of those sensory deprivation tanks for my office. Shit,” he says abruptly, draining the beer and then shoving the bottle in the case, along with his first beer bottle too. “I didn’t mean to lay all that on you. I’m here to interview you and the monks about your beer. Not talk about me.”
“I’m glad you did,” I say, also putting my bottles in the case, and then starting on the picnic leftovers.
Things packed, we both stand and, by silent agreement, start walking down the hill again, back to the monastery where we’ll drop off the remnants of our lunch and then poke our way through the ruins.
“I still think monasticism is a privileged way of living,” he says after a minute, his words nearly lost in the wind. “But I guess I can admit now that I’m jealous of it.”
I open my mouth to say something about how being a monk isn’t proprietary—not actually. The medieval period was full of people who strayed across boundaries of holy and secular, who operated outside of the Church’s official designations of what made someone monastic and what didn’t.
But as the words form on my tongue, something else forms in my chest. A tight knot which has something to do with this very idea, which is tied to it somehow, and I suddenly feel like if I speak about it, the knot will grow tighter and cinch something vital inside of me.
I close my mouth instead, and with only the breeze, our footsteps, and near-silent dart of a goshawk from a tree to the valley below, we walk down to the abbey.
30
“Aha!”Elijah crows over the hand-drawn map. “It’s this way!”
It’s a few hours later, and we’ve relieved ourselves of the remnants of our picnic, and we’ve also wandered through the ruins intertwined with the modern Semois Abbey. Ruins that we learned were not actually the first Semois Abbey, but the second.
Elijah sets off and I follow him, wending between the trees. “So do you believe the story of the first abbey?” Elijah asks, finally dropping the hand holding the map to look around us.
“You mean do I believe that there was a talking bird sent by God to help a stranded Italian countess find a cave to hide in so she wouldn’t have to get married? And then she dedicated a monastery here in thanks?”
“Isn’t it your job now to believe in miracles?”
“I believe in miracles,” I say, thinking of that night in my farmhouse and the text which had lit up my phone. “But I also believe in good medieval PR.”
“This does have all the good medieval miracle tropes,” Elijah replies. “Talking animal, aristocratic virgin...”
“...a magic spring,” I add. In the story Brother Xavier had told us, God had been so pleased by the countess’s declaration to build a monastery that he’d made his godly pleasure known by producing a spring with lots of good, clear water. The water is so good, actually, that the modern abbey still uses it in their brewing process.
“Can’t forget the magic spring,” Elijah says absently as he stops and bends over the map again.
“Did you know there’s an entire subgenre of hagiography that’s dedicated to magic springs and severed heads?”
That gets his attention. “What?”
“Severedsaints’ heads,” I clarify.
He stares at me from behind his sunglasses. “Is that supposed to make it less weird? Like it’s only weird if it’s severed heathen heads that make magic drinking water?”
I shrug.
