Second Quarter 2010: Second Place Winner
TWO MONKS
by Gerald Kamens
There was nothing to do now but wait… “His sister's plane's delayed,” said Father Bart to those gathered outside the sprawling old mansion that housed the monastery. I pray she’ll be here soon.”
Balding and heavyset, the brown-robed figure asked if any of them, friends and admirers of the late Father Charles, wanted to walk the grounds with him until she came. He had to check the fences to make sure the cows wouldn't stray. The drizzle began again, and only Kathryn, a very tall and angular woman wearing a slicker, took up the offer.
"We just celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of his coming here," said the priest, as Kathryn, despite her height, struggled to keep up with his loping steps. "Charles had quite a following. Some of the women came at all hours, with only short notice to us. Very disruptive to our routine. Our Director was eventually perturbed about it." Father Bart slowed his stride, studying her face. "His followers became, I fear, too dependent on him. Look at some of your fellow mourners. Just inconsolable. Not even family. More like groupies. I suppose we're all to blame."
"How did he go?" she asked.
"One moment, here. The next, taken. Heart attack. Only forty-seven years old," said Father Bart. "A very attractive man, some might say. The Lord works in mysterious ways." He stopped to kick a rotting wooden post. "But there's no mystery. Charles's work here was completed. His followers will eventually resolve their grief. Recognize that priests are just simple servants of our all-powerful Lord. With little unique wisdom of our own."
"Father Charles was very special," she responded. "He helped me to find out important truths about myself."
After a few moments of silence while he listed needed repairs in his notebook, Father Bart said "I don't ignore his many good works. I carry my own bag of works with me always," he told her. "When I depart the world, I hope my Lord gives due regard to my life's efforts. But Charles, like you or me, was merely mortal. With frailties. He desired, no, needed, to help people, everyone, I hope. But it was almost always women. Searching, sometimes desperate, women. Perhaps he didn’t realize the sometimes unfortunate consequences." Suddenly, Father Bart turned and started back towards the chapel. "The cab's coming. She's here. It's time for my last walk with Charles."
Moments later, Father Bart and three other fathers and brothers began to process slowly, carrying Charles' body on a simple litter down the winding path between the flower garden and the jelly factory which financed their enterprise. They'd dug the hole the previous day, as was their custom.
She sat with the others on wooden folding chairs. Charles's family members. Some admirers, all women, as Father Bart had noted. They watched the robed men move slowly past them in the light rain.
Father Bart bore one of the front poles. He told her later that he'd been thinking then about all their years of reading and worship together, preparing for the next life.
Within a yard of the hole, he seemed to slip. Struggling to right himself and not fall into the hole himself, he dropped his end of the litter to the ground. The body kept going.
"Down into the hole, head first," Father Bart wrote Kathryn a week later. "It was almost comical, but, of course, I didn't laugh. In fact, you're the first person to whom I've told these innermost thoughts." Besides, Kathryn assumed, his confessor.
"My sandal must have turned at an odd angle on the wet ground," he wrote. "But I was not yet spiritually prepared to leave this earth. The other fathers and brothers were, of course, perturbed. Brother Mitchell looked, I believe, reprovingly at me. But I'd done no intentional wrong. Charles was, after all, already dead, wasn't he?" Father Bart had underlined the typed words in red. "What did he or the Lord care at that point about his poor worn-out body? Dust to dust. Was that not true, Kathryn?" more familiar in his letter than on that first day.
"In the hole," he wrote, "Charles was rolled up in a heap, his neck apparently broken. You heard us say our farewells, as we covered him with dirt. Now we progress with our simple lives on this earth. His spirit, of course, lives on."
"Of course," Kathryn wrote back perfunctorily. Afterwards, she learned of another priest in the monastery, willing to be her spiritual advisor. Father James was a thoughtful man in his early sixties, who gave her much to ponder about, the few times she came to see him. She tried to talk about the emptiness she felt sometimes, the cluttering debris in her life. But it was never the same as before. The last time she drove out to the Abbey, she went to Sunday Mass. A bright spring morning, unlike the day of the funeral. At the parking lot afterwards, she saw a familiar figure striding vigorously towards her.
Good to see you, Kathryn," Father Bart said to her, as she stood by her car. "Father James mentioned to me that you two have talked from time to time. That's all he said to me. It's completely confidential, naturally. I fear I'm no help with other people's souls. That doesn't seem to be my calling. I'm rather selfish, I suppose. Spend most of my time getting ready to meet my Lord.
Kathryn opened the door and got behind the wheel.
"But of course I tried, in my way, to help you," Father Bart continued. "When I wrote you after the funeral. I was thinking about your well-being."
She looked up at him. "I must be fortunate. My father writes me often that his main concern in life is my happiness."
"I'm sure it is. God be with you. And with me," said Father Bart, as he turned, briskly, to walk away, up the path to the manor house, up through one of those barely perceptible doors, that led to another world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
His children's picture book, Leopold and Clinton will be published next year by Orchard House Press. His adult fiction and personal essays have appeared in flashquake, America, the Christian Science Monitor, and Dirt Press, as an "Editor's Choice."
JUDGE’S COMMENTS:
I like the formal tone and the period feel to the story. The writing carried my attention. I became a little confused at the end. Maybe the ending was too subtle for me to instantly understand, but with a second read, I grasped the meaning. Paint the characters with a little more depth. I craved to “see” them better. In most of the other entries, I suggested they tighten and decrease the size of the story. In this case, a tad more could have painted more detail and clarity. But the story moved well, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.