Brothers Keepers by Westlake Donald E

Author:Westlake, Donald E
Language: eng
Format: epub

Tuesday I was on assignment in the office, another task which left the mind free to meditate. Though in my case the word wasn’t meditate. In my case the word was stew.

There are actually two offices in the monastery, being the Abbot’s Office and the Abbey Office. The Abbot’s Office was where we’d been having our meetings and where Brother Clemence was now going through the chaos of our filing system. The Abbey Office, also called the scriptorium (inaccurately, I might say; a scriptorium in the old days was a room where monks handcopied manuscripts), was at the front of the building, containing a desk and a telephone and a visitor’s bench. Our rare incoming phone calls and in-person visitors were dealt with in this room. Our petty cash (all of our cash was petty) was kept here, to be tapped by me on Saturday evenings for the price of a Sunday Times. One of us was usually on duty here afternoons and evenings, and Tuesday was my turn.

I spent the first hour or so sitting at the desk, leafing through the airplane magazines Brother Leo keeps in the bottom drawer there, and from time to time mooning into the middle distance, my brain turning in fretful circles like a dog trying to figure out how to lie down.

All of this cogitation was entirely self-centered, concerned only with my own future. I had virtually abandoned all thought about Dimp and the demolition deadline fast approaching. We had only sixteen days left to save ourselves, but I spared that fact hardly a thought.

Nor had I done anything about my suspicion that one of the residents must have stolen the original lease. I’d mentioned the idea to nobody, and in fact I didn’t even think about it myself. It was too grim to contemplate.

Whom would I suspect, out of my fifteen fellow monks? Brother Oliver? Brothers Clemence or Dexter or Hilarius? Brother Zebulon? Brothers Mallory or Jerome? Brothers Valerian or Quillon or Peregrine? Brothers Leo or Flavian? Brothers Silas or Eli or Thaddeus? There wasn’t one of them I could suspect. How could I think about such a thing?

And my own problems did seem so much more acute. Brooding about them, it occurred to me at one point that I hadn’t been considering Eileen Flattery’s mental state in all this. Shouldn’t I care what she was thinking? Didn’t it matter that I might leave this monastery and then discover she didn’t want me after all?

Well, no. In some strange way, she wasn’t what really mattered. Brother Oliver had been right about that; her existence was the form of the test I was undergoing, but my vocation was the subject. Whether Eileen Flattery wanted me or not had finally nothing to do with my staying or going. The question was, would I remain Brother Benedict, or would I go back to being Charles Rowbottom? Everything else was confusion and irrelevancy.

It was nice to have the question defined, of course, but it would have been even nicer if it had come equipped with its own answer.

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