“Of course!” cried Brother Zebulon. He was slapping his knees and cackling as though he were on some front porch somewhere and not in our chapel at all. I suppose in the excitement he must have completely forgotten where he was. “That Brother Urban,” he cried, “was the looniest of them all, and they’ve all been loony! If he saw a piece of paper with writing on it, he’d do a copy, do it all up with pictures and big fancy capital letters and gold color all around the border and I don’t know what all.”
I noticed that none of us was looking at Brother Oliver. I too did not look at Brother Oliver, so I don’t exactly know how he took what he was hearing. But I know how Brother Clemence took it; with the stunned joy of a miser who’s been hit on the head by a gold bar. “Where is this copy?” he demanded. “The copy of the lease, where is it?”
Brother Zebulon spread his bony hands, shrugged his bony shoulders. “How should I know? With all his others, I suppose.”
“All right, where are they?”
“Don’t know that, either.”
But Brother Hilarius did. “Brother Clemence,” he said, and when Clemence turned to him he said, “Brother Clemence, you know where they are.”
Clemence frowned. We all frowned. Then Clemence’s frown cleared away. “Ah,” he said. “The attic.”
“Where else,” said Brother Hilarius.
The attic. Because the roof slanted down on both sides, the only place where one could stand up straight was in the very middle, directly beneath the ridgepole. And even then one could stand up straight only if one were less than five feet six inches tall. And barefoot.
That taller central area had been left clear as a passageway, but the triangular spaces on both sides were filled with the most incredible array of artifacts. Abbot Ardward’s matchstick mangers — and his three partly damaged matchstick cathedrals — made a sort of sprawling Lilliputian city all about, intermixed with ancient cracking leather suitcases, copses and groves of tarnished candelabra, tilting light-absorbing examples of Abbot Jacob’s art of the stained-glass window, curling blow-up sheafs of Abbot Delfast’s photographic studies of the changing of the seasons in our courtyard, piles of clothing, cartons of shoes, small hills of broken coffeepots and cracked dinnerware, and who knows what else. Over there leaned Abbot Wesley’s fourteen-volume novel based on the life of St. Jude the Obscure, now an apartment house for mice. Old chairs, small tables, a log-slab bench and what I took to be a hitching post. Kerosene lanterns hanging from nails in the old beams, bas-reliefs on religious subjects jammed in every which way, and a rolled-up carpet with no Cleopatra inside. The wanderings of the Jews were recorded in mosaics of tiny tile glued to broad planks; some of the glue had dried out and the tiles had fallen off, to be crunched distressingly underfoot. Old newspapers, old woodcuts of sailing vessels, old fedoras, old stereopticon sets and old school ties.
You can really fill an attic in a hundred and ninety-eight years.
We came boiling up to that attic now, all sixteen of us, like escaping prisoners of war. Up we came and out we spread and down we bent and on we searched. Tiles and mothballs and mouse droppings crunched distressingly underfoot. Heads thonked into beams, followed by cries of pain or indistinct mutterings. The forty-watt bulb at the head of the stairs, our only illumination, gave little enough light to begin with, and we made matters worse by constantly casting shadows either in our own way or somebody else’s. Brother Leo inadvertently knelt on a matchstick cathedral, Brother Thaddeus gashed his temple on a nail, Brother Jerome knocked over Abbot Wesley’s novel, and Brother Quillon tripped him while attempting to stand the volumes up again. Brother Valerian found a stub of candle, stuck it into a candelabra, lit it, and the candle fell out and rolled burning into a little suburb of newspapers and shirts. Pandemonium ensued, but the fire was put out before it caused much damage.
And the dust. One man up here, just having a casual look around, could raise enough dust in five minutes to drive himself back downstairs again. Sixteen of us, all more or less frantic, all rooting and scrounging through the deepest and furthest recesses of accumulated junk, created the closest thing to the atmosphere of the planet Mercury ever seen on the planet Earth. We coughed and sneezed, our perspiration turned to mud, our wool robes itched, our eyes burned, and half the things we picked up fell apart in our hands. Creating more dust.
When in tribulation, when in discomfort, the good Catholic can offer his sufferings to be credited to the account of the souls in Purgatory, to shorten their punishments and gain them earlier release to Heaven. If we sixteen didn’t empty Purgatory that day, I just don’t know.
“Here!”
The voice was Brother Mallory’s, and looking through the swirling gloom I saw his fighter’s body in a fighter’s crouch beneath the threatening beams. He was holding out and waving a large piece of stiff paper.
We all made our way in his direction, crushing anonymous crushables beneath our feet. Brother Clemence coughed and sputtered and called, “The lease? Is it the lease?”
“Not yet!” Brother Mallory shouted. “But it’s the right stuff. And there’s a lot of it here!” And he held that piece of paper out for our inspection.
Never had I seen No Smoking so beautifully rendered. The sinuousness of that S, suggesting smoke itself, was played off beautifully against the tendrils of green ivy encircling it, and the massive tree-trunk effect of that determined N was softened by the bank of daylilies in which it was embedded. The smaller letters were of a clear but soft black calligraphy, the whole surrounded by vines and leaves and floral arrangements. Small rectangular drawings of artisans in their rooms plying their crafts — writing, weaving, boot-making — were gracefully placed around the margins, and one noticed at once that not one of those artisans had a cigarette.
“There’s a whole stack of these,” Brother Mallory told us. “All different.” Turning to show us some more of them, he gave his head a whack on a beam and dropped the No Smoking sign. “Damn that beam,” he said, and looked toward Brother Oliver to say, “in a theological sense only.”
“The lease,” Brother Clemence said, leaning forward in impatience. “Never mind anything else, get that lease.” Like half a dozen of the others, he had put his cowl up to protect his head slightly from beam-thumps, and I suddenly realized that by now, in this smoky dusty yellow light, in these cramped wooden quarters surrounded by strange bric-a-brac, we sixteen robed figures, half of us with hidden hooded faces, must look like one of the more disturbed paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Monks in Hell, at the very least. I half expected some little imp-figure, half toad and half man, to come scampering out of that nearby matchstick cathedral.
But he didn’t; he stayed within. Brother Mallory, on the other hand, came up with a whole double armload of papers. “I don’t know what your lease looks like,” he complained. “Can’t see anyway, not in this light, with all this dust in my eyes.”
“We’ll bring them all downstairs,” Brother Clemence decided, “sort them out down there.”
“This isn’t all of them,” Brother Mallory said. “There’s hundreds back here.” Thrusting the present handful at Brother Leo, he said, “Here, take this. I’ll get the rest.” Brother Leo grasped the bundle of papers and hit his head on a beam. He grunted, and I waited for him to say something far worse than Brother Mallory’s theological comment. But he didn’t. For a few seconds he stood there biting his lips, and then he turned to say, “Brother Hilarius, was the Blessed Zapatero a tall man?”