Story for the Day: To Crack an Abbot

It is not every day a man of God meets his match. The abbot at Myndil's abbey has certainly met his:

Myndil and Tomte

He knelt on his dilapidated mat, the impressions from his knees wearing away the straw in places, and with his ears wracked by the tinkling cachinnations of several bathing Sisters from across the cloister, he grimaced, raised his hands in supplication and tried to put murder out of his mind for five minutes at least.

                “O, Lord,” the abbot keened, his eyes wrining over themselves, “please guide my hand in all things. You will have to, because if you don’t don’t, I am really going to stone the boy.” He exhaled and wilted into the mat. “What do I do with him? If I send him away to be ordained, he will be allowed to come back once he is made a Brother—unless the chapel he goes to sends him back before that—or they could make him a Brother immediately to distress me, which they likely will do, because everyone likes to plague me. It is all a great joke—old abbot who is bothered by everybody. They all laugh at me. I heard them, snickering in corners, thinking I don’t see them. Well, I don’t have to see them. I can hear them well enough. All very clever, I’m sure. The abbot is so discomposed by everything, oh ha ha—ingrates. I give my life to service, and everyone about me is so determined to make me regret it. I will say this, Lord,” he added, relenting a little, “that though the boy has the cerebral capacity of a dying butterfly, he has never teased me about anything. He has always done what I have asked him to do and done it twice over—which is what is so horridly annoying about him. He is perfectly obedient and good and has right intentions with everything—infuriating! He is completely without sin. He doesn’t think wicked thoughts—he doesn’t even have an interest in Abbess ThrottlesHerName. He is entirely without sin—insufferable! He must have some evil to him—we all do—his name is Myndil, for God’s sake, how can he be happy with life? And she likes him—the abbess is enamoured with him. Some nonsense about him being a saviour—“ He paused, the cloud of the conversation between Myndil and the abbess billowed back into his mind, and a shadow mantled his brow. “All this going on about a Chosen One—ha! The only thing Myndil is fit for is mucking out the byre. She is a rather pleasant girl altogether, and I suppose it was the shock of being turned out from her own abbey that made her think Myndil was your Host. Yes, that’s it. Just a bit of the shock. Terror does interesting things with the mind, makes it think of saviours and such. I’m sure that once she’s cleaned and calmed and has a proper habit, one that doesn’t keep ripping at convenient times, one that doesn’t show her chastity belt so much and her delicate legs—and did you see the way she pined at the boy. Ha! Fawning over him like a libidinous lamprey, all fingers and thighs. She is a bit of a looking-piece, but so is every woman who rails against profanity. It is good that she found God. She will not be so eager to welcome a body in her lap like the rest of them.” The abbot flushed and fiddled with his thumbs. “She is rather an angelic creature, isn’t she. A pretty pet that any abbey would be lucky to get. Yes…” The peals of mirth lilting on a tinnient loom wended their way through the window, into the abbot’s ear, and his heart swelled and sighs of amorous veneration escaped him. “She is a Gift of God…” said he, cherishing a smile.

                He thought of her, her exquisite form submerged in a basin of water, the steam from the surface streaming up and caressing her limbs, her flesh made madescent, the mist browsing her skin. His cogitations, made moderate by years of restraint and flagellation, began to divagate in adulterated waters, the pool of intemperance awaiting his return, the seed of indulgence budding in revival, and his mind when to a place that he had long ago abandoned, the pictures of pleasance that had once been eradicated now nascent. The joy of wickedness, the elation of debauchery, the nourishment that corruption and solitude provide must be felt by a man who was so lost to creed and collapse, the monotony of prayers against the exhilaration of villainy. And she became his idol, his object of sin, the herrying of the hagio-harlot, a task as congenial as it was congenital. An appetence for lust and gluttony once roused must be put down, but never was a backslide into sin-sickness so gratifying. He thought about what unholy men do with such thoughts, and he did them, winding up the whole with bitter tears and satisfied sighs, mourning his age, lamenting his position, and weltering in all the pain and pleasure of a beating so dearly earned. It is better to marry than to burn, the saints told him through their scriptures, a story they told to anyone who would believe that marriage is better than damnation. He knew what happened at night at the abbey; he could not but be aware of the creaks of doors and cracks of bedframes and mysterious groans of men and women who certainly were not helping to beat one another, but he allowed it; it was a kind of torture to himself, a torment that reminded him of why men must suffer when they are born and why they must repent until they die. Going to God would be difficult for one whose evening prayers would now be filled and emptied by the whim of a woman whom he neither knew nor loved. It was lechery and licentiousness, an iniquity of his Mortal Soul, and as long as the abbess was at his abbey, there would be no more peace in his evening prayers; there would only be daily punishment and absolution. Her presence was a penury on his self-possession. He wished he had never seen her, all her prepossessing pouts and fulsome shapes, and was angry at himself and suspicious of her all the rest of the evening. She might have been his newfound deity, but he could not deny that in her ability to penetrate his thoughts, with her suggestive looks and sensuous thighs, there was a bit of the devil.