Saints of the Desert

Remy Rougeau

YOUNG Brother Antoine stripped away the skin of a carrot with his blade and reflected upon the thankless task of cooking: hours spent in preparation of a meal that would be hastily consumed, soon forgotten, and flushed away into the sewer. Since taking up cooking under obedience, the task had become a daily misery for him. Eggs might be cooked to perfection day after day without a nod or a smile, but let the soup be salty on a single afternoon and everyone hates the cook.

From the moment he was taken out of the cheese house to work in the kitchen, Antoine developed headaches. He thought he needed glasses. Squinting at recipes, he experienced a dull and tedious pain that made his eyes throb. After a time, the pain became worse, spreading backwards under the scalp and ears to draw all of his body's attention to a head that burned to the roots of his hair until Antoine imagined that he could melt sugar on the crown of his head, turning it brown and causing it to bubble. His kitchen headaches crippled him. But someone had to do the cooking. The Abbot, Dom Jacques Bouvray, had far too much on his mind to shift a half-dozen Cistercian monks into new assignments so that Antoine might have his way. The infirmarian gave him aspirin and various herbal teas. Doctors were consulted in Winnipeg. Nothing relieved the anguish of the kitchen headaches, not even a relic of Saint Thérèse, a fragment of her holy habit that Father Jude touched to Antoine's forehead.

"Your headaches are psychosomatic," he said. "You walk into the kitchen and you have one."

"Shouldn't I be relieved of the job?" Antoine asked.

"Of course not," Jude said. "Too easy. Spells weakness of character. Besides, someone must prepare food."

"But why me? I hate to cook."

"Oh now, there. How many times have I heard that before? Happens to us all. We're shifted around in assignments until we land somewhere we don't like and we're stuck for years. It's called purgatory."

"But we're not in purgatory."

"No?" Father Jude said, arching his eyebrows. "Here or later, take your pick. I'd rather go to heaven, myself, when I die. You can peel your potatoes now or in purgatory."

"That's absurd!"

"Is it?"

Father Jude left Antoine feeling precarious about salvation, as if it depended upon things like potato peels. A pattern developed. In the morning, Antoine walked into the kitchen to start the soup, and his head felt fine until he finished peeling the onions; then the headache began, and everything in the kitchen grated on his nerves. Green beans had too much dirt on them. Carrots were limp. Eggs were cracked. Milk smelled bad. Flour had little bugs in it. And people did absolutely nothing right. Antoine disliked people who entered the kitchen because they stalled his work, causing him to stay at his job all the longer. He disliked people who avoided the kitchen because they failed to notify him of the presence of guests in the parlor wanting tea or lunch, or of their own absence at meals. All the while, Antoine's head throbbed and the demands of cooking seemed all but insuperable. Nevertheless, meals had to be prepared.

Some days, for reasons he did not know, his head felt fine. He had energy enough for two people. Sunshine seemed wonderfully new and fresh. Birds sang the opening measures of a cosmic symphony. He wanted to dance through his chores, and he found it difficult to keep the monastic silence. Happy people are not silent. Sometimes he had so much energy, he took the bicycle—the one Father Denys used to collect the mail—and he rode to the dairy barn to visit the cows. Josephine, Nadine, Daphné, Françoise, and Pauline licked his palm in turn. The others had forgotten him, it had been so long since he had worked there. But the headaches always returned. He never went three consecutive days without pain, making him wonder whether or not he was manic-depressive, if he had a chemical imbalance, or if he suffered cancer of the brain, making him realize how all human beings begin to die long before the grave.

Peeling potatoes was the last thing Antoine wanted to do. Setting water to boil on the stove, he often experienced a vast deflation of energy, as if his headache was burning away his body's fuel reserve. But the meals had to be prepared, and he forced himself to continue peeling and cooking and stirring, though it seemed unbearable.

Sometimes Antoine's pain became so severe that he could no longer see clearly, and he would leave the kitchen to sit in the cloister for a few moments. The vague outline of a crucifix on the wall made him remember that Jesus had suffered. Nails held his body to the cross. Antoine thought that he would gladly exchange psychosomatic pain for physical wounds that doctors could see and treat.

On a Friday in August, when the cloister was sunk in shade from a baking sun, and the inescapable heat made Antoine's head feel as if it were splitting open, he sat on a wooden bench with his hood up over his head, a signal to others. He did not wish to be disturbed. He knew the potatoes were boiling in the kitchen, but he could not move. All of his attention was absorbed in pain. Then, he felt a presence. He looked up. Old Brother Bernard Touzin was standing over him with a smile. The monk was bald. The top of his head seemed buffed to a shine. On his face there was no trace of hair: no shadow of a beard and no eyebrows. Bright little eyes were set within wrinkled flesh; big rubbery lips spread across his face like the mouth of a horse. His teeth came from Toronto.

Bernard's hand opened before Antoine's nose and a Tylenol nestled there like a chickadee's egg. Antoine took it. Bernard offered a warm glass of water carried all the way from the washroom. A trail of splashes on the ground indicated the path. Antoine drank the pill down while Bernard studied the young cook, and the smile on his face spread so wide that Antoine found it ridiculous. Bernard looked like a bald Martha Raye. Antoine choked and coughed on the water, but he could not laugh because the stabbing pain at the base of his skull locked his head from movement and left him without air. Meanwhile, Brother Bernard took the glass out of Antoine's hand and shuffled off in his arthritic way.

Antoine never suffered a headache after that. Something about miracles: they seem to happen only when a natural cause may as well be credited, as if out of consideration for delicate human sensibilities. We are not forced to believe. Was it the Tylenol that cured Antoine of illness? Or did Bernard cause some invisible balance to be restored in Antoine's brain?

Relieved of pain, Antoine prepared meals in half the time, and if he never learned to enjoy cooking, at least he did not suffer from kitchen headaches. Then too, he became aware of other people's pain. Brother Bernard, himself, suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. In choir, he sat on the edge of his stall in an attempt to find a comfortable position for his aching bones. He did chores, even though he was stooped over with an arthritic spine. He performed his duties with calm regularity. No one especially noticed him because Bernard drew no attention to himself. The sound of his voice was rarely heard, but it was unforgettable because of its unnaturally high-pitched timbre, like that of a child's.

Bernard seemed in good health that August because the heat suited him. But the winter to follow was severe. He took ill with the grippe after Christmas and stayed close to his bed. One morning in March, Antoine had a pot of bubbling oatmeal on the stove when Bernard wandered by, listless and without a smile. He asked for Father Jude, the infirmarian. Before Antoine took off his apron, the old monk slumped into a chair and died. No moans. No clutching. No gasps for breath. No tears. In a moment, he was gone. The flu had weakened his heart.

Three deaths occurred that same March: Brother Gabriel Eremasi, Father Louis Rondel, and Brother Bernard. Each died in a unique way, and each was buried in the old graveyard beneath the windows of the abbey. Though the monks were planning to move to a new piece of property because of city encroachment, they had not yet received a cemetery permit for the new land. They had not even begun to pack.

Brother Gabriel Eremasi was a holy man. People from Winnipeg came out to the abbey and sat in the back of church just to catch a glimpse of him walking into the choir. He had an aura. He seemed to glow at times, and not especially when he was praying, but perhaps while he was digging through his pockets for a handkerchief, or attempting to untangle his black rosary. Gabriel had no idea he was being observed. He was nearly blind, and stone deaf, and completely unassuming. He looked very different from the other monks because he was one of the last of the laybrothers to keep a beard, and his long, snow-white whiskers set him apart in choir and made his face seemed scrubbed and pink. He loved flowers, birds, trees, butterflies, and especially his pigs. Brother Gabriel doted on his pigs. Every day he walked the path to the barn with a dirty bottle of water tucked under one arm and a plastic bucket of kitchen scraps under the other. If the animals escaped into the garden, he called them back with a gentle voice. "Chouchou! Chouchou!" They ran to him like fat puppies. He sat on a stump and fed them while drinking the water and reciting the rosary. But he had a stroke in February of that year. The spring piglets were not ordered for him. He took to his bed, and people expected him to die peacefully. Instead, he suffered a horrible agony that went on for three days.

While dying, he screamed from the infirmary. Above him, in the dormitory, Antoine could not get to sleep because of the pathetic cries for help. Gabriel sought escape from some imaginary demon. Antoine wondered why Father Jude did not sedate him, to ease his passing, but monks have a deep reverence for death and prefer not to interfere. Brother Gabriel's cries were heard throughout the abbey, and whenever Antoine saw Father Jude in the hallway, where talk was forbidden, the priest signed, "Poor pig brother. Sad." When the cries stopped, Jude made that monastic sign, too, by pressing a thumb up under his chin to close the mouth. "Dead." Gabriel was buried on the second of March next to Father Ignace Lacan.

Father Louis's death was less of a mystery. He had lived in the infirmary for years and had never come to choir. He was subject to tantrums, and these sudden outbursts made others avoid him. Once, he threw a tin cup from his infirmary window and hit Father Anselme squarely in the jaw. "Chéti!" he yelled down to the sidewalk, which means good-for-nothing. The Abbot went up to Louis's room to reprimand him, but Louis refused to open the door. He said, from inside, that he ought not to be disturbed, that he was saying his rosary.

Louis hated people, or so it seemed. He hissed at Father Denys St-Pieters, though they were both from Belgium, because Denys was Flemish-speaking while Louis spoke only French. Louis also hated Father Jude Sanders because Jude was "English," although in reality Jude was born and raised in Orangeville, Ontario. Louis hated English speakers, whom he perceived to be interlopers in a French-Canadian abbey. He even shouted at Antoine whenever he saw him, "Des Anglais! Des Anglais!" simply because Antoine spoke English to Jude. When Antoine tried to explain that he was French-Canadian, Louis put his hands over his ears. "C'est en masse," he said. That's enough!

When Louis came to die, he asked for painkillers. A doctor came out to put him on a morphine drip but it was not enough. Father Jude consulted the doctor over the phone and received permission to administer a bolus, but this was still not enough. Louis wanted alcohol. Jude gave him tumblers of cheap brandy and this calmed the old priest, but toward the end Louis sobbed. He said something about how all of life had conspired against him and then he quit breathing. His eyes turned toward the ceiling like a pair of glass marbles. He was buried next to Gabriel.

Although Brother Bernard died quickly and without anguish, it is also true that he suffered a great deal throughout his life. As a young monk during the Great Depression, he was sent to the LaSalle River to remove a tree stump. The river was, in fact, gone. It had disappeared, and remained dry from 1932 until 1936. Bernard asked the superior if he might use the tractor for the removal, and with permission, he chained the tree stump to the tractor frame and drove up the riverbank incline. The tractor wheels spun around, the front reared, and the big machine rolled over on top of him. When the monks found Bernard, they decided against the hospital because he seemed so close to death. But for days, he drifted in and out of consciousness in the abbey infirmary. He woke, recognized faces, and smiled. In the end, he lived, but his body mended poorly, and for the rest of his life he remained stooped, as though carrying an invisible burden on his back. He was also destroyed as a man—or so Brother Antoine believed—which was a way to explain his high flute-like voice, and certainly his lack of facial hair. As age set in, Bernard acquired acute rheumatism from poorly set bones, but he never complained about pain. Instead, he sought comfort in prayer. He often sat in church on the edge of his choir stall and rocked back and forth like an old granny.

After his death, when Bernard had been embalmed, his body was delivered from the funeral home on a Monday, the third week of March. Antoine was in the kitchen at the time, cooking onion soup. The corpse was delivered to the church without a coffin, as was the custom: the funeral home had a standing order to embalm the abbey dead as the law required and nothing more, adding no extra costs, particularly not for make-up. The Abbot came into the kitchen and asked Antoine for help.

"Would you please follow me, Brother, to help unload the body from the hearse? I can find no one else at the moment."

The Abbot thanked the undertaker, speaking to him in French. "He looks very dead. In fact, he looks a little too dead, don't you think?"

The undertaker put on his glasses and leaned forward to examine the corpse, much as an expert would examine a piece of art.

"But it's what you wanted," he replied. "We've a standing order. I'm not to mess with the faces. Of course, if you're displeased, I could fix it for a small fee."

"How much?" the Abbot asked.

"Normally a hundred, but for you, I'll do it for fifty."

"Fifty?" The Abbot lifted a hand to his forehead and tipped slightly. "Just for the mouth?"

"Well now, let's see. Twenty-five just for the mouth."

"Mon Dieu!"

The Abbot showed the undertaker the door. Antoine leaned close to the corpse. Bernard did, indeed, look dead. His face bore an expression of grief, like the face of someone in purgatory.

"Brother, you grip one edge," the Abbot said. Antoine turned to him, puzzled.

"The mouth," the Abbot said. "Grip the mouth. We can't let the monks see him this way."

Together, they stretched the lips. But, rubbery and difficult to shape, they assumed their original position no matter how far they were pulled. The Abbot and Antoine kept trying. After much pulling, the mouth eventually took on something of a smile.

The Abbot stood back to look while Antoine felt as though he had committed a sacrilege. The corpse no longer had the grimace of purgatory, but neither did Bernard appear to be listening to the music of angels. His face looked exactly like what had actually happened: someone had fooled with the mouth. The Abbot was satisfied, nonetheless, and together they moved the body into the church for the funeral.

The living Bernard had used his smile well. When he was serious, his lips hung, flabby, on his face. But when he lifted his mouth into a grin, his lips framed huge false teeth and one could not help but smile with him; he was so ugly, he was charming. Bernard smiled frequently and sincerely, and he smiled at anyone.

Bernard's burial was stark. Cistercian monks are placed directly into the ground without a coffin. In Manitoba, this kind of burial was legal as long as the grave was dug to six feet and the body embalmed. Antoine had witnessed many monastic burials before this one, but Bernard's was unique in that his grave was not dug next to Father Louis's, in the order of death as was the custom; it was dug between a large elm and a lilac bush, next to an iron fence, and in another part of the graveyard entirely.

The abbey gravedigger, Brother Roland Roy, had already dug from the frozen earth two graves that March. In the manner of a stout Russian peasant, he had chipped the graves out with a pickax. Roland was strong: he could carry two hundred pounds of dry cement on one shoulder. But he was exhausted from grave digging, and as a concession, the Abbot told him to choose an easy spot. Roland found a dry place near the elm tree where dirt was frozen only a few inches down and below that was dry sandy ground that moved easily with a shovel. The Abbot released Antoine from his duties in the kitchen to help. The two were given permission to speak.

"So, Brother," Antoine said as he picked at the ground, "this is what it's like to dig graves in the middle of winter. Like spitting in the wind, eh?"

"Here, is no bad," he said. "Over there," and he pointed to Gabriel and Louis's graves, "is like to break up a sidewalk. In, down under, maybe two feet, come better. But you rest, and mud maybe, how you say, it freeze. Very bad. Is very different here."

Roland did not speak French because Antoine could not understand his Acadien dialect.

They dug all morning. When the grave was completed it seemed a beautiful spot for Bernard, but inconvenient for the funeral procession. The hole opened too closely to the iron fence, and a wooden gangplank had to be laid across it, between the tree and the fence. Only a plank made it possible for the monks to scuttle across the grave and lower the corpse with ropes from both sides.

Antoine went inside and washed. He put on a fresh habit for the funeral, then went to the sacristy to vest as an acolyte. The funeral Mass was simple and peaceful, without sadness or emotional outpouring. The monks believed that Bernard had gone to heaven. After the closing prayer, the Abbot, wearing his mitre and carrying his crosier, walked out of the church and into the graveyard. The sky was gray. The air was cool and the temperature was tolerable because there was no wind, not even a breeze. Six monks carried the catafalque that held the body. The Abbot began to cross the gangplank to conduct the rituals from the far side. Antoine held his breath. The plank bent low like a stick ready to snap, but the Abbot made it across. Antoine followed. The thurifer went across next. When Brother Alphonse crossed, the plank snapped with a crack as loud as a gunshot and he fell into the grave.

Everyone stood motionless, wondering what to do. Brother Camille tittered until the Abbot glanced at him and he stopped. The broken gangplank lay at the bottom of the grave with Alphonse and was of no use to him as he tried to pull himself up. Jumping up and down, he could not get a good hold on anything, and he looked distressed and angry. Several monks offered a hand, but the Abbot was afraid that more monks would fall into the grave. He sent Gennade and Roland off to fetch a ladder.

While awaiting the rescue, Antoine studied the waxen face of Brother Bernard; spread upon the catafalque, the corpse was clothed in the same white robe that everyone wore. The hood was drawn up but the face was quite visible. He had no color, and his stretched lips gave him a ludicrous appearance. The twisted grin on the dead man was a farce, Antoine thought; it had no connection to heaven or hell.

Gennade and Roland returned with a wooden stepladder and lowered it into the grave, near the hairy tendrils of an elm root. Brother Alphonse climbed out. His choir robe was covered with dirt. While monks swatted at his white cloak here and there, the ladder was taken away and the Abbot incensed the grave. The corpse was brought over, taken off the catafalque, and placed on ropes. A prayer was said. Before Bernard was lowered into the hole, Father Jude placed a piece of cloth over the face, a clean white handkerchief, the sort that each of them had in their pockets. Antoine grabbed a rope as the Abbot sprinkled the grave with holy water, and the body was let down. When it reached the bottom, the ropes were pulled and the body moved, but it fell back into place as the ropes left it. Each individual at the gravesite took a handful of dirt and threw it on Bernard. Then, as the community walked away, Roland shoveled dirt until the hole was filled.

For many days after, as snow swirled beyond his window, Antoine noticed the pile of dirt heaped between the elm and the lilac. When he went to the kitchen to cook heavy soups, he thought of Brother Bernard and how likely it was that the dead man's bones were as cold as frosted tombstones.

Antoine had read somewhere that monks of Athos judge the dead by the color of bones. The dead are exhumed on Athos, for want of burial space; they are removed to an ossuary. If ivory-colored bones are found, it is assumed that the monk went to heaven; if discolored or black bones are found, they went to purgatory, or even perhaps to hell. Antoine wondered what color his bones would be, given all his grumbling about the kitchen.

Though he suffered no longer from headaches, Antoine pestered Dom Jacques Bouvray about being released from the kitchen and sent back to the dairy where he was happy. But the Abbot reminded Antoine that Brother Dominique had filled his position in the dairy and was doing quite well, whereas no one wanted to cook. Antoine asked to be returned to the cheese house, but he was reminded that Father Casimir no longer made cheese for sale, and the few wheels placed in the cheese loft for the community took little time to prepare. The Abbot also reminded Antoine of his vow of obedience, and of the monk's responsibility to serve.

"You must learn to accept your work assignment with humility," the Abbot said.

"But I hate to cook. Everyone knows it. My food is no good."

The Abbot smiled. "Even Father Alcide is losing weight, thanks be to God. That's good."

But it was not good, for Antoine had become an unpopular figure among the monks, and in a monastic life lean on pleasures, he knew that at least the food should be palatable. Nevertheless, the Abbot remained adamant with Antoine and reminded his community that food ought to be the least of their worries: they had yet to find a contractor for the abbey buildings to be put up at the new site. The monks clung to the hope that they could build and move without going into debt.

"At present, there is a contractors' strike in Winnipeg," he said. "We may have to settle for a small company, in Treherne or Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, where contractors are used to putting up houses but not abbeys. If we don't get moving on this project, we will have no place to live."

The monks continued to feel threatened by the city. Cheese was no longer sold because of an ordinance, and they wondered how long they could keep their livestock.

A willowy-looking man with sunglasses showed up at the gate one day and asked for the superior. He and Dom Jacques Bouvray took a long walk in the early spring air, near the barns. When the man left, the Abbot called the monks into chapter. Antoine noticed that the Abbot's eyebrows were squeezing together at the top of his nose as he looked out at his community.

"The city is not willing to give us a grace period in which to move our cattle," he said. "And since we do not yet have a barn on our new property, we might have to sell the herd."

Groans of protest were heard from the monks. Antoine could not believe what he was hearing. Get rid of Josephine, Nadine, and the other cows? How could they? How would the monks make a living in the interim without a dairy herd?

"I don't have a solution," said the Abbot, "unless we begin to build a barn on the new property immediately and put Brothers Gennade and Dominique in the old abandoned farm house there."

The Abbot explained that he still hoped for a compromise from the city and asked for prayer and guidance. "We live very simply," he said. "We ask for nothing but to lead a quiet life of prayer." His voice cracked. "But we must make a living, and if we sell the herd, we must start again from the beginning. Our cows are some of the best in the area."

For days after hearing this news, Antoine prayed for an answer to the problem while cutting onions and peeling potatoes. It even occurred to him that he might kill two birds with one stone if he asked for a solution that involved himself, so that he could get out of kitchen work while saving the herd. But no answer came.

Father Yves-Marie Morice voiced the opinion that perhaps it was time to get rid of the dairy anyway. He thought the community ought to find a modern way to make a living, by taking telephone calls, perhaps. Calls for clothing or books could be routed to the abbey from direct-order merchants who needed twenty-four hour answering service. But the Abbot thought this idea somewhat out of character with a monastic spirit of silence. Brother Jules Rémy thought that perhaps hospital laboratories could give the monks slides to process, but Jules was the only monk trained as a lab technician.

"Brother Bernard," Antoine whispered in prayer. "If you're in heaven, and not in purgatory peeling potatoes, please save the cows. And if you can, while you're at it, get me out of the kitchen. I'm tired of work there. I don't care what the Abbot says. I can't go on."

Part of his answer to prayer came through an award to a cow. The National Canadian Dairy Association gave its Best Cow in Canada award to Hawthorne Rythmic's Miss Nadine, a Holstein that belonged to none other than the Cistercian monks of St-Norbert. Nadine had produced 9,767 kilograms of milk in a 360-day period, with an average fat content of 3.84 percent and protein content of 3.16 percent per kilogram. In other words, Nadine gave well over eight gallons of milk per day. Her daily output had been closely monitored after she won best of breed. A reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press came out to cover the story.

"So," he said to Brother Gennade in the parlor, "where's the cow?"

Antoine served coffee and rolls from a tray while Gennade and the reporter sat at a table.

"Nadine is in the barn as always."

The reporter pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and struck a match. "What can I say about a cow that might interest people?"

"Let's see," Gennade said, "she has a lovely personality."

The reporter tried to pick something off the tip of his tongue. "Yeah, well, people don't give a damn about cows," he said. "Most of my readers wouldn't know which end the milk comes out of. So, Brother, is there a story behind this cow? Has she ever given birth to a five-legged calf?"

Antoine straightened his back and walked out the door, sliding around the corner so that he could hear the rest of the conversation. The reporter slurped his coffee.

"Maybe I could get a photo of you with your hood up, milking the cow by hand." He laughed. "Miraculous Milk. I could put that below the picture. What do you think? Monks praise the Lord for miraculous milk." He laughed again, but Gennade only cleared his throat.

"I have a better subject," he said. "If you're looking for news, tell the public that the herd is being sold. The city is forcing us to sell out."

"Say that again," the reporter asked. Gennade kept talking. He spent the rest of the morning with the reporter, and a photographer came out from the paper. The story appeared the next day. "City Evicts Canada's Best Cow," it said, and it appeared in syndication in The Edmonton Journal and The Montreal Gazette. In The Vancouver Sun, the article was found under the heading "Monks and Cows Evicted in Winnipeg."

Winnipeg's mayor was soon forced to appear on four television stations to defend himself. The monks listened to his voice on the radio in the abbey chapter room.

"We are not throwing out Canada's best cow," the mayor said. "Furthermore, it's nonsense to believe that the Cistercian monks in St-Norbert are being evicted. The whole story is a fabrication. The truth of the matter is simple. The farm that belongs to the monks has been amalgamated into the municipality of Winnipeg, and the ordinances simply do not allow livestock to be kept in Canada's fifth largest city. We can't have cows wandering up Portage Avenue. Besides, the monks themselves know the impracticability of maintaining a large estate within the city limits. They are leaving of their own accord."

The public, however, did not seem inclined to believe His Worship the Mayor, that selling Canada's Best Cow was a civic duty. And letters to the Free Press suggested that the mayor's record was not improved by forcing innocent monks out of the so-called municipality, especially when all along the mayor claimed membership in the Independent Citizens Election Committee. Furthermore, the debacle with the contractors' strike had brought the city to a standstill and people had had enough of city hall's bureaucracy. "Leave the Damn Cow Alone," placards read, and "The Mayor Hates Milk!" All the while, Miss Nadine Hawthorne Rythmic's, as she was fully registered, chewed her cud with her eyes half closed and waited for her next milking in the abbey barn.

Fuel was added to fire. After digging about, the same Free Press reporter discovered how provincial government had closed the cheese operation of the monks under codes that clearly favored international corporations. In an article entitled "Canadians Forced to Buy American Cheese," he wrote that, by closing cottage industries, age-old and unique cheeses were being lost. After the article was published, even people who did not care which end of a cow the milk came from were up in arms about the injustice perpetrated by Tories and Liberals who claimed to be independents or members of the New Democratic Party. Letters and phone calls cried for Canadian justice, and the mayor, pressured by the premier of Manitoba, pressured by the honorable deputy minister of agriculture, allowed the monks to keep their cows until such time as a dairy could be built on their new property. Cheese, however, was not a part of the deal.

Antoine went to the church. "Thank you Brother Bernard," he whispered. "But don't forget my other request. Remember? The one about the kitchen?"

It took two years and four months for the abbey's move to be completed. New living quarters were built, as well as barns. Before walls were painted or wall socket plates screwed in, monks began hauling furniture to the new site in relays. Within the last three months of the transfer, they were going back and forth with a U-haul trailer twice daily, and the transmission on the farm truck went out. The Abbot bought a new farm truck and granted general permission for the monks to speak, so as to facilitate smoother operations.

"We'll take the kitchen equipment last," the Abbot explained to Antoine. "And the gas stove stays here. There's an electric one already installed at the new location."

"Oh, joy," Antoine said. He was stirring a pot of boiling beans. The bell for noon prayer had sounded, and he suddenly came to realize that he was only half-ready for the meal that was to follow. The cheese sandwiches under the hood of the gas broiler were still white as linen, and the squares of cheese in them were stiff and cold. He looked at them again.

"Merde!" Antoine said. He covered his mouth at once.

"What was that?" the Abbot asked.

Antoine waved his hand and bounced up and down. "Mercy," he said. "Forgot my pot-holder mitt."

The Abbot opened his mouth to say something else but Brother Camille came to the kitchen door and stuck his head inside just long enough to deliver a message to the Abbot.

"Visitors are here to see you," he said. "I left them in the graveyard."

Antoine bent down to look underneath the broiler again while the Abbot left the room. After he did so, he turned off the gas and counted to ten.

"Eight one thousand, nine one thousand, ten." He bent down to sniff but could smell no gas. He lit a match.

With a start, he discovered himself on the other side of the kitchen, sitting on his cookbook.

"Now what?" he said aloud. He could think only of the meal that would soon be required for the table. Then he felt a dull throbbing at the end of his nose.

He realized he had been burned. His heart pounded and he lifted his hands to his cheeks and nose. His eyebrows came off in his hand in black ashy smears. Lunch was no longer on his mind.

Antoine limped out of the kitchen into the hallway and made for a flight of stairs. When he had reached the third floor of the abbey, he walked into Father Jude's dispensary, where he knew Jude would be collecting medicines for distribution before the noon meal. Jude might look at his face.

There were no mirrors on the wall. By then, his nose ached, and moisture slowly ran from a sticky line on his forehead. Light-headed and close to fainting, Antoine bent his face toward a current of air at the window. The breeze revived him. On the other side of the sill, down below, he could see the graveyard.

The Abbot was in the midst of discussing a contract with five gravediggers. Antoine dabbed his nose with a handkerchief and listened.

"Mais oui!" The Abbot spoke to them in French. "They thought their traveling days were over, but the lucky devils get a field trip."

The gravediggers laughed while the Abbot smiled and rubbed his hands together. "Can you have them out by next week?" he asked.

"Certainement," a gravedigger said. "We can have half of them out today. We have our machine over there. But the iron fence must go, and I can't guarantee the safety of the trees and the shrubs." Each workman held a shovel, and a backhoe digger was parked next to the fence. The Abbot looked around at the gravestones.

"Some of these people I knew," he said, "and they were not thin. You might need a crane." The men hooted and slapped each other's backs.

"Maybe we're just in time," one of them said. "They'd be wanting some fresh air by now!" Their shoulders shook and they doubled over. They continued to laugh until they were wiping their eyes, and while they did this, the Abbot handed them a contract. They signed it right there in the cemetery. When the last gravedigger returned the Abbot's pen, Dom Jacques Bouvray spoke.

"Just a little detail," he said, folding his copy of the contract and tucking it into his habit pocket. "Three graves over there by the fence have more than one body in them." He used the French-Canadian word paqueter to describe how the dead laybrothers were packed into the grave as if into a telephone booth. The gravediggers howled, holding their sides. They thought it was a joke. Antoine turned from the window to face Father Jude. With his nurse's attitude, Jude registered no surprise at Antoine's face while he squinted to study the burns.

"What happened?" he asked. "Did the soup explode? It'd be no surprise. It often tastes as bad as gasoline."

Antoine winced when Jude touched his nose. A mirror was taken from a drawer and Antoine saw that his eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. He had open wounds on his nose and forehead. Even the stubble on top of his head had been singed. Jude dressed him with bandages. After several minutes, when the last strip of gauze had been taped down, Antoine examined himself again and decided that he looked as if he had come from a battlefield.

"The gravediggers are here," he said while he touched the bandages. Jude grunted.

"They're in for a surprise."

Both of them went to the window. The men below had already opened a grave, and the digger nearest the tombstone was scraping black gumbo soil off his shovel blade with a trowel. Father Jude shook his head.

"That's awful," he said. "They'll have to pick through the mud for those bones. How did the Abbot get them to sign a contract?"

"He's clever," Antoine replied. "He neglected to mention details and they didn't ask. I'm sure they assume everyone is buried in a coffin. Is that Brother Eli's grave they're opening?"

"No, I think it's Father Claude Joly's."

Antoine left the window and went back to the kitchen. For the remainder of the afternoon he peeled potatoes while looking at the wall, wondering about black bones and white bones. Did the monks of Athos place the black bones in the same ossuary with the white? Or did they have a separate room marked "heaven" for the white, and a room marked "purgatory" for the black? Or perhaps the black bones were put in a "damned" room and the discolored in a "limbo." It took him several hours to prepare supper, and when he had finished, he washed his hands with a facial soap and worked hand lotion into them. Brother Camille came rushing into the kitchen.

"Come look at the grave," he said with wide eyes. Then he paused, breathing hard, and stretched his neck toward Antoine.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

Antoine turned away and uncovered a pot. "Oven exploded," he said. "I don't feel like looking at any open graves just now. I'm cooking." He was annoyed. Some people, he thought, have a fascination for death, dead people, and rotting things."But you must come," Camille said. "It's Brother Bernard. They've uncovered him. He's incorrupt. Honestly! He looks as though he went into the ground an hour ago."

"An hour ago? He was buried three years ago."

"I know, I know. But he's incorrupt. The gravediggers had to telephone for a coffin because they can't put him in the metal box with the other bones. If you don't come and see, you'll regret it. He'll go back into the ground and you won't see him again. He's incorrupt. He's a saint. He must be. It's so exciting."

Antoine removed his apron and went outside. The diggers were filthy with mud. In just a few hours they had opened half the graves, and they stood down in them picking through mud and looked with animosity at anyone who glanced at them. If a bone was found, it was thrown out of the hole to be stored in a single metal container. Some of the graves had nothing left in them, so old were they, and hardly any of the skeletons remained complete. Antoine saw how old Father Louis Rondel, also buried three years ago, had disintegrated into bone in a rotting monk's habit, but what remained of his skeleton was ivory colored, with a remnant of scalp clinging to the skull. Nothing remained of Gabriel's habit. Bits of black flesh clung here and there to the bones, with a green chain and medal around what was once his neck. Antoine saw the remains of Brother Paul Sicard, killed by a Holstein bull, Father Ignace Lacan, who died in a fire, and Father Claude Joly, who passed away while Antoine was a novice. Their skeletons fell apart as the bones were lifted out of their graves. The remains went nto a heap in the metal repository. Bernard, however, was another matter.

His body seemed not to have decayed at all. The gravediggers asked if he had been buried recently, amazed because the soil above him had been hard, and they remembered no break in the turf. They had lifted the body out of the ground and left it to rest beside the open hole. His white choir robe was dirty but not muddy. His section of the cemetery had remained dry. While mud coated the bones of Louis, Gabriel and the others, Bernard was dry. His body had been buried in sand. His flesh was not desiccated, however, and neither were his clothes rotted. Antoine knelt to touch the corpse; it was cold, but the plump flesh of his hand, between the thumb and index finger, felt as fresh as a chicken thigh ready for the pan.

Monks were gathered around Bernard's body. The gravediggers left their work and gathered about as well. No one spoke. They watched as the Abbot lifted the handkerchief, the same piece of cloth Father Jude had placed over Bernard's face three years before, and revealed that odd expression.

"That's not his smile," someone said.

"No. Bernard had a beautiful smile."

"The funeral parlor must have done that. They must have put that smile on him."

"Yes, I remember that odd expression at the funeral," said Brother Alphonse. "Must have been the undertaker who did it. You know, they did the same thing to my aunt who died. She looked like she was sleeping and not dead."

"But the smile is all wrong," Father Philippe said. "He doesn't look like he's sleeping. He looks like he's drunk."

Antoine looked at the Abbot. Dom Jacques Bouvray was digging in his pocket and did not appear to be listening. Then Antoine turned his head to study the metal repository heaped with bones. He noticed how some of them were white while others were black, and some a weak but grotesque orange. The different colors were remarkable. He looked again at Bernard, who seemed fresh and rested after three years in the ground. Perhaps the soil preserved him, he thought. Perhaps his physical chemistry had something to do with his condition. The weather may have been unusual on the day of his burial. Bernard may have taken some kind of medication during his life that preserved his body in death. What was he to think?

The Abbot stooped and began snipping at Bernard's choir cloak with a manicure scissors. Antoine was astonished. The Abbot wanted a relic. It seemed that he had already concluded that Bernard was a saint, and that the body had been miraculously preserved by God as a sign of great holiness, this same corpse Dom Jacques Bouvray had worried about three years before, whether or not its facial expression was suitable.

A sudden breeze cooled Antoine's bandaged face and rushed like a sigh through the leaves above him. For a moment he felt as though he would float away, as though his spirit might leave his body and travel away from this dilemma, to where Bernard had gone. He wanted to disappear. But then he looked at the faces of the living monks around him and he knew he could not go. A chasm existed between the living and the dead, and he was not at all ready to close his life. He knew these odd faces so well, men in search of God, no different from Saint Anthony of the Desert, or all the holy monks of old; these men had come to a remarkable place called the abbey. The holy desert. We have come to find God here, he thought, and we are breathing God. The holy desert is full of God.

How easy it had been, Antoine thought, these years in the cloister, to construct a sweet little program of the spiritual life. He had tried, again and again, to frame his spiritual growth within the safe boundaries of his own preferences and talents, his aptitudes and the means he had at hand. But the grand scheme brushes all human construction aside. If he had succeeded, if his scheme had worked, he would have led a pleasant, happy little life, harmless and sunk in mediocrity. But it never came to pass. The abbey was being uprooted. His brothers were on the move. All along, the reality of monks living together had forced him to practice charity. Detachment, self-denial, charity, all these things that make saints, these had come to him in ways that he had not anticipated. The life of the cloister had overturned all his little plans and arrangements, as well as his opinion about others. The manner of death, the expression on a dead man's face, the color of bones: Antoine knew that none of these things made a difference. He knew also, looking at the faces of his brothers, that they would become saints, each of them. Either willingly or by force, God would make them saints.

The sound of Brother Camille's voice broke Antoine's meditation. "This is an act of God," he said, "and I think we ought to put the body in a glass coffin."

"A what?" the Abbot asked, straightening his back. He had collected his relic and wrapped the tiny piece of cloth in a clean handkerchief.

"His body ought to be exposed for all to see," Camille said. "We could build a shrine."

"Oh no," Brother Alphonse said. "Not with a grin like that. Do you want a drunken saint in a glass box? How can we display him if he looks like he died drinking gin? I say we bury him again."

"Yes, bury him," someone said.

"That's the respectable thing to do," another said.

The monks, together with the gravediggers, slowly lifted the body into an oak coffin. The Abbot himself readjusted the white handkerchief over Bernard's face and closed the lid.

Today, Bernard's body lies under wild flowers on the side of a hill that overlooks a good stretch of pastureland. There, the monks have established a cemetery, not far from their new quarters. Monastic life moves on in quite the same rhythm as before.

As for Antoine, he has a small white line from eyebrow to eyebrow, and if one is rude enough to stare, a permanent pink spot on the end of his nose. But the Abbot has released him from kitchen duty. He is back to salting cheese. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency sent official papers one day, not long after the monks had moved, informing the Abbot that whey cheese could again be made and sold by them, provided the product be subject to annual inspection by the CFIA, and the facility for the cottage industry incorporate stainless steel surfaces and equipment.

Such sudden shift of fortune for the monks was prompted—so they were told—by a telephone call to the CFIA from the Deputy Minister of Industry, who was himself instructed by the Premier. It seems that someone sent a package of cheese to His Excellency The Right Honorable Edward Schreyer, Governor General of Canada, and, after tasting the delicate and rare flavor of the extraordinary fromage, he was told that the Cistercians were forbidden to make it. Polite calls were exchanged. The situation was remedied in short order. And the monks are most grateful but confused, because no one at the abbey mailed a package to Ottawa.

From All We Know of Heaven by Remy Rougeau. Copyright © 2001 by Remy Rougeau. Reproduced with permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Issue #25 • Winter '99/'00