Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott

hundred people, Indian and Negro. Their leader shouted for Dad to come out and talk to them. All the time the crowd shouted, Power! They called for la Borde. Mum took to her bedroom with the rosary. I stood just inside and Dad went out on to the verandah. The chanting of Power continued. Then themost extraordinary thing happened. Toinette came out from under the house and started shouting in her weak voice.
    What all you people want? All you young boys don’t have work to do? All you don’t have mother and father to go home to? You not shame coming up in Mr La Borde yard at this time of night.
    The crowd went silent. Dad went down into the yard and stood next to Toinette, and put his arm around her shoulder. For a moment they stood there, the old cocoa planter and his servant, the old black woman, with a crowd of Negroes and Indians ready to start chanting again, but gone strangely quiet.
    I was looking down from the verandah. Dad and Toinette just stood there. Someone tried to make a speech about wages on the estate, about the state of the barrack rooms that still existed. But it was Toinette standing there that dampened the crowd. I swear they might have burnt down the house. Then people began shuffling and filing out of the yard. Dad and Toinette kept standing there till the last man and woman left. Dad indicated to Toinette to go back to her room and then he came back upstairs.
    I heard Toinette muttering, Well, what you expect if you treat people so. What you expect? She knew. But at the same time she came and stood next to Dad. He was shaking. He didn’t speak. He went to his room.
    Later in the night, I heard a noise, glass shattering, so I came out on to the verandah. Dad was sitting alone. He was sobbing. Someone had flung a flambeaux on to the verandah, where it had smashed. The flame ran for a bit then petered out. The banisters got scorched.
    They want to burn me out, I heard Dad say.
    Only one odd drunk fellow coming back late, I told him.
    But it cut him up.
    After all these years, they want to burn me out, he said.
    It was the final end of the old ways. I remember J. M. saying that. I could see that he thought we deserved what was coming to us. But then he said, Poor Dad.
    Strange all this coming back as I sit here in England unravelling these stories. We don’t know what will turn out when we are kids and growing up.
    Before J. M. left to go back to England we sorted through Dad’s things. I had flashes then of how it had been at school. He had been a kind of hero for me to begin with and then it changed. I didn’t guess his life.
    You were the one he really loved, J. M., said, meaning Dad. Funny, the one thing he took as a memento was an old Yardley shaving bowl in which Dad kept his school rowing medals. He took the bowl and the medals. They were part of the clutter on the desk in the flat in Bristol. For some reason I put my face in it and it still held that Yardley fragrance, the one perfume he allowed himself.
    I unearth. I unlearn. I’m an earth digger. I’m a word eater.
    Typical Benedict, as I’m learning: as he stood to leave the room for Vespers, he pulled me towards him and hugged me. He really held on to me.
    I will pray for you, he said. Have an open heart.
    His body was so thin. I could feel the ribs beneath his habit. Benedict used to be well built, J. M. said. He sees J. M. in me, he says. I felt a bit awkward there being hugged and him saying that. There is a way you hug a man. Youembrace and keep firm. If one of you relaxes into it as you might with a woman, he gives himself away; you know something is different and you withdraw. We held it firm. I expect they used to relax into it.
    My Lectio Divina is the Song of Songs, a favourite monastic text, interpreted metaphorically. I didn’t know the Bible could be so hot. I continue to read Aelred of Rievaulx. I have the journals and now my own stories. I reconstruct. I tell his life. It begins to change something in me. It begins to