I shook my head in mock disgust and hoisted my heavy pack. “Right, then, show me this cave and you can light a fire while I unpack.”
3
Ever since we left Glasgow, I had been fretting privately about our collective inexperience. All three of us had been cloistered in the sanctified atmosphere of the cathedral, yet now, of a sudden, we would be living and working with a real congregation, men, women, and children of all ages and descriptions who would look up to us as God’s own representatives. They would depend upon us for their sacraments and for their moral and spiritual guidance and welfare, and they would have a never-ending need for help in clinging to their faith in the midst of their daily lives. It was a terrifying prospect, and I entered into the experience like a boy dropping into a swimming hole from an overhanging branch, remembering Will’s exhortation from years earlier when he and I had discovered the deep hole in the river by Paisley Abbey. “Jump in,” he had told me, “and swim out.”
I hung up my liturgical vestments in an alcove dug into one wall of my cave on that first night, thinking that by the time I had need of them, they would have had a few days for the wrinkles to smooth out. A full month later, those garments were still where I had hung them. In all that time, I had worn the same hooded, monkish robe—a single, dark grey, ankle-length garment, ragged beyond belief and tied with a rope at the waist. I had gone barefoot, too, most of that time, while building my own church side by side with Davie Ogilvie the builder. He was an immensely strong man, though he did not look large, and I quickly developed a great regard for his skills, which included the astonishing ability to visualize complex constructions in his mind and then translate them into charts and drawings from which others could work.
I used up my supply of Communion bread very quickly, but that was easy to replace. Bread is bread, plentiful at most times. Wine, however, is an entirely different matter, scarce and difficult to come by in rural Scotland. I was not short of it to begin with, but I knew I had little prospect of renewing my supply easily, and so I quickly cut down the amount we used in the Mass and found that, by diluting even that fastidiously, I could stretch my supply well enough.
For the first week I celebrated Mass each morning as the first of our new settlers began to trickle in, but by the end of the second week I had to schedule a second Mass on the Sunday, and soon after that I was saying Mass twice a day, every day. By the third Sunday, I found myself exchanging nods with those faces among my congregation that had already grown familiar, and by the fourth, I knew most of the people’s names. We were one hundred and twelve souls by that time, and our numbers would exceed two hundred within the year. From the moment I awoke in my cave that first day and went to celebrate Mass with Alan Crawford’s work crew, I never again had time to fret about being capable of fulfilling my obligations.
I was celebrating the second nuptial Mass among my congregants, early in June, when Will stalked into the roofed building we called a church, and as soon as I saw the set of his shoulders and the cast of his face I knew something was gravely wrong. It had been raining intermittently all morning, and he wore a heavy cloak of wool, waterproofed with a thin coat of brushed-on wax. He made a place for himself at the rear of the congregation, where he stood with his head bowed while I continued with the service. The young couple I was marrying that day were a delightful pair, well thought of by everyone, and the church was filled with well-wishers, so I put Will out of my mind as well as I could for the time being and returned my attention to the sacrament I was conferring on the young pair, not wishing to give them anything less than a ceremony they could recall throughout their lives. I distributed Communion to the throng, Will included, and then brought the service to a close by leading the radiant new wife and her goodman out to meet their families, friends, and neighbours. I stood at the threshold of my poor little church and watched the parade weave away, with great hilarity and jubilation, to enjoy their wedding feast.
When Will and I were once more alone, I stepped to the altar and carefully cleaned and wrapped my precious chalice and ciborium, then packed them carefully into their leather case and carried them with me as I led Will to the cave that was my home. One of the women who insisted on caring for my few comforts had built a roaring fire against the day’s dampness, and as we reached the fire, Will threw back his cloak and unslung a fat, heavy wineskin from where it had hung beneath his shoulder.
“One of my fellows took this from a knight he and his men stopped this side o’ Selkirk town. It’s miraculous wine, they say.”