Aubrey's vigil excerpt # 7

         

            John Aubrey sank the post hole diggers into the stony soil of the secret place, thirty paces south of the outcrop.  Occasionally, he had to use a mattock to free a stone from the hole.  As he dug, the memory of another such effort came to him. It was years ago, hundreds of miles away ... a memory of a woman named Silvia, of seeing her stretched out before him, of her watching him dig a hole into the earth.  The lascivious edge of that memory had left an indelible mark on John that surfaced occasionally.  This evening, as the sun set behind him, and the autumn chill rose from the cold mountain, he didn’t try to push that image from of his mind, but rather let it die there of its own accord.  ‘Torments of the flesh,” he muttered.  Brother Flynn came to mind, who had been with him that afternoon in Fayetteville.  ‘Murdered his wife an’ her lover,’ marveled John to himself.  ‘There’s a lesson there.’

            Judging the hole deep enough for his purposes, he put the diggers and the mattock aside.  The last rays of the sun were in the treetops when he dropped to one knee for a silent prayer.  Then, he shouldered a heavy rope that was tied to the head of a cross he had constructed, having carried pieces of it up the narrow, winding path to the secret place and assembling it there.  It was a large cross – larger than man-sized.  Its vertical post was twenty-three feet long, the horizontal timber eight, made of rough, mill-cut 4 X 4 pine, mortised at the crux, secured with lag bolts and 20 penny nails, coppertoxed to withstand the elements, including the three feet that would be buried in the earth, and whitewashed to stand out among the foliage.  The rope bit painfully into John’s hands and shoulder as he struggled to pull it upright.  It was too heavy for one man to lift but, he had rigged up a vertical frame, braced to nearby trees, a rope and pulley to help him move it into place.  Alone.  That’s how it had to be.  John struggling with the cross alone.

Earlier in the day, climbing the path to the summit, carrying the heavy pieces of the cross, he had thought of Jesus ... and Peter who betrayed Him ... and Pilate who washed his hands of Him and Barabbas who was freed in His stead and Simon the Cyrenian, who helped Jesus carry the cross up the hill to Golgotha, the place of the skull.  And, he thought of Cyril Rodgers, that ragged old cross-maker he had met in Texas.

            The dusk was thick by the time John got the cross upright.  It took all his remaining strength to lower it into the hole.  He leveled it best he could in the dark, shoveling in dry cement then pouring in readied buckets of water.  He packed stones around it for support, tamping down the stones and wet cement with the blunt head of an axe.  Tonight he would keep the rope and pulley in place.  Tomorrow he would secure the cross permanently with guy wires and pitons driven deeply into the surrounding stone.  He lay back exhausted at the foot of the cross, staring at it silhouetted against the blue night sky.  It could be seen for miles where he had placed it, facing Bennett Holler.  To bless all its inhabitants.

            
            He lay for a long time beneath that cross.  He became chilled, shivering on the cold ground.  He ignored it.  He watched the stars come out, glittering in the blue.  Stars, silent as God.  The heavens above him – the infinite silence of God ... and the infinite loneliness; the infinite loneliness.  And he sensed God’s love for His creation.

John cultivated and tolerated his own loneliness.  He endured it.  He studied it.  He embraced it as best he could.  He came to know it as fear, the most basic of human fears and he was determined to move beyond it, move to somewhere as distant and mysterious as that infinite silence above him.  Sometimes, mostly at night, John’s loneliness would overwhelm him.  He would come out onto the hillside, then, and look down on the lights of Bennett Holler – the Aubrey homestead, the Stringfellow’s, the Tucker’s, the Moore’s.  Those distant lights comforted him.

Some evenings, though, those lights were not enough to fill the fearsome emptiness he felt inside.  Then, he would drive to the Aubrey house and sit among his family, in the light, noise, warmth and good smells of the house he had been born and raised in.  He would stay until the aching within him was partially appeased.  Then, he would head back into the night, up to his solitary cabin on the top of the mountain.  Human contact could be of great comfort, relieving the intensity of his loneliness, at times, but it was inadequate to satisfy it completely.  In a most essential way, John Aubrey, sitting among his loved ones, was just as alone as John Aubrey lying under that cross on the hilltop.

It was weak of him to be lonely, according to John’s belief.  The Master should be all a servant needs, all a lover of God requires.  As he lay that night under the cross, under the immense, out-spread silence of God, an inspiration came to him.  Not, as in the past, an overpowering seizure of awe.  But a subtle, soundless idea.  He picked up a fist-sized granite stone and examined it by starlight.  ‘Silent as stone,’ he said to himself.  ‘I’ll make God a cross of these stones ... a cross of silence ... and it will speak to the hearts of men.’