The Construction of the Monastery
Chapter Three of An Everlasting Name
She bore witness to the rise of the monastery. Beginning when the cornstalks stretched to the edge of the horizon, blowing their sharp verdant leaves in the rhythmic motions of the wind. Across those fields, along a path cut through flattened rows of maturing corn; she came. Dark-skinned men in straw hats whipped horses and mules struggling against harnesses, pulling wagons loaded with rough-hewn stone. She arrived perched atop a wooden pallet. Her waist, arms, and neck tied down with coarse ropes to keep her steady on the bumpy ride. She rested in several places, before finding her current home overseeing the little cemetery.
Before, she stood in the center of the cloister, watching the structures rise around her. Block by block, walls arose from their foundations, topped with roofs pitched at sharp angles. She was lifted atop the copula of the church, but her weight was too great, and the stones of the roof trembled beneath her, threatening to crack. Finally, she moved to the wall, to watch over the ground where the cemetery would be laid. She had been here ever since and supervised the opening of the first graves.
A splendid angel she was, made from high-quality marble — the sculptor didn’t skimp on her. Perhaps because of some ineptness in the artist or a weak seam in the stone, the marble broke, and the sculptor had to change her stance. The sculptor planned for her to hold a bow in her upright hand, and an arrow in her lowed hand, with a quiver on her back. Now she held neither a bow nor an arrow, but pointed awkwardly at the sky, her face lifted to the heavens. The sculptor opened her left hand, shaping it into a curled palm. She was considered damaged and inelegant, and the builders acquired her for an economical price. She settled into her new role as witness, she turned her face downward but kept the quiver of arrows on her back.
She became a spectator to the lives of the monks that made her keep their home. This monastery was still young, not even two centuries old. To give the buildings an impression of ancientness, oak trees were planted on the grounds: oak trees chose to symbolize stability and strength. Ivy was allowed to grow. Over the years, the oaks grew up, but their symbolic stand was insufficient to counteract the cracks that formed in the stone and the sagging and twisting of beams and joints. Now, these trees hosted ungainly crows and their croaking calls who were a bane to the farmers and the monks alike.
The buildings she watched over juxtaposed the antebellum and the gothic, with clashing styles and silly ornamentation that amused the monks with their incongruence. At some locations, visitors glimpsed a neo-classical southern mansion, with rounded columns and pillared colonnades, then turned a corner and confronted pointed gothic arches and vaulted ceilings. At the corners of each roof, and straddling over each doorway, cornices jutted out to drain away water from the high-pitched roof. The cornices alternated with angel and devil faces. Buildings were given cornerstones and keystones were added to pointed arches. The overall impression of the monastery was both frivolous and self-aggrandizing, especially the row of completely gratuitous flying buttresses on the north wall of the church, complemented by the four decorative gargoyles to protect the steeple at its four corners.
History records that the patron of the monastery was a wealthy guilt-ridden slave owner, who built the monastery with a flippant attitude toward piety and an insufficient budget. History has a tendency to simplify. She didn’t know if he was guilt-ridden, but she could attest to his parsimonious impulses, and his easy willingness to use slave labor to lay the foundations and build the porticoes, before bringing in thrifty artisans to ornament the walls, corners, and entryways. As the years went by the patron’s frugality began to show. In a fortuitous way, this became an unintended blessing. Its stones weathered faster than they should, giving the structure a more ancient look than it deserved.
The last structure to be laid was a low rock wall surrounding the monastic grounds. The wall circled the church and cloister. It enclosed the trees and gardens, and the yet-to-be-opened grave spaces. The wall marked the outer bounds of the monks’ spatial life. Beyond the walls were donated fields that were soon rented out to local farmers and planted with corn, sorghum, and hay crops. At the wall, the outer world began, with only those fields serving as a buffer against the encroachment of the modern world. At that wall, she stands guarding her keep, and the monks within, from the powers that encroach upon their humble lives.