What Was Carried

IN THE YEAR OF HER DEATH, AND AFTER Set down at Cill Aoife by one who was in the house, and whose name is not wanted here

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Brother Daire wrote her life and set his own name under it and called himself unworthy. He would not write her death. He said he had written what she permitted, and that she had permitted nothing of this, and that a scribe who writes past his permission is a scribe who has started to invent. So the house asked me, because I was there, and I have agreed on the condition that my name is not in it, since she asked the house to say nothing of her that she had not said, and I would rather be held to that by nobody knowing who to hold.

I will do as Daire did. What I saw, I will say I saw. What I was told, I will say who told me. What I do not know, I will leave where it is.

The Last Winter

The fevers came to the townland in the autumn of 1241, as they come most years, and more of the sick came to the well than the house could lie down under a roof. She tended them. She was fifty-five years of age by the count the house keeps, and she had tended the sick at this well for forty-one of them, and in all that time no winter had been different from the one before it except by how many came.

This one was different in her. She was slower by the feast of All Saints. By Advent she sat to do what she had done standing. The women of the house, who had once said she was too still, now said she was too thin, and she told them the two were the same complaint and she had heard it before. She would not leave the well. When she could no longer walk to it the house carried her bed into the well-house, where the water comes up under the thorn, and she tended from the bed what could be brought to the bed, and sent the rest to be tended by the women, whom she had taught.

I set this down because it is what I saw: she did not stop working. She was not carried to the well to die beside it. She was carried to the well because the sick were there.

Three Things She Asked

She asked three things of the house in the last fortnight, and I was in the room for all three, and I give them in the order she gave them.

The first: that she be buried under the thorn, where the water comes up, and not moved. Not in the church, not in the churchyard, not to any house that might ask for her afterwards. She said it plainly, and she said why, and I give her reason in her words, because they are the only words of hers in this account that I am certain of to the letter: Do not carry me anywhere. What is to be carried of me will not need a cart.

The second: that the well be kept for the sick, as it had been, and not for her. She said a well that was kept for her would stop being a well. She said this to the one who kept the house's book, who was there, and who wrote it down, and I copy it from the book.

The third: that nothing be said of her that she had not said herself. This one she said to the whole house, on a morning when the whole house was in the room, and the whole house heard it and can be asked.

I have kept the third in the writing of this. It is why the account is short.

The One Thing She Said

On the night she died she said one thing, and I must be careful here, because it is the thing the house has repeated most and heard least.

I was not in the room. I was in the outer room with two of the sick, and the door was open, and I heard her voice and did not hear the words. The woman who was with her, who had been with her longest, came out afterwards and told the house what was said, and told it the same way each time I heard her tell it, which was more times than I can count, and this is it:

I was shown. I was not healed. I am going where I was shown.

The first two sentences the house already had. Daire has them in the Life, with his confession that he did not understand them. She had said them for twenty-five years to anyone who tried to make her well-water into a cure, and the house had learned to hear them as a correction, the way one hears a mother correct a child's grammar, and had mostly stopped hearing what they corrected.

The third sentence is new. I did not hear it. The woman who heard it is the only one who did, and she is a truthful woman, and she was also the one person in the house who loved Aoife past the point where a report can be weighed. I set it down as reported, from one witness, who was alone, at night. That is what it is. The house has read it on the eve of the feast every year since, and the house is right to, and the house should know what it is reading.

She died before the bell for Lauds, on the feast of Saint Stephen, in the winter of 1241.

What the House Looked For

We looked for a sign. I will not pretend we did not; we are what we are, and twenty-five years before, the well had run warm for three days, and every one of us who was old enough to remember it went down to the water that morning and put a hand in.

The water was as it always was. It did not run warm. It did not run cold. The thorn was a thorn in winter. The sick in the outer room were as sick as they had been the night before, and two of them recovered in the following weeks and one did not, which is the ordinary proportion at this well in a fever year and I have the house's book to show it. Nobody in the house dreamed anything that they reported. The air did not fold.

I set this down because a later hand will want it to have run warm, and it did not, and the later hand will be tempted to supply what the morning withheld. Do not. She asked that nothing be said of her that she had not said, and she said nothing of this morning, because she was not there for it. Neither, by any sign we could find, was anything else.

What Was Carried

What the house holds is this, and I give it as the house's and not as mine, because it is not the kind of thing one witness can hold.

The house holds that she is with God. The house holds that He took her the way He takes any soul He takes, in His own time and by His own choosing, and that we did not see it because it is not a thing to be seen, and that we were not meant to, and that looking for it at the water was a child's mistake made by people who should have known better and who have forgiven themselves for it since.

The house holds that what was taken of her was chosen, and has argued over what it was for as long as I have been in the house. I give the argument's settled end. Her sickness was not carried. It ended at the well, in the body, under the thorn, where she asked to be left. Her name was not carried. It was the place's before it was hers, and it is the place's again, and the place keeps it. What was carried, the house holds, is the thing the older women complained of when she was fourteen and the thing the sick could tell from the door: the stillness that listens. The staying. It was the only thing she had that was wholly hers, and the house holds that it was the only thing He wanted.

And her body waits under the thorn for the day every body waits for. The house holds both, and will not let the one be said for the other. She taught us that, in her correction, for twenty-five years: do not let the second be said for the first. We say she was carried. We do not say she was healed. We say her body waits. We do not say it is empty. Each is a promise, and they are two promises, and a house that collapses them has stopped listening to the woman it buried.

That is the house's. I was asked to write it and I have written it. Of my own I will say one thing only, and then I am done.

I was in the outer room. I heard her voice. I did not hear the words. I have been in the house thirty years and I have never once wished I had been in the inner room instead, and I have thought about why, and I believe it is because she would not have wanted a second witness. One was enough for her. One is enough for a thing that is true, and no number is enough for a thing that is not, and she knew the difference better than anyone I have met, and she died knowing it, and was carried, and did not need a cart.

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Archive note: this is the earliest continuation of Brother Daire's Life, and the Celtic Union's devotional reading of translation descends from its last leaf: the Union's feast-day office reads what was carried aloud, and Union usage of carried for what the Five Layers file as Kiemeic translation is this text's word before it is the Archive's. The record's position is the one that page states. Translation into the Spiritual layer is held by many traditions to be Kieme's election alone, carrying chosen aspects and not others; it is invisible to the Physical and Material layers by nature, neither testable nor falsifiable in the Survey Corps' sense, and the Archive files it as devotional and takes no position. Nothing on the Spiritual layer has personhood or agency, and nothing said to be held there acquires either by being there, so the record has no account of a translation from inside and will have none. What the record can file at its own grade is the one claim in this text that its author filed at hers: that on the morning of Aoife's death the house looked for a sign and found none, and declined to supply one. The continuator's refusal to write what she had not heard is the discipline the Life was kept for, applied to a death. What Aoife met at the thorn well remains unplaced, and whether anything was carried of her is a question the record's instruments are not shaped to reach, and which the record declines to answer by grammar. The Ceridwen Archive shelves this leaf after the Life*, beside the* reader-school Legend and the river abbey's Champion at the Thorn Well, which say nothing of her death beyond its year and place.

See also: Saint Aoife, Aoife (character profile), The Life of Saint Aoife, The Champion at the Thorn Well, The Legend of Saint Aoife, Brother Daire, The Five Layers of Reality, The Cosmic Cascade, Resurrection and the Life.