Read Online The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online Page A

Brother Basil had a bizarre tic, shouting out “Meep!” during choir or other odd, sacrosanct moments. Meep. What did it mean? It had driven Thomas nuts at first. But Basil was at least kind, unlike Sebastian.
    Thomas had not been one of those people who romanticized monasteries, and if he had, that illusion would have evaporated the first week.
    Simply, his grieving had opened into a larger abyss.
    â€œI have come here not to find answers,” he’d written in his notebook that first year, “but to find a way to live in a world without any.”
    To be honest, he’d been turned away three times over the course of three years before the abbot, Dom Anthony, finally accepted him. Thomas was sure it was not because the abbot had changed his mind, but because he’d finally worn him down. Because, too, they’d needed a younger man, someone who could climb the ladder into the timber buttresses of the church and change the lightbulbs, who knew about computers—that the word “reboot” did not necessarily mean putting on your shoes again, as several monks seemed to think. Mostly they’d needed someone who could take their small boat into the creeks and measure egret eggs, count hatchlings, and test the water for salinity—work the monastery had been contracted to do for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to bring in extra income. Thomas was happy to do it. He loved disappearing into the rookery.
    His arms had begun to ache a little around the elbows. He changed position and turned his head in the other direction. He saw the church as a mouse would see it. As a beetle. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling without moving his head and felt he was lying at the bottom of the world, looking up. The place where all ladders start—wasn’t that what Yeats had said? He had spent a lot of his time here reading—especially the poets, systematically going through the volumes in the library. He loved Yeats best.
    He felt less consequential down here on the floor, and it struck him that all self-important people—the ones in Congress, in the Vatican, at AT&T perhaps—should lie down here for a while. They should lie here and look up, and see how different everything seemed.
    He’d had an overly important sense of himself before coming here, he admitted it. The cases he’d tried—so many of them high profile—had often put him on the front page of state newspapers, and sometimes he still thought about that life with nostalgia. He remembered the time he’d prevented a big landfill company from trucking in sewage sludge from New York City, how it’d landed him in the New York Times , and then all the television interviews he’d given. He’d basked in that.
    On the boat, the day he’d come here to stay, he’d thought of the river Styx, of the ferryman ushering him across the last threshold. He’d imagined he was dying to his old life and coming ashore to a new one, one hidden out here in the water, hidden from the world. It was silly and overly dramatic, but he’d liked the analogy. Then it had turned out that it wasn’t so much the water but the trees that had impressed him, how the branches were warped and curled in extravagant spirals from the ocean winds. The moment he’d seen them, he’d known that it was a place of harshness. Of enduring.
    Of course he’d taken the name Brother Thomas because he was the resident doubter, and it was practically a cliché, but he took it anyway. He doubted God. Perhaps he would find there had never been a God. Or he would lose one God and find another. He didn’t know. Despite this, he felt God the same way the arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only the hint of him.
    On the first page of the notebook, he’d written “Disputed Questions” in honor of Thomas Merton, the monk who’d written a book by that title. He’d