Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Vigil I Attend Asleep
A retired verger dreams of keeping vigil at the services he once served and wakes with the printed order of service warm and creased in his bare hand.
- dated: "the ember months"
- narrator: "Cyril Broadbank, retired verger"
First entry, ember months. I served the one church forty years, Christ Church up the hill, and retired from it four years come Lent, and I will say this before anything else: I did not ask to be let go, I was asked to go, gently, by a committee, over tea. I have not gone back except for harvest. What I go back to now is in my sleep and that is the whole of this book.
Second entry. In these ember months, when the evenings come down early, I dream the same dream in the same seat. I am on the verger's chair by the south door, service about to begin, and there is an order of service in my hand. I know it is the same dream because the church is lit as it was lit, the candles set the same distances apart, and the register of who sits where does not change between dreams. I keep vigil. That is the word for it. The congregation comes in and I hand out books and I do not hand out any.
Third entry. I woke the first time with my right hand closed and warm. I will write exactly what happened because nobody believes it and I hardly believe it and it was my hand. When I opened it, there was nothing in it. But it was warm, and shaped, the way a hand is shaped after holding a folded card for a long sit, and there is a crease across the palm I did not have before September, straight, like a fold in paper, and it has not gone out.
Fourth entry. In the dream the service was the one I vergered more times than any other, that I could do it with the lights off, and in the dream the lights were off. The lesson was read by a voice I knew, and I knew it and cannot place it, and the hymn numbers were shown and were the ones for the service forty years back, and I stood at my post through all of it, without moving, smaller in my sleep than I have been in life.
Fifth entry. My daughter took me to the doctor about my hand, over my suggestion, and nothing came of it, which I could have told her. But at the surgery I met the curate's mother, in from the next parish, and she asked how I kept busy now and I said I kept vigil, and she looked at me kindly and said we all do, in the dark part of the year, somebody has to. I have thought of nothing else since. She cannot have known what she said. She said it the way you hand someone a book at the door.
Sixth entry. Ember week again, a year on. The vigil in the dream has changed by one thing. This year the order of service in my hand is for a date that has not arrived. I could see it plain in the dream, top of the page, the printed day, and it is the ember day after this one. I am not going to the dream's church to see whether the paper says so again.
Last thing and then the book gets put away with the others. I have kept the crease in my palm and stopped talking about it and stopped being frightened, mostly. But the question I hand over to whoever reads this, the way I handed out those books for forty years: in the dream nobody comes to the south door all service long, and I keep the vigil anyway, so who is it waiting for — the congregation that never arrives, or the one verger who is already there, and has been since before he retired.