On Purpose

By the time the northbound train eased to a stop at Bradford Station, John Evans had been traveling for nearly five hours. He’d caught the first bus out of Oswestry at four in the morning, nearly slept through the transfer to a train at Shrewsbury an hour later, then slept again after the switch to a line that took him up through Manchester. His journey was not over—another two plus hours remained before a third train would land him at his destination. And yet, as he stepped onto the Bradford platform with a groggy but significantly better-rested head, John couldn’t help but feel as though the journey had begun for a second time.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said, her words accompanied by a tug on the sleeve of John’s windbreaker. He turned and found a young woman with mousy brown hair, holding a small girl in her arms. The woman looked desperate, and for a moment John thought that she might ask him for money. He released the object he’d been clenching a fist around in the pocket of his windbreaker and reached instinctively for his wallet.

“Do you know which way it is for Ripon?”

Instead of grabbing the wallet, he scratched his back. “Sorry?”

“For Ripon? We’re supposed to board the northern at nine-thirty.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s the one I’m supposed to catch as well, but I’m afraid this is my first time in Bradford. Here, follow me and we’ll figure it out.”

Together, they moved through the work-hour traffic of the station, John constantly aware of the tug on his windbreaker where the woman had grabbed hold so as not to lose him. He glanced back occasionally to be sure it was her grabbing him, and usually found the gaze of the small girl in her mother’s arms. He would have guessed her to be around three or four, nearing the age too big to be carried, but still too small to be trusted in such a crowd. After several minutes, they reached an information booth where a short man with a severe haircut pointed them in the direction of the right platform that would take them to Ripon.

“Thanks,” John said as they left the booth.

To his surprise, the mother and daughter did not leave his side as he made his way over to the indicated platform. The crowds had thinned somewhat in this area of the station—most were on their way into either Manchester or Sheffield for work—and so the woman walked beside him, the pressure of her tug no longer on his jacket.

“You on holiday?” he asked the woman, unable to stand the silence.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes. Sort of. Daisy’s supposed to be with her dad this weekend, but he couldn’t make it so we’re having our own bit of fun. Thought it might be nice to head up to the countryside and see some of the sights. My mum’s in Ripon as well.”

“Been traveling long?”

“Just from Huddersfield, not too bad. And you?”

“Coming from Oswestry.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “You must have been up since the crack of dawn, to come so far. What’s so important in Ripon that you needed to get up so bloody early?”

Stuffing his hands into his windbreaker pocket, John shrugged.

“Four isn’t too bad. Only an hour and a half earlier than I’m used to.”

“Are you one of those gym people? I could never—”

“A priest, actually.”

Now, the woman’s eyes narrowed. “A priest? You don’t look it.”

It was true. John had dressed nondescriptly for the journey: wool trousers, button-up shirt, an old pair of scuffed Oxfords, and the olive windbreaker. The only hint that he might have been a man of the cloth resided in the right pocket of his windbreaker, where a stiff bit of white plastic resided. A clerical collar, which he would not wear today. His hand went to the collar as the woman scrutinized him, opening and closing around it compulsively.

“I’m on leave for the day.”

“I didn’t know priests had leave. Anglican?”

“Catholic,” said John. “St. Oswalds.”

The woman gave him another searching look, then shrugged. They continued to walk beside each other in silence until they reached the proper platform, where the train had yet to arrive. A small digital board above their heads announced a ten-minute delay.

The woman laughed. “Guess we had no reason to panic.”

“Suppose not,” said John.

“Well, it was lovely to meet you, Mr. Priest.”

“John Evans,” he said, reaching out a hand.

The woman took it. “Harriet. And darling Daisy. Say thank you, Daisy.”

Instead, the little girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and peeked out with one eye and a shy smile, as though his presence were simultaneously frightening and funny.

Harriet laughed again, and then the mother and daughter moved off to find a bench to sit and wait. Once they’d disappeared behind an old advert stand for deodorant, John pulled the hand from his pocket that had been clenching the clerical collar and examined the red lines that had formed where the hard plastic had dug into his skin. He shook the hand out.

Twelve minutes later, the train to Ripon arrived with a screech and hiss. John boarded on the third car and found a seat by a west-facing window, where he’d be able to watch the countryside move in paneled scenes once they got out past Leeds. He had just settled into his seat when a child’s voice caught his attention—Daisy and Harriet sat several rows up, and Daisy was leaning over the top of her seat to stare at John with wide, dark eyes.

“Hullo,” she said. “Hullo Mr. Priest.”

He smiled at her, then turned back to the window and he placed his hand in the pocket of his windbreaker. The clerical collar had already grown cold without his grasp.

Apparently, Daisy was not one to give in so easily.

“Hullo,” she called again. John glanced in her direction and was unsurprised to find a very flustered looking Harriet trying to get Daisy to sit down. The other occupants in the car cast amused glances in the mother’s direction, and an older woman sucked her teeth endearingly. As he continued watching, Daisy eventually wriggled free of her mother’s grasp and staggered out into the aisle, which she then barged down until she stood next to John.

“Hullo.”

“Hello,” John said. “Did you decide you wanted to talk to me?”

“No,” said Daisy. Then, with great effort she pulled herself up onto the empty seat next to him. She took a moment to flatten the hem of her skirt neatly over her legs.

“I think your mother might miss you,” John said.

“No,” said Daisy again. Then, “Where’s your mum?”

“Oh,” said John. “Well, she’s not here.”

“But where? Maybe in Liwerpool.”

John laughed. “Not in Liverpool. What gave you that idea?”

“That’s where Dadda is.”

“Oh, I see. Well no, my mother isn’t in Liverpool.”

Harriet appeared, kneeling beside Daisy. She gave John an apologetic look, then grabbed the little girl’s arm. “Come on, dear. Let’s not bother the man.”

“It’s alright,” said John. “Really, I don’t mind the company.”

Harriet raised an eyebrow. “She wasn’t pestering you with questions?”

“Not the hard ones, at least.”

“Where’s your mum?” Daisy asked again.

This time, John smiled and pointed to the clouds over the station roof. “My mum’s up there. Not so far away, if you think about it from a certain perspective.”

“Oh,” said Daisy. Then, “Isn’t she lonely up there?”

He glanced up at Harriet, wondering if she minded him waxing theological. But she was looking out the window as well, her dark eyes matching her daughter’s. Their faces were pressed together, Daisy’s pinked cheeks giving warmth to her mothers’ pale face. A memory—brought in tandem by Daisy’s question and the image of daughter and mother—flashed in John’s mind, warm and sharp. He pushed it aside with force, hand clenching around the collar. He’d promised Father Hughes that he wouldn’t make any decisions until he’d reached his destination, though he wasn’t entirely certain why the old priest had recommended this site. For now, on the train, he was only to enjoy the journey. Meditate with God over the steady rum-chuk-chuk of the wheels over tracks, the nearly imperceptible swaying of the cars, the green hills with mist pouring over their hedgerows in the mornings. All else would wait.

“No, I don’t think she’s lonely,” said John.

The train car shifted suddenly as they began to pull out of the station, and Harriet wobbled from her crouched position in the aisle. John glanced up to where she’d been sitting with Daisy earlier and noticed that their seats had been taken by a pair of young boys. The rest of the car had filled as well, with a few gentlemen standing with hands on rungs.

“Do you mind if I sit?”

“Not at all.”

It felt strange, the sudden intimacy between him and this woman and her child who she gathered into her lap as she sat. Strange, but familiar at the same time. A provoking of that same memory, clear as the little girl now seated next to him or the cut of the collar on his palm.

The mother and daughter spent the ride peering over John to look out the window. At one point, he offered to trade but they refused, insisting that they couldn’t take his spot after imposing on him so much already. The city thinned quickly as they went from Bradford and through Leeds, and then they were out in the country, passing pasture after pasture with narrow creeks running back and forth between them. John tapped a hymn on his knee with one finger as they moved, humming it in the back of his throat. Every so often, he cast a glance over at Harriet and Daisy as they watched the country pass, Daisy’s mouth partially opened in awe. Then he’d turn his gaze back to the passing copsed cottages, sheep on the hills.

By the time the train stopped in Harrogate and they disembarked to take a bus the rest of the way to Ripon, Daisy had fallen asleep in her mother’s arms. When Harriet complained that the girl was somehow heavier when asleep than awake, John offered to carry her onto the next bus. Harriet agreed, a flush of pink touching her face as she walked beside him. They boarded the bus together, and this time John made sure Harriet had the window seat before he placed Daisy on her mother’s lap. He replaced a small red shoe that had wiggled loose on the journey between train and bus, then stood to find another seat.

“Won’t you ride with us?” Harriet asked as he moved away.

The memory of pain wrenched in John, his hand tightening. “I figured I’d give you two a chance to rest. And myself a time to think. But thank you for the offer.”

He moved off and found an open row on the opposite side of the bus, where he tucked himself against the window. As the bus departed, he pulled the clerical collar from his windbreaker pocket and turned it over in his hands. He wasn’t entirely certain why he’d brought it. Father Hughes probably would have recommended against it, saying that it was best to leave things where they belonged. Probably quoted something from Ecclesiastes 3, like “there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” John swallowed the scripture away before his mind could continue the rest of the verses. Sweat slicked his brow, and he stuffed the clerical collar back into his pocket. Best to focus on the window, ignore the vague reflections of turquoise and maroon that were Daisy and Harriet behind him.

A drab rain had begun to fall by the time the bus stopped in Ripon. John disembarked quickly and pulled the collar of his windbreaker up, wishing he’d had the foresight to wear something with a hood. There was still one final bus to take, the 139 that sat waiting in the lot opposite him. He made his way over to it but stopped when he spotted Harriet and Daisy boarding the same—they’d rushed past him to stay out of the rain. Harriet tugged Daisy up the steps as the little girl resisted, her shrill voice cutting indistinctly across the station.

Perhaps it would be best to walk. The bus ride was only supposed to have taken twenty minutes, and it would be through a final bit of countryside. He’d often ridden his bike in the rain as a boy on the way back from school in a neighboring borough, sometimes wearing no more than the above-knee trousers and short-sleeved shirt he’d worn for uniform, with the rain falling so fast that it came at him sideways. He smiled at the remembrance, then turned from the 139 and headed down Queen’s Street until he spotted a small brown sign decorated with a white silhouette of holly pointing him in the direction of Fountains Abbey.

He followed the signs out of Ripon, then walked for another forty minutes into the countryside. At one point, the 139 passed him—a frantic knock sounded from one of the windows, and he glanced up just in time to see Daisy at the window, waving. Then she was gone in a flash, leaving John to whistle “May the Road Rise Up” between the hedges.

Finally, he arrived at the abbey ruins.

The main building had been constructed along the side of a hill, with green grass rolling down to the front door like an invitation. It must have been a grand structure once—two or three stories tall and sprawling, built from large stones that ranged from yellow to gray to pink depending on the section of wall. A short cliff ran north of the structure, almost but not quite overcoming the height of the bell tower that rose to the east. None of the buildings in the area had any roofs, save for occasional mossy green blankets that peeked over the edges of some of the lower structures. Adding to the sense of grand decrepitness were the tourists who gave the place a forlorn purpose, their bucket hats and slouching paces perhaps not quite what the abbey might have seen in earlier days when habited monks moved between chores.

As he stood on the hill above the abbey entrance, the memory that had simmered beneath the surface of thought—held at bay only by the clutching of the collar—bubbled up before John’s mind as palpable as though he stood within it. A decade ago, on a hill not dissimilar to this, fireworks bursting up on Bonfire Night. A woman sitting beside him, the day’s straw hat discarded at her side in the dark of night. A young boy running up the hill towards them, pointing at the crackles and bursts of colors filling the night sky above a treeline. His son hadn’t been more than four years old that day, almost the same age as Daisy.

The memory stabbed. It shook, it rendered inept.

“You aren’t happy here, anymore.” Father Hughes had sprung the accusation on him after dinner one evening. John had paused in clearing the table. “Not to worry—most probably haven’t noticed it. You put on a good face for mass. But I know you better.”

“I’m happy,” John had said. He’d meant it.

“You came to us mourning a loss. Needing purpose.”

“I found that purpose.”

“Many things are eternal,” Father Hughes had said. “The human soul. The love of Christ for all his children. My penchant for rosemary bread. But not purposes.”

John had leaned against the sink, back to the father.

“You found a purpose here after a tragedy. It is not uncommon for a person who has experienced loss to find solace in the work of the Lord. But a purpose…well, it serves a purpose. To lead a person out of a difficult moment in the past. Or to lead forward into a new future. Once that has been accomplished, you must find a new purpose in the Lord.”

“What purpose could be greater than the one I’ve already sworn to?”

“Perhaps an old purpose. From a previous life.”

The conversation had dissolved into an argument about vows, which in turn dissolved into memory until John stood once more before the Fountains Abbey. For a moment, he could only stare at the building and the sloping hill that a small boy might once have enjoyed tumbling down. Then, hands in his pockets, John headed down to the front doors. It did not take long before he found the room Father Hughes had indicated when he’d first spoken of John visiting the abbey. A grand hall with the walls reaching up into the open sky, slabs of tombs on the floor and a small plaque that old couples slowly shuffled by. More than a few titters sounded from the queue as they passed the tombs—someone had graffitied a word on the stone wall behind the plaque, black and red letters with fuzzed edges he could not make out.

Finally, he arrived at the plaque. It read:

Founded in 1132, Fountains Abbey was formed by several monks after they were expelled from St. Mary’s Abbey for rioting in favor of adopting the Cistercian order. The Cistercian order follows the 6^th century Rule of Saint Benedict, which calls for pax (peace) and ora et labora (prayer and work) and seeks to provide a moderate path between individual zeal and formulaic institutionalism.

John shook his head at the final words—bronzed where so many fingers had brushed over them in an effort to seek some sort of clarity or epiphany. Certainly, this is what Father Hughes had meant him to see. Monks who were willing to riot, a moderate path where none seemed plausible. An inherent but necessary tension between obedience and life itself. He hung his head against the words, feeling an emptiness settle inside his chest. The whole journey up, he’d imagined that the decision would become clear when he reached his destination. But the two halves remained, binary aches resounding in his chest. A boy running up a hill in the dark. A man, standing before an altar and making a promise to forgo any future pain of loss. If creating another family was not an option, he could not agonize over losing them.

A man coughed behind him.

John realized he’d held up the queue.

He moved away from the plaque, hand clenched in his pocket tighter than before. He glanced back at the wall, and his eye caught the graffiti behind. Proverbs 16:11. He could not remember the verse. He left the open-topped hall, retraced his steps back through the crumbling abbey until he found himself once again atop the grassy knoll. There he stood, suddenly rigid, unwilling to reenter the abbey but unable to take himself back in the direction of Ripon, where he might catch a bus and train and bus back to Oswestry. Caught. He sat, legs crossed in front of him like hers had been on that Bonfire Night, the image burned in his mind. He closed his eyes and lay back, legs protesting as folded they now stretched, tightening his hips. He tried to imagine as he had so many times before what it must have felt like. A flash of light and a screeching, rubber on wet asphalt. Gone in a moment, leaving him. Alone.   

“What are you doing, Mr. Priest?”

Slowly, John pulled his hands from his face. Sunlight burned in his vision, though not before he caught a glimpse of turquoise standing over him, a pinked face crouching down to examine him as though his face were the wriggling underside of a rock. He scrambled back up into a sitting position, face flush with the realization of sudden company.

“Just resting,” John said. He smiled. “What are you doing here?”

His vision resolved just in time to see Harriet coming up the hill behind Daisy, a bemused sort of smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “My mum recommended this place for our holiday—said it’s a nice place for kids to run around. I’m not a huge fan of old buildings myself, but this one has its charms I suppose. Better with no roof, let the sun in.”

“And have you enjoyed it?” John asked Daisy.

Daisy nodded, then reached up and tugged the hem of her mother’s jacket. When Harriet asked what she wanted, Daisy gave John a mischievous look before miming something with her hands. Harriet looked confused and squatted so her daughter could whisper something in her ear. John stood as she spoke, brushing the dampness from the back of his trousers.

“Oh, alright,” Harriet said after a moment. “Though I don’t see why he deserves one. After all, he did abandon us on the bus so he could walk here by himself.”

John flushed as Harriet reached into the pocket of her jacket and removed a fistful of yellow dandelions, their stems tied loosely together by a bit of long grass. She handed the bunch to Daisy, who carefully considered each flower before pulling one from its place. Then she handed it out to John, the yellow head lolling from side to side where the stem had been crushed. He reached for it, accepting it tenderly between two fingers. Daisy smiled.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

“She wanted to give it to you to say thanks,” said Harriet, hand on Daisy’s head. “For helping us get here. We wouldn’t have found any of those flowers without you.”

A lump formed in John’s throat, and he nodded.

“Well, we’d better be off,” said Harriet. “Grandmum’s waiting with lunch for us back in town. Daisy just spotted you and wanted to come say goodbye. I hope we didn’t bother.”

“Not at all,” John said. And then they were gone, moving off to where the 139 stopped at the Fountains Abbey park entrance on its way into Ripon.

He sat on the hill for a long while more, staring down at the abbey and its steady stream of families and older couples moving in and out of its aged archways. He sat long enough that the clouds parted, and the sun began to dip towards the western treeline, and the tourists began to move en masse towards the park entrance and the bus. Then, when the sky had turned a mysterious sort of pink and he was ready, he too made his way away from the abbey. 

As he boarded the 139, his hand cupped the dandelion reverently in his left pocket. He did not want to disturb a single broken petal on the journey home.