Snowfall

I shall tell you what I know of Father John. He once admitted that he had been a lawless man. He was a playwright of all things. Sometimes an actor but mostly He wrote the plays and managed the performances. I have read some of his plays since. He wouldn\'t allow me to read them at the time, some were quite naughty, imagine that! He was wonderfully talented. His characters were full of the quirks that made them human and the plays were about things in life that every person in the audience could understand and many knew about from personal experience. They were made more fantastic for theatre but it was the nature of Father John\'s plays to show on the stage some of life\'s problems being worked out and solved by these lovable human characters. It made the audience forget their own troubles for a time and laugh and sympathize with someone else\'s. After reading them, I realized that one of Father John\'s greatest talents was the observation of people. He was an avid people watcher.
It was this trait though that would get him into trouble. Her name was Sebine and she worked at the local tavern. Sebine was a lovely creature by the priest\'s description. Hair as black as night, eyes the color of emeralds and lips of ruby red. He said she had an exotic look to her like part of her parentage might have been from farther East but he could not actually place it and it never came up in their conversations. This was said with a blush. A thing I have rarely seen on Father John.
He watched Sebine wind her way through the patrons of the bar with almost unseemly attention. She smiled at him once or twice throughout the night; he was hooked. Father John came back every night after the shows. Soon they began to speak to one an another. Little conversations at first, but I believe Father John was quite probably a charming young man. He wrote her poetry and spoke of her beauty in ways that would romance the hardest heart because he meant it from his. He was quite enamored. Sebine seemed to find his advances interesting but she never took him up on them. Father John said he was convinced he wanted to marry this woman. He told her so one night and finally Sebine promised to meet him. It was a strange meeting, outside a stable not far from the tavern but it hardly seemed a suitable place when he would be willing to take her home. The priest said he put it out of his mind and looked forward to the meeting.
Seeing the stables deserted when he approached, Father John worried that she had chosen not to show at all. But upon hearing him, she quietly slipped out of the shadows. The priest said he could not restrain himself from reaching out to touch her, finally after all these nights. He placed his arms around her and pulled her close. She seemed to collapse against him. He said at first he thought she was as relieved to finally be together as he was but then something just seemed wrong. He looked down at her and noticed she was shaking.

\"Sebine? Is this not what you want?\"

She looked up at him with tears in her eyes and held him tighter for a moment before pulling out of his embrace. \"It is what I want... and what I cannot have.\"

He stood there speechless, this scene was not going at all the way he had envisioned it over and over in his head. \"I don\'t understand. I love you, Sebine and I would take you away and marry you. Never believe I was dishonor you!\"

She smiled sadly at him. \"I have dishonored me. They say it is sin to love another in your heart when you are married. I love you, Jon, but I am married to the tavern owner.\"

Jon, Yes, Father John\'s name was Jon. The church was quite original in giving him a new name. He could not believe what he was hearing. In His mind he had never come up with the possibility that Sebine was married. Why would it? She worked in a tavern. Jon began to blame her husband, no good man would allow his wife to be a serving wench to be ogled and pinched by drunken men. He\'d be right there, it seems her husband was not a good man but what he lacked in goodness he made up for in size.

\"I came to tell you to stop before you got hurt. I do not want to see that happen. Please forget about me, you are a good man and there is someone in this world for you.\" Sebine moved to step away from him.

\"But I don\'t want anyone else in this world.\" He reached for her hand and pulled her close again. \"There is only you. I\'ve never felt this way, Sebine.\"

\"It will pass. It always does.\" Such bitterness, did she mean love? Or did she believe he did not truly love her. Agood question that no one knows the answer to.

\"It won\'t. Come away with me, Sebine.\" He sucked in his breath. Jon was asking her to sin against her husband and to continue sinning with him but he couldn\'t give her up. \" I.. I know I should not ask you but I would honor you and treasure you through out your days.\"

\"I am married...\" She didn\'t exactly say no... Jon was as observant as always. He leaned down and kissed her. That ended it right there. No more arguments. She melted into his embrace and clung to him with a desperate fierceness. Jon felt his heart rise and his excitement. They could run away together, she did love him! Together always. He kissed her with the longing he always felt when watching her.
And then he was ripped away from her. He said it took him a while to figure out what had happened. He fell to the ground and heard a voice.

\"Filthy whore! I knew you were seeing this good for nothing actor!\" He heard the sound of flesh meeting flesh in violence and looked up in time to see the tavern owner strike Sebine knocking her up against one of the stable posts. The large man then turned on Jon and proceeded to pummel him within a inch of his life. Quite literally it would seem. He said he lost consciousness and when he woke the man was gone. He frantically looked around despite the pounding in his head and the blood in his eyes. Did he take Sebine with him?
No Sebine still lay next to the post, Jon crawled over to her and placed a hand on her cheek. She was cold but serene.

\"Sebine, we can leave now. It will all be all right. I will take care of you. I promise.\"

It was then that he noticed his other hand had been pushed into something wet, looking down he stared in horror at a pool of blood. Not his but hers. Jon pulled Sebine frantically to him and then saw the tragedy that had befallen his love. When she struck the post she struck one of the tools hung on it and it pierced the back of her neck. Sebine had lain silent, her life\'s blood flowing out of her as men fought over her, too busy to see she was dying.

Not that I would personally blame the priest. He was forcibly seeing another\'s point of view and a painful view it was. I am being flippant aren\'t I? Here were are talking about a good man\'s most tragic event. I should be more sensitive. I should and at one time I most certainly would. I was when this story was told to me. The horror of it and the pain the still filled Father John\'s eyes when he spoke of it touched me deeply, at the time.

Jon was found there next to Sebine in the morning by the stable hands. They did not know what to do with them so they took them to the church nearby. The priests tended Jon\'s wounds and saw to the girl\'s burial. They knew her from confession and mass because though she worked in a lawless place like a tavern, she tried to live a good life. It confused them that she was found by the stables and with a man near beaten to death. They would have asked her husband but he seemed to have vanished. The only person left to ask was Jon, if he lived.
Obviously he did live. He told the priests the whole story. What use would it be to lie to a priest, a servant of God? The only detail he left out was Sebine\'s willingness to leave with him. As it would never happen, he left it out. He told the priests that he had fallen in love with her and that he had asked her to marry him. She met him to tell him that she was already married and that he needed to find another and forget about her. He had pulled her close. His sin, he told them, not hers. It was then that her husband had shown up. He struck Sebine and the fall against the pronged tool had killed her. He then turned his attention to Jon. The priests decided from Jon\'s story that Sebine had died an honorable woman, if misguided. She should have told him in the tavern and not met him elsewhere. This lawless behavior would cause her to spend time in purgatory but at least she did not send her soul to hell. As for Jon, he was still alive by the grace of God and could atone for his sins of coveting another man\'s wife and trying to seduce her. The church looked after him as he grew more healthy. He found their orderly lives a peaceful balm to his torn and battered soul. The thought of leaving the church, which seemed like another world, to go back out into the real world caused him fear. To live outside of the church was to have to feel life\'s pains and sorrows. In the church they taught you to push all that aside and follow something higher. It seemed so inviting to his wounded spirit. Jon was no more and Brother John took his place.
The tavern owner returned quietly one night. He spread the story that his wife ran out on him and he had not seen her but that she had been making eyes at the actor who frequented the tavern. Neither the playwright or Sebine was found and it was forgotten as an unsolved mystery. People who heard the story assumed the two had run off together. No doubt the tavern owner assumed they were both dead, for why else would he have run that night? His lady wife was very well known, and to be found dead next to a man who was last seen in his bar... well, suspicion would have fallen very heavily on him. Worse, there were patrons who could attest to him storming out into the night. He was even heard to say. Something about getting \"that cheating wench\" All in all, even a rock of a man like this one had enough sense to see that he might want to leave town and quickly. He couldn\'t leave his tavern though and so he snuck back into town and asked around. When it seemed no one was looking for him, he resumed his job. Eventually he found him a nice blonde tavern wench that while she wasn\'t quite the exotic beauty of Sebine, She seemed to have a more flirtatious attitude that caused an equal draw of drunken men looking to eye a lovely woman while they drank their day away.

So the moral of this story? There isn\'t one. Its just life. You can decide whether one sinful thought or action in Sebine\'s life was worth her death. Or whether Father John should have lived while she died. Was it right for him to go into the church and hide himself away from the rest of the world for the rest of his life? I don\'t know. The tavern owner... nothing happened to him at all, he killed his wife, nearly killed another and still had his business. Life just isn\'t fair sometimes.