by André Alexis
creature on this night.
Would anyone find his body?
Or would he be eaten where he stood?
The pig grunted lasciviously as it came. It was steps away
when he heard a car backfire – once, twice –and felt drops of
warm rain on his face and neck. It was then that he realized his
eyes were closed. Opening them, he saw that he wasn’t quite
where he thought he was. He was on his knees in the middle of
the road. Before him was a tall figure, a man who said
– Do you mind if I slap you?
Before he could answer, the man slapped his face hard enough
to make his back teeth hurt.
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– Did you feel that? the man asked.
– You’re damn right, I felt it! That hurt!
– I’m sorry, said the man.
It was then that Stephens saw the pig. It lay dead on the
ground, its feet pawing at the air. The man who’d just slapped
him had shot it.
– The name’s Kit, said the man. I was in the pub?
Mr. Stephens didn’t recognize him.
– Why did you slap me? he asked.
They walked on then, leaving the pig in the middle of the
road. Kit, a Methodist from Manitoba, was tall and broad, his
dark hair gathered in a ponytail. John Stephens couldn’t see
much of his face in the dark, but he recognized the man’s voice
and remembered that they’d spoken while waiting for their drinks
at the bar. The man was Scottish on his father’s side and Jamaican
on his mother’s.
– I slapped you because I wasn’t sure if you’re possessed.
– What would you have done if I was possessed?
– I’d have shot you, said Kit. But just in the leg so you couldn’t
walk. I couldn’t kill you after drinking with you like that.
Kit hadn’t followed him from the pub. He’d chosen the road
they were on because he was walking to Feversham. A coinci-
dence. He’d been surprised to see someone else out at this time
of night. More surprised still to find a man kneeling in the middle
of the road with a pig in front of him. The pig had seemed like a
breathing, white marble figure. You didn’t even have to believe in
demons to feel the malevolence. It was palpable. The thing he
couldn’t tell was who, of pig or man, was host to the demon and
who was not. Because the pig was unnaturally still, he shot it.
Twice. He was sorry to have killed a fellow being, but his almost
instinctive concern had been for the kneeling man.
Given that Kit had almost shot him in the leg, it’s surprising
how untroubled their relationship was. That first night, John
Stephens was preoccupied by what had happened. Had he really
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been possessed by a pig possessed by a demon? The idea wasn’t
easy for an atheist to accept. He preferred to think that the earth
was a being of many aspects, some of which were malign, that
people and animals could be overcome by “evil” the way an early-
morning traveller is shrouded by fog in a valley. The land had a
“dark side,’ and he’d touched it. Or had it touched him? As dawn
came, he and Kit finally saw that he’d been spattered by pig’s
blood: his clothes, his face and neck, his hands.
Naturally, John Stephens wondered about his companion.
Why was an imposing, intimidating Manitoban walking the back
roads of Ontario with a gun? And was it better or worse, for him,
that Kit could tell – or thought he could tell – if a man was
possessed by slapping him? Mr. Stephens felt both anxious and
curious. He and Kit walked easily together, though, neither of
them saying much until Woodstock, where Mr. Stephens cleaned
up and they had a coffee in a place near the Ingersoll Road.
In total, the two travelled together for five days. They slept
where they could: in hotel lobbies, taverns, restaurants, and
McDonald’s. They were close, in the way that road acquaintances
sometimes are. But Ùisdean Ross – who preferred being called
“Kit” to having his name mangled – was not a man to waste
words. He seemed happier to keep quiet rather than talk about
trivial things.
Then again, Kit was always ready to talk about the spiritual.
He allowed it to influence his life. He was walking from Winnipeg
to Feversham, for instance, as penance. He wouldn’t say what
he’d done to require penance. It was a family matter. Kit was
convinced, though, that his soul would be healed by walking –
as opposed to wandering, which is what John Stephens had been
doing. Kit had been a month on the road when they met, and he
felt almost whole. More than that, he believed that rescuing John
Stephens from a demon was a sign that his penance was near its
end. This did not free him from actually going to Feversham,
however. Feversham was inescapable.
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But who in their right mind would journey all that way –
almost 1,250 kilometres – to Feversham? Feversham was what
the French called “un bled,’ a place with no appeal, a village you
leave as soon as you’re able, a place where it rains five days a
week, even when it doesn’t rain at all. Stephens had never heard
anyone say anything about it – good or bad – and that included
the one time he’d walked through it.
That, said Kit, was because he’d judged Feversham with his
eyes. He had taken its unpaved roads, the modesty of its houses,
stores, and institutions as the basis for his judgment. But did he
realize that Feversham had the highest percentage in the world
of priests and holy people living in it? Well, it did. Surpassing
even Vatican City. Ninety-five per cent of those who live in
Feversham are spiritual masters, men and women of all denomi-
nations. If Stephens had looked in the general store on River
Road, for instance, he’d have seen a bewildering variety of food,
foods to accommodate Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Shin-
toists, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and so on. The choice of fruit and
vegetables alone was stunning. You could buy everything from
yuzu to custard apples, from jicama to marrow-stem kale.
Was Kit himself a holy man?
No. Holy men don’t walk around with guns. But Feversham
wasn’t a place to be trifled with. Kit was going because he wasn’t
sure whether he wanted to live or die, and this was the kind of
question that could be answered in Feversham. The gun, its bullets,
had been meant for himself. Until, that is, he’d shot the pig.
As if all that wasn’t enough spiritual matter to think about,
somewhere around the town of Arthur, where they shared a bed at
an inn, Kit suggested that, given how they’d met and where they
were going, it was likely that Feversham was Stephens’s destiny
too. Kit recognized in John Stephens a man suffering from the
same hesitation to live that he himself suffered from. The difference,
said Kit, was that he could admit to a longing for death. But
Stephens seemed not to have admitted this – not even to himself.
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This was true and
obvious, and John Stephens at last admitted
it to himself. He did want to die, but he didn’t know how. So,
he’d chosen a way that reflected his irresolution: death by drink.
– You can speak to God with me, said Kit. I really think you
should, John.
Feversham’s sanctity had first been described to Kit by a
Christian monk from Neepawa, in metaphorical terms. Think of
it this way, the monk had said: God needs sleep as much as
mortals do. We were made in God’s image. We share God’s
habits. So, God obviously sleeps. No surprise, then, that there
are places God prefers to rest. These places are little known.
They’re northern – Feversham, Pangnirtung, Sarqaq, Ny-Ålesund,
Chatanga – and modest and quiet and, evidently, suited to divine
repose. Those in distress, those teetering between life and death
who manage to stay with God as God sleeps, those who manage
to share God’s dreams, are granted grace if they choose it.
Two strange ideas: that God would choose to sleep in Fever-
sham, Ontario, and that Stephens’s journey with Kit Ross was
now a pilgrimage.
– What happens when a god dreams? John Stephens asked.
This no one could say, said Kit, because, according to his
monk, we all exist only within a divine dream. When God awak-
ens, we will vanish. Not knowing the awakened God, we cannot
know the one who dreams, either, having nothing to compare
the dreamer with. We can say, though, that, as with any dream,
the dreamer is all and all is the dreamer. Trees, gourds, people,
clouds, dresses, ants, boots … all are part of the same wonderful
dream. And to be where the dreamer dreams – in Feversham –
is to be closer to the source, as when one lies beside a dreaming
beloved and feels a dream pass through them as if it were a
current. To be in Feversham is to be next to the dreamer and to
experience something deeper: intimations of the self.
As far as Stephens was concerned, the monk from Neepawa’s
ideas were pure contradiction. God was either asleep in some real
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place – in which case He could be approached while He slept –
or we were all (including God Himself) part of a dream and, so,
equidistant from the dreamer wherever we might be. To be beside
the dreamer’s dream of himself would, in that case, mean nothing,
with Feversham no more significant than anywhere else..
Kit, who believed the monk from Neepawa, saw no contra-
diction at all. To him, it was obvious that the dreamer would
dream himself, and that, to know the dreamer, even in the dream,
was to be blessed. More: it was the definition of grace to find the
dreamer in the dream. Which is why Feversham, one of the places
where God dreams Himself into our ‘reality,’ is sacred.
Knowing Feversham as Stephens did, it was hard for him to
imagine where exactly the Lord’s bed might be. But it was ques-
tions like that that convinced him to travel on with Kit. Atheist
or not – and unsure though he was of Kit’s sanity – Stephens’s
curiosity got the better of him. So, days after being attacked by a
pig, John Stephens walked into the sacred town of Feversham.
What is it you see when you enter a legendary place? Not the
place itself, surely, not the place in and of itself. Rather, you see
it through a curtain of ghosts, expectations, and legend. So it
was for John Stephens. Feversham was more or less as he remem-
bered it: bland and unremarkable. But now its blandness had an
ascetic feel to it. Its small houses, identical to small houses all
over the province, now seemed falsely normal, hiding as they did
the priests and holy people Kit had told him about. The tar on its
roads seemed like a stratagem. The river was like a river in a
vision of small towns. Stephens accepted that Feversham might
be sacred to him because he could no longer see it as profane.
But he couldn’t tell if profane Feversham was real or if sacred
Feversham was. Which Feversham was the illusion, which the
real? Or, to put it another way: between illusion and reality, which
was least untrue?
(Of course, if the monk from Neepawa was right, the question
was pointless, there being no such division as illusion/reality,
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all being dream-stuff. Then again, Stephens did not believe the
monk knew any more about the world than we do. And, without
denying the influence of illusion on reality, it was important to
remember that, for those of us who are not mystics, the distinction
between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is crucial.)
The Methodist home was a white A-frame on River Road. Its
driveway sloped toward the street, and a white Ford Fusion was
parked on the slope. From outside, nothing gave the house away
as anything other than a modest family home. Even the spring
mechanism on its screen door was slightly flawed, so that the
door pulled quickly open and had to be pulled shut, rattling like
a sheet of tin behind you.
Once inside, though, the story was different. Past the entrance
alcove, the living room was white with no furniture, save two
lacquered wooden pews, both ten feet long. Beyond the pews,
suspended from the ceiling, was a gold-painted crucifix, four
feet tall with a two-foot crossbar. The living room wasn’t hushed,
as a church might be, but it felt like a place of worship. On the
front pew, the pastor – Rev. Sara Crosbie – was speaking to a
Coptic monk, her next-door neighbour, a man dressed in black
save for his bonnet, which had white crosses on it.
Seeing Kit, Reverend Crosbie got up.
– You’re Kit, she said, extending a hand. Welcome!
John Stephens knew, at that moment, that everything Kit
Ross had told him about the town was true. It wasn’t only the
fact that they’d found a Methodist church in a fixer-upper by
the river. It was the look on the monk’s face: serene but engaged.
Stephens would meet a number of the holy men and holy women
over the following days, their homes like spiritual Tardises –
plain on the outside, temples within. But he believed Kit Ross
the moment he saw the monk’s face. The business here was
clearly spiritual.
On the other hand, Kit’s version of what would happen –
communion with a dreaming God – was (perhaps) off the mark.
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According to Reverend Crosbie, whose guest room served as a
place for pilgrims, the only certain thing, the only thing all the
holy people gathered in Feversham believed, was that God,
however defined, was often close to Feversham, and even in those
times when God’s presence was less pronounced, God’s absence
was a warm one. Now, here, the analogy of beds and sleep actually
worked. You could say, and Reverend Crosbie did, that God’s
absence from Feversham was very like the warmth on one side of
the bed when your beloved has gotten up in the middle of the
night and you reach over to touch the place where they’ve been.
A point of contention a
mong the spiritual leaders was whether
God communed with anyone who came to Feversham or only
with those who’d prepared for communion with God. This was a
particularly lively debate. There had been a number of cases in
which “common people,’ wandering near the sacred clearing, had
been touched by God, coming away with prophecies or scriptural
interpretations or predictions about the future. Some believed
that those who had been in the company of God were holy,
whether “spiritual” or not. Others believed that those claiming to
have been in God’s company were not to be trusted unless they
were spiritual leaders. Still others believed that common people
should not be allowed in Feversham at all, as they might intercept
messages meant for the reverend.
It seemed to Reverend Crosbie that there were good argu-
ments for many of the positions. She herself did not like the
idea of people trampling on sacred ground looking for God to
solve their problems, as if the Lord were running a garage for
the soul.
And yet, who knew the will of God? In one baffling case, it
seems the Lord provided a poor supplicant with the names of all
the winners at Dresden Raceway. That is, every winning horse in
every race for thirty days. A miracle, surely. None doubted it was
the work of a divinity. And the poor supplicant used the entirety
of his winnings to build a church beside the racetrack, a church
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that burned to the ground the day it was finished. This incident
alone brought up a thousand questions. To begin with, there was
the question of whether or not God sent “mixed signals.’ Some
felt that, in burning the church to the ground, God had changed
Their mind. Others felt it was too soon to tell what God meant.
Some felt God was condemning gambling, though why, having
used gambling to build a church, would God then burn the
church, not the racetrack? None of Feversham’s spiritual leaders
was prepared to admit that God had made a mistake but, after
the incident, all of them wrestled even more intensely with the
meaning of God’s actions in the world.
Reverend Crosbie was wrestling with the idea still, which is
why she was sympathetic to Kit’s situation. She didn’t entirely
approve of petitioning God for earthly advice, but neither did
she feel she had the right to decide who should be encouraged