Pastoral

by André Alexis

  There was no one about. The man continued across the water, singing or reciting as he went. The water was rigged, surely. There was almost certainly some solid path just beneath its surface. And smiling at what he imagined to be a wonderful illusion, Father Pennant stepped into the water at or near the very point the man had stepped. It was deep water, though, and he sank. His clothes and shoes weighed him down immediately. Sputtering and panic-struck, he managed to turn himself around and pull himself out of the pit. The water was cold, but he kicked off his shoes, grappled to safety and emerged mud-streaked, soaked and freezing. Turning back to the pit, he was stunned to see that the man was on the opposite side looking at him or seeming to look at him with derision. Poised a moment on the other side, still speaking to himself or to Father Pennant, the man now began his return across the water. If when he had thought it a trick Father Pennant found this water walk charming, he was now frankly frightened by it.

  As the man approached, Father Pennant recognized George Fox, the mayor of Barrow. Mr. Fox was not speaking English, nor was he paying the least attention to Father Pennant. He looked only before him, enraptured, speaking in tongues:

  – Mose hsaou ne eeaui aoe meu ne loox an matu uie matu og easui …

  Hearing these sounds and believing that Fox was possessed, Father Pennant fell to his knees and began to pray. He was in the presence of the diabolical. He knew it. He closed his eyes and said his prayers as loudly as he dared. He was not a timorous man, far from it, but he was terrified to be in the presence of Satan.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and the touch was like fire, despite his wet clothes.

  – Father Pennant? Are you all right?

  Opening his eyes, Father Pennant saw George Fox looking down at him. Fox had a broad face in which his small, brown eyes were set. His forehead was speckled by freckles. He was mostly bald and his breath was abominable, like sour milk and rotting chicken skin. Above Fox, the sun ignited a small cloud.

  – Get thee behind me, Satan, said Father Pennant. I cannot be tempted.

  Mr. Fox stood up straight, immediately defensive.

  – That’s pretty unfair, he said. I’m a politician, so maybe you’ve heard people say some bad things about me. But I’m as God-fearing as the next man. I may not be Catholic, but that doesn’t give you the right to insult me.

  Mayor Fox walked away with all the outrage he could muster – very little, as it happened, because he was a generous and warm-hearted man. Not that Father Pennant noticed the mayor’s attempt at outrage. He was too busy praying, reciting the psalm he loved best (As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O Lord …) over and over, until he felt calm enough to stand. Only then did he look up and take stock of the situation. He was alone, shoeless, wet, his clothes covered with grit. It seemed to him that he had seen the devil disguised as Mayor Fox. And Satan, unlike the gypsy moths, was a mystery, as miraculous as loaves and fishes, water and wine. Father Pennant had encountered the Lord of the Flies, and his faith, which had wavered of late, was fully restored.

  He shivered as he walked the miles back to town, his feet punished by the stones at the side of the road.

  That evening Father Pennant was still too upset to do his duties, too shaken to prepare a sermon for the next day or to visit the old people at Maud Chapman’s Home for the Aged. He sat at the dining table, as if turned to lead. Lowther had prepared a lamb roast with roasted potatoes and sweet corn. For dessert he had made a sticky toffee pudding. The pudding had sat out, aromatically blooming in the rectory as soon as it was taken from the oven. Father Pennant, who loved sticky toffee pudding, put his spoon in the pudding, tasted a morsel and dispassionately said

  – Thank you, Lowther. It’s good.

  before putting his spoon down and looking away.

  Lowther was, of course, interested in the priest’s behaviour, but he sat in silence until Father Pennant said

  – Do you believe in evil, Lowther?

  – I believe men do unspeakable things, Father. I don’t know about evil.

  – Evil is the other side of the sacred, said Father Pennant. If there’s no evil, there can’t be anything sacred either. I know that. I know it is God’s will that evil exist, but I wish it were different.

  – I can see you’re upset, said Lowther. Do you mind my asking what’s wrong?

  – No, I don’t mind, said Father Pennant.

  He told Lowther what he had lived through that day: the climb over Petersen’s gate, his first vision of Mayor Fox, Fox’s diabolical traverse of the gravel pit, walking on water and speaking in tongues, and his – that is Father Pennant’s – near drowning and long walk home. When he had heard Father Pennant’s story, Lowther said

  – I’m sorry I didn’t go with you, Father. I understand how you could interpret things as you did. And I can see how much you respect and fear Satan, but there wasn’t anything satanic about what you saw. Nothing miraculous either. Mayor Fox should have told you himself, when he saw you so upset. He wasn’t walking on water. If anything, he was walking on plastic. I know it’ll sound strange to an outsider, but Mayor Fox crosses the gravel pit every year. Several times a year, actually.

  There was a perfectly logical explanation for what Father Pennant had seen. What he’d seen was a foretaste of Barrow Day. There were, deeply planted in the gravel pit’s floor, tall columns of thick, clear plastic, columns some thirty feet tall, almost entirely invisible to the eye. There were sixty of them. They were beneath the surface for most of the year, but in late summer, the water level fell and you could see them clearly. The tops of the columns were flat and oval, wide enough to accommodate even a large human. The columns were arranged so that a man or woman of average height could walk across the pit with ease. Naturally, when the water was high, as it usually was, you couldn’t see the columns and so it looked as if someone were walking on water, though they were actually stepping on the flat tops of the columns. More than that: the words Mayor Fox recited were not an incantation. He hadn’t been speaking in tongues. The words, gibberish really, had been written to help whoever was walking across the water know when to step. The pillars were not evenly spaced, so if you walked at the right pace and said the words with the right rhythm, at every third word you could step down with confidence. The timing was important. The words and their rhythm varied according to the height of the person crossing the water. That was all there was to tell, in essence.

  No, there was more. This walk across the columns was a relatively new aspect of Barrow Day. The columns had been fashioned and then (with great difficulty) planted in the gravel pit by an artist. The artist, a Russian émigré named Anton Mandelshtam, had meant his ‘installation’ to represent the freedom one has in a capitalist society. For instance, the freedom to walk across a gravel pit without getting one’s feet dirty, to walk above the land as if exalted. No one in Barrow understood the ideas behind Mandelshtam’s Freedom, but watching a man walk across the pit on glass pillars was, in and of itself, entertaining. The installation was such a popular work that it was absorbed into Barrow Day’s festivities, and by the late eighties, the crossing of Petersen’s gravel pit came to mark the end of Barrow Day.

  – I’ve done it myself, said Lowther. It’s difficult. The tops of the columns are sometimes slippery. You have to pay attention. When he was crossing the gravel pit, Mayor Fox wouldn’t really have seen or heard you.

  Father Pennant did not know what to say. He believed what Lowther told him and he felt he should have been comforted to learn that what he’d taken for diabolical was, in fact, a kind of civic duty. And yet, he was not comforted.

  – You know, said Lowther, it’s easy to mistake what we see for things we haven’t seen.

  Lowther felt contrite for a trauma that was, after all, of his own making. He had meant for Father Pennant to see Mayor Fox cross the gravel pit. He had even hoped Father Pennant would be as stunned as he had been when he first saw the ‘miracle.’ So, in effect, the
timing had worked out perfectly, where Lowther was concerned. On the other hand, Lowther had lived in Barrow for so long he found it difficult to think of the mayor’s walk on water as anything that could permanently affect a man. Though he regretted the extent of Father Pennant’s shock, Lowther had learned something important about the priest: Father Pennant was superstitious in just the way Lowther admired. The man believed as fervently in darkness as Lowther himself did. There was now, as far as Lowther was concerned, an unshakeable bond between himself and Christopher Pennant. No more ‘miracles’ were needed, no more crises for the young priest to deal with. When Lowther’s time came, he would be honoured to confess his sins to this man and to leave the world with grace.

  But the effect on Father Pennant of this contact with a counterfeit ‘evil’ was indelible, and it changed him. He was no longer the man Lowther imagined him to be.

  After his encounter with Mayor Fox, Father Pennant was wary of Barrow Day. He was not as inclined to join the celebration as he was to observe it.

  Every year, harsher penalties were instituted, in an effort to limit the worst offences: public drunkenness, public nudity, public fornication. And every year, these things (drunkenness, nudity, etc.) happened just often enough to bring on both Christian regret and a pagan longing for the next year’s celebrations.

  Barrow Day began at eleven o’clock with memorial masses said in churches across town. At mass, the townspeople remembered those who had died during the previous year as well as Richmond Barrow himself, long dead but still illustrious. After mass, it was traditional, whatever the denomination, to eat a slice of Barrow bread: a sweet bread (or cake) made with flour, eggs, sugar, coconut, raisins and vanilla. The centre of Barrow bread was where the coconut and raisins (dyed red) were baked in the form of an X above which there was a circle. That is, when one cut a slice of the loaf, it was meant to look as if a red skull and crossbones were in the slice’s centre. Though this required some skill to do well, virtually every woman in Barrow could make Barrow bread and make it very well indeed.

  At one o’clock, the parade would begin. There were no more than two miles from one end of town to the other, but the parade usually went on two or even three hours, because half of the population was in the procession. Not that the spectators minded the time it took their family and friends to walk from one end of town to the next. It was during the parade that drinking began in earnest. Officially, drinking was not permitted on the streets, but the men and women watching the parade would all drink (much or little) a concoction of soda, rum and dandelion wine: Barrow brew. A little Barrow brew went a long way. Father Pennant – who politely accepted a mouthful from a pigskin – found it unbearably sweet. But it lifted the spirits of most who drank it, so that the parade was the heart and soul of the day.

  The parade was not entirely about drink and good cheer. It was also fitfully, strangely beautiful. This was largely due to the handmade and sometimes breathtaking costumes worn by that half of the town that was on display. The parade was also a competition, with ‘best costume’ elected by a panel of judges. And here, the unusual was prized above all. One year, for instance, first prize was given to Rowland Briggs, a house painter, whose costume made him look like a burning schoolhouse, complete with students and teachers jumping from the upper floors. A year later, the prize was won by John Walker, a garage mechanic, whose costume included an effigy of a school principal hanging from a gallows while flames rose up behind him. Walker’s outfit was considered a witty rejoinder to Briggs’s costume.

  After the parade, there was a breather, a few hours during which people could prepare for the banquet and dance that took place in the old fire hall. And finally, at the end of the night, usually around eleven o’clock, almost everyone – adults and such children who were not asleep or a hazard to themselves – ended up at Petersen’s gravel pit where the mayor would walk across the water and so mark the end of the day’s festivities.

  Father Pennant’s first Barrow Day passed like a convulsive dream. It began early with Lowther practicing ‘The Song of the Birds,’ a mournful piece that cast a spell on the day: quiet, as the sun rose in the faded blue sky, no clouds, the morning smelling of a warm rhubarb compote Lowther served at breakfast.

  At eleven o’clock, the church was filled to capacity, most of the celebrants his own parishioners. He smiled at Robbie Myers and Elizabeth Denny – who, conspicuously, sat side by side – and nodded at George Rubie and George Bigland. For some reason, the brooch worn by Ellin Machell, the librarian, caught his attention: praying hands carved in a light blue stone.

  After mass, there were more faces and mingled voices.

  – How’re you, Father Pennant?

  – Happy Barrow’s Day, Father.

  – Father, have you met my cousin Don?

  Then they were all eating Barrow bread, a macabre kind of treat, it seemed to Father Pennant, but delicious: the taste of coconut against the sweet raisins. In the end, he sampled the Barrow bread of seven or eight women before returning to the rectory, where Lowther had prepared roast chicken, dill dumplings and, of course, Barrow bread. Lowther’s bread was wonderful, but it was also a slight variant: in the centre of his slices there were no skulls and crossbones but only a simple, puffy red circle.

  Father Pennant had been invited to be part of the parade but, wary as he was, he chose to watch the procession from the sidewalk. Men and women he had seen here and there passed by on trucks, on tractors, on the back seats of convertibles. It seemed as if every institution in town had put one of its own on the back of something that moved: Lions Club, Rotary Club, 4-H Club, library, fire station, police station. People he had seen behind counters or out in the street waved, smiled and waved, accompanied by recorded music or followed by men playing bagpipes, which, as ever, sounded like small children being tortured into melody.

  Most of the costumes were plain. There were coureurs de bois, frontier ladies, a handful of Laura Secords and a dozen (faux) Native Canadians. But there were also a number of perplexing or curious disguises. Two in particular struck Father Pennant as remarkable. The first made its wearer look as if he or she were a large bear. Out of the bear’s mouth a bald eagle sprang up with a salmon in its beak. The salmon flipped and flopped as if it were alive and, at intervals, spat hard candy into the crowd. The second costume, more grotesque, was worn by a man on stilts. He looked like a gigantic and unpleasant beetle. The man’s white face protruded from the insect’s dark mandible. From the lower parts of the insect, balls of foil-wrapped chocolate dropped. The chocolate was perhaps meant to roll to the children watching the parade, but it was inevitably squashed by the people or vehicles that followed, the warm chocolate oozing or spurting from the foil.

  Father Pennant stood in one spot all parade long. So, he was not aware of any incidents that took place in other parts of town. He heard about some of them in the bits of conversation he caught from those who passed by. For instance, he heard about two or three drunks, the most unruly of whom seemed to be George Bigland.

  – Only thing he ever does is drink and fuck sheep, said someone.

  – Yeah, it’s a vicious circle, answered someone else.

  Also, Esther Greenwood, whom Father Pennant knew as soft-spoken and modest, had exposed her breasts, as she had been doing for years in an effort to bring attention to the various cancers that afflicted women in Barrow. When Esther had first decided to bare her breasts, some fifteen years previously, she had indeed brought attention to herself and her cause. But times had changed. Few people paid attention to her, and the police, one of whom inevitably brought a sweater to the parade, covered Ms. Greenwood up as soon as she disrobed. Over the years, other women had bared their breasts in sorority with Esther, but not this year.

  Two hours after the parade had begun it ended. People dispersed. Those who were incapacitated were helped away. And for a moment Father Pennant saw the town cleared (or at least clearing) of people. Plastic cups and paper plates moved like little a
nimals across the streets and lawns in the centre of town. As he was walking back to the rectory, the street cleaners came. A small battalion of men with push brooms began to restore order. It struck Father Pennant as an oddly sinister sight.

  Just as sinister was the lone man astride the shoulders of Richmond Barrow’s statue. The man seemed to be drunk and, from time to time, called out for what Father Pennant assumed were his friends. That is, he shouted ‘George’ or ‘Johnny’ or ‘Arlene.’ There was no one around him. He had been abandoned. Nor, as far as Father Pennant could tell, did the man want to come down. As the priest passed, the man stopped shouting and was polite.

  – How are you, Father? Having a good day? I wish there were more apples, don’t you?

  And then, as if he’d recalled something crucial, he began shouting out his names again.

  – Arlene! Johnny! George!

  It was as if a moment of sanity had passed through a madman, like a shiver animating someone feverish.

  Father Pennant did not go to the dinner and dance at the firehall. Lowther had warned him that, the previous year, thirty people had been sent to the hospital by coquilles St.-Jacques that had proved to be a ruthless laxative. Father Pennant and Lowther ate at the rectory.

  At eleven, they took up their candles and flashlights and walked to the Petersen gravel pit, met on the way by dozens of festive others. For Father Pennant, this walk in darkness, flashlights guiding their steps, was the most striking part of the day. Yes, some of those who walked were so drunk they had to be helped, but most were buoyed by a spirit that came from somewhere beyond the nameable. It was a kind of pleasing fright, this being out under the star-filled sky, the darkness and mystery only slightly lessened by company.