by André Alexis
– I believe, said Father Pennant, in God the Father and Christ His Son and I believe in the Holy Ghost. What I don’t believe in is talking sheep.
Stopping again to stare across the suddenly noiseless creek, the sheep said
– Christopher, how do you know that I am not your Lord?
– My Lord has no reason to speak to me, he answered. I’m not the kind of man God seeks out. You have me confused with some other, better man.
– Lowther has broken your faith, said the sheep.
Father Pennant smiled. His spirits lifted and he entered more fully into the game. He spoke to the sheep – Lowther, obviously – as if it were, in fact, God.
– There is something you can do for me, he said. Teach me to be satisfied with the world and everything that’s in it.
– My son, said the sheep, that’s a tragic thing you’re asking me to give. You should not be satisfied with the things of this world, however seductive they are.
Father Pennant laughed.
– No, he said, that is exactly what I want. No miracles, just the plants and animals and the sky above. That’s all the mystery I need.
– I’ll give you what you’ve asked for, said the sheep, but allow me a few words. You’re on a road that leads to disappointment. Of course, it’s wonderful to contemplate Nature, but without the miraculous the earth is only a coffin. What you should ask for is a restoration of your belief in miracles. You would still have the earth and all that’s beautiful, but you would again be open to more than you can conceive. Let me help you imagine it. Look over there. I will set those trees on fire.
No sooner said than three maple trees on the other side of the creek caught fire: flames from their roots to their highest leaves. It was a peculiar fire, though: noiseless and without smoke. The flames themselves were more like supple red and orange crystal. It was like the idea of fire rather than fire itself. A hologram, thought Father Pennant, one of Heath’s holograms. But it was impressive all the same.
– That’s lovely, said Father Pennant. Well done. Really well done, but I prefer the trees to the illusion.
– I understand, said the sheep, and I’ll give you what you’ve asked for. From now on you will be satisfied by the things of the earth. If ever, someday, you wonder if there is more, come back to this place and cut those three trees. The first will bleed, the second will give honey and from the third you’ll have water. If ever you do this, you will know that I am the Lord and that there is more to the world than the world itself.
– It’s a deal, said Father Pennant, smiling.
He turned toward the maples. They were no longer alight. He turned back to admire the sheep, but it had gone. The hologram, it seemed, had been turned off. A perfect illusion. And it was a joy to have had things done so well. He supposed that Heath and Lowther had prepared the trees so they would bleed, give honey or water. He was tempted to try them, so their time and effort would not be wasted, but he was tired. He had been walking for a while and it was time to go back. Moreover, he was impatient to talk to Lowther, to tell him how much he appreciated all the work they’d done in order to test him. His spirits were raised. He was deeply moved by the care that had gone into the illusion. He saw the attention to detail – the sheep, the trees on fire – as a form of respect, and he was grateful to Lowther.
The thought that he had actually encountered God was amusing, but it did not stay with him for long. He did not believe that any supreme being would waste its time on him and, perhaps more significantly, he did not want the attention of God. The miraculous was the last thing he wanted. And if he avoided testing the trees for blood, honey and water, it was not only from fatigue. It was also because, deep inside, he refused to entertain the idea that the sheep he’d seen was divine.
As he walked along the road home, his thoughts turned to Elizabeth Denny. He wondered if Lowther could come up with an illusion that would amaze her and direct her thoughts to the things she needed to take into account: Nature above all. It struck him, in fact, that the same sheep he’d seen might well work for Elizabeth, because he took, as he walked back to the rectory, such joy in the natural world: the sharp pine smell of the spruce trees, the wet earth drying in late afternoon sunlight, the stillness of the clouds above. In other words, it couldn’t hurt to have Elizabeth feel how great the world was, how sufficient. It was a feeling that put everything else into perspective.
V
AS AUTUMN COMES
As Father Pennant was thinking about Elizabeth and the peace Nature might bring her, Elizabeth was thinking – again and again and inescapably – about love. She wondered what, exactly, love was and if she was, in fact, possessed by it. Like a cloud of midges, the questions pestered her.
Why did people fall in love? Why in love? Wasn’t love within us? Was the love within different from the love one fell into? Did love need an object? Did it need a person? Was love still love if unrequited? Was it love if the object of one’s love was unworthy? Could she marry a man she no longer loved in the hope she would fall in love with him again?
Any one of these questions could have kept a mind busy for months. Worse, all of them had answers that were as difficult to deal with as the questions themselves. The answers seemed to lead her further and further from her own feelings. In any case, they did not bring her closer to Robbie. Nor did they make her decision to carry through with the wedding easier to accept. Never had she been so unsure of anything. In the past, when doubt or ambivalence troubled her, Elizabeth had turned to her work for comfort. Doing, doing something, was her best way out of the disquiet: learning to make bread, helping her aunt and uncle with whatever needed to be done – housecleaning or sod cutting. But her doubts about love could not be quelled by physical activity.
So, what was love to her? It was Robbie and it was not Robbie. It was Robbie’s body, his arms and back. It was nothing physical, though it could be set off by the physical, by the memory of the physical, by the memory of a memory. Love was a scene in which she saw herself. It was at the heart of who she was. It was peripheral. It was a moment. It was a thousand moments she had shared with Robbie. But it did not matter that it was Robbie in particular because, in these moments, adrift from herself, she was not Elizabeth Denny. Love was a kind of anonymity, an anonymity in which she was (chiefly) ‘a woman in love.’ It turned her into someone else, into Charlotte Brontë, into Emma Bovary, into the woman in Brief Encounter, so in love with Trevor Howard she would sacrifice her happiness for him. No sooner did she imagine herself as other, however, than she was thrown back on the very Elizabethness of everything she was and all that she wanted. And so, at nearly every turn, waiting like a sentinel for the answer to the first question (‘What is love?’), was a further question: ‘Who am I?’
What is love/Who am I?
Who am I/What is love?
Neither question could be answered without answering the other.
Unexpectedly, this impasse brought relief. ‘Who am I?’ was a more daunting question, in some ways, than ‘What is love?,’ but thinking about herself and her life, her aspirations and desires, brought the question of love into sharper focus. It became clearer to Elizabeth that, whatever love was, she was no longer the girl who had been ‘in love’ with Robbie Myers. She was a woman considering marriage with a man named Robert Myers, a man she now knew as fallible, someone who was as liable to hurt her as not. It was a gift to know this, to think it, to face its implications.
As Elizabeth was thinking about love and Father Pennant was thinking about Nature, Lowther Williams was thinking about life.
Lowther had become ridiculous to himself. So, when weeks after his sixty-third birthday, his depression lifted, he was relieved. He began to see things in a more forgiving light. God had decided differently than he, Lowther, might have wished. Was that reason to behave like a spoiled child? Wasn’t it more sensible to treat the leftover life he had been given as a gift? He would be the first male in his line to see sixty-four, if he kept up his health. An
d he resolved to keep up his health, though he also kept an eye on the possibility that God would, in His own way, take him before he saw sixty-four. No tragedy, that. He had already been given more time than his father.
Of course, he had not planned for a long life. He had to think about how this unanticipated portion might best be led. Should he now spend the money he had spent years saving (and which he had promised to Father Pennant)? What would he spend it on? He was a man who desired nothing. He had travelled all over the world. He had eaten wonderful food. He had read all the books he considered necessary – from Aristotle’s Metaphysics to Zamyatin’s We – in preparation for an early (or, rather, timely) death. His cello was not the best. There were certainly more expensive, warmer instruments than his, but he loved this cello, these pieces of wood that he had touched and held, daily, for so many years. Needing no cello, no exotic food, no new books, he could not think what he would do with money. So, there was the first decision made for him: he would continue his frugal existence.
Would he continue his work at the parish? Heath had asked Lowther to consider working with him, and the idea was appealing. Working for Heath, he would not be bored. But Lowther had had all the excitement he needed from life. The simplicity and quiet of the rectory was more appealing. So, he would stay with Father Pennant. In fact, as he prepared to live out his last days (or months, or years), the only change of routine Lowther made was to take an hour in the evening to write music, a thing he had thought about doing for years.
On the day Father Pennant was accosted by the sheep, Lowther went to the Thames River with no purpose in mind. He sat on the grass by the bank of the river and watched the river run. The sun was warm, but not oppressive, after a rain. The ground was damp, but Lowther did not mind. He had a copy of the Barrow Topic, the town’s newspaper, under him. The clouds above were white. There was a slight breeze that, from time to time, brought a whiff of rotting fish. Somewhere further along, a catfish or a carp or even a pike must have died and washed up on the banks of the Thames. Growing wild along the riverbank: goldenrods, thistles, clover, chicory and, of course, grass: grass that was green, sparse where people walked, grass that made it look as if a hillock beside the river had a bad comb-over.
The most beautiful aspect of the afternoon was the river. No, not the river, which included both water and bank, but rather the water itself. The water was various tints of green, blue or bluish green, with silvery-white eddies where it moved around the stones and clumps of reeds close to the shore. The water was like the tail of a long animal – something living and entirely unconcerned with the life beyond its unpredictably twisting bed. As Lowther watched, he was reminded of Tomasine Humble. Lowther hadn’t liked her any more than most people had. She had been the very definition of miserable. But one summer afternoon, an afternoon much like this one, he had been out for a walk. It must have been a weekday, sometime before the end of school, because, at least in his memory, there had been no one else around. He had seen the old woman sitting alone, her back to the world, her feet in the water.
It was odd that his memory had taken so deep an impression of such an insignificant moment. Lowther experienced a rush of sympathy for the poor woman. It wasn’t easy not knowing when death would come. This ignorance now united them, though he was years younger than she had been on the day he’d seen her with her feet in the water.
Lowther took off his shoes and socks, walked to the side of the river, sat on a rock and allowed both of his feet to rest on a flat stone beneath the surface. His feet, as the clear water ran over them, were distorted, slightly distended, and looked as if they had been fixed to his ankles at an amusing angle. How wonderful life was!
He had been staring at the river for some time, moving his feet over the velvet grime of his underwater shelf, when the time came to return to the rectory to prepare an evening meal for Father Pennant. Lowther stood up, but too quickly. The blood rushed from his head and, disoriented, he stepped into the river where, landing barefoot onto a smooth stone, he slipped, falling over sideways, hitting his head on a rock, passing out and drowning in water not six inches deep. No final words, no last rites, no deep thoughts, no music. Just a quick incursion of darkness, a darkness that was itself like a river.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the sadness Father Pennant felt when he was asked to identify Lowther’s body in the morgue. He had been called not long after the body entered the morgue, so that, when the sheet was lifted to show Lowther’s face, Lowther’s hair was still damp. It had not been combed back. It clung to his forehead and right cheek. At his left temple, there was dried mud, and that was the most disturbing detail. It was so unlike Lowther to look dishevelled, as if he had been in a fight of some sort. His corpse looked almost exactly like him, but not quite. And Father Pennant felt as if this whole business were another of Lowther’s tests to see his reaction. It was hard to keep himself from gently slapping Lowther’s face and telling him, ‘Stop, now. That’s enough. This is disturbing, Lowther. Please get up.’
– Is everything all right, Father? asked the attendant.
– Yes, he answered. I’m fine. Thank you.
He walked out of the morgue, dazed.
There were two facets of Lowther’s death that Christopher Pennant found difficult to take in. First, there was the sheer fact of Lowther’s being gone. It was impossible for him to reconcile the fallen trunk of flesh with the living being it had once been. It was almost easier to believe that the man had gone to Europe, say, and left his body behind for when he returned. Of course, this was how he always felt about the dead. None of them stayed and yet it was as if none of them had gone. It wasn’t the finality of death that surprised him. It was the ghostly persistence of life. As if to say, it isn’t the dead who haunt the living; it’s the living who haunt the dead.
Even more difficult to encompass: Lowther had died, as he said he would, at the age of sixty-three. Father Pennant had not, until the very moment he looked down at Lowther’s grey face, believed him. The idea that God would kill on schedule was ludicrous. It was like those at Medjugorje who had regular appointments with the Virgin: not only absurd but petty, if true. One had to imagine the Lord keeping an eye on His datebook. But could you really call Lowther’s death accidental? It was a disturbingly precise accident, if so. Which was it then? Accident or divine intervention? In the days immediately following Lowther’s death, Father Pennant chose ‘accident’ and let it go at that. There was too much to do: a eulogy to write, Lowther’s things to dispose of or to put in order, arrangements to be made.
Hours after seeing Lowther’s body in the morgue, Father Pennant tried to write a eulogy for Lowther’s funeral. His first effort was filled with platitudes. Lowther had gone ‘to a better place,’ ‘God had called Lowther to Him,’ Lowther’s memory would be ‘evergreen’ for those who had known him. Reading his own words back, he felt as if he had betrayed someone. He rewrote everything. He wrote the eulogy three or four times, from ‘Please be seated’ to ‘Amen.’ He then rewrote it a few more times before it became clear that he had no idea what he thought about Lowther’s death. He had feelings, but they weren’t yet settled in him. Was it really good that God should call the ‘traveller’ home? Was death a better place, a reward that waited? Was it loving of God to have made us for death and, if so, why should God’s love need explaining? Was there any love worthy of the name that could be explained?
Days passed and not one of the words he had written, save ‘Amen,’ remained unchanged or unexamined. He thought fleetingly, but more than once, of allowing someone else to write the sermon for him. That seemed worse than mouthing clichés, though. It seemed cowardly.
The problem was that he had, in some measure, succumbed to the sheep’s curse. He actually did find it more difficult now than he had previously to imagine a world ‘beyond,’ a world beyond this beautiful world. How prescient the sheep (that is, Lowther or one of his friends) had been to suggest that greater sensitivity to this world me
ant a weakening of the hold God had on the imagination. In the midst of his rewrites, Father Pennant began to think of death as nothing but an end, and how was one to speak of a cul-de-sac or a bricked-up exit? Death was no more than the termination of lively functions, the collective refusal to go on of a group of organs that had, moments before, collectively refused to desist. It was an end, no more to be mourned or explained than the end of a symphony, the final pages of a book, the last daub of paint applied to a canvas. And so, death: significant only in being the last of something. But if death had so little significance, what did that make of life? Wasn’t life, as they say, given its poignancy and meaning by death?
Yes, finally a cliché that he could use. Death gave poignancy to life. It was the shadow in Arcadia. A field through which a river ran, white clouds, wheat in stooks – all was made more precious by the presence of evening: a touch of crimson, deepening shadows, the time of day when it was not possible to tell dog from wolf. Lowther had lived a long twilight. From the moment his father had told him that he, Lowther, would die at sixty-three, Lowther had lived in anticipation of night, and now night had come. It was not to be mourned. Certainly, the passing of Lowther’s spirit was sad for those who had loved him. But death was nothing and there was nothing beyond it that was of concern for those who remained.
In the eulogy he delivered, Father Pennant did not (of course) say that there was ‘nothing in death that is of concern for the living.’ He shared his thoughts about Arcadia before going on to recall his most precious memory of Lowther, a man he had not known for long – five months, was it? – but whom he had come to treasure. For at least two weeks, Lowther had been baking bread, dozens and dozens of loaves. At times, every surface in the kitchen had been whitened by flour. Lowther had thrown out many of the loaves he’d made. Others, they had eaten. These had been wonderful, but Lowther had been unsatisfied with them. Father Pennant did not understand Lowther’s sudden passion for bread until, one evening, as they sat down for supper, Lowther brought out a loaf that tasted familiar and smelled of yeast, molasses and burnt walnuts. In order to apologize for his bad mood in the days after he’d failed to die, Lowther had perfectly duplicated Harrington’s brown bread, Father Pennant’s favourite. And Lowther, having gotten the recipe right, had baked a further dozen of the loaves. There were eleven of them still in the rectory’s freezer, and Christopher Pennant did not know if it were best to eat them or to preserve them in Lowther’s memory.