by André Alexis
As it had done when he was beside the Queen, the water held Father Pennant’s attention for a time. It ran pure and quick, looking like a strand of clear muscle. And it seemed to Father Pennant as if he could have lifted the brook out of its channel, as he would ligaments and fascia from an animal he had dissected. What was it about the streams in this part of the world?
Father Pennant stepped across the brook at its narrowest point and began to explore the rest of the field. The land was so alive, it felt as if he could have put a hand down into the tall weeds, without looking, and picked up a living creature. And he was thinking how much he would have liked to hold a deer mouse or a shrew in the palm of his hand when he heard a click like the sound of a twig snapping and a cloud of gypsy moths rose from the grasses.
That in itself was strange. Gypsy moths usually ate tree leaves. They were the last thing one would have expected to find in the tall grass. But stranger still, the moths flew up as one and formed, with their wings and bodies, two distinct shapes. First the moths aligned themselves in such a way as to create, from Father Pennant’s perspective, an elongated loop:
There could be no mistaking this for a random configuration. Then, as if to confirm that very thought – that they had purposely created a loop – the gypsy moths dispersed then regrouped to form a flawless circle:
They fluttered in formation for some time before falling to the ground.
Father Pennant had never seen nor ever heard of anything like this. He was at first puzzled, unable to quite believe what had happened. He had been surprised by the first pattern the moths made (the loop), but he was, as time passed, frightened by the circle they had formed. He could not help feeling that such a perfect circle had some special meaning, a meaning meant for him alone, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what it might be. It was as if some being had spoken to him in an extraordinary language and expected him to understand. But, if so, who had sent the insects to ‘speak’ with him?
No, there had to be something wrong with the moths. He looked about the field, but though there had been quite a number of them, Father Pennant could find none on the ground. Here was another puzzling thing: it wasn’t possible for so many moths to vanish so quickly. Thinking that deer mice must have eaten them all, he gave up his search for moths after half an hour, disappointed. He drew what he had seen: Lymantria dispar, brownish-grey with a brown fringe at the bottom edge of its wings when the wings were closed, its antennae like two delicate, minuscule feathers, its body a narrow, umber cylinder with six thin white stripes that transversed it at almost regular intervals. Perfectly common. They had been gypsy moths, no doubt about it, despite the strangeness of their behaviour.
Or had he been dreaming? He waved his right hand before his eyes. And saw it. He cleared his throat and heard the sound. Aside from the fact that he had just witnessed something unaccountable, he was – or felt he was – as normal as could be: a Catholic priest in Barrow at a time of year – mid-spring – when gypsy moths are about.
As he always did when he was bewildered or thought about God’s grandeur and mystery, he kneeled down to pray. He kneeled in the weeds, among the insects and rodents, and prayed for enlightenment. What were his duties, now that he had been given a vision?
There was great comfort in prayer. It was not so much that he felt the presence of God when he prayed, though he did at times feel His presence and that always brought him peace. It was that kneeling – head bowed, fingers interwoven and held on his chest – immediately brought to his mind all the times he had surrendered to the mystery that was the world and to the mystery that was God. Comfort came from the continuity of submission. Kneeling, praying, he was himself at his most open and at his most genuinely human: ignorant, hopeful, humble in the face of the unknown.
The man who had gone to the old Stephens field was, for a time, different from the man who left it. The new Father Pennant was rattled and uncertain. On entering the field, he’d believed he was getting to know the county and its people. Barrow and the land around it had struck him as marvellously new, but not mysterious in any metaphysical sense. The certainty that Barrow and Lambton County were ‘normal’ was taken from him when he saw moths flying in a circle, a fluttering hoop suspended in mid-air. But this uncertainty wasn’t certain either. As the days passed, he grew less sure that he had seen the moths in wilful pattern. The whole episode began to seem incredible and he was relieved he’d chosen to keep details of the day to himself. Lowther would almost certainly have thought him unstable.
He might even have forgotten about the moths, but then, while collecting the mail one day not long after his episode in the Stephenses’ field, he found a postcard for Lowther. It was from Cartmel Priory, in England. On the front was the picture of an old church. But on the back, where a signature might have been, was a mark: a one inch by one inch square, with an element that reminded him of the loop the moths had made:
Father Pennant kept the postcard until evening when he and Lowther were at the dining room table. Lowther had, as usual, prepared a lovely meal – white fish, olive bread, lemons, capers, a vinaigrette, a tossed salad. He seemed slightly distracted, or perhaps more thoughtful, but it did not detract from his duties. (The rectory would smell of the olive bread he’d made, for days.)
– Lowther, said Father Pennant, a postcard came for you today. I hope you don’t mind, but I was struck by this lovely woodcut on the back, so I hung on to it for a bit. Do you know where the woodcut comes from?
Lowther took the postcard.
– Yes, he answered. This is from Heath, the man who was with me when we first met. He was adopted, but a long time ago he found out his real family’s descended from William Caxton, the owner of the first printing press in England. That woodcut is Caxton’s symbol.
– Oh. It looked like a rune.
– Nothing that exotic. Just a signature. You know, Heath and I have known each other since grade school. And he’s been using that woodcut for a long time. I don’t even notice how it looks anymore. It is beautiful, though, isn’t it?
– What does he do for a living?
– That’s hard to say. He used to be a farmer. Then he worked for Massey Ferguson. Then he made a lot of money selling a fertilizer he invented. He still farms a little, but now, I think, he mostly invents things.
– I’d like to meet him again, said Father Pennant. We never got a chance to talk.
So it was that, three weeks after the incident with the moths and a week after Heath Lambert had returned from the Lake District – where he’d been travelling – Father Pennant was in a house at the outskirts of Oil Springs waiting for Lambert to come in from a back garden where he was gathering rhubarb leaves to use in an insecticide.
Though they were the same age, Heath looked much older than Lowther. His hair was brush-cut, which gave him a military demeanour. He was short, about five foot five, with a belly like a sleeping pup. He smiled at whatever was said or whatever he himself said. It left the impression Heath could give or take any news with equanimity. At least, that was Father Pennant’s impression, until he realized that Heath’s smile was something of a nervous tic, that an alternate indicator of Lambert’s thoughts and feelings were his eyes: dark brown, almost unblinking, serious. It was disconcerting to feel unsure about how to read a man’s face, to be unsure if Heath were friendly or slightly hostile. And it was difficult – or difficult for Father Pennant – not to mistrust him.
From the outside, Heath’s home appeared to be a solid, old-fashioned red-brick farmhouse with a few solid, red-brick additions here and there. Inside, the house was a bewildering number of connected warrens. This stairway led there and that hallway led somewhere unexpected and on his first tour through the house Father Pennant thought he’d need a map to find any particular room again. As well, every room seemed to be in disarray, with books, papers and magazines scattered about. Some of the rooms were labs of a sort, with cages for white mice or weasels and sand farms for ants, worms a
nd shrews. The whole place was in a kind of organized chaos, and Lambert apologized constantly for the state of his home.
Although Heath Lambert was, clearly, a brilliant man, he was a dull talker. The longer he spoke about something, the more tiresome that thing became. Lambert himself took evident pleasure in explaining things at length. So, when Lowther asked his friend what he had been up to ‘in the last while,’ Lambert went on for an hour describing the minutiae of his latest endeavours: from trying to discover a natural insect repellent to devising ways to defoliate and kill sick or infected trees.
As Lambert spoke, Father Pennant gradually lost interest in the deadly potential of weeds, herbs and animal by-products. He listened, more and more distractedly, looking out the living room window at a vast, uncut lawn, beyond which were the first houses of Oil Springs. The sky through the living room window was blue behind the cirrus clouds that looked like bloated, white writing. Inside, the air was a little stale, but from time to time a breeze would come through one of the windows, bringing with it the scent of grass and weeds.
Distracted by the sky and the breezes, Father Pennant was caught off-guard when Lowther asked him
– Is that all right?
– Yes, Father Pennant answered instinctively. Yes, of course.
So, when they got up to follow Heath, he had no idea what they were going to see.
They went up to the second floor, walked along a long hallway, then along another, and stopped in front of an orange door.
– Be careful how you step, said Lambert. And please close the door behind you.
Then all three of them entered a room that was, almost literally, filled with gypsy moths. The moths covered the floor, ceiling, walls and windows. There were tables along one wall. On the tables: aquaria. In the aquaria: leaves and moths. In the centre of the room was a table with a chair, over the back of which was a yellow sweater. On this table were a number of notebooks. On the notebooks: gypsy moths.
Father Pennant was afraid to step anywhere, for fear of crushing the moths. Heath went about in stockinged feet, shuffling rather than walking. He moved his feet on the wooden floor without lifting them, trying to push the moths out of his way.
– Here it is, Lambert said. I’ve been working with these critters for years.
Stunned (and also somewhat alarmed), Father Pennant said
– I’m sorry. I must have missed something. What have you been doing?
– Defoliation, said Lambert. Targeted defoliation. You must have drifted, Father. I’ll start from the beginning.
If Heath was at all inconvenienced by this repetition, he did not show it. After brushing the moths off a wooden chair, he invited Father Pennant to sit. Father Pennant sat and, after a few minutes, was covered by moths, some of which he gently brushed from his neck and forehead as Lambert spoke.
Having made much money with his slow-release nitrogen fertilizer, Lambert had gone to the University of Guelph to study biology and psychology, two subjects that had always interested him. His courses in biology led to specialization in entomology. His study of insects led him to wonder if there was any demonstrable insect psychology. He wrote a thesis on ‘hive-mind neurosis.’ And over the years, he devised a number of experiments with insects, moths in particular. One day, while feeding gypsy moths’ larvae, he cut an oak leaf into narrow strips and lay the strips in a pattern. The gypsy larvae naturally followed the pattern their food made. And following many experiments, Lambert found, to his own surprise, that after a time, if the pattern of the leaves was always the same, the moths that emerged from the larvae had a tendency to fly in the pattern their food had made. That is: if, every day for a certain period of time, a larva’s food was laid out in a circle, the moth it became would, when it was flying, fly in a circle. With time, he found he could get gypsy moths to fly in circles or triangles or even more elaborate patterns. Of what practical use was this insect husbandry? Lambert thought up any number of uses. For instance, he was almost certain he could train moths to flutter together to make business insignias or business marks. It seemed to Lambert that his moths might even, one day, take the place of skywriting or fireworks. Yes, it was too early to tell if his ideas were workable on a large scale, but he was certain a generation of moths would come along, a generation trained and bright enough to flutter in commercial patterns.
On hearing about Heath Lambert’s work, Father Pennant was, to say the least, skeptical. It seemed to him that Lambert was telling tall tales, though the man’s constant smile made it difficult to judge how much he believed what he said. It was clear, however, that Heath Lambert, and perhaps Lowther as well, had had something to do with the gypsy moths he’d seen in the Stephenses’ field. In the silence that followed Heath’s account of moth advertising, Lowther and Lambert stared at him, as if waiting for a reaction. They seemed to expect something from him. In fact, Lowther asked
– Did you want to say something, Father?
But what was he meant to say? He felt relief and sadness. He was relieved that what he had seen in the field was not miraculous. It had not been a sign from God. He did not have to rethink his role on earth. Yet he was also strangely disappointed. For a while, there, in the Stephenses’ field, he had recovered his awe before the divine. These men may have been responsible for its recovery, but they were now the cause of its loss.
He considered telling Lambert he’d seen gypsy moths execute patterns in a field near Barrow, but when he thought to say so, he felt a strange reticence. Though neither Lambert nor Lowther had been in the field with him, it was (curiously) as if both knew what he’d been through and were waiting for his testimony. Not wishing to play a game whose rules he did not understand, Father Pennant said only
– I hope your experiments are successful, Heath.
– Why is that, Father?
– Because I can see you love your work.
– That I do, said Lambert. Thank you, Father.
Understandably, Father Pennant lost some of the lightness he’d felt during his first weeks in Barrow. His encounter with the gypsy moths – and Heath Lambert – put him off balance. He was now more acutely aware of himself as an outsider. Still, Barrow had not entirely alienated him. And to commemorate the end of his second month in town, he went to the bakery, looking for a loaf of the bread Harrington himself had sold him on his first day.
Pushing the door to the bakery open, he immediately smelled the kaiser rolls that had recently come from the oven and were now cooling in a wooden bin. He took two rolls and then, seeing the bread he wanted on a shelf, he took two of those as well. To his surprise, the bread too was warm and pliable and smelled of yeast and walnuts.
– Good morning, Father Pennant.
Elizabeth Denny, the bakery’s cashier and assistant manager, smiled, took the bread from his hands and put it in two paper bags.
– This is wonderful bread, said Father Pennant.
– Yes, I think so too, said Elizabeth. You’re lucky you came when you did, though. There aren’t usually any left by now.
Father Pennant thanked her, then stepped out into the sunny mid-afternoon world that smelled of dust and gasoline. He had walked half a block or so when he was stopped by Elizabeth, who tugged lightly on the sleeve of his soutane.
– Father, she said, I’m sorry to bother you. Do you mind if we talk a little?
– I don’t mind at all, said Father Pennant. What is it?
– Maybe we could go to Barrow Park, she said. I can sit and eat my lunch there.
– A good idea. I’ll even join you. I don’t think I can keep my hands off at least one of these kaiser rolls.
They walked together to the centre of town where Barrow Park, a circle of grass some two hundred yards in diameter, stood partially shaded by an imperfect semicircle of willows. In the centre of Barrow Park was a statue of Richmond Barrow looking like an Old Testament prophet. He stood, or his bronze double stood, in formal clothes pointing toward the heavens while staring in the distance
at whatever world it is the bronzed see. In the park there were four benches disposed around the statue. Elizabeth and Father Pennant chose the one facing Barrow himself and talked about insignificant things while they ate: a lamb sandwich, in her case; a still warm kaiser roll, in his.
When they had finished eating, they talked about the coming Barrow Day. And then Elizabeth unceremoniously asked
– Father, do you believe it’s possible to love two people at the same time?
Father Pennant, taken aback, did not know how the question was meant. He had heard the same rumours as everyone else but he still found the question odd, coming as it did from a woman who was, as far as he knew, soon to be married. This was the second time she’d caught him off-guard with a question about love. She had not called the wedding off, but perhaps she was having doubts about marriage. As gently as possible, he asked
– Are you in love with someone other than Robbie?
Elizabeth laughed: a dry, unconvincing sound.
