Pastoral

by André Alexis

  He had, of course, promised, because he did not want to talk about this with his mother any more than she wanted to talk about it with him. Still, the humiliation and embarrassment were things one might have expected to feel after traipsing around in one’s altogethers. The strange thing, the thing he could not have predicted, was the exhilaration he’d been feeling since walking out of the beauty parlour. He had faced his greatest fear and he had overcome it. He had done all that for Jane. How much he loved her! He had never loved anyone like this, maybe not even Liz.

  He did not want to repeat the experience, it’s true, but he now knew what it was to love someone beyond what he’d thought possible. Though he could not understand why Jane had asked him to walk into Atkinson’s, he would be grateful to her for the rest of his life. Days after his mother had chewed him out for acting foolishly, he felt more willing than ever to follow where Jane led. What a woman she was! He would never leave her.

  And, again: was he not marrying the wrong woman?

  Wasn’t this feeling, the exhilaration of submission, what marriage was all about?

  For generations, the men in Lowther’s family had been dying at the age of sixty-three. Lowther’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather … all the way back to at least seven times great. It was taken by most in his family to be a curse. Lowther’s mother had seen it that way, as had his father. But Lowther took the matter differently. He took it as a promise, God’s word.

  He hadn’t always faced his ‘pre-ordained’ death with equanimity. As a younger man, he had been defiant, angry. Knowing he would die at the age of sixty-three gave Lowther, when he was younger, a disregard for his life.

  Of course, his early attitude had something to do with the moment he learned that his time on earth was fixed. On Lowther’s twelfth birthday, his father, drunk and lugubrious, had taken him aside and let him in on his fate. Mr. Williams, going through a spiritual crisis, had wept and then apologized for having passed on a death sentence. What had impressed and traumatized the young Lowther was not the age at which he was to die. As for any twelve-year-old, sixty-three seemed ancient verging on unreachable. At twelve, he himself might have chosen a more reasonable age at which to go: thirty-five, say, or fifty at the outside. It was the spectacle of his drunken father and the fact of his father’s certainty (a certainty that proved well-founded), his father’s conviction that this was an injustice handed down to them from God Himself. The Williamses, in other words, were cursed by a God whose attention they had, though they could not put it to good effect.

  It was no doubt sad that his days were so specific in number, thought Lowther, but the opposite side of the coin was: he would not die until he was sixty-three. If God’s word was true, Lowther had been given licence to do whatever he liked until then.

  His twenties and thirties were filled with a recklessness that would have made most men blanch. He went in search of danger to test his destiny. He did the usual jumping from planes and tall cliffs. He worked in the jungles of South America, handled poisonous snakes as a member of a cult in rural Georgia, and travelled to the most unfriendly parts of the world, in pursuit of death. As a result, he and death were on familiar terms long before his sixty-third birthday. By the age of forty, Lowther had seen men, women and children shot, stabbed, run over, thrown from high windows, set alight. He had seen a severed human hand still holding a cigarette, the head of a woman, eyes open, thrown into a shallow hole in a dirt path and a newborn child nailed to a tree. The death of others meant little to him.

  When Lowther was in his forties, his father died of liver cancer. It took a year, a year during which Mr. Williams longed for a death that would not come. Whenever they spoke, his father was either gone on morphine, drifting in and out of consciousness, or lucid enough to feel bitter that the cancer had pounced on him somewhere around his sixty-second birthday, leaving him with a year to suffer. As his sixty-third birthday approached, however, knowing that his death was coming at last, Lowther’s father held his son’s hand and apologized for what he’d passed on. Lowther saw his father off on the morning of May 4th, as a robin sang and a breeze came through an open window. It was the morning of his father’s sixty-third birthday. The inevitable was inevitable, after all.

  As father and son had both expected the end to come around the time it did, his father’s death could not be said to have drastically changed Lowther’s view of life. It had been eerie to have the thing arrive so tightly to schedule, but the death that changed him for good came after his father had passed.

  While working as a skip tracer, Lowther had tracked down a man who had fallen seriously behind on the payments for an El Dorado. It was Lowther’s duty to get either the money owed or the car. He came to an elegant, red-brick house in Sarnia, not far from the river. A good address in a good neighbourhood, but the front lawn needed mowing, and rose bushes in the garden had withered, their petals scattered on the dirt. Lowther imagined that the man he sought had once been wealthy and, even on the run from debtors, could not do without the trappings of success. Everything about him seemed to confirm it: seedy clothes that had once been fine, good grooming, even a kind of annoyed politeness when Lowther explained his business. In fact, his only words to Lowther were spoken with a hint of largesse.

  – Fine, he said, do come in.

  Inside the house was a different matter. The living room into which Lowther stepped had only one piece of furniture: a reclining, faux-leather armchair. But the place was in disarray. Old newspapers everywhere, plates stacked on the floor, knives and forks here and there, here and there children’s clothing and countless toys. Lowther had taken the place in and was standing near the alcove when the man came back carrying a five-year-old boy and a revolver. Lowther felt surprise, not panic, not fear. He had been threatened more often than he could remember, but always by a certain type – men or women whose demons were not well-hidden. The man put the child, who was eating an arrowroot cookie, down on the floor. The child looked blankly Lowther’s way before the man, looking at Lowther, shot the boy in the back of the head. He then turned the revolver on himself, shooting himself in the face.

  If you had asked Lowther, at that moment, what he felt, he would have said curiosity, the kind of curiosity one feels about a puzzle of some sort or a riddle whose answer was just beyond one’s ken. From his perspective, a predictable sequence of events had been followed by an outcome that made no sense: two bodies on the floor, blood on the walls and on Lowther’s brown shoes. A small, intimate massacre staged for him alone, it seemed. He had witnessed worse, but not with his guard down. He had been defenceless. Curiosity remained his chief emotion as he called the police, waited in the house for them, told them what had happened and then gone to the police station to tell everything again.

  On his own, Lowther tried to dig deeper. The man who’d killed himself and his son had lost all his money in some business deal, had been left by his wife, had come to the end of his rope. Why hadn’t he shot Lowther? Why had he killed his son? To punish his wife? To punish himself? To punish Lowther? Impossible to answer any of these questions without resorting to banalities like ‘fate.’ There was something missing, somewhere. Lowther ate, slept, drank, lived on, carried on with his work for weeks, like a man only slightly unhinged.

  Then, one day, apropos of nothing, he remembered the look in the man’s eyes. Pure nothingness, an abyss. That look, that abyss, was like a bell in Lowther’s consciousness, its one note endlessly sounding. A month after he’d witnessed the small massacre, Lowther abandoned the life he had been living. He did not simply change jobs. He withdrew from the world he had known. Having found a point beyond which he could not go, having encountered the abyss in another man, Lowther ‘woke up.’ There were still some twenty years before his sixty-third birthday. He decided to spend them studying life, leaving death to its own devices.

  In the beginning, it was not easy to tell how best to study life. He read all he could about all manner of things and finally came
away with the idea of submission, submission to the world. He resolved to be attentive to things others largely ignored. He studied mycology and entomology. He could walk in the woods and reliably identify which mushrooms were safe to eat. He could name endless species of beetles, flies, ants and spiders. He also knew his trees and birds well. After a while, birdsong became as coherent as the cries, voices, whispers and laughter one hears when humans congregate. For the sheer discipline of it, he taught himself to cook. And he resolved to master the cello when, one day, he heard a passionate woman playing a sonata by Debussy. By the time he met Father Pennant, he had been playing the cello two hours a day for twenty years.

  None of his obligations – his time with the cello, his study of small things – was obsessively carried out. He listened and looked and, in the process, kept himself open to the world. His decision to work for Father Fowler was based on happenstance. He’d been walking around Barrow one afternoon when it began to rain. He had thought to take shelter in St. Mary’s church, but it was locked. Lowther had turned away when he noticed two white bowls on the church steps, the water in them clear, dimpled by rainfall. Water so clear it made him thirsty. Having paused to admire the white bowls, he was about to walk away when one of the doors opened and Father Fowler looked out.

  – Come in, said the priest. You’ll catch your death out there. Would you mind picking the bowls up? I put out milk for the strays. Poor things.

  Over the years, Lowther had got to know Father Fowler well and, as time passed, it seemed to him that Father Fowler was honourable. Having decided the priest was a good man, he was determined to have Father Fowler shepherd him through his – that is Lowther’s – death. So, when Father Fowler died before him, he was saddened to lose his friend as well as his guide.

  But what did it matter who gave him extreme unction?

  It mattered to Lowther the way correctly playing a piece by Bach or Debussy mattered. Not flawlessly in the sense of getting every note and notation right. That kind of flawless happened rarely, but its occurrence was trivial. In fact, when all the notes and tempi, trills and pizzicati were rightly hit, it usually meant he had been thinking about notes and tempi, trills and pizzicati, not about music. As he slowly discovered over years of listening and playing, music was an affair of spirit and moment. And that was it: he wished his final moments on earth to be musical, an offering from one world to the next. Death would come, no matter what, but he wished to accomplish it with spirit and grace. And these qualities, if they were to be had at all with a priest, called for the right priest, a man without pretension or falseness of spirit.

  Father Fowler had been just the man. So, his death had been a setback. But then Father Pennant had come and, with Heath’s help, Lowther had tested him, had devised a ‘miracle’ to see how the man would react. As far as Lowther was concerned, Christopher Pennant was just the shepherd he wanted: modest, thoughtful, curious about the world and, much as Father Fowler had been, a lover of music and a man with a sensibility. With Father Pennant there, Lowther was convinced his death would be a proper duet.

  With that settled, he had only his own soul to worry about. He would confess in order to clear his conscience, give away his possessions in order to unburden and prepare himself to face whatever pain there was to be on the day of his death.

  So, two weeks before his sixty-third birthday, Lowther dealt with his possessions. He had been successful and thrifty, so there were hundreds of thousands of dollars to disperse. He had no immediate family. He had chosen not to pass on the Williams curse. He wrote a will, bequeathing all his money and his cello to Father Pennant. Lowther owned a house in Petrolia. He left it to the family who had been renting it for the past decade. He had a house in Sarnia. He left this to the mother of the child whose murder he had witnessed. Not because he felt the death had been his fault, but because he wished to do something for a woman whose suffering had influenced the change in his life.

  At the end of July, over the space of three evenings, Lowther confessed his sins to Father Pennant. He painstakingly unveiled his life, thinking it crucial that Father Pennant should know him as he had actually been. Everything of which Lowther was ashamed or proud, his sins and good works, all the details of the man who was Lowther Williams, were laid before the priest who, by the end of the third evening, knew Lowther as well as Lowther knew himself. Only after that did Lowther ask for forgiveness.

  Now there was only the preparedness for pain. But there was no pain. Not a hint of it. He felt as healthy two days before his sixty-third birthday (on July 31st) as he had ever felt. No, he felt healthier, more at ease than at any other time in his life. Perversely, this made him miserable. He wondered if God had broken His covenant with the Williamses.

  Still, the absence of pain was no proof that death was absent. He had often heard of men and women at the peak of health dropping down dead, like puppets whose strings had been cut, all because their times had come. His time would come. He was sure of it. But his sixty-third birthday (August 2nd) came and went, and the worst of it was he did not feel anything but healthy. Seeking some dark diagnosis, he went to a doctor. But the man was entirely optimistic, congratulating him on the state of his health.

  – You’ve got the body of a forty-year-old, the doctor said.

  Despite himself, Lowther was offended. The last thing he wanted was the body of a forty-year-old, unless the forty-year-old in question was terminally ill.

  He left the doctor’s office confused and momentarily rudderless.

  The problem, surely, was one of miscalculation. His miscalculation. There were 365 days during which he would be sixty-three. God had plenty of time to take him. But Lowther had planned for a death on his birthday, a death such as his father had had. Every moment that succeeded his sixty-third birthday was like leftovers. He played the cello distractedly, waiting for a heart attack or stroke.

  Whereas previously Lowther had had something to look forward to (his appointed death), now there was only the unsettling thought that death would not come when it was due. He needed faith – in God, in God’s inclination to kill him sooner rather than later. In fact, Father Pennant’s initial impression – that there was something not quite Christian about Lowther’s religion – was true. Lowther’s relationship to God had been personal and more than a little pagan. Now that he was forced to wonder if God would keep His end of the compact, Lowther’s feelings were hurt.

  Heath and Father Pennant were the ones who bore the brunt of Lowther’s unhappiness.

  Where, previously, Lowther had been unflappable and slightly mysterious, a good conversationalist with a wide range of knowledge and an expert’s eye for things in the natural world, he was now close-mouthed, manifestly disappointed and interested in one subject alone: the date of his death. For Heath, this was very strange indeed. He was filled with an almost distressing ambivalence. For his friend’s sake, he wished Lowther dead. For his own sake, he wished him long life. When Lowther was around, Heath was forced to pretend that a being he did not believe in (viz. ‘God’) was behaving childishly. And when Lowther was not with him, he genuinely did not know if he wanted his closest friend alive or not.

  Father Pennant was not convinced that death could be as predictable as Lowther thought it, though he’d felt honoured that Lowther had chosen him for his confessor. Now, weeks later, Father Pennant was saddened that the man he admired and whose company he treasured was eclipsed by this neurotic sixty-three-year-old who insisted on accompanying him wherever he went: church, Wyoming, the fields around Barrow. Almost everywhere Father Pennant went, Lowther went with him in case there was need for sudden last rites.

  It was surprising how quickly this became a burden.

  It had been raining for days. A succession of black clouds crawled above Barrow. And what wind! Small things and bits of paper were taken into the air, held, then tossed, as if Lambton County were sullenly looking for something it had lost. Day was as dark as evening, evening as dark as night.

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nbsp; On one of these evenings, Robbie waited for Liz in his room. To create an atmosphere, he had set out slices of Harrington’s raisin bread, toasted, on a plate, so that his room smelled of yeast and raisins. Beside the plate, there was a candle in a blue cup: a white candle, some eight inches tall, its wax congealing into perfectly formed droplets along its body.

  Liz had asked to see him. No doubt, she had something to say about Atkinson’s. Well, she could say what she wanted and he would listen, but he felt he was a better person for having faced his fears and he didn’t care when people kidded him about making his shortcomings public. Besides, something had shifted in him. He was not as sure as he should have been that he wanted to marry Liz. Feeling as he did now, the right thing would have been to marry Jane.

  And yet, the more he thought about how much he wanted Jane, the more vividly images of Liz would come to him: Liz’s upper torso, from the bottom of her neck on down, her white robe gaping, most of one breast visible, and her right hand, its long fingers holding the robe closed. A memory like that was imperious, dismissing everything before it. What he would have given to master words! How he wished he could share his feelings with the women he loved.

  When Liz knocked at the front door, he let her in and took her up to his room, where the smell of raisin bread had given way to something still yeasty but more burnt. God only knows why she loved this smell, but as it gave her pleasure he did not mind.

  The look on her face was impossible to read, and Robbie was suddenly unsure of himself.

  – Is everything okay? he asked.

  She looked around as if taking the room in for the first time. There was the narrow bed in which they had managed to sleep, side by side, when his parents were away, the coverlet with its blue and white chessboard squares on which there were drawings of the same objects repeated over and again along the white diagonals: a candle, a sheep, bread, a stream, an open book. The walls were light blue, uninterrupted save for the generic painting of a schooner, a painting Mrs. Myers had chosen for the room shortly after Robbie’s birth. There was a chest of drawers, a desk that Robbie never used and a bookshelf half-filled with books Robbie had never read: bound copies of Reader’s Digest, mostly. On the floor there was a crimson-and-red throw rug from somewhere exotic (Iran, his mother said), bought from a Middle Eastern gentleman at a garage sale in Leamington.