Pastoral

by André Alexis

  As she approached, she imagined he would see her change of heart in her eyes. They stood, as Father Pennant gave a short sermon on marriage and passages from the Bible were read. Before she knew it, it was time for the vows.

  – Dearly beloved, said Father Pennant, we are gathered together here in the presence of God and in the face of this company to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, a sacrament held honourable amongst all men and women and so not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and solemnly.

  While wondering which of these adverbs she could commit to – ‘discreetly’ being the only one with a real chance – her mind drifted and she missed Father Pennant’s words, missed being given away by her uncle, and only came around when Robbie took her hand and looked her in the eyes – evidently unaware that she no longer loved him.

  – Do you, said Father Pennant, Robert Myers, take Elizabeth Denny to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and keep her, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?

  – I will, said Robert.

  And then, for an instant, time stopped for Elizabeth. She looked, for what seemed hours, into the eyes of Robert Myers. She studied him. She had a memory of them making love for the first time, when they were fourteen. How certain she had been that she loved him and wanted to marry no one else! There were no such feelings now. Not a shred of confidence remained.

  Father Pennant finished his part of her vow.

  – … forsaking all others as long as you both shall live?

  Elizabeth hesitated and time stretched out. She could not find the right road within her. But then, the thing she was waiting for came: a vision of Barrow, Barrow seen from the air, its houses and farms interlocking. Barrow was hers, its mind her mind. And Robert was part of it all, a part she knew, a part that could not hurt her anymore, because she did not love him. She was immune to his lunacy. The important thing – the only thing – was that she wanted to begin her life, here, in this place. So, although she did not love the man, Elizabeth said

  – I will.

  They exchanged rings. Father Pennant spoke again, facing Robert.

  – You may now kiss the bride, he said.

  Which Robert did, his lips on hers feeling, to her, like warm, soft rubber, behind which were his teeth. Then, the music sounded and all those in the church rose to applaud. All approved. All were happy, though in the midst of that happiness was Elizabeth herself: bewildered, married to someone she no longer loved, her husband.

  The bride and groom, priest and witnesses, retired to the vestry where, on a table, there was the book they were to sign and two lit candles. Robert was ecstatic or, simply, relieved. His grin was unreadable. Someone took a picture as he signed his name in the registry. As Robert signed and as the picture was taken, Elizabeth’s attention was drawn by one of the candles. It was nondescript, as far as candles go: six or seven inches tall, three inches in diameter. The flame danced as candle flames will, but Elizabeth was mesmerized by it, by the way it fluttered, the flame itself suggesting something solid and thick. No wonder, she thought, the ancients compared flame to a bird.

  Gently, Father Pennant said

  – Elizabeth?

  – Yes? she answered.

  – Your turn to sign the registry.

  Robert kissed the side of her head as she signed the book. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the ceremony was over. Back down the aisle she went, with her arm in Robert’s while, outside the church, a crowd waited to cheer and throw rice.

  It was odd to be in a field in her wedding dress, but she had agreed to keep the dress on so people could take pictures of the bride. As the reception was in a field at the Biglands’, however, a field normally occupied by sheep, she longed to be in something less delicate. Also, given her ambivalence about her husband, she did not want to be in the dress any longer than she had to. It seemed there were hundreds of people with her, dozens who wanted pictures: friends, family, Barrownians, the human parameters of her world.

  Everyone seemed genuinely pleased by the wedding they’d witnessed: her wedding. She was congratulated, endlessly. Her dress was admired. Her radiance was remarked on. All the while, as if they were now indissociable, Robert stood beside her, holding her hand, kissing her whenever people asked to take a photo. Robert’s family was as thrilled as her own. Some had come from as far away as Winnipeg. One of his uncles, the one who had patted her behind, had come from Ocala, Florida.

  In all of this, it was difficult for her to figure out what Robert felt about their wedding. Did he realize she did not love him? Did that matter? To break the smile on his face, you would have had to hit it with a hammer. It was possible, wasn’t it, that this smile hid his indifference to her? She would have to wait until later to hear what he said. She would know his feelings that night, their wedding night, when they would sleep together as husband and wife for the first time. She did not know how he felt about it, but just about the last thing she wanted from him was sex. They would have to make love at some point, if only to mark the occasion, but she did not know how she would react to his touch. Before this day, she had always – mostly always – enjoyed their lovemaking. It was strange that the very idea should become a problem on the one day when it should have been a consecration of their feelings. But she had married him. She had said yes. She had not stood him up. She had not told the truth about her feelings. Perhaps, now, this feeling of alienation would be the principal one, the one fact of their marriage. For a moment, as she looked at her husband and then at all the smiling people around him, she felt a monumental bitterness, a bitterness so deep it could sweep the world away or, at least, make everything in it unbearable. Her own smile felt like a small handkerchief held up before her naked body. Almost in self-defence, she took her husband’s hand and kissed his lips. The people around them laughed. Mr. Bigland said

  – Save it for the motel.

  Could he really be drunk so soon?

  Her wedding was what gossipmongers would call a lavish occasion. The food was still being cooked and put on the long tables. It seemed everyone in Barrow had contributed something. There was more gelatin, more flavours and varieties of gelatin, than you could easily keep in memory: red gelatin with bits of slaw and carrots suspended within, a yellow gelatin with pineapple pieces, an orange one in which something was suspended like smoke in a small sunlit room. There were pots of potato salad with its yellowish mayonnaise and bowls of greens. Beside the tables, at a slight remove, a barbecue pit had been dug. In it a whole pig was roasting, its blackened corpse continually turned and faithfully doused with a barbecue sauce that smelled of molasses, mustard and oranges. Beyond the barbecue, parts of a cow were being cooked and roasted on a black grill from which plumes of smoke rose. Also, there were drinks. Bottles of alcohol: rum, gin, vodka, beer, scotch, rye and, though no one in town liked it much, wine. There was also, of course, champagne and, as almost everyone had had a glass, Elizabeth had one too. It tasted like a fizzy vinaigrette in which someone had dropped sugar and pieces of apple.

  Finally, at its own table apart from the others, there was her wedding cake. It was odd to see it here, in a field, beneath a white canopy. It was tall and magnificent. All the affection John Harrington had for her had gone into its making. The details, the florettes and silhouettes, were precisely done. You could smell the marzipan from a distance away, as if the cake were an almond censer. Impressive and elegant, it suggested great love and it was for this reason that, seeing it here, in this still-green field, Elizabeth began to cry. How inadequate and petty her feelings were, compared to the deep feelings Mr. Harrington’s patience and kindness were meant to celebrate.

  Her aunt Anne was beside her in an instant, holding her hand and wiping the tears from her face, as if Elizabeth were still a child and homeless as she had been at her parents’ death. Though she did not want to upset Elizabe
th further, her aunt also began to cry, as quietly as she could, overcome by the thought of her child, and in the end Elizabeth was her child, leaving, happily married, as she imagined.

  – Is everything all right? someone asked.

  – Yes, yes, someone else answered. It’s tears of joy.

  And before Elizabeth knew it, she and her aunt were surrounded by cooing friends, all congratulating her on her happiness.

  At some point, Elizabeth imagined she understood the meaning of the day. She and Robert, at the centre of this maelstrom, were being made to feel the magnitude of all this, the wedding and the reception. And it suddenly occurred to her that a wedding was like a train wreck or an inner-city mugging, a fall from a survivable height or a near drowning. It was a trauma that would – that was meant to – bring them closer.

  After the meal, Elizabeth had at last gone in to change her clothes. Her suitcases were packed. She and Robert were off to England, to the Lake District, where Robert’s family had come from three hundred years previously. Some of Elizabeth’s people had also been English and had come from a place in Suffolk (mythic, in her imagination) called Snape. But her English relatives, once they reached the New World, had intermingled and intermarried, so that Elizabeth was more French Canadian or Native Canadian than she was anything else.

  After changing clothes, Elizabeth and Robert danced for the guests. They danced in the field, as the embers used to cook the pig darkened to black. For the bride and groom’s final dance, the band from Glencoe played something that sounded Celtic. And it pleased her to dance. There was meaning to all this too: the association of man and woman in dancing was itself a kind of matrimony, two and two, a necessary conjunction, holding each other by the hand or the arm in concord. For a moment, dancing with Robert, she was happy. Not that she suddenly loved him, but she liked him, because he did not mind dancing, because he was not a wilfully cruel man, because he loved his family and because, in the end, she believed he loved her. And because she was happy, she stopped worrying about their future.

  Around six o’clock, the newlyweds were ready to leave. Their time together as husband and wife had begun. Elizabeth wanted a last look at the land that was home, before she left for Pearson Airport in Toronto, so she quietly walked away while Robert said goodbye to his friends. Somehow, a few of the sheep had strayed from their pen. They stood eating grass at the periphery of her wedding, as if curious about the goings-on, but not too curious. They kept their distance. Elizabeth walked toward them, away from the reception, unobstructed now that she was in normal clothes. The sheep were so used to humans, they scarcely reacted to her approach: a little bleating, a shifting, as if to make room

  for her, and then they were quiet, thoughtfully eating the grass and weeds.

  As she passed them, it struck Elizabeth that she had always loved sheep, but she had rarely paid much attention to them. They were, simply, a part of her world. She stopped, turned back and stood looking at the sheep for a while: dirty fleeces, fat-looking flanks, delicate legs, almost invisible tails, the smell of them, the weight of them in the mind so different from the weight of cows, say, or dogs. In her imagination, it was as if one could pick a sheep up with one hand, like raising a cloud. Not true, of course, not true. They were beautiful and solid and having taken their beauty in, Elizabeth walked on toward a rise in the land from which one could see all the way to Barrow, its houses.

  Elizabeth was alone for no more than a few minutes before Father Pennant approached.

  – It’s beautiful, he said. Isn’t it?

  Elizabeth looked out over southern Ontario, the land beneath them, oddly misshapen squares of dark green, black and yellow. Here and there were farmhouses and barns. To one side, there were the woods. And beyond, the crab shape of a small town: Barrow. This was who she was. Had her parents lived, her destiny might have been different. She might have had these feelings for Strathroy or Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay. But her parents had died and this was the place that had taken her in, and she could imagine, finally, that in death the land would take her broken body and care for it as it would for all bodies that had walked the earth.

  – Yes, she answered. It is beautiful.

  – Sometimes, said Father Pennant, I think it’s all we have.

  – I don’t think it’s all we have, Father.

  – You’re right, said Father Pennant immediately. You’re right. There’s more. Are you enjoying your wedding?

  – It feels a little strange to call it enjoyable.

  Father Pennant laughed.

  – I find weddings strange too, he said. No … mysterious is a better word. They’re mysterious. All the sacraments are, when you think of it. They’re moments when the grace of God touches the earth. I mean, that’s what the Church teaches.

  – You don’t believe that? asked Elizabeth.

  – Yes, yes, of course I do. But it’s still mysterious, however you describe it. I mean, you don’t have to bring God into it. The very idea that two people choose to get married in the first place is mystery enough.

  – Yes, said Elizabeth. It is mysterious.

  They spoke for a few more minutes, before Father Pennant wished her a happy honeymoon. He was going to walk to Barrow, to work off some of the wonderful food he’d eaten.

  – It’s one of the finest weddings I’ve been to, he said.

  He walked away, wishing her all the best in the life to come with her husband and – did they want children? – children.

  Elizabeth stood alone for a moment longer, thinking of Father Pennant’s words about the world being all we have. Well, if that was true, if the land was all – no God, no love, no others – she could still be happy because, in the end, everything came from the land, from the smallest thing to, maybe, God Himself. Anything you took away, the land would give back. Or so it felt to her, at that moment, and she walked back to the reception, tired and content.

  Yes, she did want children.

  The next day, the very next day, the new life would begin in earnest. It would have its problems, of course. She was not certain she could remain married to Robert Myers, that she would be Mrs. Myers for long. But she put her doubts aside as she returned to the field and to her various families.

  Father Pennant went on his way back to Barrow. He passed through the woods, its darkness a little intimidating, before coming out by the highway that looked down onto Barrow. His thoughts were confused. Had he really asked Elizabeth Denny if she didn’t feel Nature was all? He should not have. (Nor should he have had the feelings he fleetingly felt for her. For the briefest of moments, as he asked Elizabeth about children, he had imagined the salt taste of her, the feel of her tongue on his, the animal there-ness of her body.)

  Since the death of Lowther Williams, he had become so passionate about his study of the land around Barrow that he sometimes lost sight of the world beyond, of God the creator. Even now, at the thought of ‘God the creator,’ he felt an unexpected twinge of mistrust. Mistrust? Yes, ‘mistrust’ was almost the word. Take the implications of Lowther’s death, the implications of a ‘compact’ with God. He supposed that some would have taken Lowther’s death as a manifestation of God’s mercy or, at very least, His will. That is, if they accepted that God had interrupted His infinite discretion to kill Lowther himself. For a while, he’d preferred to think of Lowther’s death as a coincidence – perhaps, even, an unconsciously made decision on Lowther’s part, a suicide carried out unawares. Now, however, he admitted to himself that, yes, it was possible for the infinite to concern itself with the death of a being. Perhaps it was even right. Perhaps if Lowther or any of his male antecedents had lived beyond the age of sixty-three, there would have been catastrophic consequences. So, Lowther’s death had been justified.

  But if so, that made any ‘god’ who carried out the execution a caretaker, a gardener pulling weeds. And as it was with Lowther, so it was with loaves and fishes and the parting of the Red Sea. God, ­ultimately, was useful. But why call Him �
��creator’? Why should we say God created Nature rather than, as the ancient Greeks believed, Nature created the gods, that ‘god’ was subject to Nature’s laws and interdictions? It was easier to believe, easier for him to believe, anyway, in the rules of Nature binding God rather than the other way around.

  Honestly, that sheep couldn’t have done better if it had been divine.

  Christopher Pennant knew, or felt, that his thinking was suspect, but he could do nothing about his thoughts. He was again ­experiencing the struggle for faith he’d experienced as a seminarian. And, yet, he was not unhappy. More than that: as he walked home he was in the very best of moods, as joyful as if a storm had passed and the world was restored to its entrancing self. The early evening sun was still bright, though the clouds in the distance were reddish and darkening. The air was clean and smelled of the woods, of the fields, of the world itself over which a light breeze blew.

  He thought again of the sheep he’d encountered in Preston’s field. He then immediately thought (again) of Lowther and then of Lowther’s prayer book. The prayer book, which had once belonged to Lowther’s father, had had every prayer crossed out but one. The one prayer left, a perverse prayer for death, had itself been crossed out by Lowther, almost certainly in the days when he had believed God had abandoned him. So, on the dresser in what had been Lowther’s room, there was an entirely useless prayer book. Useless? No, not useless. In that it served as a memento of Lowther, Father Pennant could not bring himself to throw it out. There, you see? There was an example of spirit (Lowther’s spirit) adhering to a thing (the prayer book). You could use Lowther’s prayer book as proof that the world was more than material, couldn’t you? No sooner had he asked himself this question, though, than it was dismissed. The only value the book had was in him, Christopher Pennant. It was not in the book itself.