Pastoral. Andre Alexis

more food to sample: a pear cake, a honey and plum cobbler, an apple crumble. In a matter of hours, Father Pennant had a strong sense of his parish. It was as normal as could be. And here again, he felt fortunate. It would be a pleasure getting to know those who’d been too shy or too busy to approach him early on.

       The day’s only sour note came from an old woman named Tomasine Humble. Her hands constricted by arthritis, her thin body like a knotty stick under a thick yellow dress, her white hair held stiffly in place by hairspray, she was not in a good mood, or perhaps she was in the best mood her ailments permitted. When someone asked if Father Pennant had enjoyed a piece of cake, he’d answered

       – Yes, very much.

       But Tomasine had muttered

       – Not on your life.

      and smiled when he looked at her inquisitively.

       When someone else mentioned the good weather they’d been having, Father Pennant answered that he was looking forward to exploring the countryside in spring, to watching the gardens bloom. Tomasine Humble then said

       – Not much point in that. You should be taking care of souls, not gardens.

       – I can do both, surely, Mrs. Humble.

       – We don’t know what you can do at all, she’d answered.

       – Well, I hope I won’t disappoint you.

       – You’ll disappoint me. There hasn’t been a priest yet who hasn’t disappointed me.

       – Perhaps I’ll disappoint you less?

       – I live in hope, young man.

       With that, she had turned away, her point made, apparently.

       Despite Mrs. Humble’s warning that the soul, not the earth, was his proper domain, Father Pennant spent the last hours of his first afternoon exploring the countryside around Barrow. He was driven about in an old Volkswagen by Lowther, who also acted as his guide. Everywhere the earth was coming back to life: here, a scarlet tanager, like a tongue of flame, alighted on a telephone wire; there, at their feet, a shrew scampered for cover. The earth, which has only two words, intoned the first of them (‘life’) noisily, with birdsong, the gurgle and slap of rushing water, the suck and squelch of the ground itself. Not that its other word (‘death’) was banished. As they walked in a field, Father Pennant spotted a small clearing over which bleached animal bones (ribs, skulls, backbones and limbs) were strewn. Among and through the bones, young grass grew. It was like an open ossuary.

       – What’s this? asked Father Pennant.

       – I’m not sure, said Lowther. Maybe someone dumped the remains of animals they didn’t mean to trap. Poachers, most likely.

       The most impressive thing they saw that afternoon, however, came as they stood by George Bigland’s farm admiring the violets and thistle. They were on their side of the barbed wire when Father Pennant saw, in the distance, a dark sheep. It was followed by others and still others until, after a while, it was as if a wave of sheep, baaing and crying out, were subsiding in their direction. The sheep, their fleeces dark with dirt, seemed aware of Father Pennant’s and Lowther’s presences. They pooled about on the other side of the fence, hundreds of them. Then, curiosity satisfied, they dispersed, going off here and there to eat the short grass.

       Lowther was an ideal guide to the fields. He knew the names of all the birds, grasses and wildflowers. As Father Pennant was himself an amateur naturalist, his respect for Lowther grew. It grew immeasurably when he discovered the sheer breadth of Lowther’s learning. Lowther seemed to have read everything and his memory was extraordinary. He could, if asked, recite reams of Coleridge and Shakespeare, Dante and Hopkins. He was modest and self-effacing, but there was also something slightly disturbing about him. Why should such an evidently talented man be satisfied working at the rectory? How did he support himself? What was he after, exactly? It troubled Father Pennant to think this way about a man with whom he felt a kinship, but it was like finding a gold ring in a back garden: you had to wonder to whom it belonged.

       Then, too, there was the angularity of Lowther’s thinking. As they were driving to Petrolia and talking about southern Ontario, it emerged that Lowther did not like to speak of the past. He insisted that what had been was a distraction from the here and now. To Father Pennant, this seemed a clear contradiction. The past was the place from which Coleridge and Hopkins reached us, no? Lowther was steeped in the past, wasn’t he?

       – You must be right, Father, but I don’t think of it that way. A tea bag comes from somewhere, but tea exists when you pour hot water on it. I’m steeped in the present.

       – Yes, but what about tradition and the people who came before us? You and I wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be talking, if it weren’t for what came before us.

       – I’m sure you’re right, Father, but I don’t see the contradiction. The past has no meaning, absolutely none.

       – Hmmm …

       As they drove over the dirt roads and along narrow lanes, stopping now and then to admire a farmhouse or a striking vista, it seemed to Father Pennant that his companion was trustworthy, more or less, but Lowther Williams was also difficult to read.

      Anne Young, who had asked Father Pennant about the relative weight of adultery, was not afraid her husband had been unfaithful. For one thing, John Young was as lazy a man as she could imagine. Though he was still handsome and desirable at sixty, he was not the kind of man to take on the work of planning, calculating and deceiving. He might commit adultery, but only if there were very little movement involved. Besides, he loved her, and she was sure of it. They had gone through so much together: childlessness, hard times, deaths and, most importantly, the adoption of his sister’s daughter, Elizabeth. In these crises he had been all that one could have wanted from a husband. And loving him the way she did, there was no question she would be unfaithful. He was the only man she had ever slept with. Not that she hadn’t been curious, from time to time, but she was curious about all sorts of things and you would no more find her with another man than you would have found her drinking a glass of Cynar, that greenish, artichoke liqueur her neighbours had brought back from Italy.

       Adultery was on her mind, though, because she had seen Robbie Myers with Jane Richardson, and Robbie Myers was her niece Elizabeth’s fiancé. If he was not, technically speaking, ‘adulterous,’ there was almost certainly a serious name for his behaviour.

       Elizabeth had come to stay with them under the worst circumstances. She was the daughter of John’s sister, Eileen, and one summer, seventeen years ago now, Eileen had asked if they would mind taking care of Liz while she and her husband went off to Europe for a romantic holiday. Childless themselves, Anne and John adored children, so they had happily accepted. But Elizabeth’s parents had drowned when their ferry sank somewhere between Piraeus and Naxos. It was a tragedy on a number of fronts. John was, of course, devastated by the death of his younger sister and her husband. And then she and John were bewildered to find themselves entangled in legal proceedings to determine who should take care of the child. And then there was the three-year-old Liz, a strange little puzzle. They did not at first know how to tell her that her parents had died, but when they did tell her, it was as if the child could not or would not understand. For months Liz would calmly ask after her parents, as if she were asking after clothes she’d misplaced. Reminded that they were dead, Liz would go back to her toys and remind the dolls and fuzzy bears that their parents had died.

       – Your mother and father are dead, she would say to each

      of them.

       For all of that, she grew up to be a normal young girl, whatever ‘normal’ was when it had its hair cut. A shy child, she had opened up at school, making friends easily at St. Mary’s Primary School. From there, they had the usual problems with her. Liz questioned everything they did or said. For a time, she insisted they were not her parents and so had no authority over her. For a very long time, they could not get two words out of her. She would mutter at them on her way in or out of the house.

       Then