Days by moonlight Read online

  creature on this night.

  Would anyone find his body?

  Or would he be eaten where he stood?

  The pig grunted lasciviously as it came. It was steps away

  when he heard a car backfire – once, twice –and felt drops of

  warm rain on his face and neck. It was then that he realized his

  eyes were closed. Opening them, he saw that he wasn’t quite

  where he thought he was. He was on his knees in the middle of

  the road. Before him was a tall figure, a man who said

  – Do you mind if I slap you?

  Before he could answer, the man slapped his face hard enough

  to make his back teeth hurt.

  145

  – Did you feel that? the man asked.

  – You’re damn right, I felt it! That hurt!

  – I’m sorry, said the man.

  It was then that Stephens saw the pig. It lay dead on the

  ground, its feet pawing at the air. The man who’d just slapped

  him had shot it.

  – The name’s Kit, said the man. I was in the pub?

  Mr. Stephens didn’t recognize him.

  – Why did you slap me? he asked.

  They walked on then, leaving the pig in the middle of the

  road. Kit, a Methodist from Manitoba, was tall and broad, his

  dark hair gathered in a ponytail. John Stephens couldn’t see

  much of his face in the dark, but he recognized the man’s voice

  and remembered that they’d spoken while waiting for their drinks

  at the bar. The man was Scottish on his father’s side and Jamaican

  on his mother’s.

  – I slapped you because I wasn’t sure if you’re possessed.

  – What would you have done if I was possessed?

  – I’d have shot you, said Kit. But just in the leg so you couldn’t

  walk. I couldn’t kill you after drinking with you like that.

  Kit hadn’t followed him from the pub. He’d chosen the road

  they were on because he was walking to Feversham. A coinci-

  dence. He’d been surprised to see someone else out at this time

  of night. More surprised still to find a man kneeling in the middle

  of the road with a pig in front of him. The pig had seemed like a

  breathing, white marble figure. You didn’t even have to believe in

  demons to feel the malevolence. It was palpable. The thing he

  couldn’t tell was who, of pig or man, was host to the demon and

  who was not. Because the pig was unnaturally still, he shot it.

  Twice. He was sorry to have killed a fellow being, but his almost

  instinctive concern had been for the kneeling man.

  Given that Kit had almost shot him in the leg, it’s surprising

  how untroubled their relationship was. That first night, John

  Stephens was preoccupied by what had happened. Had he really

  146

  been possessed by a pig possessed by a demon? The idea wasn’t

  easy for an atheist to accept. He preferred to think that the earth

  was a being of many aspects, some of which were malign, that

  people and animals could be overcome by “evil” the way an early-

  morning traveller is shrouded by fog in a valley. The land had a

  “dark side,’ and he’d touched it. Or had it touched him? As dawn

  came, he and Kit finally saw that he’d been spattered by pig’s

  blood: his clothes, his face and neck, his hands.

  Naturally, John Stephens wondered about his companion.

  Why was an imposing, intimidating Manitoban walking the back

  roads of Ontario with a gun? And was it better or worse, for him,

  that Kit could tell – or thought he could tell – if a man was

  possessed by slapping him? Mr. Stephens felt both anxious and

  curious. He and Kit walked easily together, though, neither of

  them saying much until Woodstock, where Mr. Stephens cleaned

  up and they had a coffee in a place near the Ingersoll Road.

  In total, the two travelled together for five days. They slept

  where they could: in hotel lobbies, taverns, restaurants, and

  McDonald’s. They were close, in the way that road acquaintances

  sometimes are. But Ùisdean Ross – who preferred being called

  “Kit” to having his name mangled – was not a man to waste

  words. He seemed happier to keep quiet rather than talk about

  trivial things.

  Then again, Kit was always ready to talk about the spiritual.

  He allowed it to influence his life. He was walking from Winnipeg

  to Feversham, for instance, as penance. He wouldn’t say what

  he’d done to require penance. It was a family matter. Kit was

  convinced, though, that his soul would be healed by walking –

  as opposed to wandering, which is what John Stephens had been

  doing. Kit had been a month on the road when they met, and he

  felt almost whole. More than that, he believed that rescuing John

  Stephens from a demon was a sign that his penance was near its

  end. This did not free him from actually going to Feversham,

  however. Feversham was inescapable.

  147

  But who in their right mind would journey all that way –

  almost 1,250 kilometres – to Feversham? Feversham was what

  the French called “un bled,’ a place with no appeal, a village you

  leave as soon as you’re able, a place where it rains five days a

  week, even when it doesn’t rain at all. Stephens had never heard

  anyone say anything about it – good or bad – and that included

  the one time he’d walked through it.

  That, said Kit, was because he’d judged Feversham with his

  eyes. He had taken its unpaved roads, the modesty of its houses,

  stores, and institutions as the basis for his judgment. But did he

  realize that Feversham had the highest percentage in the world

  of priests and holy people living in it? Well, it did. Surpassing

  even Vatican City. Ninety-five per cent of those who live in

  Feversham are spiritual masters, men and women of all denomi-

  nations. If Stephens had looked in the general store on River

  Road, for instance, he’d have seen a bewildering variety of food,

  foods to accommodate Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Shin-

  toists, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and so on. The choice of fruit and

  vegetables alone was stunning. You could buy everything from

  yuzu to custard apples, from jicama to marrow-stem kale.

  Was Kit himself a holy man?

  No. Holy men don’t walk around with guns. But Feversham

  wasn’t a place to be trifled with. Kit was going because he wasn’t

  sure whether he wanted to live or die, and this was the kind of

  question that could be answered in Feversham. The gun, its bullets,

  had been meant for himself. Until, that is, he’d shot the pig.

  As if all that wasn’t enough spiritual matter to think about,

  somewhere around the town of Arthur, where they shared a bed at

  an inn, Kit suggested that, given how they’d met and where they

  were going, it was likely that Feversham was Stephens’s destiny

  too. Kit recognized in John Stephens a man suffering from the

  same hesitation to live that he himself suffered from. The difference,

  said Kit, was that he could admit to a longing for death. But

  Stephens seemed not to have admitted this – not even to himself.

  148

  This was true and
obvious, and John Stephens at last admitted

  it to himself. He did want to die, but he didn’t know how. So,

  he’d chosen a way that reflected his irresolution: death by drink.

  – You can speak to God with me, said Kit. I really think you

  should, John.

  Feversham’s sanctity had first been described to Kit by a

  Christian monk from Neepawa, in metaphorical terms. Think of

  it this way, the monk had said: God needs sleep as much as

  mortals do. We were made in God’s image. We share God’s

  habits. So, God obviously sleeps. No surprise, then, that there

  are places God prefers to rest. These places are little known.

  They’re northern – Feversham, Pangnirtung, Sarqaq, Ny-Ålesund,

  Chatanga – and modest and quiet and, evidently, suited to divine

  repose. Those in distress, those teetering between life and death

  who manage to stay with God as God sleeps, those who manage

  to share God’s dreams, are granted grace if they choose it.

  Two strange ideas: that God would choose to sleep in Fever-

  sham, Ontario, and that Stephens’s journey with Kit Ross was

  now a pilgrimage.

  – What happens when a god dreams? John Stephens asked.

  This no one could say, said Kit, because, according to his

  monk, we all exist only within a divine dream. When God awak-

  ens, we will vanish. Not knowing the awakened God, we cannot

  know the one who dreams, either, having nothing to compare

  the dreamer with. We can say, though, that, as with any dream,

  the dreamer is all and all is the dreamer. Trees, gourds, people,

  clouds, dresses, ants, boots … all are part of the same wonderful

  dream. And to be where the dreamer dreams – in Feversham –

  is to be closer to the source, as when one lies beside a dreaming

  beloved and feels a dream pass through them as if it were a

  current. To be in Feversham is to be next to the dreamer and to

  experience something deeper: intimations of the self.

  As far as Stephens was concerned, the monk from Neepawa’s

  ideas were pure contradiction. God was either asleep in some real

  149

  place – in which case He could be approached while He slept –

  or we were all (including God Himself) part of a dream and, so,

  equidistant from the dreamer wherever we might be. To be beside

  the dreamer’s dream of himself would, in that case, mean nothing,

  with Feversham no more significant than anywhere else..

  Kit, who believed the monk from Neepawa, saw no contra-

  diction at all. To him, it was obvious that the dreamer would

  dream himself, and that, to know the dreamer, even in the dream,

  was to be blessed. More: it was the definition of grace to find the

  dreamer in the dream. Which is why Feversham, one of the places

  where God dreams Himself into our ‘reality,’ is sacred.

  Knowing Feversham as Stephens did, it was hard for him to

  imagine where exactly the Lord’s bed might be. But it was ques-

  tions like that that convinced him to travel on with Kit. Atheist

  or not – and unsure though he was of Kit’s sanity – Stephens’s

  curiosity got the better of him. So, days after being attacked by a

  pig, John Stephens walked into the sacred town of Feversham.

  What is it you see when you enter a legendary place? Not the

  place itself, surely, not the place in and of itself. Rather, you see

  it through a curtain of ghosts, expectations, and legend. So it

  was for John Stephens. Feversham was more or less as he remem-

  bered it: bland and unremarkable. But now its blandness had an

  ascetic feel to it. Its small houses, identical to small houses all

  over the province, now seemed falsely normal, hiding as they did

  the priests and holy people Kit had told him about. The tar on its

  roads seemed like a stratagem. The river was like a river in a

  vision of small towns. Stephens accepted that Feversham might

  be sacred to him because he could no longer see it as profane.

  But he couldn’t tell if profane Feversham was real or if sacred

  Feversham was. Which Feversham was the illusion, which the

  real? Or, to put it another way: between illusion and reality, which

  was least untrue?

  (Of course, if the monk from Neepawa was right, the question

  was pointless, there being no such division as illusion/reality,

  150

  all being dream-stuff. Then again, Stephens did not believe the

  monk knew any more about the world than we do. And, without

  denying the influence of illusion on reality, it was important to

  remember that, for those of us who are not mystics, the distinction

  between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is crucial.)

  The Methodist home was a white A-frame on River Road. Its

  driveway sloped toward the street, and a white Ford Fusion was

  parked on the slope. From outside, nothing gave the house away

  as anything other than a modest family home. Even the spring

  mechanism on its screen door was slightly flawed, so that the

  door pulled quickly open and had to be pulled shut, rattling like

  a sheet of tin behind you.

  Once inside, though, the story was different. Past the entrance

  alcove, the living room was white with no furniture, save two

  lacquered wooden pews, both ten feet long. Beyond the pews,

  suspended from the ceiling, was a gold-painted crucifix, four

  feet tall with a two-foot crossbar. The living room wasn’t hushed,

  as a church might be, but it felt like a place of worship. On the

  front pew, the pastor – Rev. Sara Crosbie – was speaking to a

  Coptic monk, her next-door neighbour, a man dressed in black

  save for his bonnet, which had white crosses on it.

  Seeing Kit, Reverend Crosbie got up.

  – You’re Kit, she said, extending a hand. Welcome!

  John Stephens knew, at that moment, that everything Kit

  Ross had told him about the town was true. It wasn’t only the

  fact that they’d found a Methodist church in a fixer-upper by

  the river. It was the look on the monk’s face: serene but engaged.

  Stephens would meet a number of the holy men and holy women

  over the following days, their homes like spiritual Tardises –

  plain on the outside, temples within. But he believed Kit Ross

  the moment he saw the monk’s face. The business here was

  clearly spiritual.

  On the other hand, Kit’s version of what would happen –

  communion with a dreaming God – was (perhaps) off the mark.

  151

  According to Reverend Crosbie, whose guest room served as a

  place for pilgrims, the only certain thing, the only thing all the

  holy people gathered in Feversham believed, was that God,

  however defined, was often close to Feversham, and even in those

  times when God’s presence was less pronounced, God’s absence

  was a warm one. Now, here, the analogy of beds and sleep actually

  worked. You could say, and Reverend Crosbie did, that God’s

  absence from Feversham was very like the warmth on one side of

  the bed when your beloved has gotten up in the middle of the

  night and you reach over to touch the place where they’ve been.

  A point of contention a
mong the spiritual leaders was whether

  God communed with anyone who came to Feversham or only

  with those who’d prepared for communion with God. This was a

  particularly lively debate. There had been a number of cases in

  which “common people,’ wandering near the sacred clearing, had

  been touched by God, coming away with prophecies or scriptural

  interpretations or predictions about the future. Some believed

  that those who had been in the company of God were holy,

  whether “spiritual” or not. Others believed that those claiming to

  have been in God’s company were not to be trusted unless they

  were spiritual leaders. Still others believed that common people

  should not be allowed in Feversham at all, as they might intercept

  messages meant for the reverend.

  It seemed to Reverend Crosbie that there were good argu-

  ments for many of the positions. She herself did not like the

  idea of people trampling on sacred ground looking for God to

  solve their problems, as if the Lord were running a garage for

  the soul.

  And yet, who knew the will of God? In one baffling case, it

  seems the Lord provided a poor supplicant with the names of all

  the winners at Dresden Raceway. That is, every winning horse in

  every race for thirty days. A miracle, surely. None doubted it was

  the work of a divinity. And the poor supplicant used the entirety

  of his winnings to build a church beside the racetrack, a church

  152

  that burned to the ground the day it was finished. This incident

  alone brought up a thousand questions. To begin with, there was

  the question of whether or not God sent “mixed signals.’ Some

  felt that, in burning the church to the ground, God had changed

  Their mind. Others felt it was too soon to tell what God meant.

  Some felt God was condemning gambling, though why, having

  used gambling to build a church, would God then burn the

  church, not the racetrack? None of Feversham’s spiritual leaders

  was prepared to admit that God had made a mistake but, after

  the incident, all of them wrestled even more intensely with the

  meaning of God’s actions in the world.

  Reverend Crosbie was wrestling with the idea still, which is

  why she was sympathetic to Kit’s situation. She didn’t entirely

  approve of petitioning God for earthly advice, but neither did

  she feel she had the right to decide who should be encouraged