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.
     â 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 â 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 âfate.' 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 âwoke 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 â his time with the cello, his study of small things â 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.
     â 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 â that is Lowther's â 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 âmiracle' 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.
     â 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 â in God, in God's inclination to kill him sooner rather than later. In fact, Father Pennant's initial impression â that there was something not quite Christian about Lowther's religion â 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. âGod') 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.
    Â
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.
     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.