Duncan Lowrie, Deceased

Chapter One: Cold Soil

The soil in Colborne stayed cold long after the snow went. Duncan Lowrie knelt on a folded towel at the edge of his vegetable bed, pushing his thumb into the earth to test it, and found it damp and unwilling, the way it always was in the first week of April.

He planted anyway. Peas went in cold. His mother had told him that, a long time ago, in a language he no longer used.

He worked down the row with the seed packet in his left hand, dropping the peas at intervals he measured with the width of his palm. Behind him the lake lay flat and grey and enormous, visible in strips between the neighbours' houses. Two years into retirement, he had learned that the garden was the only thing in his day with a beginning and an end. Everything else drifted.

When he had finished the row he sat back on his heels and looked at the house: white clapboard, green trim, a porch Claire had painted herself the summer they bought it. Inside, the kettle would be cooling on the stove. On the dining table there would be a stack of index cards covered in his small handwriting, notes toward a translation of a Greek play about a boy who does not know whose son he is. Duncan had been working on it for eleven months and had not told anyone how far he had got, because the answer was not very far.

The phone rang in the kitchen.

He heard it through the screen door and did not hurry. He was sixty-two years old and he had spent his life not hurrying to phones. It was one of the small disciplines he had built, the way another man might discipline himself not to swear. A ringing phone was a coin flip, and Duncan had trained himself to appear indifferent to coin flips.

By the fourth ring he was in the kitchen with soil on his knees.

"Hello."

"Dad." Daniel. His son's voice came through fast and bright, the voice of a man walking somewhere with purpose. "Is this a bad time? You sound out of breath."

"I was in the garden."

"In April?"

"Peas go in cold."

"Right." A car horn, distant. Daniel was on a street in Toronto, probably King, probably with a coffee in his other hand. "So listen, I've got something. This is the thing I mentioned at Christmas, the long feature."

"The immigration piece."

"Identity, more than immigration. Identity fraud in Canada, going back. It's turning into something much bigger than I pitched." Daniel had a habit of narrating his enthusiasm as though it were news. "You know what the twentieth century looked like in this country, records-wise? A swamp. Provincial vital statistics, church registers, county clerks doing their best with a fountain pen and no cross-referencing. If you wanted to be someone else in 1955, you didn't need a computer. You needed a bus ticket and nerve."

Duncan stood at the counter with the receiver against his ear and looked at the row of jars on the windowsill.

"Nerve," he said.

"And a dead person. That's the part I didn't understand until I got into it. The cleanest way to become someone else was to take the identity of a child who died young. Infant mortality was brutal, especially rural, and here's the thing—births and deaths were registered in separate books. Nobody stapled them together. So there are these babies all over the record who were born and never grew up, and on paper they're perfectly available."

"Available," Duncan said. His voice sounded normal. He listened to it as if from the doorway.

"I've filed something like forty access requests. Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes. Half of them come back useless, but I've got a stack of index scans now and I'm just reading them, cross-matching, seeing what pops." A pause; the rasp of a plastic lid. "Dad, I found the strangest coincidence. Almost stopped my heart, honestly. Then I laughed."

There was a moment—Duncan would remember it later with a clarity that felt almost cruel—when he could still have hung up. When it was still only weather.

"Go on," he said.

"There's a death registration in Digby County, Nova Scotia, 1962. Infant. Three weeks old." Daniel's voice went slightly gentle, the way it did when he thought he might be about to tease. "Name on it is Duncan Lowrie."

The kitchen did not tilt. The jars stayed on the windowsill. Duncan felt his own hand, still gritty with soil, tighten on the counter's edge.

"Well," he said.

"Same year you were born. Same county. Same name."

"Lowrie is not a rare name in that part of the world." He heard himself produce a small dry laugh, the professor's laugh, the one he used when a student proposed something unlikely. "There were four Lowrie families within ten miles of us. Half of them called their sons Duncan. It was the sort of place where you needed a middle initial to survive."

"That's what I figured." Daniel laughed too. "Still. Try reading your own name off a death certificate. I sat there in the archive with my mouth open. Then I thought, this is the exact thing I'm writing about—how thin the paper is between one life and another. Sorry. That's the kind of sentence my editor cuts."

"She should."

"She will." Traffic swelled and fell. "Anyway, I wanted to tell you. Also I wanted to ask—could you dig around for anything from back then? Any of Grandad's papers, church stuff, anything with a Digby stamp on it? It'd be good colour. And Mom said you had a photo of the farm."

"There's very little," Duncan said. "You know that. There was the fire."

"The fire, right." Daniel said it easily. He had grown up with the fire; it was a fact of his family the way other children had a grandmother in Winnipeg. "Okay. Well, if anything surfaces. And Katya and I were thinking about the twenty-first, if that works. She's never seen the lake."

"Your mother will make too much food."

"That's the plan." A grin in his voice. "Love you, Dad. Go plant your cold peas."

"Goodbye, Daniel."

He set the receiver in its cradle with great care, as if it were full of liquid.

Then he stood in his kitchen and did not move.

The furnace came on. Somewhere down the street a truck reversed, beeping. The light through the window was the thin, generous light of early spring, and it lay across the table in a long rectangle, over the index cards, over the salt cellar, over the tea towel Claire had folded that morning into a shape as precise as an envelope.

He had been waiting for this call for forty-one years.

Not this call exactly. He had never imagined it would come from his son, and that detail struck him now as so exquisitely apt that he wanted to laugh and could not. But some call, some letter, some polite young man from a government office with a folder. He had built his life on a joint, a seam, one place where the invented thing met the real record, and he had spent four decades pretending he did not know exactly where the seam was.

Duncan Lowrie, born June 3, 1962, in Digby County, Nova Scotia. Died June 24, 1962, three weeks old, of pneumonia, in a farmhouse eleven kilometres from the water.

Duncan Lowrie, born June 3, 1962, in Digby County, Nova Scotia. Bachelor of Arts, Dalhousie, 1986. Doctor of Philosophy, Toronto, 1993. Professor of Classics, Cataraqui University, Kingston, 1993 to 2022. Head of department, 2004 to 2010. Married, one son. Author of a well-reviewed monograph on the Greek particle and a hundred and nine reviews. His name on a brass plate in a corridor. His name in the mouths of a thousand students. His name on the mortgage, the tax returns, the passport, the marriage licence, the little card in his wallet that permitted him to drive.

The first Duncan Lowrie had lived twenty-one days. The second had lived forty-one years and counting, and had planted peas that morning.

He sat down. The chair was where it always was, which he found obscurely reassuring.

His actual name—his first name, the one that belonged to him the way his knuckles did—rose in his mind unbidden, in his mother's voice, in the flat vowels of the Restigouche valley.

Victorin.

He had not heard it spoken aloud in fifteen years.

When Claire came in an hour later with two bags of groceries and cold hands, she found him still at the table with the seed packets fanned in front of him like a losing hand of cards.

"You'll get earth on the table," she said, and kissed the top of his head. "Was that Daniel who called? I saw the number on the machine."

"He's coming on the twenty-first. With Katya."

"Oh, good." She began putting things away, moving with the brisk economy of a woman who had spent thirty years on hospital wards. "I'll do the lamb. Is he still doing the fraud story?"

"He is," Duncan said.

Claire folded the paper bag flat, and slid it into the drawer with the others, and said something about the price of lemons.

Outside, the lake went on being grey. Duncan looked at his hands on the tablecloth, an old man's hands now, the nails rimmed with soil, and understood with a calm that frightened him that the next few months were going to take everything he had built and hold it up to the light.