The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  In the front room, there was a long, lime-green sofa that faced the largest of the windows I had so far seen. An almost floor-to-ceiling window, it would have afforded an expansive view of the beach and the ocean if not for a grove of spruce trees that had probably not been there when the house was built or abandoned. Through the gaps in the trees, I could make out his boat at the wharf.

  Perhaps I would read the notebooks here in this otherwise empty room while reclining on the sofa.

  There were fireplaces in every room, but only the one in the front room was in working order. It had a wooden mantel that was even more conspicuously bare than the walls. My battered trunks would be the most stylish, least practical of all the furnishings. In the front room, standing upright, they would serve as peculiar cabinets for my Scotch and cigarettes.

  “I brought everything out here myself,” he said.

  “What a tremendous amount of work it must have been.”

  And the purpose of all this work? The only room he ever used was the kitchen and, perhaps, this one. This one where, for a man who couldn’t read and had no radio, there would have been nothing to do but lie on the sofa and look out the window.

  How pointlessly and eerily restored the old house seemed.

  “You’re the only other person who has seen this place since I fixed it up,” he said.

  “No one else has seen it? Not even your family?”

  He shook his head.

  “Never? They must be curious. Have they never asked simply to see the place?”

  He shook his head and stared again in that vague way of his at the floor.

  I felt a faint sense of dread at being so completely at the mercy of a man who was a stranger to me and whose unwillingness to explain this place that he had “fixed up” was alarming.

  “I’ll show you what’s out back,” he said.

  He gestured wordlessly to the outhouse as we passed it, the door of which was kept closed by a revolvable bar of wood nailed to the jamb.

  In the shed, stood against the wall with an assortment of tools, was a double-barrelled shotgun.

  There were burlap bags of oats, flour, sugar, large canisters of tea, molasses, tomatoes, an eclectic assortment of canned food, large boxes of condensed milk.

  “You could hide out here if we lose the war,” I said.

  “You’re welcome to anything you want,” he said and moved on.

  At the back of the shed there was a bin nearly full of glistening black coal and a scuttle just inside the door. “You won’t need to use the coal for a while. You shouldn’t use it at all if you don’t have to. It’s best to burn wood until the snow comes. There’s plenty of wood down where the wharves and stages were. No trouble to chop it up. There’s a chopping block and a sawhorse out behind the shed.”

  He gestured to the crank pump he had mentioned earlier. He put a wooden bucket on the floor below the pipe and pumped the crank with one hand several times before, after much sputtering and clanking from what might have been below my feet, a clear stream of water came pouring from the pipe.

  “Ice cold,” he said. “All year long. It was working just like this when I found it. I never had to spruce it up a bit, except rub a bit of dust off, that’s all.” He put his cupped hands to the water, then raised them to his mouth and drank.

  “Hurts my teeth,” he said, squinting, and indicating that I should taste the water.

  Handing him my cane, I did as he had done. The water was so cold I felt it in the bones of my hands as I stooped slightly to drink. It was ice cold. At whatever depth in the earth it came from, it was always winter. I gulped from my hands. I hadn’t tasted water this pure in decades, nor realized until now how thirsty I was from the day’s exertions and anxieties.

  “It’s delicious,” I gasped. It was so much so that, in sympathetic response to the taste of it in my mouth and the feeling of it in my throat, tears welled up in my eyes and went streaming down my cheeks. I laughed.

  “My God,” I said, “this water is so good it makes me cry.”

  As we were leaving the shed, he picked up the shotgun. “There’s a box of shells in the kitchen cupboard. And another one up there in the loft behind the food. You should keep this gun in the house. You never know. Someone might come ashore and—and steal from you.”

  “Germans, you mean?”

  “Anyone.”

  He held the gun out to me at arm’s length as if it were a rifle, he a drill sergeant and I a private whose weapon he had just inspected and found satisfactory.

  I was startled by the abruptness of the gesture. He must not share his wife’s concern, I thought, that I mean to do myself harm. I did not reach out to take the gun.

  “I’ve got five or six of them,” he said. “I can show you how to use it.”

  “I know how to use it,” I said.

  “Ever fired one?”

  “My father let me fire his. Into the air. On New Year’s Eve.”

  “I’ll show you how to load it.”

  “How to break the breach.”

  “How not to shoot yourself.”

  “What do I need a gun for?”

  “I told you. And there’s some wild dogs out here,” he said. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. They’re not big dogs.”

  At last I took the shotgun from him, but I could not bring myself to thank him for it.

  It always surprised me how heavy and unwieldy guns were. Not at all as they seemed. (I’d had not a word from anyone yet as to exactly how David died. Better not to know, perhaps.)

  “Leave it unloaded,” he said. “It might go off by accident.” When you’ve been drinking, he might as well have said.

  “Is there anyone you know who’s in the war?” I said.

  He shrugged as if to say that nothing in Quinton depended on the outcome of the war.

  “Be careful,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to hurt yourself very bad to get yourself in trouble out here. Any kind of broken bone—”

  “Might be the end of me.”

  “Yes, it might.”

  “So I’ll see you in a month?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t be to blame if something happens to me.” I wished instantly that I hadn’t said it.

  There was perhaps an hour of light left when we walked down to the beach, though I knew that light lingered longer on the ocean than it did on land. It will soon be time, I thought, for Irene to run the light.

  “You won’t be able to bring in all your things before dark,” he said.

  “The trunks are waterproof.”

  We went down to the beach, where I stood with my boots several feet apart, my cane planted between two rocks. Putting down my cane, I folded my arms for shelter from the fast-cooling breeze that was blowing shoreward. We stood there in silence. His boat bobbed slightly beside the wharf.

  He might have been a visitor whom I had walked down to the beach, a visitor whose departure we had delayed to the point where further stalling was impossible unless he meant to spend the night. How quickly the house had become mine, me the host and he the guest with whom I was sharing what for him might have been the last look he would ever have of this spellbinding view of mine. Two friends about to part forever.

  “You’ll do all right. I’ll be back. I’ll have everything you put down on that note.”

  Surely he was keeping nothing from me. Yet how strange they had seemed, those signs of how recently he had been there. The slept-in daybed. The bar of soap. The footprints on the path. The frying pan. It did not seem possible that, since that last visit, he had grown so weary of the place that to relinquish it to me would not be a hardship, not deprive him of something precious.

  As he headed out to sea, I looked over at the Trunks. I foresaw long, nighttime conversations with them in that front room, not all of them having to do with what they contained. Sentinel servants, they would stand, discreetly silent, loomingly there in the lantern light, a tandem
of shadows on the floor and on the walls, reflected in the window, omnipresent while I read and read in the hope that while my mind and body were preoccupied, sleep would creep into the room.

  Chapter Two

  IT TOOK SEVERAL TRIPS TO MOVE THE CONTENTS OF MR. AND Mrs. Trunk inside. And then I moved the trunks themselves. When empty they were quite light and I was easily able to drag them behind me. Once settled, I spent my first days and nights in Loreburn indoors unless to go outside was absolutely necessary. I put off everything. I didn’t read the letters or the notebooks or journals I had brought with me. Or my favourite books. Didn’t even consider writing. I lay sleepless on the sofa, staring out the window.

  Loreburn by day sounded more deserted than the city had at night. And there was no word for how it sounded after dark.

  I would never be able to go out walking at night in Loreburn as I had in St. John’s. Walking through the woods at night was out of the question, even with the help of a lantern. Even if the paths of Loreburn were not all but grown over, I would lose my way, or trip and fall and set the woods on fire. How far, even by day, could I safely walk? I would not get lost if I followed the coast, though I might never make it back to Loreburn if, as Patrick had said, I so much as twisted an ankle. Such a walk in winter would in the best of circumstances be impossible for me.

  In St. John’s, far from having stayed indoors on nights when the weather was bad, I had stayed out longer than usual, walked farther, the feeling of having the city to myself, which I relished, being heightened because streets that on clear nights were almost deserted were completely so on nights when there were storms. On rainy, windy nights, I would stop and look downhill to survey what I could make out of the city. I composed my column in my head as I slashed my way through snowdrifts with my cane. Everywhere there was the sifting sound of snow on snow, the wind howling high above me, the real storm raging up there unimpeded by houses and trees. I heard the ocean in it, the wind still blowing as it had a hundred miles from land. The clacking of what might have been branches brittle from the cold. Dead leaves and twigs raining down, then being carried off or buried by the storm.

  There were no large trees in Loreburn like there were in St. John’s, no oak, maple, ash, chestnut, planted a hundred years ago to replace the stunted spruce, to disguise the barrens by which St. John’s was still enclosed.

  Someone in a pseudonymous letter to the editor had written of my habit of working by night and sleeping by day: “While others man the brigade, she sleeps through the conflagration of the day and goes out at night to kick through the ashes, to find out what has fed the flames, to turn up with her cane the words of her column, which she lugs home like a scavenger.” It wasn’t bad. I suspected its author to be an assistant to one of the archbishops, or else a politician, someone afraid of provoking me into making them a special target in my column.

  I had never been able to write while sitting at a desk, nor without saying the words aloud. Sometimes I walked about the city at night, spoke whole sentences as if reading from a book. I often startled passersby at night when, having paused in some dark and public place to concentrate, I suddenly resumed my declamation. My unintended victims would gasp “Blessed God” or something like it, then hurry away, looking furtively behind them. I would mutter “Sorry” distractedly and then, to reassure them, set off at a purposeful pace in the opposite direction.

  I sometimes gestured with my cane as though writing the words in mid-air. And so unsuspecting walkers were likewise terrified by the sudden appearance in front of them of my gesticulating cane, thrusting out from a darkened doorway. I had once knocked a man’s hat clean off his head. I was recognized, sometimes by people who had heard of me but never seen me, a mere description being enough, for who else could it fit but Sheilagh Fielding? “What are you doing, woman?” people said. “You must be mad. You’re a danger to yourself and others, a public menace is what you are, a public menace.”

  It was commonly believed that I went out walking at night because of my limp, because I couldn’t stand people gawking at my cumbersome boot. I had been self-conscious upon first leaving the San. The first time I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I was shocked by the sight of this weirdly moving mechanism that from now on would be me. How light, how graceful my good leg looked and felt because of its partner’s leaden clumsiness.

  What struck others most, I think, was the incongruousness of a woman of my size being hobbled by a limp, the conjunction of superabundance and deficiency. I believe they thought my height and my limp were somehow connected, both proceeding from the same flaw in my nature.

  When I could put it off no longer, I tried to sleep. For days, I had done little more than doze for widely separated intervals of minutes.

  But sleep, as had been the case since my mother left my father and me when I was six, would not come.

  I went outdoors, leaving the shotgun behind, figuring that to carry both it and my cane would be a nuisance. I followed the path from Patrick’s house along the edge of the beach towards the others.

  The town was flanked by meadows. In the one on my side of Loreburn, I saw the wild dogs that Patrick had warned me about. Or one pack of them. He hadn’t said how many packs there were. I watched through my lorgnette as they skirted the edge of the woods in mass pursuit of some small game, a rabbit I guessed, the whole pack weaving in unison. I could only infer the rabbit’s course from that of the dogs and the furrow of commotion in the grass. The rabbit, perhaps only to conceal itself long enough to catch its breath, perhaps to fool the dogs into thinking it had got away, stopped. The dogs did likewise, falling silent. They sat back on their haunches, waiting, scrawny chests heaving, scattered randomly on the hillside. They were beagle-like mongrels, all ribs and legs and gapped, scrawny fur as if they were slowly being blown bald by the wind. They ignored the horses, who returned the favour, paying them no more attention while they grazed on the hill above the houses than they did the ceaseless screeching of the seagulls overhead. And then, abruptly, the whole thing started up again as the rabbit, having regained its breath or lost its nerve, took flight.

  Surely the dogs were aware by this time of my presence on the island. But perhaps Patrick stayed often enough in the house that they found its being occupied unremarkable.

  There were, at least, fifteen of them and only one of me, whose limp and laboured movement I had no doubt they would quickly notice. I decided it was wise to be afraid of them and vowed never to venture this far from the house without the gun again.

  I would never know the outcome of their pursuit. They went off into the woods, still yelping, which I took as a hopeful sign for the rabbit.

  I half-expected to see, on the beach some morning, people who, like their pets and horses, had taken to the woods, descended from a handful that had stayed behind after the Loreburn experiment had failed. A pack of feral people.

  I had discovered in the archives that in 1860 the island had been settled by three families, three couples, each of whom had brought three children with them who over the years had married each other and married into families from elsewhere. The population had peaked at forty-five.

  There were seventeen gravesites in the yard beside the church, some marked by headstones, some by wooden crosses, some by stones laid flat that had sunk into the earth and been overgrown by grass.

  At one end of the yard, halfway between the church and fence, stood a plain stone cross, the largest by far of all the monuments, marking the gravesite of Samuel Loreburn, “fisherman and minister.” All the other upright markers were engraved on their west-facing sides, most brightly lit near sunset, while his was engraved on the side facing east, facing the sunrise, the daily resurrection that he alone was allowed to see. In death, he still presided over his congregation of relatives. All day, all night, through all the seasons of the year for years on end, the dead of Loreburn attended in silence to his silent sermon. I imagined them all lying there with their hands behind their heads, star
ing at his inscription as though it were the key to their salvation. Inscryption was more like it: HERE LIES SAMUEL LOREBURN, A GOOD MAN WITH MANY FAULTS WHO FAILED HIS PEOPLE AND HIS GOD AS ALL MEN MUST.

  At some point every day, no matter what the weather, the horses zigzagged in single file down the slope of Loreburn, winding their way among the houses, forgoing the steeper shortcuts for the road, like animals being slowly led or herded towards some destination. They made their slow, unmistakably habitual descent, plodding purposefully, headed somewhere that must have been easiest to reach by this route, paying the houses no more attention than they did other inanimate obstacles like trees and rocks. At the bottom, still in single file, they left Loreburn by an opening in the woods, a path that I made up my mind, in spite of Patrick’s advice, to follow some day.

  After being informed of David’s death, but before receiving the notebooks from Sarah, I had half-hoped, half-dreaded that I would hear from her. In the days after the one on which I learned of David’s death, I went to the post office frequently. I could think of nothing else but hearing from his grief-stricken sister that might make my own grief more bearable.

  Though I had yet to use the party-line phone in the basement of the boarding house to either make or receive a call, I taped a note to the wall beside it saying that Sheilagh Fielding, of Room 37, was expecting a call that might come “at any time of any day.” It doesn’t matter, I told myself, that, if Sarah calls, I will have to maintain the pretence that we are sisters. Contact with her of some kind, an acknowledgment from Sarah of the existence of a blood relative named Sheilagh Fielding, might be of some help.

  I thought of contacting her myself, finding out where she lived and trying to reach her by phone—and commiserating with her about the death of our “brother.” But I doubted that I would be able to maintain my self-control, resist breaking down and blurting out the truth at what would surely be the worst possible time.