The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  That voice behind the shadelike curtain that never moves despite the wind.

  “How are you, tonight, Miss Fielding?”

  I tell myself that I should leave, that I am risking far too much, that I should wait out my craving as it would surely pass. But I am not convinced that it would pass. It feels as though something has entered my body, or been awakened in it that will never leave or sleep again.

  “Cold,” I said. “Like you would be if you’d been standing out here for an hour like I have.”

  “Yes. March is always cold. Or seems to be. But there has never been a March like this one, has there?”

  Always there must be this pre-transaction conversation. It is for some reason necessary to pretend that the callabogus is incidental, that it is really to talk that we meet like this. A strange voice he has. A kind of faux genteel voice that he must know doesn’t fool anyone. The transparency of its affectedness seems intentional. The trace of an unfamiliar accent, a blending of accents perhaps, though none of them a Newfoundlander’s.

  Who are you? I always feel like saying. Why do you never show your face? It’s not as though it would be hard to find you if, for some reason, I reported you. It’s not as though I don’t know where you live.

  “It has been a very bad month,” I said. “But as for its being the worst of all time, I don’t know anyone old enough who can say for certain, do you?”

  “Such a brazen young woman you are, Miss Fielding. But where has brazenness got you so far?” That he knows my name does not bother me so much as the way he says it. “And with so much to lose if you upset me.”

  How he enjoys the upper hand. I sometimes think, what if I were to thrust both arms through that curtain or use my cane to beat my way inside. He must have some means of protection. He can’t be as vulnerable as he seems or he’d have been robbed long ago, forced out of the business by the sort of men I’ve seen in court who would warn his customers and suppliers not to deal with him again. Protection. A gun, no doubt. All I know about him is that he has large hands. A son, perhaps, upstairs sleeping, forever on call should his father need his help. There might be a whole family there who would be willing and able to pitch in.

  “I’m not trying to upset you. It’s just that I’m freezing—”

  “I was merely joking, Miss Fielding. What’s mine is yours no matter how much you upset me. You’re thirsty. Yes. In spite of the cold. A woman so young with such a craving. But I know what it’s like. I know what you are going through. And not only because of the nature of the service I provide. I was like you, once. Worse than you. Far worse. But I—I simply stopped. When I was completely alone. A very bad way to stop, but I had no choice. No one to so much as lay a hand on my forehead.”

  “A reformed drinker. Keeping the unreformed in booze. A man who understands his customers.”

  “You are my only customer.”

  “Why? Why me and no one else?”

  “Who knows what might happen if you tried to buy from someone you mean nothing to.”

  “What do I mean to you?”

  “Everything.”

  “I’ve got my money here.”

  “Always in such a hurry. Tell me more about your children.”

  Walk away and never come back, I told myself. There must be someone else that you can deal with. As indeed there is, but he’s right—only in parts of town where I would have to pay a different price.

  “I told you that that was just an expression,” I said. “‘I know where all my children are.’ It means, I know the consequences of everything I’ve done.”

  “I doubt that you do. But tell me more about your children.”

  “Look, really, I have no children. You know my name. Ask anyone. Where would I be hiding them—”

  “Calm down, Miss Fielding. I already know your story. I merely wanted to hear you tell it. I know you have no children in St. John’s. Remember the unsigned letter you received on the ship that night. I wrote it.”

  Even as this caught me by surprise, I knew it was true.

  “I have no idea what you mean.” Their names are David and Sarah. I half-expected him to say it. Was he still merely guessing, bluffing, hoping that I would give away my secret, blurt out an admission of some sort, plead with him to be discreet?

  “You know exactly what I mean. As I know exactly how you feel. But I am still curious about some things. And curiosity is a craving that must sometimes go unsatisfied. Not like other cravings. We’ll talk again. But for now, it’s time for our exchange.”

  Again, as I extended the money, he took my hand in his and held it, rubbed his thumb on the back of it, caressed it for a moment, then released it. Could it really be that that is all he wants? A woman.

  “I’ve come here to buy callabogus,” I said. “Not to sell myself.”

  A bottle appeared on the windowsill.

  LOREBURN

  I was there when the Newfoundland and the Bellaventure docked. I’m glad I didn’t see the seventy-eight men who were stacked in the hold of the Bellaventure. The bodies were taken to the Harvey and Company premises, where they were put in the huge cauldrons normally used for rendering fat from seals. They were, in this ghastly manner, unfrozen, then sent to undertakers.

  I didn’t know that Smallwood had survived until I saw him in the rigging of the S.S. Newfoundland, looking just as he had when the ship departed. My legs almost gave way. I shouted to him but he seemed transfixed by the sight of something far away, something beyond the dread-struck crowd, beyond even the hillside city. He climbed down as the ship was docking and I lost sight of him as I was carried towards the dock by the people who rushed forward as if the winners of the race to the ship would find that their loved ones had survived.

  April 2, 1917

  My father and every other doctor in the city have spent the last few weeks treating men for frostbite and exposure. Not just the surviving crew of the S.S. Newfoundland but sealers from other ships as well.

  It is a strange sight. So many men with bandaged hands out to take the air, accompanied by their wives, children, brothers, friends. Each survivor with a man on either side of him, holding him by the upper arm, without which assistance he would slump to the ground, topple forward and reflexively use those bandaged hands to break his fall—those hands that the others stare at but go to great lengths not to touch and that the survivors hold upright like men presenting proof of something. Innocence.

  In the absence of the sealers, during the time when they were unaccounted for, when it was possible that we were keeping vigil for men who were already dead, our own world was transformed. And it has yet to revert to its former self. For us, as for them, time cannot keep up with space. Time still passes with the sluggishness of gloom. Unable to believe what we now know to have happened, we are still waiting for some other, more credible outcome, something on the scale of previous “bad years” when, though a few were lost and many were injured, the majority returned, in much the same state as when they left, to a place much the same as when they left it.

  The city is full of wounded men home from the war or injured at the seal hunt. It looks like an epidemic of some disease to which women are immune has reached its height. Everywhere there are canes, crutches, crude, makeshift wheelchairs that are more often lifted than pushed because of all the snow and ice.

  Masses and services. Nonstop, it seems. Hardly a second between sunrise and midnight when there is not at least one church bell ringing in the city. Dread lines lead to the doors of every church, cathedral and basilica. People, mostly women, queueing for confession. And, having confessed, taking their place at the back of the line again.

  Smallwood is safe. I keep telling myself that, for I have seen him only once since the ships returned and I have not spoken to him. I know I saw him. But it sometimes seems that I imagined it. That it wasn’t him I saw in the rigging of the Bellaventure but someone else. A wonder-struck sealer staring at the city as if he had come to disbelieve in its existence. In
the existence of solid land. Abiding land. A world beyond the one of ice. A various, many-featured one whose inhabitants’ lives were not constantly at stake, not constantly on the verge of guttering like candles in an empty, drafty room.

  I went by Smallwood’s boarding house today, knocked on the door of his room but got no answer. Asked the landlady. “He hasn’t been back here since the Blessing of the Fleet,” she said. Went to the Telegram, where they told me they have “heard” that he survived but haven’t seen him yet. I know I saw him. Absurd to doubt. Who else looks like that? Others have seen him.

  He must be in his father’s house on the Brow. I could go there, I suppose. No. Charlie probably knows my story. Thinks about as highly of me as my father does of Smallwood. But that must be where he is. Recovering. After witnessing God knows what sort of things. How relieved his mother must have been to see him. The answer to her prayers.

  Smallwood is safe. I have been visiting his boarding house every day for three weeks since he left his father’s house on the Brow. At last, today, he answered the door. Judging by what I saw in his eyes, his first few days must have been very bad. He still wears the same grimace of defiance, but now there is something else behind it. Some intolerable notion or idea that he is fighting to suppress, something ineffably but profoundly subversive of every other notion or idea he has ever had or ever will. The idea that there is no agency of reckoning or mercy. The suffering of the innocent will neither be prevented nor redeemed. It is not that some belief of his has been overthrown but that he has never thought about such things before except to dismiss them as the tiresome preoccupations of ministers and priests.

  He said he went to his home on the Brow because he could not stand to be alone, especially at night. He has been to the ice and back without once having set foot off the ship. He seems to think this a shameful admission. All the more shameful because so many men were lost. He alone, of all those who sailed on the S.S. Newfoundland and the other ships, remained on board at all times. He still has no idea what it feels like to walk on anything but solid ground. He stared at the sea ice from the gunwales every day, about as remote from it as if he had stared at it from Signal Hill. He was nothing but a passenger, he says. How fortunate for you, I say, but he shakes his head. Confined to the ship and, when the storm came up and the men of the watch whose sleeping schedule he shared did not return, confined indoors, alone in the quarters with a hundred empty bunks. No contact with anyone for days but the men who brought his meals. A passenger, a guest, a puny tenderfoot whom the others coddled even after he protested and whose idle presence mystified the sealers even after he explained it to them.

  “You sound like you’re disappointed,” I said, “that you missed the chance to spend fifty-three hours outdoors in a blizzard. It’s not as if you failed some sort of test.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  But I did. His being there had altered nothing, for better or worse. His presence had not registered on anything at all. He had not been noticed long enough to be dismissed as useless.

  “You can write about it,” I said. “You are going to write about it, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I signed a contract forbidding me to write in detail about the seal hunt once the ship returned. I agreed to keep my mouth shut. Like Fielding the Forger. I am writing what anyone could write.”

  “Not that anyone envies you for it,” I said, “but you saw the sort of things out there that most people never see.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know what I saw. Things I won’t forget. Things I wish I’d never seen. But you’re missing the point. The point is that something must be done. That’s why I joined up with George Grimes the other day. George Grimes the socialist.”

  It is all socialism with Smallwood now.

  My father is not home yet. It is dark downstairs. The fire has gone out. Nearly two o’clock. He must have dozed off in his surgery as he has done before. He will not be home tonight. The woman who cleans his office will wake him in the morning and he will resume the work of what will seem to him to be the same nap-interrupted day. I believe it has been decades since he truly slept. He has not, in all that time, slept in his bed, nor any bed, but always in that chair or on the sofa in his surgery, dressed for work or even for the outdoors, as if he might be caught unprepared for something should he truly fall asleep, as if these “naps” must do “for now.”

  Has he felt, since her departure, the way that I have felt these past few days and nights? We have gone for days without speaking, without even setting eyes on each other. I have heard his comings and goings, footsteps downstairs late at night and early in the morning, minimal commotions as he settles down to sleep or gets up to go to work. As he must hear me above him, bare feet padding on the rug, the floorboards squeaking. The companionable sounds of the house’s other occupant, an exchange of words with whom is rare, polite, perfunctory. I would not have thought the house would seem so much emptier without him, without the mere fact of his silent presence.

  There is no question, now, of not going back to see the man who supplies my callabogus. To hear him, I should say. I cannot even drink myself to sleep what with wondering how much he knows and what he plans to do with the information.

  I know your story. What do I mean to you? Everything. The more often I recall him speaking those words, the more convinced I am that he wants something more from me than money. Perhaps this is exactly what he wants, for me to brood like this, to wonder and speculate. I am worried that, even if I do not go back to speak with him, I will hear from him. Or my father will.

  He might turn up at my father’s surgery or house some night. And how easy it would be for him to bluff my father into thinking he has proof of everything. My children. My father would panic, lose his temper, make threats, offer the man bribes in exchange for his silence, not realizing, until it was too late, that blackmail never ends.

  I wonder if there is a way that I might find out the identity of the man behind the curtain without arousing curiosity, or without word of my own curiosity getting back to him. There are few private phones in the city and none at all on Patrick Street, and no directories for party-line users who have to place their calls through the operator. There is no home postal service. People trudge out instead each day to “the mail depot.”

  I thought of asking Herder if he knew anything of the occupants of 43 Patrick Street, but decided against it, for I was unable to come up with any plausible pretence for such a query. A suspicious Herder would likely have the place “investigated” in some manner, and there is no telling what else this might lead to. The fewer people who are involved in this matter the better.

  There is nothing to do but submit to being his only customer.

  “Have you thought about adjusting your recipe?” I said. “If you used three parts rat poison instead of two, there’d be nothing wrong with your callabogus that a pinch of hemlock and a few drops of hydrochloric acid wouldn’t fix.”

  “Most people would not speak like that to their provider, Miss Fielding.” He had not referred to himself as that before. My Provider. “I will miss speaking to you when these conversations end. How much you may never know. Your reputation is well deserved, Miss Fielding. Part of it, at least. Tell me. Do you think that parents should provide for their children?”

  Again the pounding of my heart.

  “It is a belief more widely held than practised.”

  “More widely held than practised. Yes. Well put. Like most beliefs. Take your own case, for example. Abandoned by your mother. Raised by Dr. Fielding, who did the best he could, I’m sure.”

  “And you,” I said. “What about you?”

  “You have a boy and a girl, Miss Fielding. Twins. A boy who will never give his mother sleepless nights. At least not by going to the seal hunt. An abandoned girl who may never know how it feels to be abandoned.”

  “I told you, I have no idea what you mean by all this talk of children—”

 
; “I could tell you their names, Miss Fielding.”

  “No. Please. Don’t say their names—”

  “Shhhh—I won’t. I promise. But I want you to know that they are healthy and happy.” As tender as if he were speaking of his own children. “You say their names to yourself as often as I say your name. At night when sleep cannot be coaxed into the room.”

  Healthy and happy. I barely managed to suppress a sob.

  “What do you want?”

  “Let us talk of parents. You who are the children’s mother. And the young man who is their father.”

  I wondered if my father had let something slip to someone, denounced Smallwood to some supposed friend who had goaded him onto the subject of his obsession.

  “I know about the young man, Miss Fielding. I know the circumstances of your association with him. A delicate subject for both of us. I would rather we were speaking of more pleasant things.”

  “I would rather we were not speaking at all.”

  “Yet you keep coming back.”

  “I come here for callabogus, not gossip.”

  “Not gossip. The gospel truth.”

  “You give away the gossip and charge me for the booze.”

  “Always ready with an answer. Even when you’re terrified. As you must be. What a wonderful young woman—”

  “I might have been?”

  “You are. And how much more so you might yet be. I know about the young man. Young Mr. Prowse.”

  It was all I could do not to run. His source was not my father.

  “Young Mr. Prowse. What a blow it would be to his family’s reputation. Not to mention his own. The grandson of the great historian. His career ruined just as it was getting started.”

  “I couldn’t care less about young Mr. Prowse’s career—”

  “Nor could I. But what about your children?”

  “What do you want? Night after night I come here—”