The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “I thought you’d gone away.”

  “Not yet. Maybe soon.”

  “What are you doing here, P.D.?”

  “They told me to meet you here with this. And this.” He reaches inside his ragged coat and withdraws a sealed white envelope that he extends to me. I stare at it, faintly hear the snow grains as they strike the paper.

  “Take it,” P.D. says. “It’s getting wet.” I take it from him, shake it free of snow and tuck it inside my coat.

  “What is it?”

  “A letter,” he says, shrugging, as if he has only the vaguest notion of what a letter is.

  “A letter from whom?”

  “They told me to give it to you. But it’s not from them because they can’t read or write. They never said who it was from. They just said, make sure she gets it.”

  “Your parents?”

  He nods.

  “Tell me everything you know about all this,” I say. “It’s very important to me. What about this callabogus?”

  He shrugs again. “Same thing. ‘Make sure she gets it.’”

  “They knew where I would be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have they had any visitors lately? Other than the usual ones maybe.”

  Another maddening shrug.

  “Think,” I almost shout. He steps back, more frightened, it seems, than is warranted by my one-word command. But it occurs to me that he must be often shouted at, and worse. That, in spite of how well I have treated him in the past, he may believe me to be capable of anything, capable of changing, turning on him, in an instant.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “But please, try to remember—”

  “No one ever comes to visit us,” he says.

  “How do they find their customers?” Another shrug.

  “What else did they tell you? Am I supposed to read the letter and give you my reply?”

  “They said give her the paper and the ’bogus. That’s all they said.”

  I look at the window, the curtain, tap the glass with my cane.

  “Do you know who lives here?” I say. He shakes his head. “Have you ever sold callabogus or any other kind of booze to the man who lives here?”

  “No. We don’t sell to anyone on Patrick Street. Someone else does.” He glances about as if this “someone else” might be watching.

  “I have been here every night for more than three weeks,” I say. “And I have never seen or heard another soul. Except some passing constables. And I have spoken with a man who sits at that window every night. He opens the window and we speak. But I have never seen him. Every night until tonight, I have heard his voice, which I am certain I have heard before. Somewhere, but I can’t think where. It seems that tonight the house is empty. And here, instead of him, are you whom I have had dealings with before. Which I suspect is no coincidence. Here are you, P.D., you with a letter and a case of callabogus. What am I to make of that?”

  “I am just a messenger, miss. No one tells me nothing.”

  “Perhaps if I could speak to your parents—”

  “Oh no, miss, please. They would kill me if you went to see them. Please, miss.” Suddenly he is on the verge of tears.

  “But I would make it crystal clear that it was my idea, P.D. That you did what you were told and were not to blame for anything. And I would offer them money in exchange for information.”

  Now he was crying. “Miss, please. Don’t get me into trouble. They’ll think I told you where they live. If you ask them questions, they’ll take it out on me, they will. They’ll kill me. I still don’t have enough to go away—”

  “Calm down, P.D. How much more money do you need—?”

  “A lot. But even if you had that much—look, you don’t understand. They’re not really my parents. I don’t want any trouble. You don’t know what they’re like. They’re not like you. He says he won’t just take my arm and break it like before. ‘If you misbehave again,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut you open like a fish.’”

  I shudder, almost begin to cry myself. I know nothing, really, of the kind of life he leads. The childhood he is hoping to escape from. I believe him, believe that I will, if I go to see them, be risking nothing less than his life.

  “All right, P.D., all right. I promise not to find out where they live. I won’t ask anyone any questions. I won’t say a word to anyone about you.”

  He wipes his eyes and nose with the back of his hand but looks at me as if he doubts that I will keep my word.

  “How much for this callabogus?” I say. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” he says, but does not look me in the eye. “They said to tell you that it’s paid for.”

  “Are you sure? You’re not just saying this—”

  “I’m sure. That’s what they said.”

  The voice he must use for all his other customers, the ones he fears almost as much as he fears them. If only I could take back what I said. Even if he does not panic, does not jeopardize his plan for freedom, I have lost his respect. His affection. I had no idea that losing it would mean so much to me.

  I look down at the case of callabogus. Enough to tide me over until I find another provider, he must have thought. Soon, my father will once again be my Provider. I look at the boy. They’re not really my parents. In other circumstances, I would ask him to explain. But not now. And not here on this cold and snowy street with morning in the offing.

  “Goodbye, P.D.,” I say. “Here, I’ll give you a penny like before.” He shakes his head. I decide against holding out my hand in case he might refuse it or somehow misunderstand the gesture. I suspect he hopes that he will never see me again. I believe that he will get his wish. This parting that I dread for reasons that I do not fully understand cannot come too soon for him. I have a feeling of momentousness that it saddens me to think he doesn’t share.

  “Goodbye, miss,” he says and, turning, runs swiftly away, as if to make it impossible for me to follow him. He runs down Patrick Street, unburdened by callabogus, heels high, arms pumping, turns right at the next intersection. Heading west. To the bridge, probably. And then uphill to the Brow.

  I lay my cane on top of the callabogus, pick up the box. The boy is less than half my size. How far he must have carried this for me.

  I must hurry home. I am the very definition of conspicuous. I go east, slowly ascending the hill, taking the slope slantwise, afraid that, if I fall, someone will hear the crash of breaking glass, see the liquid seeping from the sack, melting the snow around it, running down the hill, a reeking, incriminating mess. Snow covers my cane and the top and sides of the box so that, to someone watching, it would look as though I am clutching to my chest a block of ice.

  Will this winter never end? he said in early spring. No Newfoundlander would speculate in early spring about the end of winter. Yet I know I have heard his voice before.

  Above the Narrows, despite the heavy overcast and falling snow, the sky is faintly blue. In an hour, maybe less, my father will start stirring in his chair. I must hurry home and read the letter that I hope has not fallen from my coat. Lost. Or found by someone who can read. I press my body against the box and hear the crackle of paper.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  I am sorry that I was forced to miss our last appointment. I hope you will accept the callabogus as a token of my regret.

  Even now, as I write this, hours before you will appear outside my window, I fancy I can see you there, unmistakably Miss Fielding, waiting patiently, reposefully erect, as motionless as if you were under orders from me to remain that way.

  A semicircle of cigarette butts in the snow outside my window every morning, half-enclosing what might have been the footprints of a man. Evidence of your protracted vigil. A succession of vigils. Fresh evidence each morning. By noon ground into shreds beneath the boots of those whose faces I have come to know, by whose passage I can tell the time of day.

  Those to whom this street is home, those looking out their windows late at night, have s
een you standing there, have grown accustomed to the sight of you standing outside Number 43.

  An open secret in the neighbourhood. Like me. Subject of fruitless speculation. You whose name they know. Me whose real name they suspect is not the one I gave when I moved in. Who made it clear to them he wanted to be left alone.

  If you ask the people of Patrick Street about me, they will tell you this: a man from away rented that house. We don’t know who he is. We thought you might know why, but we were told not to ask you. And not to tell you anything about him, not that there is much to tell. We don’t want any trouble. What they might not tell you is that I bought their silence with money.

  Never really having seen me, they will be unable to tell you what I look like. Or looked like, I should say. A man can disguise everything except his height. They might tell you I am very old. And even that would be inaccurate.

  At first your voice was unmistakably a woman’s, though not like those of other women. You sounded imperiously bored. As if there was nothing I or anyone could say that you hadn’t heard before or could not easily predict. A jaded child.

  For that was what your voice became, that of a child.

  You will never be anything but a child to me, Miss Fielding. Though it may seem to you that you have not been one since the day your mother left. Or that your childhood ended when your motherhood began.

  As mine did when my fatherhood began. The child is father of the man.

  You changed. You became less able to disguise your fear. You have always been afraid, my child.

  Callabogus. Alky. Juneshine. Junibeer. Afraid that sleep will never come. Dreamless sleep. Surcease from memory. Afraid the words will never come. The moving finger stalls and, having stalled, must point the blame. What if you had to choose between the words and the bottles you bring home each night? Which one would come at a cost that you are not prepared to pay? An unfair question now. But one that you may ask yourself some day.

  Twice fathered. Once by me. I understand you better than I understand myself. Our great fear that from lack of sleep we would lose our minds. And all the things we meant to do would remain undone.

  Those “forgeries” of yours. You are a better writer at eighteen than those you fear will ever be. Could ever have been, under any circumstances. A better one by far than me. How proud you make me feel.

  I am proud of you, your talent, your courage.

  I should be warning you of the perils of everything you do. The road to perdition. Never too late to double back. Reformation. But I am not a hypocrite. I will never know how much better or worse I might have been. A coward’s epitaph, perhaps. But not a hypocrite’s.

  I knew your mother before she came to Newfoundland. We met in Boston when she and I were your age. I stayed in Boston when, a year after breaking off our engagement, she moved to St. John’s, where she was married some months later. Dr. and Mrs. Fielding.

  I was once very much in love with your mother, far more so than she ever was with me.

  If you tell your mother about our conversations and this letter, she will deny all knowledge of me. She will admit to nothing, and not just for the sake of your children. As will Dr. Fielding. Though, in his case, the profession of ignorance would be sincere. He has no idea who I am, though we have met.

  I have never lied to you and I never will.

  We will meet again. I am more certain of this than I am of anything else.

  As you read this, I am on a boat bound for the mainland.

  Some day, Miss Fielding, I will ask your forgiveness for three transgressions, two of which have yet to be committed.

  Your Provider

  LOREBURN

  I folded the letter that I received from P.D. that night on Patrick Street and had read many times since. On each occasion, my hands trembled, my heart hammered in my chest as though I had just read it for the first time. Your Provider. It will not be long until he finds me. Perhaps he already has. I dread it. Hope it. It may have been his voice I heard outside, though it seemed there was a woman’s voice as well.

  The letter. Sometimes lucid. Sometimes cryptic. Cryptic at the end. Why would he ask my forgiveness for things of which he was blameless? He seemed to have come to St. John’s for the sole purpose of meeting me.

  I just heard what sounded like a gunshot. A mile away, perhaps. Strange enough at any time on Loreburn but a gunshot at night?

  Could I, with the help of my lantern, make my way down to the beach and search for a dory? But my hand, at the thought, shakes so badly I have to put the lantern back on the table.

  Hard not to think of the front room, the contents of the trunks that could slow my racing heart and stop the shaking of my hands and perhaps even help me get to sleep. If only to do so would be wise.

  I have listened for an hour but heard no other sounds. I dare not leave the kitchen. I am again at the table, staring at my notebook in which I stopped writing mid-sentence. I pick up my pen, and as if it was this pose itself that conjured up the voices and the gunshot, strain to hear something, anything.

  Perhaps, on both occasions, I merely dozed off for a moment and dreamt the sounds I heard, the man calling out and the woman answering, their words unintelligible though there seemed to be some urgency or even panic in their tone.

  The gunshot.

  Tomorrow, at first light, I may find the courage to venture out and search for signs of visitors. And what, if I see a dory on the beach or a boat at the wharf or one anchored in the harbour, will I do?

  September 3, 1920

  I asked him, “What are we, Smallwood? You and I. What are we?” He pretended not to understand me. Looked like a child confronted with the evidence of misbehaviour. This after inviting me to go to New York, “with” him, I presumed he meant. Perhaps he did but lost his nerve. All he is willing to admit to himself is that he wants our association to continue. What an absurd-looking couple I and any man would make. Almost any man. There must be some as tall as me. What an absurd-looking couple he and any woman would make. The height of nonsense. The nonsense of height.

  What an association it has been. He believes the answer to everything is socialism. War. Poverty. Disease. Injustice. Corruption. Exploitation. Travesties like the deaths of the sealers. The slaughter of the Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. Unhappiness. He believes that, ruled by socialists, under socialism, people will be nicer to each other. I, of course, share none of his beliefs.

  Searching for that “answer” is like—well, I am searching for a different answer, though I have said nothing to Smallwood about my Provider.

  Yet I like spending time with him while he tries to change the world. I follow him about as if I am his mother, as if socialism is a toy and I must make sure he does not hurt himself while playing with it. Must feign interest in his fascinations and not allow my mind to wander. Must coo encouragement while disguising boredom, lest I make him jealous of whatever it is that preoccupies me. A mother, arms folded, trailing patiently after a boy who gravitates infallibly towards hazards that I must somehow teach him to avoid.

  Perhaps it is the discrepancy in our statures that makes me think this way.

  No amount of teasing can discourage him, but I defend him anyway. And, afterwards, tease him myself. This, though they tease him because of me. Just as in court. Here comes Joey with his mommy. Smallwood with his bodyguard. Fielding with her protégé.

  He stump-speaks. Stands on a chair that he carries with him from wharf to wharf, pier to pier. Beseeching stevedores and lumberjacks and fishermen to unionize.

  But we have no followers. “We are sowing the seeds of revolution,” Smallwood said a month ago. “If it takes a hundred years for them to sprout, then so be it.” But he is already impatient. He speaks of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.

  “Ten days,” he said.

  “Ten Millennia that Shook the World doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” I said.

  “What is the point of planting seeds if you never see what
grows from them?” he said yesterday.

  And so he says he must move on to New York. Where he swears that socialism is “flourishing.”

  “Not unless ‘flourishing’ is a synonym for ‘languishing,’” I said. Everyone but Smallwood seems to know that, in America, the party’s fortunes are falling fast.

  “Politics are cyclical,” he said.

  “Hammer and siclical,” I said, but he seemed not to notice.

  I told him to go to New York. Said I wasn’t sure what I would do. Then said I was certain I would stay here. He grinned. Said he was certain I would change my mind.

  New York. How can I go back there? How can I not go back there? But so soon. Though it seems like an eternity since I was there. For all I know, my mother and her husband have moved to some other city and I have no reason to fret about New York.

  Whatever else is uncertain, it is certain I will lose Smallwood if I stay behind. I don’t even know if I want him.

  There are times when I can imagine no future for myself. No goals, no purpose, no ambition. No fellow travellers. What do I risk? Already, a thrice-broken heart. My mother. Prowse. My children. What was it Miss Emilee once said in class? An allusion, it seemed, to some past and secret sorrow of her own. “Hearts, like rules and promises, are made to be broken.” More sententious than profound, except that when she spoke, she sounded so dreamily preoccupied, unmindful of her audience of uncomprehending girls.

  Not entirely uncomprehending. They mimicked her after class, finding hilarious the thought that Miss Emilee had been jilted, that she had once been in love and thought herself loved. That she had let slip this secret in front of all her girls. “Hearts, like rules and promises, are made to be broken.” The truism of a jilted spinster.

  Yet she has managed to resist bitterness. She persists in caring for others, whom she knows will forever be oblivious to her effect on their lives, she forever unappreciated. Yeats says, “Be secret and take defeat/from any brazen throat,/Be secret and exult,/Because of all things known/That is most difficult.” And Miss Emilee does it every day.