The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  It is common knowledge that I am “fresh from the San,” though no one could be “fresh” from that place. I am largely left alone, but a few of the older men who have probably known survivors of tuberculosis come by with winter vegetables from the little “farms” they cultivate behind their shacks. And with rabbits and trout. The staple foods. There are so many ponds and lakes that more of the Bonavista is below water than above it. The waters are teeming with trout that I catch using a stick of bamboo, some nylon line, a single hook and earthworms that lie stranded on the grass after it rains.

  “Why do you want to live in such a Godforsaken place?” my father said. To him, all places but St. John’s are Godforsaken. He didn’t wait for an answer, perhaps fearing he would inadvertently make me reconsider. His relief was transparent. She does not wish to move back in with me. Or even to live in St. John’s. Or to write for a newspaper.

  During my stay in the San, he had grown used to my absence. Grown accustomed to the most that he could hope for by way of peace of mind.

  Who knows how long my sojourn here will last? No one but Herder asked me. He wanted me to resume writing for him and was as perplexed as my father when I told him I meant to live on the Bonavista for a while.

  Perhaps Smallwood wonders where I am. Though I hope not. “Whatever became of Fielding?” is not how I wish to be remembered. Perhaps Miss Emilee thinks of me. To persist in someone’s memory. To be remembered. Not memorialized. Commemorated. She was not unloved who is remembered.

  The unqualified love of a single soul. I do not have it. I never have. Though in that letter that he sent me in the San, he wrote that he hoped I had found strength in the knowledge that I was not forgotten. An indirect way of saying that he loved me? The first letter, on the ship. All who are loved have no reason to despair.

  Whom do I love as I long to be loved? My children, whom I do not know.

  Must I withhold love from my father because he is not capable of love? There is no argument, no case that can be made for love. One loves or one does not.

  It seems I have always known that it was here. For the Bonavista, no word will suffice, not even one from a long-forgotten language. From before the obsolescence of silence.

  Cold and calm in late September. And all one sees of water is what it reflects—the sky, the shore—and all of it is fading now. Between sunset and moonrise, there is nothing but the inside of this shack, lamplit; lamps in the windows double and disperse the light.

  I hear the night train, a blast of its whistle for every shack, each approaching blast louder than the one before. The locomotive, whistle blaring, shakes my shack as it goes by. The cars behind it shake it less, a rattling succession of anticlimaxes until the whistle sounds again, and again, as though the train is hurtling down some never-ending hill.

  Bedtime on the Bonavista, and I know that, if I dimmed my lamp, I would see the others dimming too, as though withering in the train-borne breeze.

  All lights out might be the message of the whistle, the sole purpose of the train to mark the end of day, a roaring reveille, the silence in the wake of which seems so heavy it makes me drowsy for a while.

  But only for a while. I never fail to fall for it, the promise of sleep, for the notion that my body and my mind know what is good for them, sleep unabetted, uninduced, sourceless, irresistible.

  Each evening, my ears still ringing from the last blare of the whistle, I lie down, fully clothed, on my bed, hoping to fool my body. I am merely lying down to think. See—would I leave my boots on if my purpose was to sleep? No. Think, close my eyes the better to reflect and concentrate, is all I mean to do.

  And always I step back in fright from the brink of sleep. My whole body gives a jolt as it braces for the impact. Something within has saved me yet again from a non-existent peril.

  My hands folded on my stomach, my boots beyond the end of my too-short bed, I open my eyes and stare at the planks on the ceiling. I lie there long after I am certain that sleep of the kind I crave will never come. Until I feel, as I no longer do when I am standing, the difference in the weight of my two boots. One buttoned boot, and my new boot with its thick and clunking orthopaedic heel.

  My new boot. For my new, ancient-looking leg. The heel held in place with a metal strap and extra nails. The doctor told me to be careful with it. I would many times knock it against things, he said. Or I would rely too much on my right leg and there would be even less strength in my left one than there could be. I would tire far more easily than I had before.

  A sturdy boot and a matching spare.

  Night after night, after the charade of bedding down, I struggle out of bed again. To read, to write and afterwards to drink. The Prohibition Law is still enforced, despite rumours that it is soon to be repealed. But booze of all kinds is easy to come by out here. There is a still in every clump of junipers.

  Wooden crates whose labels of “ginger beer” are meant to fool no one are weekly unloaded from the train. Juneshine. Callabogus. For those, like me, with more money and a greater thirst, rye and even Scotch. The latter I drink on Saturday nights. Rye and spruce beer otherwise. From the same chipped enamel mug I use for tea, though I sip from my flask when I’m outdoors.

  I sense from some of the men I “work” with that I am regarded as “lonely.”

  Work. I take away the brush they clear from the sides of the railbed, pile it on my trolley car, which I have only recently been deemed strong enough to operate alone, and pumping the handle, make my way to the nearest body of water, on the shore of which I burn the brush.

  It is a job that any child could do.

  The men paint the ties with long-handled brushes that they dip in boiling vats of tar. They shore up the ties with gravel, and the railway bed with soil brought in by the train for that purpose, there being no soil on the Bonavista that would not, in a matter of days, either blow away or settle so deeply that more would soon be needed.

  They replace rusty spikes, warped nails and rotting ties and leave it to me to clean up after them, wordlessly moving on from one task to the next.

  I have displaced no one from their job. The work I do was formerly done by some of the men’s wives for nothing and they are glad to be rid of it.

  I suspect the real source of my pittance of an income to be my father, though I sign a railway receipt every two weeks.

  When I see a man half my size slashing at a stand of alders with a machete, I feel like grabbing his arm and showing him, using nothing but my cane, how it should be done. My cane that, after all these years, I wield as expertly as if it were a sword.

  The men appraise me, stare at me as I lurch ungainly about, my lame leg moving forward as though in parody of something. I dress much like the men, as much as available clothing allows—coveralls large enough to fit me; beneath those, checkered shirts and once-white undershirts.

  I wear leather-palmed, khaki-coloured gloves, as they do. Also what they call a “sod,” a grey peaked cap that, no matter how tightly I tie my hair back, often blows off in a gale and is retrieved by one of the men because I cannot move fast enough to catch it.

  They appraise my face most closely of all, my face that not even the smudges of soot from the brush fires can disguise. The face of a young woman who, though she looks older than she is, is still attractive. I look at myself in the mirror in my shack. Let down my hair. My eyes are unchanged. My lips that in the San were cracked and scabbed are smooth again. But mine is also the face of a woman not only St. John’s-born but of the quality, not of the bay or the scruff like the sectionmen.

  Whatever you’re here for, their kind but intractable faces say, you’ll never belong, no matter what. You are, for reasons we cannot fathom, a visitor in our lives.

  Mabe they think it has something to do with my illness, which of course it does. What would they think or say if I told them of my children or my Provider? They think I’m out here because of my leg. Also true. And because of my history, my time at Bishop Spencer and my brief st
int as Fielding the Forger, some sketchy version of which they know.

  But none of these, nor all of them together, explain to their satisfaction what I am doing here or how long I plan to stay or might be capable of staying.

  I have deserted my place in favour of finding one among them, which I cannot, ever, do. They are waiting for me to come to this realization, to reconcile myself to it. Waiting patiently, for they know the outcome is certain.

  I stand daily as close to my bonfires as I can to warm myself, for it is the cold, the sheer length of time spent outdoors at this season of the year, that affects me most. My bones—all of them, not just those of my afflicted leg—have been made by my illness more susceptible to cold, porous, desiccate, something.

  There are times when I feel a kind of chill in my belly, a weight like the one that heralded my illness in New York, and I fret that my illness is returning, that this feeling portends a relapse, partial or complete. But so far it has always gone away.

  I stand close to the fire, on the leeward side of it, back on to it so that I can endure the smoke, and look out across the water that some days, depending on the size of the pond and the strength of the wind, is whitecapped, the waves all racing away from me towards the distant shore.

  The water, because the sky is uniformly overcast, is grey, even black. And all around the water the treeless boulder-littered bog of Bonavista. Blueberry bushes, their leaves a russet red, bobbing in the wind, the few remaining alder leaves crackling like bits of ancient parchment.

  The memory-stirring smell of fall; real particular memories, but other kinds as well, intimations of some life beyond recall or never-lived, once-hoped-for, now-forgotten things, an elusive imminence that in the end yields nothing, only tantalizes.

  We knock off work early enough to make it home by twilight, some heading up the tracks, some down, silent with hunger and fatigue.

  Only on those homeward marches as, one after another, the sectionmen reach their homes and bid the rest of us goodbye, do I feel some sense of camaraderie and a suspension of the awkwardness that otherwise is always there between us.

  “Good night, miss,” they say when we reach my shack, a staccato chorus in which there is no scorn or irony, only a kind of faint tenderness because, unlike them, I live alone, but, like them, have worked all day, am bone-weary and, they think, not far from sleep.

  Fall on the Bonavista. It seems portentous of anything but winter. Portentous of nothing. Wholly itself. As if out here it is always fall. Snow always on the way but never here. Remnants of a summer that no one can remember. A season that prevails, persists throughout the camouflage of winter and the fleeting dream of summer. Fall is real, indigenous, definitive, a prelude with no successor.

  Every house has a name, two words of which it shares with every other house. My house is Twelve Mile House. The numbers, passed down through generations, are spelled out like ancestral names above the doors of every shack, including mine.

  Twelve Mile House’s line of succession was interrupted when the family that once lived here moved away. Some man whose last name I do not know as good as abdicated, renounced the family profession, the legacy of generations, and no one has yet been found to take his place.

  The families always accompany the men. Children spend their entire childhoods here. Some men and women their entire lives. They have no choice, for the trains run throughout the year. This is not seasonal employment like working “on the boats.” All or nothing. All and nothing for the children for whom there are no schools and whose parents cannot read or write. No place to play but in the woods, away from the trains, away from the cinders and sparks that in summer their fathers have to stamp out with their boots. Away from the wheels. Childhoods, whole lives spent out here.

  The children, though some have seen a train go by ten thousand times, always stop to watch one do so yet again, to watch awestruck from a distance as the great machine that dictates the terms of their existence passes by. Such an anomalous spectacle making such an all-inclusive din cannot be ignored.

  No more than the anomalous spectacle of me can be ignored as I pump my two-man trolley down the tracks. I must be the most unusual thing that most of these track-children have ever seen.

  They throw things at me from the cover of the trackside alders and blasty spruce—apple cores, small trout, half-eaten sandwiches—while their mothers, standing in the doorways of the shacks, warn them to leave me be.

  It seems they like to regard me as some sort of witch, whom their parents are unable to defeat and whose troublesome presence they have no choice but to endure. My height, my limp, my buckled boot, my cane, my flask, my working side by side with men, all confirm me as a witch.

  I oblige by tracing what they think are spells in the air with my cane, letting the trolley coast, drawing circles and X’s and triangles, which causes them to duck and seek cover.

  These mock spells earn me disapproving looks of consternation from their mothers, who seem unsure of my intentions.

  Their names are David and Sarah. Their birthday is April 17,1927. They have had eleven birthdays. I have celebrated eleven times.

  Each April 17, for eleven years, including one here at the section shack, I have thrown a one-woman party. Twice in the San when I was barely able to move.

  How strange it was in New York, wondering what they might be doing, what their birthday wishes were. What sort of party they were having. What gifts my mother gave them. And what went through her mind as they unwrapped them.

  Do they each make a wish and blow the candles out together? Or is there a cake for each of them?

  Here in the shack I made a cake and gave anyone who visited a piece. Told them I was celebrating my birthday. By midnight, more than half of it was left so I threw it in the fire. Happy Birthday, David and Sarah.

  I look at my cane. The last birthday present my mother gave me. The only one I still have.

  What, on my birthday, does my mother do? May 22. There have been eleven of those since they were born. All it ever seems appropriate to do is wish them well. Best wishes to you both on this my special day. Here’s to you. One last drink. And may it be tomorrow when I wake.

  Every Sunday, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, the church caboose goes by. The sectioners line the tracks to receive the blessing of one of the clergy on board.

  Priests, ministers, pastors all stand side by side and, according to the denomination of each section shack, one of them makes, from the slow-coasting train, the sign of the cross.

  I always watch from my doorway as they pass Twelve Mile House. The first couple of times, one of them shouted, “What are you?” meaning what denomination, but my lack of reply discouraged him. Now the riders of the church caboose go past my house in silence, staring down at me with disapproval.

  The one good, lasting side effect of my illness is that I seem to have developed an immunity to hangovers. All I feel upon waking is hunger, though my weight remains the same or even decreases no matter how much I eat. “It’s a good sign, that appetite of yours,” one of the men who comes to visit and who can spot a drinker at a glance tells me.

  I climb the ladder on the side of my shack, pull a rocking chair tied to a length of rope up after me, and sometimes sit out rocking on the roof and drinking until early in the morning, nodding off in the chair and waking to the sound of chirping birds, the sky faintly blue, the Bonavista dimly visible for miles.

  My rocking chair, about which I walk from time to time, following the doctors’ orders not to remain seated for too long, my “ginger beer” bottles and my lamp, because of the glow from which I cannot see as far as the edges of the roof-—I must make quite a sight to anyone watching from the nearest section shack.

  I sometimes hear footsteps in the gravel between the rail ties, but though I say hello no one answers.

  My first thought, the first time I heard them, was that it was some man who, wondering if I wanted “company,” lacked the nerve to declare
himself. Or changed his mind. Or else was flummoxed by my being on the roof.

  But after the footsteps went by, receded into silence, they returned minutes later from the other direction, this time stopping right in front of my shack.

  “Who’s there?” I said. Whoever it was had no lantern, no light by which to navigate the tracks and keep from stumbling on the ties. There was no answer but neither did the footsteps continue. I felt certain I was being stared at by someone who knew that, because they were outside the circle of light from my lantern, I couldn’t see them. I grabbed the lantern and turned the flame down low, just short of extinguishing it. But my eyes, accustomed to the light, could make out nothing in the darkness.

  The footsteps, the sound of boots crunching on the crushed stone between the ties, resumed. Unhurriedly. Almost lazily, as if my unseen companion wished to make it clear that it was not because I challenged him that he was moving on.

  I remind myself it could be anyone.

  One sectionman visiting another. Men who know the tracks so well they do not need a light, men who do not wish to disturb others who are sleeping. Men buying or selling or drinking juneshine. Better to do it out here than in front of disapproving wives and impressionable children.

  But always, on the way back up the track, the footsteps stop when they draw even with my shack. Whoever it is sometimes stands there for minutes, staring, I am certain, at me, at my shack, my window. As if the shack was once his and I displaced him from it.

  Lately I have been turning off the lamp and waiting for him. I hear the footsteps at a different time each night. Anytime from just after dark to just before sunrise.

  No pattern. Most nights I do not hear them at all. Again, no pattern. Not every other night, or every third night. I might have to live in darkness for weeks to catch a glimpse of him.

  And lately, too, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been hearing things, so irresistible is the notion that my Provider followed me from New York, and from the San. That the footsteps I hear are those of his delegate, the same man, both brazen and elusive, who in New York was my protector.