The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  At some point I fell asleep and woke to, perhaps was woken by, silence as startling as a clap of thunder. The wind had dropped, but I could not hear Smallwood.

  I scrambled out of bed and to his room. He was, I saw instantly, sleeping deeply, the blankets wrapped round him, his chest rising and falling.

  He was recognizably himself. In his face, even though his eyes were closed, there was that look of optimism that is as unwarranted as it is unassailable, that look because of which he is taken by so many for a fool, but a likeable one, because people find hilarious the degree to which his expectations exceed his prospects.

  I bent over him and kissed him on the forehead.

  The silence that woke me did not last long. It was merely the wind changing the way it did the night the sealers died.

  I backed out of Smallwood’s room.

  Smallwood is gone.

  He saw me from his bedroom and thought he was hallucinating. Even after I satisfied him that he wasn’t, he went on looking at me with astonishment. I explained what I was doing there and told him I knew of his walk across the island.

  He presumed that I had rescued him and I let him think I had. He did not thank me, looked more resentful than grateful because I had put him in debt to me. As if he would rather have died than owe me his life. When I spurned his offer to make me a member of his union, he shook his head.

  “Even the women who make the tar have joined,” he said. The “tar ladies,” they are called. Brigades of women who, for next to nothing, brew the tar with which the men paint the ties to keep them from rotting, dipping their long-handled brushes into the cauldronlike tar cars from which blue smoke rises in a plume that can be seen and smelled for miles.

  I didn’t tell him that, occasionally, I was conscripted into one of these brigades and became reluctantly a tar lady.

  We traded insults in the same petulant manner as on our last encounter in New York. I layered mine in irony so thick that he was mystified, which further incited him.

  I fed him rabbit and potatoes, which he ate somehow both ravenously and begrudgingly, his expression saying that the least I could do was feed him.

  Momentarily losing my temper, I told him that I had been in the shack when he first knocked.

  I saw him glance at my orthopaedic boot from time to time.

  “I’d rather wear this than those,” I said, pointing at his ragged shoes, the soles of which were hanging from the insteps by lengths of string. “I wear this because my right leg won’t stop growing. They say the heel will have to be three feet high by the time I’m forty. My father says he will stop short of nothing to make me taller. ‘I will go to any lengths to make you grow to any length.’ How lucky you are with two legs the same length. The same as one of mine, I mean.

  “My father, when I told him how much I liked the San, would not hear of me relinquishing my hard-won independence.

  “‘We can’t have you readmitted to the San,’ he said. ‘I made inquiries, and the doctors mumbled something about a raving villain vivisecting a conniver. Or perhaps it was the gravely ill and reinfecting a survivor. At any rate, if it’s a shack on the Bonavista you want, then it’s a shack on the Bonavista you shall have. I don’t care if it leaves me penniless.’ Or maybe he said ‘with a penny less.’ I’m not sure.

  “And about my choosing the Bonavista he either said he would ‘miss the cut and thrust of our debates,’ or ‘amidst cut-throats and reprobates.’ But at any rate, he pulled some strings and here I am.”

  He sniffed.

  “You are not half the man you were when you were half the size you should have been,” I said.

  He must have seen by my face that I was summing up his prospects. He looked at my leg, my boot as though to say, Who are you to take a dim view of someone else’s future?

  “Fielding,” he had called me. Not since I had moved into the section shack had anyone called me that. On the Bonavista I was “Miss” to everyone.

  “Fielding” brought back to me, as not even the presence in the shack of Smallwood himself had done, my inevitable return to St. John’s, the resumption of my life.

  “Still drinking,” he said, again looking at my boot as if to say how typical of me that I had failed to learn my lesson, how typical that I was still drinking in spite of the harm it had done me, perversely persisting in a vice that had left me lame.

  I felt, as he looked at me, that I was a fate that he had narrowly escaped, that he could not credit his former fondness for me, that it mystified him how he could ever have mistaken me for anything other than what I so obviously was. Perhaps, I thought, this is how my Provider felt when he found that note from my mother on his pillow.

  “Booze is not the moral of this boot,” I said.

  “What do you plan to do, Fielding?” he said, sounding like he had often posed the question to himself and was stymied.

  “I plan to unionize the men of the world as soon as I find some and find out what it is they do.”

  “You have no plans.” Again, a glance at my boot. The consequences of a life without a plan. “You are like my father, Fielding.”

  “From the mouth of most men, that would be a compliment.”

  “You should be like your father.”

  “Lord Byron had a limp, you know, and so did Keats. The Romantics and their antics. Our patron poets. Keats died of tuberculosis, Byron of pneumonia. Byron swam the Hellespont, just to prove that he could. But Leander did it every night to visit the woman he loved, whose name was Hero. Another figure from Greek myth, Leander’s rival, tried to swim to Hero, but he lost his way and drowned. His name was Meander.”

  “Is this how you spend your time, Fielding? Daydreaming about Romantic poets? Reading old-fashioned poetry?”

  “Not so old-fashioned. Byron called himself a ‘degenerate modern wretch.’ We could use a few more of those. At least I could.”

  “Fielding, you will lose your mind out here.”

  “Poets are more likely to go mad than those who read them.”

  “You wear Smallwood’s boots,” he said. “Boots made in my uncle’s factory.”

  “No,” I said. “I wear Wellingtons. Made in England.”

  “I saw the name Smallwood on your boots,” he said. “Both of them. On either side of my head. Big boots.”

  “You were delirious,” I said and pointed to my Wellingtons beside the stove. “Those are my boots.”

  “The boots I saw didn’t look like those.”

  “So you must have been delirious.”

  He shrugged doubtfully.

  I silently vowed that, when I was next in St. John’s, I would go to Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes and inquire about a man who had purchased oversized boots or had had them custom-made. Even if they had not been made or ordered recently, surely the cobblers would remember, or have a record of, whomever had bought such boots.

  “You were so delirious you were singing,” I said.

  “But there you go,” he said. “I remember singing. I sang ‘The Ode to Newfoundland.’ I thought it would keep me awake.”

  “Your singing would wake the dead.”

  “How did you find me? I wandered away from the track.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I looked up and saw a gas mask—”

  “That part you did see. We wear them in snowstorms so we can breathe.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I lost it just as I found the shack. I’ll find it when the snow melts.”

  “Where did you go after Hotel Newfoundland?”

  “Where I was most likely to catch tuberculosis. I lied when I said that I’ve never had a plan. Catching TB has been my plan since I was nine. Who knew that it would take so long? That I would have to get myself expelled from Bishop Spencer, drink too much for years on end, spend on booze money that I should have used for food, move to New York, get myself evicted from Hotel Newfoundland, then live on the Lower East Side until finally my fondest wish came true.”

&nbs
p; “Why do you never say what you mean straight out?” He looked at my boot again. “Does it hurt?”

  “It pains when it pours. Or snows. Or blows. When the wind is on the rise, I can barely move. The Bonavista. The perfect place for someone who can feel in her bones when a gust of wind is coming.”

  “Your father must have something that could dull the pain.”

  “Yes, he does have something.” I shook my flask. “We call it my supply.”

  “You shouldn’t say such things about your father. He could lose his licence.”

  “Quite right. A man who lost his wife and daughter could easily misplace something the size of his licence.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are. Or were. How does he sleep knowing that his daughter, his only child, is living in a section shack on the Bonavista?”

  “Better than he would if she was sleeping down the hall.”

  “You’ve had a falling-out?”

  “You might say so. In fact, you did so say.”

  “Over what?”

  “Primarily over The Origin of Species. Secondarily over The Origin of Me.”

  “More riddles.”

  “He thinks he’s not my father. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking.”

  “Why does he think that?”

  “There is the matter of family resemblance. We look nothing like each other. The matter of my height, really. And now this.” I tapped my boot with my cane. “He finds it hard to believe that any child of his could get that disease. Or drink like me.”

  “A lot of people look nothing like their parents.”

  “He thinks I should respect his suspicions.”

  “He suspects your mother, not you.”

  “He suspects my mother and some as-yet-unlocated-or-identified-by-him man tall enough to be my father. He is obsessed with height. Mine. His. Hers. She’s shorter than him, so you see his dilemma.”

  “I doubt—”

  “That he has real doubts? Don’t. He has them. They have him. Who knows? He may be right.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “I could speak of stranger things.”

  “You suspect your own mother?”

  “This is not your mother we’re talking about. I’m sure that all thirteen of her children are her husband’s. This is my mother. Who left us both when I was six. And while we’re on the subject of parental disrespect, why don’t we go back to your father?”

  “You should go back to yours. Go back to St. John’s and live in his house. Live a respectable life. There’s nothing stopping you from that.”

  “Respectability. The most that I can hope for. To be a respectable spinster. Make the best of things, Fielding. Take care of your father as if you were his wife or he your child. Limp respectably about St. John’s, making amends for my misspent youth by running errands, atoning for my height and wit. And width. And weight. And when my father dies, live like a respectable recluse who peeks out through the curtains once a day. Or devote myself to charities, the league of this and that, The League for Cripples Who Wobble When They Tipple.”

  “You are ill, but mainly you are drunk.”

  I stood up and cleared the table with a swipe of my cane. Cups, plates, cutlery clattered to the floor.

  LOREBURN

  For the first time since I came here the wind is on the rise. Not even a gale. Not yet. But a gust just then against the window made me jump. Out here there is no one’s life to save except my own.

  Fog so wet and cold it feels like snow on my forehead. Even the barking of the dogs is muffled by the fog. There could be a fleet of ships in Loreburn Bay and I wouldn’t know it.

  I can barely hear the foghorn at Quinton, blaring out its warning like a rogue siren, “keep away, keep away.” How abruptly the sound stops. No echo. Insufficient as an aid to navigation. By the time fogbound mariners determine its location, it will be too late. A mere token it might be, of no real use. The reassurance of a man-made sound in all that silent and fog-obscured expanse of water.

  Reassuring to me. I feel as though I should answer it somehow, have my own foghorn. Or discharge the shotgun. How far, in such fog, would that sound carry? A hundred thousand gulls startled into flight, a host of unseen birds.

  I go out walking without the gun when I plan to travel any distance. It is too difficult to carry the gun and my cane.

  My heart hammers when I hear the dogs. And when I see them I do what Patrick told me and keep still.

  They have come close sometimes. One or two of them have broken from the pack to saunter within twenty yards of me. They look at me, appraisingly it seems, though perhaps merely out of curiosity. Stare at me for minutes, waiting to see if I’ll run, towards them, away from them, waiting for me to declare myself. I do not look away. I stare back and in my mind say, I will not harm you unless you force me to.

  There is a horse, a mare, missing from the herd. The white sway-backed mare. The oldest, I think.

  I was walking up the hill among the houses, following the path from side to side, criss-crossing from memory because the fog was in so close I could see nothing but the ground in front of me, when the herd surprised me as they did before.

  Though I was not so startled this time, they bolted in even greater panic than they did the first time. I stopped and allowed them to go around me. They seemed different than they have lately, even aside from their panic.

  Once intent on something that excluded me so completely I was not sure they noticed me at all except as they would a tree that was in their way, they looked at me as though I was the first of my species they had ever seen. I noted them as they passed, the two grey stallions, the shaggy-haired mare, the one whose body is brown but whose head is black.

  I counted ten and waited for the last to come galloping from the fog, but she never did.

  I’ve seen them twice since and both times the sway-backed mare was missing. My first thought was that she might have been brought down by the dogs, but I have seen the horses ignore the pack as it went yelping past them, the dogs likewise seeming to ignore the horses.

  I hate to think she might be sick or lame somewhere, untended to, abandoned by the others whose state of agitation may be owing to her absence.

  How many horses have perished on Loreburn since the place was abandoned? Dozens? A hundred? Their remains unburied in the woods, in places avoided by the horses who live here now.

  The dogs, likewise, though the thought of coming suddenly upon the bones of a horse is more disturbing.

  Perhaps the white mare was somehow separated from the others when they roamed farther afield than usual. Though I would have thought that even a horse her age could follow the scent of the others back to wherever it is they go at night, to wherever that path leads that every evening they follow into the forest.

  If not for my leg and the time of year, I would explore that path, but I dare not take the chance of being stranded overnight in the woods.

  Every morning now the brooks are frozen over, though the ice melts from them once the sun has cleared the trees. Some mornings there is snow on the ground that likewise melts by noon.

  But soon, as soon as tomorrow it might be, the ice and snow will stay. I have lost track of the date, though I believe that it is still November. If it is December, then winter is late.

  I wonder if I will ever be able to bring myself to read the notebooks that Sarah sent. David’s notebooks. I could burn them now, in the stove, and never know their contents. Not even Sarah knows their contents. She expects no response from me. Hopes for none. She merely complied with her brother’s last request. Her twin. With whom she had a falling-out and with whom she may not have been reconciled when word reached her of his death. My children forever estranged.

  I must not lose my nerve now. I know what will happen if I burn those books. I will go to Mr. and Mrs. Trunk and begin to drink again.

  To falter now would be such folly, having come this far.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE
BONAVISTA, THAT WAYSTATION BETWEEN THE SANITORIUM and the city.

  Two years after my Provider rescued me, I went back to St. John’s, taking to Riverhead Station the train that Smallwood shunned.

  I didn’t mind that there was no one there to meet me.

  After having been more or less in hiding for years, I decided I would live as I had done in New York, in some place where the landlord doubled as a bootlegger.

  The newspapers I had read while at the shack had often run stories about such iniquitous places, stories whose real purpose seemed to be to advertise to those who wanted it where moonshine could be found.

  I hailed a horse and cab, which I struggled into without help from the driver. There were motor cars waiting at the station, but I had never, not even in New York, ridden in a car. That horse-drawn vehicles would some day be obsolete, that there would not always be this mixed sort of traffic, this embroilment of horse and machine, did not occur to me.

  “Take me to the cheapest boarding house that you can find,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later, I alighted from the cab that had stopped in front of what did not seem to be a boarding house. I was on Cochrane Street, looking up at a place that bore a name befitting of the grandeur it no longer had: the Cochrane Street Hotel. I would learn that it was now referred to simply as The Cochrane, which, throughout the city, was a euphemism for a kind of flamboyant seediness. It was home to that faction of the locally infamous who managed to combine with indigence and destitution a redemptive flair for eccentricity of some kind.

  There were, among the many prostitutes who lived there, a woman who was so synonymous with prostitution that prostitutes in St. John’s were collectively referred to by her name, which was Patsy Mullins.

  There was a convicted forger, a Pole who had worked off part of his sentence painting frescoes on the ceiling of Government House, working for years, Michelangelo fashion, on his back on a piece of board atop a perilous scaffolding.

  There was a defrocked nun who had started her own one-woman order called the Sisters of Celestine Fecundo and spent most of her working hours “fundraising” at the corner of Duckworth and Prescott streets. Many others.