The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  Still standing on the church floor, two steps below the altar, she cannot guess his height, but it seems inconceivable that it is less than seven feet.

  “You look ridiculous, Miss Fielding, with that shotgun in your hands. A woman in a church aiming a shotgun at an old man. I believe you think that all of Loreburn is yours and I am but an interloper who must be forced to leave.”

  “How did you get here? Is there a boat? Is someone waiting for you somewhere?”

  “A delegate, you mean? No. There has been but one. Now I am alone. Like you.”

  She lowers the barrel of the gun, the better to look him in the eye.

  He is off the altar and has one hand on the barrel of the gun before she can even think about the trigger.

  He is almost behind her when the gun discharges. It falls from her hands, but he keeps his one hand on the barrel, with the other grabs the stock, then breaks the gun in half across his knee as though it is the toy of some misbehaving child.

  He throws both halves aside, then clutches the hand that gripped the barrel, which, judging by his expression, must have burnt him badly though he did not cry out in pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You might have hurt yourself with it.”

  “Did you burn yourself?”

  “I haven’t touched a gun in more than twenty years. Not since the war.”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but think I might need it.”

  “Sit down,” he says, pointing at the steps that lead up to the altar.

  She all but falls onto the steps, and supporting herself on her hands, leans back to look up at him.

  “Are you all right?” he says. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

  “What in God’s name do you want?” she says, gasping out the words, remembering the ease with which he snapped the gun.

  He sits, then kneels in the front pew, hands clasped as he rests on his forearms.

  “I told you in a letter long ago,” he said. “My daemon is memory. It has always been.”

  “No point changing daemons in midstream.”

  “There it is at last. That famous sarcasm. Better you draw on your courage now than on your wit.”

  “You think you have courage.”

  “I have done courageous things. But also others of which I am ashamed. As you have. But you are still young. And I am old.”

  “I shouldn’t have insulted you. But can you blame me for being scared?”

  “I suppose not. Here I am, dressed as the priest I used to be—”

  “How is it that no one ever spoke of your visits to St. John’s? That no one ever remarked at the sudden appearance and disappearance of a stranger of your height? Why were there never rumours of the sort that my father would have seized upon?”

  “The answer, Miss Fielding, is so simple. I once told you that the one physical trait that could not be disguised was height. A statement that you left unchallenged.”

  “I still—”

  “Miss Fielding, each time I debarked from a vessel in St. John’s, I did so in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, a wheelchair pushed by my delegate, whom I pretended was my son.”

  A wheelchair.

  “I liked wearing my disguise. People said all kinds of things in front of me, spoke as if I wasn’t there. You’d think that old and crippled in a wheelchair I could hear no voice except my own.

  “On the ship that brought you back home from New York the first time, I passed you in the hallway in my wheelchair. You had read my letter by this time. You smiled at me. A very kind thing given your circumstances. ‘You have a lovely smile,’ I said. You thanked me and moved on.”

  “I knew that I had heard your voice somewhere.”

  “On the Bonavista we travelled by train from St. John’s in a private berth. Me in my wheelchair when we appeared in public. We rented a summer house where I stayed while my delegate, disguised as a hobo, rode the Bonavista back and forth for weeks. He often walked past your shack at night on his way from one depot to the next. On the day of the storm, when the trains stopped running and the nearest depot was closed, we drove by trolley down the Bonavista. We stopped beside your shack in which I told my delegate to wait when, after looking through the windows, he said that it was empty. I wanted him to be there in case you returned before I did. Had you done so he would have nailed his hat to the outside of the door. A signal to me to knock four times, then wait until he let me in. The point was to make sure that you were, shall we say, asleep, before I came inside. Chloroform. But it never came to that.”

  “Why was it so important to you that we never meet?”

  “I worried, Miss Fielding, though you may doubt it, that I might, by revealing everything to you or to others, destroy you and your children. When we first spoke you were so young but already so troubled. Already drinking to excess. And then there was Dr. Fielding. Imagine what he would have done if you or someone else made him aware of my existence. And imagine the effect that would have had on your children.”

  “I have no idea what you want. What you have ever wanted from me.”

  “I think you do.”

  “My mother’s account of your courtship differs somewhat from yours.”

  “Yes. I believe that she convinced herself that what she wrote to me and what she told David was true. I would not have thought that self-delusion so absolute was possible. But which one of us do you believe?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Did she leave me because you somehow forced her to?”

  “No. She could have chosen to stay. She chose to leave. She foresaw the consequences of both choices. She chose against loyalty and love. As she did with me. And our child.”

  “I have no way of knowing if that’s true.”

  “Have I ever lied to you, Miss Fielding?”

  “As I said, I have no way of knowing.”

  “Did your mother ever lie to you? Do you think she ever lied to Dr. Fielding?”

  “Two very different questions.”

  “Whose answers are the same. Let me make it simpler for you. Name one person to whom you are sure that your mother did not tell, shall we say, a significant lie. Her parents? Her fellow sisters at the convent? Her two husbands? Your children? You?”

  “Considering her circumstances—”

  “What you call her circumstances proceeded from a lie. A false pledge. A broken pact. Even before she met me, your mother’s life was a series of betrayals and abandonments. I think her parents, if they were still alive, would agree with me, don’t you? She renounced them for the convent. But kept her trust fund just in case. To swear an oath, to pledge oneself for all eternity to something or someone is all very well, but best hold something in reserve lest that oath or pledge should need to be revoked.”

  “She was young—”

  “I, too, was young, Miss Fielding. Do you really believe that, if not for me, your mother would have kept her convent vows? Remained a nun?”

  “My mother and my children are strangers to me.”

  “I did not take your mother by force from the convent. To that cottage on Cape Cod. In that cottage on Cape Cod. I have proof that I hoped it would not be necessary to show you, that my child, my first child, was not the issue of an evil act committed by its father. Proof that your mother lied about me to your son.”

  “The proof that you spoke of in your letter to David? Half of one page was torn out.”

  “By him. Not me. He did it for your sake. To spare you. I can assure you that he knew the truth. All of it. As you soon will.

  “When David found the correspondence between your mother and me and confronted his mother about it, she told him that I blackmailed her into leaving you with Dr. Fielding, threatened in a letter to take your life unless she abandoned you. More lies. I proved as much to him by sending him some of the letters that she wrote me.”

  “You still have not proven anything to me.”

  “I met with David once, wearing my disguise, and showed him this.”
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br />   He takes from the inside pocket of his jacket the sort of box in which a ring might be displayed, a small, black, velvet-covered box whose silver clasps and hinges gleam. He holds it up between his thumb and forefinger as a person with a smaller hand might do with the ring itself, the better to allow someone to admire it.

  “It once held an engagement ring,” he says. “I spent everything I had. She wore it for two weeks before the morning she crept from bed while I was sleeping. She left the ring on her pillow. Beneath the ring, held in place by it, she left a note. Which I put in this box after I threw the ring away.”

  “You showed this to David?”

  “I should not have. But—yes. I did.”

  He holds the box at arm’s length, offers it as though for her inspection.

  “Take it,” he says.

  She rises from the altar, takes the box from him, holds it between thumb and forefinger in mimicry of him. It looks so delicate, so fragile that, handled any other way, it might crumble into pieces.

  “Open it,” he says.

  She places it on the palm of her other, outstretched hand. It looks new, fresh from some display case, the velvet unblemished, unfaded, the metal without so much as a trace of rust.

  The opposing clasps slide almost silently apart. She feels as though she is opening a miniature casket or crypt, an impression that is heightened by the gleaming white upholstery inside. Tucked beneath the loop by which the ring is held in place is a tiny scroll of paper that, despite its age, looks well preserved.

  Placing the box on the nearest pew she removes and unscrolls the note. The paper crackles like parchment but does not break.

  Her mother’s handwriting. She recognizes it instantly.

  She reads the words aloud, unmindful of what their effect on him may be:

  Thomas: I have made a grave mistake. I must break off our engagement. As I am undeserving of it, I will not ask for your forgiveness. I do not love you and must return to my true home. Goodbye.

  “Her true home,” he says, his voice quavering. “Not the convent, which was but the first part of her grave mistake. Her true home. Her old life.”

  “She falsely accused you of raping her.”

  “Yes.”

  Fingers trembling, she rescrolls the note and replaces it in the box, which snaps loudly when she closes it.

  “Keep it,” he says. “I want you to have it.”

  She puts it in the pocket that contains her empty flask.

  “My mother—”

  “I travelled to St. John’s when I heard from my delegate that your mother was married. I arranged to meet your mother in the boarding house where I was staying. As always, my ‘disguise’ was a wheelchair. My story, our story, was that I was an aged, crippled relative of hers visiting from Boston who was not staying with her because it would have been too difficult for me to navigate the many stairways of her house. This was what she told Dr. Fielding who several times came with her to see me.

  “‘Why have you followed me here,’ she said when we were alone. ‘What do you want from me?’

  “‘Until recently I wasn’t sure,’ I said.

  “’And now?

  “‘Restitution. Of a sort. An eye for an eye. A child for a child.’

  “‘I will not have a child just so you can take it from me or destroy it.’

  “‘I did not say I meant to take it from you or destroy it. The latter is, for me at least, unthinkable. As is the former, though for different reasons. My plans are—not compatible with raising children.’

  “‘Then in what sense would my child be restitution?’”

  “‘I would, with your cooperation, follow its progress. You would write to me about it. Consult with me regarding certain matters. I would send you money stipulating how it should be spent. The child and I need never meet. It need never know of my existence. Dr. Fielding need never know.’

  “‘I would go mad living like that,’ your mother said. ‘Knowing that that man of yours was always watching, as I’m sure he would be. I would never stop wondering what you had in mind and when you would alter the terms of your agreement.’

  “‘I do not see what choice you have. Dr. Fielding—’”

  “‘Has yet to share my bed and now he never will.’

  “‘Another vow of chastity.’

  “‘That I will keep this time.’

  “‘Even though I could destroy you and your entire family.’

  “‘I will pay any price to protect my family except the one you’ve named,’ she said. ‘I would not subject a child to that.’

  “Oh what a blunder I had made, Miss Fielding. I realized too late that I had been a fool, that I should have waited, should not have made her aware of my presence in St. John’s, should not have approached her until she was expecting a child.

  “She smiled as if she could read my thoughts.

  “‘You speak,’ I said, ‘of what you would not subject a child to. YOU—’”

  “I stopped when I saw that she was still smiling.

  “I could neither conceal nor control my rage. I then did, Miss Fielding, what I did not do on Cape Cod. She did not resist, not in the least. She merely submitted. As if she had long ago resigned herself to the idea that one day this would be the form of my revenge. As if her false accusation had been a kind of prophecy. I apologized afterward, told her that it had never been my intention. Miss Fielding, I assure you that it happened only once.”

  She raises her cane high in the air but cannot bring herself to strike him with it, though she imagines what it would be like to bring that ornamental knob down on his skull.

  “In all those letters you wrote to me,” she says, “you made it sound as if you had come to see the folly of revenge. As though you were on the verge of making peace with your past.”

  “I have relapsed many times. I did not speak of my relapses in my letters because I wanted to impress you. Win your approval, even your affection. But I have lately come to wonder if I truly lapsed when I gave in to the urge to be magnanimous, to espouse a way of life that I was merely imitating.”

  “What did you do after you raped my mother?”

  “Though she discontinued her visits I did not leave St. John’s. I believe she thought that the score between us had been settled, but it did not seem so to me. I feared that she might try to leave the city but my delegate told me that she rarely left her house.

  “I was about to contact her to demand that she come to see me when she arrived of her own accord one afternoon while I was napping.

  “‘I am pregnant,’ she said the instant she closed the door behind her. ‘With what can only be your child.’

  “‘Dr. Fielding—’”

  “‘Knows that I am pregnant with someone else’s child. As much as he will ever know unless you tell him more.’

  “‘He will divorce you?’”

  “‘He is primarily concerned about his reputation, which a divorce, especially one so soon, would tarnish. If I were to subsequently have a child, it would make certain things clear to everyone. He would look like a cuckolded fool. His main fear is that I will leave him.’

  “‘Will you?’”

  “‘No.’

  “‘I don’t believe you. It would be a grave mistake to do with this child what you did—’”

  “‘I intend to have this child.’

  “So we waited, Miss Fielding. Until she began to show to the point that not even the largest, most loose-fitting clothes could conceal her pregnancy, we met twice a week, the four of us sometimes. Politely making conversation, Dr. Fielding doing most of the talking while I pretended to drowse, nodding off while my delegate, who introduced himself to Dr. Fielding as my son, sat there in silence. When there were just the two of us, we spoke very little. She not at all except to answer my questions. I asked her how she was feeling. Asked her if her doctor had detected any problems or complications.

  “I asked her if she remembered conversations we had had in my confessi
onal or in the cottage on Cape Cod. ‘Yes’ was all she ever said. Did she remember the plans we made, the way the seashore looked in winter? She nodded. She remembered everything but contributed no memories of her own. I recounted every detail of our courtship and elopement. Yes, she said every few minutes while I spoke. It got so that even when I didn’t ask if she remembered she said yes, nodding reflectively it seemed.

  “We sat there in that room, Miss Fielding, the two of us and you. I noticed how her body changed from week to week, month to month. Once I put my hand on her belly and felt you kick inside her womb.

  “‘Are you going to take this child from me?’ she said.

  “Countless times I told her no, but she was not convinced. She seemed almost resigned to losing it. You.

  “One day I told her: ‘You have let it live longer than you did our nameless child. It is now older than that one ever was.’ She said nothing.

  “I asked her which she was hoping for, a boy or a girl. She didn’t answer. Perhaps because I had not told her what I was hoping for and she was fearful of what I would say or do if her hope clashed with mine.

  “‘I’m hoping for a girl,’ I said.

  “‘What if it’s a boy?’ she said.

  “I shrugged.

  “‘I will have no more children after this one,’ she said.

  “‘Your husband—’”

  “‘Is what he seems to be. He will reconcile himself to anything I do or do not do.’

  “A week after the baby came, she took it—you—to see me. I poured a cup of water on your head and baptized you ‘Sheilagh.’ The name I chose for you.”

  She still holds the cane aloft, now with both hands, and again feels and resists the urge to strike him with it. She could kill him if she wanted to.

  “My God, I never knew my mother. And now it is too late.” She cannot speak further. She trembles so much she almost drops her cane, almost falls forward. Tears that quickly cool stream down her face, fall from her chin like drops of sweat. A shudder like the ones she felt while giving birth courses through her. Her chest heaves as she fights to catch her breath.