A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  Deacon liked it. Landish was in Gen of Eve. He was in Genevieve when she drew Gen of Eve. He was there but you couldn’t make him out. Like a ghost. You couldn’t tell by Gen of Eve. Her belly wasn’t big. You could tell she was keeping a secret but you couldn’t guess what it was. Deacon wouldn’t have guessed if Landish hadn’t told him. Landish told him the story of the wooden horse. No one knew the Greeks were in it. Landish looked at Gen of Eve for a long time. He shook his head. A smile came and went. He said it was the one and only image of his mother. His lips moved when he touched it with his hand, but Deacon couldn’t hear the words. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Landish would unroll the portrait on the table when the table was clean and uncluttered, and otherwise unroll it on the floor. He’d weigh it down at the corners with beach rocks, and hold the lantern while Deacon walked, and sometimes crawled, around the sketch, appraising it from every angle. In the lamp-and-lantern-lit attic, they stood over the image of his mother. It was an eerie light and an eerie manner in which to view the sketch of Gen of Eve and Landish. They might as well have been examining a just-discovered sketch of uncertain age and provenance that depicted a stranger.

  When it was on the table, he took Deacon in his arms, lowering his face towards the portrait when the boy asked him to go closer. “She was good at drawing,” Deacon said. As Landish looked at her, he wondered what she’d make of what his life had come to.

  “Genevieve drew Gen of Eve,” Deacon said. “Is that what your mother looked like?”

  “Just like that.”

  “She’s nice. She died. She’s in the Tomb of Time with my mother and father.”

  He couldn’t afford to put a frame around it and have it encased in glass. If he tacked it to the wall, the smoke from the lamps and lanterns and the fireplace would blacken it with soot and it would warp, curl up in the middle, on the sides. In no time, Gen of Eve would be unrecognizable. He wasn’t sure he’d have put it on the wall even if he could afford to have it framed. His mother hadn’t wanted anyone but him to see it.

  Their attic was in an old house.

  The house was built on a slope but stood alone, no prop house on either side. It was a rectangle tilted on its short side. It was narrow and shallow and pointlessly tall, the ceilings abnormally high for a house of that size except in the attic, where the ceiling was the height that you’d expect. Landish guessed that the house was more than three times as high as it was wide. It was portioned into three levels, all accessed by the original stairs so that you could not reach the second level without passing briefly through the first, nor the attic without passing through the first and second.

  The attic was the best level of the three, Landish said, because Deacon had plenty of headroom and they had no intruders. Landish said he would rather walk around bent over than have his neighbours tramping through his house. It was better than being sandwiched between or living under everyone.

  Deacon could fit his head through the porthole window, but Landish could only fit his arm. They had to take turns looking out because the window was so small. They could see the marsh and beyond it the harbour, the Narrows and the Brow. They were north of Barter’s Hill at the end of Dark Marsh Road.

  Luckily, the ceiling of the attic wasn’t high enough for Landish to carry Deacon on his shoulders. He refused to crawl, would not let Deacon ride him like a horse. He declared the hour before tub time to be toddle time. “A toddler is supposed to toddle,” he said, but Deacon wouldn’t walk just for the sake of walking, so he had him march about the attic with a stick resting on his shoulder like a gun.

  “What’s the biggest man you could carry on your shoulders?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old will I be when you can’t carry me anymore?”

  “How old will you be?”

  There was a curfew of ten o’clock so that the lower tenants could lock their doors. There was an old couple on the first floor who were called the Barnables.

  They rarely glimpsed the Barnables because of how hastily they fled the kitchen when they heard Landish and Deacon at the door or coming down the stairs. Landish and Deacon heard the scraping of the kitchen chairs and hurried footsteps. Sometimes they opened the door to see a small table set for two, steam rising from food and cups of tea, slices of half-eaten buttered bread, chairs askew. Other times, a meal in mid-preparation spat or bubbled on the stove, or the kitchen was unlit and empty, the first floor silent. Deacon wished the man and woman didn’t have to run and hide because of him. He thought of the old couple standing in some other room, waiting to hear the closing of the door upstairs, then coming out to resume their silent supper.

  There was a man named Hogan on the second floor. Landish knew that Hogan would have liked nothing more than to have a silent ceiling, but he saw in his eyes that he would never complain to a man the size of Landish, who, to top it all off, was a Druken, a member of a family that no one with a mote of sense would ever cross.

  Hogan had been suffering from an apparently symptom-free complaint since his youth, and got by on a combination of what he called “top-ups”—some kind of disability pittance, rent relief and food vouchers.

  There was a closet where they did their “business.” A bucket with a board on top, a round hole in the board and sawdust that you poured into the hole when you were finished. Each night Landish put the bucket on the path beside the road. The Night Soil wagon took the bucket and replaced it with another one. The business buckets.

  Landish dealt with Hogan’s buckets. Hogan left his business bucket on the stairs outside his kitchen every night. They would have been there forever if Landish hadn’t dealt with them.

  “You should mind your own business,” Landish told him. “I shouldn’t have to mind it for you. Never mind your ‘condition.’ What is your condition? No one’s ever seen any sign of it.”

  Hogan snitched on his neighbours to the landlord, the nuns who came to visit him, the man who came by with his food vouchers, the ’Stab, and other authorities whom he collectively referred to as the Clout. Landish sometimes felt sorry for Hogan and just as often was sickened by the sight of him.

  Hogan wore long underwear with pants but without a shirt, his white top always buttoned to the neck, a pair of suspenders hanging loose about his waist. He smiled at Deacon in a way that made Deacon smile back even though he didn’t want to.

  He was always in the kitchen when they came and went. They opened his door one day to see him racing to the stove lest they close the door at the bottom of the stairs and pass through his kitchen without his having seen them. Landish told him his socks would last longer if he simply put his bed beside the stove.

  Hogan muttered something under his breath about Mr. Nobleman, their landlord, whom Landish simply called “the nobleman.”

  “What was that?” Landish said, but Hogan turned away.

  The nobleman sometimes wrote letters warning Landish what would happen in the event of more complaints. The letters always enraged Landish. He said that one day, the nobleman would find out what came of slipping letters under doors in the middle of the night. He wrote letters to the nobleman that ended up in the stove with the nobleman’s once he had read them aloud:

  “Should you, as you say in your letter, have no recourse but to evict howsoever many tenants now occupy the premises known as the attic, I will have none but to evict howsoever many living daylights now occupy the premises known as the nobleman.”

  Later, Landish opened the attic door, went downstairs and hammered on Hogan’s door, shouting “kitchen snitch.”

  “Tell the nobleman you live below a den of thieves,” he shouted. “Tell the Clout I taught Deacon how to pick the smallest pocket. Tell the nuns they’d better keep us both in front of them when they come to visit, unless they want to see their rosaries in the window of a pawnshop.”

  “Landish, come upstairs,” Deacon whispered. “If Hogan tells the nobleman, we might be sacked.” Landish did as Deac
on said but clomped on the steps as loudly as he could.

  He bundled up the boy and took him down to the harbour to see the Gilbert once when his father was in Harbour Grace.

  “If you add up the weeks, I spent almost three years on that ship,” he said. He and his father had not spoken since Landish had left Princeton in 1891. He had seen his father since his disownment but only from a distance and by chance.

  Landish said that among the men for whose deaths Captain Druken was blamed was Deacon’s father, Carson of the Gilbert. Deacon, his nose running from the cold, stared at Landish. “It might not have been your father’s fault,” Deacon said, but Landish said it was.

  Landish told the boy everything he knew about the Carsons.

  “You were born three months after your father was lost at the seal hunt. Your mother died less than a year later. She held out hope for months that he’d be found alive. ‘He is still out there,’ she wrote to me, ‘and he may yet come home.’ ” But he came home only in her dreams. Cruelly joyous dreams which she struggled not to wake from, in which he simply showed up at her door as if no time had passed since she had last seen him.

  “She’s in my Murk.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But mostly in the Tomb of Time.”

  Landish said that Deacon was a “gauntlet,” a smaller version of a “gaunt,” which was a gaunt-looking grown-up. He said that he was a “brawnt” and so was Deacon’s father. He said Deacon’s mother had been a “plumpling.”

  “So there’s no accounting for you,” Landish said. “I hope you won’t be a gauntlet much longer, but you’ll never be a brawnt. ‘Ungaunted’ might be all that we can hope for.”

  A wing of a Cornish hen should have done Deacon for a week, though Landish had yet to encounter the amount of food that would do him for a day. The boy was always flushed from hunger. His body didn’t so much digest food as destroy it in the blast furnace of his belly.

  Landish told the boy that even though Deacon Carson Druken had three names, he had the appetite of a boy with many more, so he called him by twelve names: Deacon Carson Bacon Touton Onion Mutton Capon Chicken Lemon Melon Cinnamon Druken. But that didn’t work. So Landish took Deacon Carson Druken to a puniatrist, a doctor who specialized in “robusting” puny babies. But Deacon did not robust in spite of all the doctor did. The doctor told Landish not to worry because the boy would probably “spontaneously robust” when he was older. He said that cases of spontaneous robustion were not as rare as most people thought.

  “Deaconian measures are called for,” Landish said. He explained to Deacon that he was named after Deaco, who was the brother of Draco, the first legislator of ancient Greece who imposed, and wrote down for the first time, the laws of Athens. Punishment for the smallest crimes was severe, he said, usually death. But under the less stringent, less exacting Deaconian system, Deaco granted an instant pardon to anyone who misbehaved. Then he granted universal pardons in advance and therefore made it impossible to break the law. Not even Draco had been able to accomplish this.

  But Landish—though he joked about it with Deacon—knew that there was something wrong with the boy, not an illness per se but a seemingly innate weakness of body that nothing, so far, could rid him of, something at the very core of him that could not stand up against the world. Landish wondered if the grief that Deacon’s mother had endured during the last months of her pregnancy had so weakened her body that it also weakened her soon-to-be-born child. Perhaps the grief itself had somehow seeped into Deacon while he was in the womb, into his very bones where it still resided, an enervating agent for which no one could find the antidote.

  There was a library called the Athenaeum in which Landish had spent much time as a boy. Not long ago, it had been damaged in the fire that destroyed much of the city. It had been partially restored and Landish took the boy there some afternoons. They could not afford the small subscription fee but the librarian let in them in anyway, telling him she had fond memories of watching him with his face pressed to within inches of books that he could barely lift. Landish told Deacon her name was Library Ann—even though Ann was not her name. He said that she worked for the rights of the poor and encouraged the poor to vote. The poor, he told him, were known as the Scruff. The Clout were on the top and the Scruff were on the bottom. He said Library Ann was a scruffragette.

  Library Ann said almost no one went there anymore because it smelled too smoky from when they had the fire and people were afraid it would collapse. But it didn’t smell as smoky as the attic and it wasn’t as dark. Library Ann told Deacon that Landish had spent a lot of his life there before he went to Princeton, and he was the most unlikely looking bookworm she had ever seen. His voice echoed even when he whispered. But he had been her best customer. Now he and Deacon were almost her only customers and she was very afraid her beloved Athenaeum’s days were numbered because it wasn’t safe. She said they would have nowhere to store the books, so when the time came they could have their pick.

  They went in the afternoons and sat side by side at a long, bare table. Using books that were smudged with soot and had little holes burned into them, Landish taught Deacon how to read. They skipped printing and went straight to writing words. They did arithmetic. In the winter months it was warmer than the attic. Sometimes he sat beside Landish and slept, curled or slumped in his chair, while Landish read—though he was restless even as he read, surrounded by shelves of unburned books written by writers who, often against odds greater than the ones he faced, had succeeded. “The Athenaeum’s books burned by accident,” Landish told Library Ann. “I burn my book on purpose.”

  But one afternoon the doors were locked, a notice, pinned to the wall, stating that the condemned building was about to be torn down. They banged and heard a key turning in the lock. Library Ann peered around the door at them. Her eyes were red and she dabbed them with a handkerchief as she pulled Landish and Deacon hastily inside. She told Landish they could take as many books as they could cram into the wooden wheelbarrow she had put beside the steps.

  Landish pushed the barrow up the hill. I look like a book peddler, he said. They stood the books on the floor along the wall. They had to lie on their bellies to see the names. In a library, he told Deacon, the shelves of books are called the “stacks.” And we have a Smokestack. You’ll have the Attic School from now on.

  A priest who gave Communion to shut-ins came by with the nuns who were nurses too on Sunday afternoons to visit Hogan. Sometimes, Landish and Deacon were passing through Hogan’s kitchen when they arrived. The priest wore his vestments, the hems of which the two nuns carried as they trailed behind him. The holy vessel that contained the Host was covered in white cloth whose purpose Deacon fancied was to keep something warm until Hogan ate it. Deacon said he could tell that the priest was pretty high up in the Clout.

  “That boy was baptized in the Catholic Church,” the older of the two nuns said one time. “There is the matter of his religious instruction and his preparation for the sacraments.”

  “The Drukens are Anglicans, Father,” Landish said, “as I believe you know.”

  “Mr. Druken may raise the boy as he sees fit,” Landish was very surprised to hear the priest say.

  “Yes, Father,” the older nun said.

  Landish and Deacon had left, Landish gently guiding Deacon by the back of his head with his hand.

  Captain Druken had made it known throughout St. John’s that he had stipulated in his will that his estate, when he died, would be divided equally between the Churches of the city, doled out to them in annual stipends. Landish assumed that the priest was concerned that the stipends of the Catholic Church might be withheld if he took an interest in Deacon’s upbringing.

  But the nuns began to come upstairs to check on the boy, who, they said, was dressed no better than the boys who all but lived outdoors. When Landish told them that Deacon’s face was bruised from the latest surprise hug he had staged on his leg, the older nun said it would be a sha
me if the boy’s face had got that way from the very hand that held his own.

  The nuns asked Landish a lot of questions when Deacon was in the other room, and Deacon a lot of questions when Landish was in the other room.

  When Landish spoke with the nuns who were nurses too, he was always sober and unLandishly polite, so time after time they went away, but each time seeming more reluctant than before. Landish feared that one day the nuns who were nurses too would tell him they had come to take the boy. He wasn’t sure what he should do.

  He tried again to find a job, but scarce to the point of non-existence were employers who were unaware of both the Sartorial Charter and his reputation, the latter best summed up by one of the bishops who said he would rather choose his teachers from among God-fearing grade-school dropouts than from among men who, though they had gone to Princeton, lived like Landish.

  Though Landish grew used to having Deacon on his shoulders, he tried everything he could to convince the boy to walk more often, short of punishing him or threatening to punish him or even getting angry with him, none of which he could bear to do. He had nothing he could bribe him with.

  “It’s better up high,” Deacon said. When he was tired, he would rest his head sideways on Landish’s, entwine his arms up to the elbows in his hair, and go to sleep.

  They walked for hours because there was not much else to do.

  They wandered one night into the better neighbourhoods where there was electric lighting.

  “Their lights go out every time there’s a storm of wind,” Landish said. “Then they have to use what we use in the attic.”

  Deacon nodded.

  “My father’s house has electric lights,” Landish said. “We got electricity long before I went to Princeton.”

  “You don’t have it now.”

  “No.”

  “But you wish you did.”

  “Not really.”

  “Are electric lights nicer?”

  “You don’t have to keep them lit like you do with oil and coal and wood and candlesticks. Less work. Cleaner. They don’t have any smell.”