The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

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  The Custodian

  of Paradise

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  One

  A CLAUSE IN MY MOTHER’S WILL TERSELY STIPULATED: “I leave to Sheilagh Fielding, the only child of my first marriage, the sum of three thousand dollars.” It was because of her money that I was able to come to the island of Loreburn. I had gone for days to a place in St. John’s called the Registry, which was overseen by a small, middle-aged man known as the Vital Statistician. V.S. I told him I was doing research for a book, an explanation that he at first accepted.

  Each time I saw a zero in the population column in one of the census ledgers, I asked him how I might get more information about it. It turned out that there were islands listed as unoccupied that in fact were inhabited by some lighthouse keeper and his family. Why, in the opinion of the census takers, these people did not count, V.S. didn’t know. He said that perhaps, on these islands, the isolation was such that no lighthouse keeper could endure it long enough to be said to live there.

  I fretted over the reliability of V.S.’s information. It would mean the end of my venture if I wound up by mistake on some island that was occupied. After I had paid to get there from St. John’s and back, there would be almost no money left. And word of my curious behaviour would get round and I might be prevented from trying again.

  I told V.S. that by “deserted” I meant an island on which there had once been a settlement but whose population was now zero, not one that had never been settled. “I know the difference,” he said.

  An island on which it was at least hypothetically possible to live. There had to be one more-or-less intact house and a beach where one could land or moor a boat.

  What a nightmare it was trying to navigate that census. It seemed that people lurked like submerged rocks under all those zeros. How tired of the sight of V.S. I had become. And he of the sight of me. “I can’t be spending all my time on this obsession of yours,” he said at last.

  Many times I went to V.S. thinking I had found my island, only to have him declare it “seasonally occupied” or tell me that its population was “uncertain.” Uncertain. I never bothered asking for an explanation. Each time, I tried to hide my disappointment. “I see, yes,” I’d say, nodding as if my book had just moved one increment closer to completion.

  “There’s a war on, you know,” he said to me one day. Yes, I felt like saying, and what contribution to its outcome do you imagine you and your registry would be making if not for my intrusions on your time? Though unaccustomed to holding back, to needing anything from another person so badly that I could stand to keep my opinion of them to myself, I said nothing.

  I decided that my island had to be along the south coast, where there would be the least ice in the winter and spring, where whomever I depended on for supplies could reach me all year long.

  Late one summer afternoon I found it. Loreburn. Population: zero. The last resident had left in 1925. It was used as a summer fishing station until 1935. Abandoned since. No lighthouse. No “uncertainties,” it seemed, after I consulted with V.S.

  I did not conceal my excitement from him. “It’s perfect,” I said.

  “For what?” he said and looked at me with frank suspicion. I wondered if he had already spoken to someone about me. He knew my reputation. He might even think I was collaborating with the Germans. It seemed at once ridiculous and highly likely.

  There were signs everywhere in the city, urging Newfoundlanders to be vigilant, even around people they had known for years. Your neighbours might be “pacifists” hostile to “the effort.” There was no telling what their “sympathies” might be.

  How this little man would love to help catch a collaborator. A spy. He looked as though he hoped I was one. Researching remote islands. Deserted islands. That might be used for who knows what. Radio transmissions, perhaps. Claiming to be writing a book, yet never writing down what he told her. This woman who in her column criticized everything, mocked everything, rejected everything. This woman who admitted in her column to frequenting “establishments.”

  “Perfect for what?” he said again, louder this time.

  “For my book,” I said, surprised to hear my voice quavering. “I’ve decided it will just be about one island. I’ll go there, when the war is over, I mean. Just to see it with my own eyes. Not that I have any idea when it will end. The war, I mean.”

  “You’ve been drinking,” he said.

  On the doors of the city’s few establishments that admitted women were signs that read: LADIES UNACCOMPANIED BY GENTLEMEN WILL NOT BE ADMITTED. Recently, I had written in my column that I preferred establishments whose signs were on the inside of the door and read: LADIES UNACCOMPANIED BY GENTLEMEN WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO LEAVE.

  I thought of denying his accusation. But here I was in front of him, looking every bit the Sheilagh Fielding he had heard of. He had probably seen me tipping back my head to take a pull of water from my famous flask.

  I had been drinking, up to some months ago. But every time I had come here, every time I had sought him out for help, I had not been drinking. Had not smelled of Scotch.

  “You are about as likely,” I nevertheless said, “to win a medal for discovering that Sheilagh Fielding is a drinker as you are for discovering that Hitler has a moustache.”

  “You’ll have to leave,” he said.

  Suddenly my vision blurred with tears for my dead son. I felt myself swaying, tilting forward. I planted my cane at an angle to the floor to keep from falling. I looked at V.S. He seemed terrified of having to go and bring back help, bring back people who would see this giant of a woman passed out on the floor of his registry.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “This is merely the legacy of an ancient illness.” I closed my eyes, as if the better to recall the past. The days of my confinement at the San. “I am not contagious. This will pass. It always does.”

  “Well then,” he said. “If you have everything you need.”

  “I have all I need for today,” I said. I drew myself up to full height with an expenditure of strength that left me out of breath. I turned away from him, moved the cane by increments along the floor, a series of rapid thuds, until I was certain of my balance.

  “Goodbye,” I said, but heard no reply.

  David. In dreams he came to notify me of his own death, appearing in full uniform, his hat beneath his right arm, in his left hand a black-bordered yellow envelope marked Western Union. He stood there in the doorway of my room and told me he was sorry he had died. “I’m sorry, Sis,” he said, handing me the telegram. Then he turned and walked away, the sound of his footsteps receding in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” the American sergeant had said when I opened the door.

  And David too, on another afternoon, a year before, had stood in that same doorway in his uniform, having sought me out for the first time in his life. What a strange and wonderful sight it had been.

  “Hello, Sis,” he said, grinning.

  The dream-David was a hybrid of the real one and the sergeant. My mind turned against me in dreams, devising cruel puns. “Sis” for “miss.” Sometimes, in the most disturbing dreams, he walked into my room, and I was certain I was awake, certain he was sitting on my bed and looking down at me, his patient, to whom he had come to impart upsetting news as gently as he could. “I’m sorry, Sis,” he said. And it was only when he reached out to brush the hair back from my forehead that I woke. I put my own hand on my forehead and closed my eyes.

  Sometimes it was me who spoke. I told him I was not his sister but his mother and that, if not for me, he would not have gone to war and I would not have been a stranger to him and he would not have died. If I had acted like a woman, acted my height instead of my age, stood up to my father and my mother. “I should not have relinquished you.” “Relinquished.” It was the most apt word I could think of. Larger than “abandoned” or “re
nounced.” Containing them, and others. “Shed.” “Lied.” “Languished.” “Finished.”

  In the self-absolving dreams, he told me I was not to blame. There was my age. My father and his concern for his reputation. I had only done what other girls in my circumstances did. Girls. Mere girls who felt guilty and ashamed, whose families did not offer them a choice. Who did what they were told to do lest they and their babies be disowned. Who were so chastened and afraid they agreed to almost anything. To things worse than I had agreed to.

  It was upon waking from this dream of absolution that I felt most guilty, most ashamed. For putting words in David’s mouth, conferring upon myself a forgiveness I did not deserve and didn’t feel. Excusing myself for doing to my children what my own mother had done to me. But even she had been my mother for a while. Six years.

  No railroads, roads or even footpaths led to Quinton. I had to book passage there on a supply boat in St. John’s. The captain told me that Quinton’s population was so small that even supply boats passed it by, but he would make an exception for me and my money. He said he would stop at Quinton only long enough for me to debark with my belongings. I told him I was a teacher, a temporary replacement for Quinton’s Church of England teacher, who was ill. I was ready with a more elaborate explanation but hadn’t been asked for one.

  The only woman on the voyage, which included many stops in places that until now had been mere names to me, I stayed below in my quarters, a small room with a bunk normally occupied by the first mate who was compensated for losing his berth to me by a sub-bribe from the captain.

  I worried that on the wharf at Quinton the captain or one of the crew would, upon speaking with the locals, discover I had lied. But by the time we made Quinton, almost everyone on board was drunk. I spent most of my time in the seclusion of my quarters, in part to avoid the company of drinkers.

  After somehow managing to dock his boat in Quinton, the captain went below while two taciturn and whisky-reeking members of the crew unloaded my belongings: two massive black travel trunks, some wooden crates and wicker baskets.

  The supply boat was already pulling away, and no one curious about the appearance at their wharf of a vessel they didn’t recognize had come down to investigate. There was but one fishing boat at the wharf, a longliner with a “make-or-break” motor that looked undersized for the purpose of moving such a vessel through the water. I surveyed closely the hill on which the settlement of Quinton lay and saw that the twenty or so houses were boarded up. Where at one time there had been doors and windows there were now warped and rain-washed squares of plywood.

  For a few seconds I thought the captain had left me stranded in a place as abandoned as I believed Loreburn to be. But then I saw smoke rising from the chimney of the most distant and highest-perched house whose bottom half was obscured by trees and rocks, the only house that still bore a coat of paint.

  I took out my watch and looked at it. Two o’clock. Perhaps there really was a school here, and the children were in it being taught by the teacher whom I had supposedly been sent here to replace. I sat on one of the trunks, my back to Quinton, and stared out across the water. I soon heard voices some distance behind me, those of people who must have been making their way through the woods towards the dock.

  I had been unable to think of any response to the question of why I wanted to go to Loreburn that would seem sufficient or would not be a transparent fabrication, except the one that, a few months ago, I had given V.S. “I’m going there to write a book.” A lesser eccentricity than a desire to live on a deserted island.

  Soon after, I heard footsteps on the wharf. I was so close to the edge that no one could stand in front of me, no one could look me in the eyes unless I turned to face them. The footsteps of perhaps four or five people. I felt that if I turned and looked at them I might begin to cry, might let myself be coaxed into going up the hill and returning to St. John’s.

  “Missus, would you like to come up to the house for some tea?” I heard a woman ask. When I shook my head, there was a long silence. I could almost see them trading mystified, anxious looks. I knew that by “tea” the woman meant a spread of the best food she had to offer.

  A mid-afternoon in early fall. The sky was overcast but there was almost no wind, no sign that rain was on its way. Mixed in with that of the ocean was the smell of spruce trees, a smell I loved but hardly noticed in St. John’s, except in the first few hours after returning home by sea after the long voyage from the mainland. Here, outdoors, away from the smells of the city, my own body and the boarding house, facing the open sea, it seemed fleetingly possible that I might reform, that some Fielding would emerge who would have no need of her silver flask, who would not stay up all night and sleep all day, a Fielding in whom lay dormant an instinct that would lead her to contentment if only she would let it.

  I felt the possibility evaporate and the return of the feeling of being pointlessly at odds with everything. It would never make me feel better to get up with the sun or to go to sleep when it got dark. “I need someone to take me out to Loreburn,” I said. “I’m going there to write a book. And I need someone who, once a month or so, can bring me what I need. Someone reliable.”

  “My love, you can’t live there,” the woman who had previously spoken said. “There’s nothing and no one in Loreburn.”

  “I will pay them, of course,” I said. “But it must be someone I can count on to bring me my supplies.”

  “My love, you’ll perish there all by yourself. You poor thing. You’re not right in your mind. You can’t be. They never should have dropped you off like that.”

  Once I started countering their objections or protesting my sanity, there would be no end to it. Especially since their objections were perfectly reasonable.

  “I need someone to take me out to Loreburn,” I said. “I will borrow a dory and row myself out there if I have to.”

  “My love, you couldn’t row a dory all the way to Loreburn. No one could. You’ll drift out to sea, is all you’ll do. Do you even know where Loreburn is?”

  I thought I could see it in the distance, an amorphous shape that grew smaller the longer I looked until it vanished altogether. I felt dizzy. Felt the urge to reach into my vest and take out my flask, which contained nothing but water. A long, restorative drink of Scotch was what I needed. But that, aside from being otherwise catastrophic, would only bolster their objections.

  “Mom—”

  “Shh.”

  “But, Mom, I’ll go get—”

  “Be quiet, I said.”

  The new voice had been that of a little girl. The boards of the wharf creaked slightly as I heard the shuffle of what were unmistakably the footsteps of a child. No, more than one child.

  Still facing the sea and unable, even peripherally, to make out anything of these residents of Quinton—they must have been keeping their distance from me or from the edge of the wharf—I turned slightly to address them.

  “How many people live in Quinton?” I said.

  “How many people live in Quinton?” the woman repeated, her tone incredulous.

  “We’re the only ones who lives here, lady,” a boy said to a faint chorus of giggles from the other children. I guessed there were four of them but resisted the urge to turn around.

  “She looks like a scarecrow,” the boy said to further giggles.

  “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE,” their mother shouted at a volume and a pitch the likes of which I had never heard issue from a woman’s throat before. “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE, ALL OF YE, RIGHT NOW.” The unnatural bellow of her voice echoed all around, out across the water, down to the point and back again, ringing in my ears.

  The children ran in silence from the wharf and up the path.

  I felt the woman staring at me.

  “My love, what in God’s name are you doing here?”

  What folly it would be to attempt to tell the truth. Her voice was so different, so much softer and more wistful than the last time she had spoken
, that I momentarily wondered if there might be two women on the wharf behind me. In the voice was an entreaty, an invitation to me to reply in the knowledge that we were now alone, the woman believing that, if not for the presence of her children, I would have made some personal admission that only another woman could understand.

  “I have told you why I’m here,” I said, trying not to show how moved I was by the kindness in the voice of this woman I had yet to look at.

  “What is she doing here?” the woman said barely audibly, under her breath. I could feel myself being appraised—my clothes, my thick-soled boot, my stature, my cane. I was suddenly aware of what an offputtingly incongruous spectacle I was, sitting there on the wharf with my two massive trunks.

  “We live here,” the woman said. “No one else but us. We run the light.”

  I had not seen a lighthouse, but then I had not looked out my window until the boat was almost at the wharf.

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “Down around the point. Where the rocks and the reef are.”

  I felt like turning round but was aware of how absurdly dramatic it would be to do so now. And when this woman saw my face, well—she would find nothing in it, nothing in my eyes especially, that would reassure her.

  “What are we going to do with you?”

  It went on like this, the woman alternating between addressing me and then herself, as if I couldn’t hear her. As if someone not right in her mind must in all her senses be deficient.

  “You’re being selfish,” she said, though not severely. “Making us responsible for you.”

  She was right. If I did somehow get to Loreburn, it would not be possible for any of them, and especially not for this woman, to forget that I was out there. How she would fret for me on winter nights. But it could not be helped.

  “All I want to be is left alone, out there,” I said. I looked at the boat. I imagined the woman, her husband and children coming out with hampers on Sunday afternoons. Better they think that I was crazy, unreceptive to such kindnesses. Alone. I knew that even this isolation-bound, lighthouse-inhabiting woman was wondering why anyone would want to live alone.