“Ice cold,” he said. “All year long. It was working just like this when I found it. I never had to spruce it up a bit, except rub a bit of dust off, that’s all.” He put his cupped hands to the water, then raised them to his mouth and drank.
“Hurts my teeth,” he said, squinting, and indicating that I should taste the water.
Handing him my cane, I did as he had done. The water was so cold I felt it in the bones of my hands as I stooped slightly to drink. It was ice cold. At whatever depth in the earth it came from, it was always winter. I gulped from my hands. I hadn’t tasted water this pure in decades, nor realized until now how thirsty I was from the day’s exertions and anxieties.
“It’s delicious,” I gasped. It was so much so that, in sympathetic response to the taste of it in my mouth and the feeling of it in my throat, tears welled up in my eyes and went streaming down my cheeks. I laughed.
“My God,” I said, “this water is so good it makes me cry.”
As we were leaving the shed, he picked up the shotgun. “There’s a box of shells in the kitchen cupboard. And another one up there in the loft behind the food. You should keep this gun in the house. You never know. Someone might come ashore and—and steal from you.”
“Germans, you mean?”
“Anyone.”
He held the gun out to me at arm’s length as if it were a rifle, he a drill sergeant and I a private whose weapon he had just inspected and found satisfactory.
I was startled by the abruptness of the gesture. He must not share his wife’s concern, I thought, that I mean to do myself harm. I did not reach out to take the gun.
“I’ve got five or six of them,” he said. “I can show you how to use it.”
“I know how to use it,” I said.
“Ever fired one?”
“My father let me fire his. Into the air. On New Year’s Eve.”
“I’ll show you how to load it.”
“How to break the breech.”
“How not to shoot yourself.”
“What do I need a gun for?”
“I told you. And there’s some wild dogs out here,” he said. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. They’re not big dogs.”
At last I took the shotgun from him, but I could not bring myself to thank him for it.
It always surprised me how heavy and unwieldy guns were. Not at all as they seemed. (I’d had not a word from anyone yet as to exactly how David died. Better not to know, perhaps.)
“Leave it unloaded,” he said. “It might go off by accident.” When you’ve been drinking, he might as well have said.
“Is there anyone you know who’s in the war?” I said.
He shrugged as if to say that nothing in Quinton depended on the outcome of the war.
“Be careful,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to hurt yourself very bad to get yourself in trouble out here. Any kind of broken bone—”
“Might be the end of me.”
“Yes, it might.”
“So I’ll see you in a month?”
He nodded.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t be to blame if something happens to me.” I wished instantly that I hadn’t said it.
There was perhaps an hour of light left when we walked down to the beach, though I knew that light lingered longer on the ocean than it did on land. It will soon be time, I thought, for Irene to run the light.
“You won’t be able to bring in all your things before dark,” he said.
“The trunks are waterproof.”
We went down to the beach, where I stood with my boots several feet apart, my cane planted between two rocks. Putting down my cane, I folded my arms for shelter from the fast-cooling breeze that was blowing shoreward. We stood there in silence. His boat bobbed slightly beside the wharf.
He might have been a visitor whom I had walked down to the beach, a visitor whose departure we had delayed to the point where further stalling was impossible unless he meant to spend the night. How quickly the house had become mine, me the host and he the guest. I was sharing what for him might have been the last look he would ever have of this spellbinding view of mine. Two friends about to part forever.
“You’ll do all right. I’ll be back. I’ll have everything you put down on that note.”
Surely he was keeping nothing from me. Yet how strange they had seemed, those signs of how recently he had been there. The slept-in daybed. The bar of soap. The footprints on the path. The frying pan. It did not seem possible that, since that last visit, he had grown so weary of the place that to relinquish it to me would not be a hardship, not deprive him of something precious.
As he headed out to sea, I looked over at the trunks. I foresaw long, nighttime conversations with them in that front room, not all of them having to do with what they contained. Sentinel servants, they would stand, discreetly silent, loomingly there in the lantern light, a tandem of shadows on the floor and on the walls, reflected in the window, omnipresent while I read and read in the hope that while my mind and body were preoccupied, sleep would creep into the room.
WAYNE JOHNSTON is the author of six previous novels, including The Divine Ryans, which won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award; The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which was nominated for the Giller Prize and first introduced Sheilagh Fielding to readers; and of Baltimore’s Mansion, which won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Born and raised in Newfoundland, Wayne Johnston now lives in Toronto.
BOOKS BY WAYNE JOHNSTON
The Story of Bobby O’Malley
The Time of Their Lives
The Divine Ryans
Human Amusements
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Baltimore’s Mansion: A Memoir
The Navigator of New York
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 55