A World Elsewhere (6 page)

Her marriage to Captain Druken had come about by some arrangement of which Landish no longer remembered the details. She came from a sealing family like the Drukens. She had a brother who left school when he was twelve. No sisters. Her father and brother died when their ship sank in a storm, her mother some years later of pneumonia. She said she’d never minded being matched with a man who, like her father and her brother, would almost always be away. She used to say that the ship was his, the house was hers. She could have had servants but didn’t want them.

“It will just be me here soon enough. Himself will want you all to Himself.” Landish told her he would rather be with her. “We’ll see,” she said. “The house or the ship. Which will it be for Landish?”

His father couldn’t stand coming ashore. Houselife. Captain Druken slept on the
Gilbert
even when it was docked in St. John’s. He visited his own house like an invited guest, had dinner, then went back to the ship. He would let himself in and Landish’s mother would take his hat and coat and hang them in the vestibule, and help him on with his coat when he got up from the table and said that it was time to go. At dinner, he spoke almost exclusively to Landish.

She said the
Gilbert
was his home away from her. It doubled as a coastal supply vessel and even as a passenger ship for those who had no alternative or could afford no better, so he was almost always away. They attended Sunday service with him, and the two of them went when he was away because Captain Druken said it would look bad if they didn’t.

Landish’s mother said she got “looks” from men who thought she must be lonely with a capital L. But she said that looks were all that a woman neglected by a Druken had to fear. “Or hope for,” she’d once said beneath her breath.

“I’ll go mad here when you’re gone,” she said to Landish. She stamped his face and head all over with kisses until he laughed and pretended that he wanted her to stop.

“Who does Landish love?” she’d ask out of the blue, at dinner when his father was away, when they went out for walks. “You,” he’d say. Or else he’d tease her and say he didn’t know. He’d hold out until she pretended she was crying.

“I love
you,”
he’d shout.

Who does Landish love? No one else had ever said they loved him. Not even Van. He hadn’t heard it or said it since her death.

She had taken up pencil sketching while she was pregnant with Landish. Later, she scrolled up all her drawings—mostly St. John’s streetscapes—tied them with ribbon at both ends and in the middle, and piled them in her closet. There were dozens of them but she said she didn’t think anything she drew was worth framing or displaying in the house or elsewhere. She dismissed every one of her sketches as “hideous.” He thought her actions similar to what he did with his writing. But she hadn’t destroyed her sketches, only hidden them. Captain Druken might have destroyed them by now. All of them but one.

The one thing other than his clothes that he managed to remove from his father’s house as he was leaving it for the last time was a three-feet-by-two-feet sketch that his mother had drawn of herself.

“GEN OF EVE and LANDISH” she had printed below the drawing in large letters, meaning that Landish was “in” the picture as well. “Can’t you see yourself inside my belly?” she asked.

Inside the paper itself, he’d liked to think when he was younger. A secret, in spite of the title. She must have added “and LANDISH” after he was born, there being no way, when she drew the sketch, that she
could have known the gender or name of the child she carried. So Landish called the sketch what she must first have called it, simply
Gen of Eve
.

The sketch matched—and had probably influenced—his memory of her. She was sitting with her arms on the arms of a chair. She was not smiling but looked playfully skeptical of the notion that she was worth depiction. A long angular face, thin but wide lips, prominent cheekbones, dark hair—and wide, dark eyes.

Gen of Eve
was undated and was signed, in the bottom right-hand corner, “Gen of Eve Marcot,” Marcot being her maiden name, one of French origin that was pronounced “market” in St. John’s. Why she had not used her married name he wasn’t sure, unless it was that the sketch was part of the house, which was “hers,” as opposed to the
Gilbert
, which was “his,” her husband’s.

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 Deacon 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.”