The Custodian of Paradise (2 page)

“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 merely 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 “renounced.” 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 her objections or protesting my sanity, there would be no end to it. Especially since her 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 deeply personal admission that only another woman could understand.

“I have told you why I’m here,” I said quietly, 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 beside me.

“
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 fishing 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.

I had crammed into my improvised luggage as many of my belongings, as much of my former life as I could manage. Twenty years before, I had seen the immigrants at Ellis Island. I imagined myself in steerage, dressed not much better than the others, but looking somehow aloof, like some recently deposed aristocrat, some woman of affluence, the only visible emblem of whose past life was her cane.

How bereft I was of all that was so precious to other people. The immigrants had brought with them ancestral photographs and heirlooms, keepsakes, letters from which they hoped their descendants would piece together some sort of family history. I had brought none of the few family photographs I possessed. They were in a box in a closet in my room just as they had been for years, looked at by no one, not even me. I had astonished my landlord by giving him three years’ rent the day before I left. I warned him that a friend of mine would come to check on the room from time to time and make sure that he didn’t, in my absence, rent it out to someone else. But I had made no such arrangement. Both keys to the room were in one of the trunks.

I was wearing most of
my
keepsakes. Of these, all but my cane were self-acquired. My cane, my silver flask concealed in the inside pocket of my vest, attached to it by a silver chain. My lorgnette. My black ivory cigarette-holder. All had been affectations of my young womanhood, my later school years, of which I had assumed I would divest myself and which I might have done had things not turned out as they had. My ancient, thick-soled boot, if not for which I might have been mistaken from a distance as the Fielding of my school days on the grounds of Bishop Spencer in St. John’s. Though no one else would have named it as an heirloom, there was my leg itself, which made the cultivation of a “look” redundant.