The Custodian of Paradise (26 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I was caught for forgery. That’s how I ended up in court.” It occurred to me that he could not read one word of the stories he took from me for Herder. Had not been able to read one word of the Forgeries. An illiterate printer’s devil.

Sometimes, walking to the courthouse in the morning, I looked across the harbour at the Brow, where he lived. Columns of smoke rose up here and there from the dense woods above the houses. Any one of them could be coming from the still where my juneshine and spruce beer were made.

“Have you ever been caught?” I asked him.

“No, miss,” he said, shaking his head as if he had never considered the possibility. “Have
they
ever been caught?” I said. “No, miss,” he said, though he looked grave this time. He knew what the implications of their being caught would be for him. He must have been conspicuous walking about with those wrapped bundles clutched against his chest, especially on streets like ours where there were no stores and not much traffic.

“Has no one ever asked you what you have inside those bundles?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “I just tells ’m clothes and shoes. From Sally Ann. If anyone asks to look inside, I’m s’posed to drop everything and run. They’d have to be some fast to catch me. But no one ever asked me yet.”

He’ll wind up in jail one day because of me or someone like me, I told myself. I pictured him dropping a bundle by accident on some busy downtown street, the bottles breaking, the juneshine and spruce beer soaking through the paper onto the ground, the whole mess reeking of illicit alcohol.

But I kept on buying juneshine from him. And the spruce beer to wash it down. From just such a boy as my unacknowledged son might one day be.

The spruce beer came in dark green, long-necked bottles, stoppered, like the juneshine, with cork. It had to be kept cold, or else it all but exploded when you pulled the cork, froth shooting from the bottle like champagne. The spruce beer was even cloudier than the juneshine, with whole spruce twigs on the bottom and spruce needles swirling about like some ingredient used to insoluble excess.

Every evening, I performed the same ritual. Carefully poured into a glass a small amount of juneshine, a quarter of an inch or less. Then put a tea strainer on the glass and poured the spruce beer through it an ounce or so at a time. By the time the glass was full, the tea strainer was as well, with little twigs and needles. I thought of some man from the Brow making his way home through the woods at twilight, bent beneath the weight of a load of spruce and juniper branches, smeared from head to toe with turpentine. It was by no means an unpleasant image. Nor was that of his wife, picking the sticky black berries from the juniper branches, then notching both kinds of branches and skinning the bark from them until nothing but bare wood remained. Then the juneshine and the spruce beer being made, one after the other, in some sort of makeshift cauldron that the couple stirred with two-by-fours or shovels. I liked the idea of this covert, illicit, almost occult labour going into the making of the glass
of junibeer that I would soon be drinking. And the idea that the junibeer was made from trees just like the ones I looked at every day, trees that grew not far away, on the Brow that was visible from almost everywhere I went.

I had to keep the whole matter hidden from my father. He rarely opened the icebox and even then only after work when he was thirsty. He ate only one meal a day, a large lunch that he had delivered to his surgery, and after consuming which, he took a nap. Nevertheless, I cleared the icebox of spruce beer and juneshine before I went to bed. After he came home, I waited for an hour until I was sure he was asleep and crept downstairs to replenish my supply. Once asleep, he was all but unwakeable, so I knew it was highly unlikely that he would catch me in the act. I sampled the junibeer twice each evening, drinking a small amount before I went to bed, and a larger amount before I went to bed the second time, enough to make me sleep soundly until morning.

At my first taste of junibeer, I almost retched. It was not the taste so much as its breathtaking potency that surprised me. Black spots of the sort I sometimes saw when I stood up too fast swarmed before my eyes. My usual cure for this was a deep breath, which on this occasion I couldn’t manage. After the impulse to gag passed, I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me and my body had forgotten how to breathe. I went out onto the back steps, gasping to no effect several times until at last air rushed in all at once and I gulped it down like water.

After that, I used less juneshine and more spruce, experimenting until I found a proportion that was drinkable. The main difficulty with concealing my new habit from my father was the smell. I stoppered the juneshine as quickly as I could after pouring it, but still the kitchen reeked as if a juniper tree had been left in it for days. The smell of the spruce was not as strong, but it mixed with that of the juneshine to create an odour of hyper-fermentation. I burnt wood in the fireplace instead of coal and closed the flue for a while so that smoke spread through the house, explaining to my father when he came home that I had done so by accident. The next nights, I left all
the windows open. But I knew some long-term solution was needed, so I smoked more cigarettes than usual, using the cheapest, most acrid smelling tobacco I could find, the Yellow Rag I had long ago forsaken for Royal Emblem.

“It is a most unladylike habit,” my father said, “smoking cigarettes.”

“So is having children out of wedlock,” I said.

“It is even reprehensible in men. I don’t know why you took it up. I have never so much as smoked a pipe.”

“All the lawyers at the courthouse smoke,” I said. “And the other reporters.”

“All of whom are men.”

“Yes, but it’s hard to resist taking it up when everyone around you is doing it.”

“Suddenly
you
are following the crowd?”

“I don’t plan to make a habit of conformity, believe me,” I said. Unsure just how volatile the junibeer might be, I kept it far separate from my lit cigarette—the junibeer on one end of the table and the Yellow Ragarettes on the other, I went back and forth between them, sipping, smoking, sipping, smoking. It wasn’t long before I was rolling Ragarettes while lying in bed, while writing, while sitting in the courtroom. It also wasn’t long before I was drinking junibeer as more than just a cure for sleeplessness.

I was as careful as I could not to be seen sipping from the flask, but I dropped it on the floor of my office one day and two of the bailiffs saw the junibeer that spilled out. The bailiffs grinned at me and then at each other but said nothing. But in no time, word of the contents of my flask got around.

“So what’s your poison these days, Fielding?” one of the prosecutors asked me.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and he shook his head and laughed. I would have left the flask at home from then on, but I found it too difficult to get through the day without the junibeer.

“Two months on her first real job and she’s on the ’shine
and
the cigarettes,” one lawyer said.

“Junibeer,” another lawyer standing next to me announced one day. “You smell like the inside of the Black Mariah on a Sunday morning. You’ll be dead in six months drinking that stuff.”

I suppose it was inevitable that word of the flask would get back to my father.

“I was told,” he shouted upstairs to me one night when he got home from work, “that you were seen at the courthouse with a flask of something.”

I got dressed quickly and went downstairs, smoking a cigarette, still feeling the effects of my first nightcap.

“Junibeer,” I said.

“Are you insane, girl?” he said. “Do you realize that you could be arrested?”

“It seems unlikely,” I said.

“In the courthouse? Surrounded by police and prosecutors? And judges?”

“And criminals,” I said. “Your name is mud among them.”

“You’re drunk. You’ve been drinking.”

“Been drinking but not drunk.”

“Why have you taken to drinking?”

“It helps me sleep.”

“I could have given you something for that.”

“No laudanum, thanks.”

“Junibeer. Do you know what that can do to you? I’ve treated people who became ill because of drinking that. People have died. Where do you get it?”

“Not from anyone you know.”

“What must they be saying at the courthouse?”

“They call it Fielding’s Remedy.”

“Because I’m a doctor. Fielding’s Remedy. Dr. Fielding’s Remedy, they might as well be saying. You are to promise me you will never drink again.”

“It would only be a promise that I would break. It would only be a lie.”

“You won’t stop breaking the law?”

“I won’t promise that I’ll never drink again. Perhaps it really is time that I left this house.”

“Do you realize that I was one of those who signed the petition for prohibition? One of the prominent citizens whose name appeared on that list that was published in the papers? I didn’t just
vote
for prohibition.”

“I would have voted against it. If I had the right to vote.”

“Don’t tell me that, on top of everything else, you’ve become one of those awful suffragettes?”

“Cigarettes, suffragettes and junibeer. It’s quite a threesome, isn’t it?”

“My God—”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t become one of those awful women. God knows what women would vote for if they had the vote. Even if they did have it, I’d be too young.”

“Junibeer. The young woman they all think is my daughter, thrown in jail.”

“So could you be. The junibeer’s in your icebox at the moment.”

“Good God, girl, you’ve lost your mind. You’re drunk. And have been in public. What a disgusting spectacle. And people blame
me
for everything
you
do.”

“Whereas they only blame me for some of what you do.”

“What?”

“Never mind. As you say, I’m drunk. It’s not as if you can put a notice in the paper. Dr. Fielding is no longer to be blamed for what his daughter does.”

“Is this how you intend to spend your life, blackening my name? No doubt you’ll still be at it when I’m gone.”

“At some point, people will blame only me for everything I do.”

“I wish that were true. But such a day will never come.”

“It will come sooner the sooner I move out.”

“No. I won’t have you moving out. A girl your age. Dr. Fielding’s daughter in some dive. Disgraced again. What sort of place, what sort of dump could you afford? A room in some boarding
house. You have no idea. I have seen such places. The way people live. The things that go on. You have no idea how such places are regarded.”

“If you would like to supplement my income, perhaps I could afford a decent place—”

“There is no decent place for a woman by herself. A woman living alone. Other men’s daughters are well on their way to getting married.”

“If you are waiting for some man to take me off your hands—”

“I am not
waiting
. I am not an idiot. You have—disqualified yourself. You will never marry well. That confession. Those Forgeries. Now
this
—”

“And I haven’t exactly saved myself for marriage, have I—”

“Do not speak to me like that. My God, you cannot be mine.”

“Regarding what you call
this
. I think we could come to some arrangement.”

“Meaning what?”

“Not laudanum. But you are a doctor. You could prescribe something else for me.”

“Something you would fill your flask with and take with you to court.”

“What if I promised to take my medicine at home?”

“Prescribe something—”

“Yes, and I also don’t mean some patent medicine like Brown’s Bronchial Elixir or Beef Iron and Wine.”

“You are too young. I could not prescribe alcohol for you.”

“Then prescribe it for yourself. Diagnose yourself with some disorder of the nerves. I have heard at the courthouse that half the doctors in town are prescribing for themselves.”

“I doubt that any are prescribing for their underage daughters.”

“As I said, prescribe it for yourself. Have the prescriptions filled yourself. What druggist would doubt that the father of Sheilagh Fielding needed help to calm his nerves? People will blame your condition on me.”

“People will think I have taken to drink.”

“They will think you are doing what most of them are doing. Finding a way past prohibition.”

“I have been a teetotaller all my life. Before prohibition, my colleagues teased me because I didn’t drink. Wouldn’t have a brandy with them. Or even smoke cigars.”

“You are my father. People will accept that as an explanation for any change in your behaviour. And they will assume that
you
take your medicine at home, to help you sleep. It’s not as if you’ll be going to work drunk or smelling of alcohol.”

“A sorry state of affairs. You need only turn aside from alcohol.”

“I do not wish to turn aside from it. I don’t plan to be a dipsomaniac, a common drunk. But I find it makes me—I think less about some things that I would rather not think about at all. And sleep. It helps me sleep. I worry less about not sleeping.”

“This arrangement. It amounts to blackmail. I go along with it or else. You go on dealing with these moonshiners from the Brow. Go on breaking the law. Risk winding up in jail. Jail would be the end of both of us.”

“Father, for most people, finding ways to get their hands on alcohol has become a game. They drink more now than they ever did. The law will be repealed. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Blackmail. Shameful. Further proof that you are no child of mine.”

But he agreed to the arrangement. Wrote himself prescriptions for alcohol. Went to several druggists in the vain hope of disguising “his” level of consumption. When he came home from work, he left the alcohol for me in a brown paper bag on the kitchen table where I found it in the morning after he had left the house. By tacit agreement, the delivery was never made in person. The alcohol never passed from his hands to mine. I kept the bottles at all times in my room, in a dresser drawer so that not even by chance could he set eyes on them. I never drank in his presence. Was never in his presence when I
had
been drinking. He returned the empty bottles to the druggists to have them refilled, collecting them from the back porch where I left them. I mixed the raw alcohol, known as “alky,” with anisette and with a kind of
carbonated soft drink that had no brand name but was simply called “aerated water with sugar.” Unlike the Juneshine, it was as clear as water. Alky, anisette and aerated water. Triple A, I called it.