The Custodian of Paradise (28 page)

Smallwood worries that his father will show up in court some day. Public drunkenness. Buying from bootleggers and causing a disturbance. Profanity. Resisting arrest. He scans the courtroom docket every day in dread. He frequently encounters people that he knows or knew, boys, now men, that he grew up with. Friends of his father whom his father, like mine, calls “associates.”

“Smallwood?” my father said when he first heard that we were colleagues at the courthouse. “Then you must quit your job at once,” he said. “How can you consort with
him?
After what he did. The likes of him. The dregs. Have you forgotten who he is? He must have no shame. That business in New York. God knows what he would do. Who
he
would tell some day if you tell him something after you’ve been drinking. Or worse. What he did once he might do again, especially if you’d been drinking. Take advantage of you like before. My God, he must never know. I would think that, of all the people you wanted to stay clear of—have you lost your mind? You cannot associate with
him
. You will wind up telling him your secret.”

“I told you I will never speak of it,” I said. “Never. He knows nothing about that business in New York and he never will. No amount of Triple A could loosen my lips about that. It is by pure chance that we wound up working together. I can’t quit my job. I might never get another one. Herder is the only man I know who doesn’t mind my—reputation.”

“Have
you
no shame?”

“I have no choice.”

Smallwood asks often about what New York was like. Doesn’t understand my reticence. “You spent, what, six
months there? Six? In the greatest city in the world. And you never talk about it.”

I describe New York to him as I have seen it on postcards, in photographs, in books. I repeat descriptions of it I have read.

“What do you remember most vividly about it?”

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” I said. “It’s—an amazing bridge. To tell you the truth, Smallwood, all I did while I was there was argue with my mother and her husband.”

“Six months in New York,” he said. “You must have seen every inch of it.
I
would have. Did you go to Central Park much?”

“Yes,” I said. “Central Park is very beautiful.”

“I don’t think I would ever have come back,” he said. “All this must seem so different to you now.”

“
Very
different,” I said. “Before New York, and after New York. That’s how I see my life.”

“Before New York and after New York. Yes I can see that. St. John’s must seem so small. You must think about New York all the time.”

“Yes. I do. All the time.”

“Do you think you’ll go back?”

“I don’t know. I may never see New York again.”

“I’m going there some day. And if I
do
come back, I’ll be prime minister of Newfoundland. Also some day.”

I smiled. He said it as if his ascension to the top was as good as accomplished, preordained. I smiled, he thought condescendingly, but I was touched. I foresaw no such rags-to-riches rise in his future. Foresaw disillusionment and disappointment. And pointless persistence.

“I will have the last laugh,” he said.

His self-confidence entirely unjustified and entirely unshakeable. Reporting for pennies a day. Talking as if he is ideally situated to surpass all the lawyers and judges he works among.

Smallwood says his publisher has convinced one of the merchants to let him write about the seal hunt. See it first-hand. He has a berth on the S.S.
Newfoundland
. Captain Westbury Keane is the skipper. Son of “old Man Keane.”

“I won’t be allowed to leave the ship,” he said.

“Not even if it’s sinking,” a lawyer said.

“I have to watch the seal hunt through binoculars,” Smallwood said. What an image. Smallwood at the gunwales of the otherwise deserted ship, the only man left on board the S.S.
Newfoundland
, a pair of binoculars pressed against his glasses, trying, as always, to make out what is going on “out there.” Trying to understand a world that will always keep him at a distance.

“I’ll see everything that happens on the ship,” he said. “Close up. I’ll have a bunk like all the other men.”

“Are you sure you won’t be sharing one?” said Sharpe. “It would be a shame to waste three-quarters of a bunk.”

The lawyers are laying bets on his chances of survival.

“Three weeks,” he says. He could be talking about three weeks in New York or London. “Because of me, people will find out what it’s really like.” His stories, he says, will be telegraphed daily to St. John’s.

“Yes,” I said, “after Keane blacks out the parts he doesn’t like. And puts in the parts that you left out.”

He is convinced that other reporters are jealous of him. With the exception of me, he says, for, being a woman, I am “automatically ineligible.” No women allowed on board. Bad luck. Even a woman my size.

“I don’t believe in bad luck,” he said. “I’m not superstitious. But you have to admit that a woman on a ship would be distracting.”

“Smallwood,” I said, “a more distracting, less likely sight on a sealing ship than you is something I cannot imagine.”

It is just as I told him it would be. The “realistic” accounts of the seal hunt that bear his byline are romantic adventure stories. “Over the side the brave men go and the hunt is on. They are sealers of great skill who jump from one ice pan to the next as matter-of-factly as you or I would walk on solid ground.”

“He’s quite a writer,” Sharpe said, to which I replied, “He is more likely to write a story describing
lawyers
as brave men with great skill than he is to have written
that.”

But there is no more talk of Smallwood. Rain for two days, but now the wind has changed. Slant-driven sleet is clattering like stones against the windows and the walls. Not even my father, exhausted though he is, can get to sleep. Better sleet than snow in wind like this. Though not, perhaps, for sealers.

I wonder if my father hopes that Smallwood perishes out there.

A gust just then. Something somewhere in the moorings of the house began to break. Some piece of wood that no one has laid eyes on for more than twenty years just came to life.

The blessing of the fleet. Ten thousand on the waterfront. Women crying as if their men were off to war. Smallwood standing like a sealer in the rigging of the S.S.
Newfoundland
. Absurd. Absurdly touching. Hoping to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. Despite his spectacles. Despite his size. He looked, at that height, like some delinquent stowaway who would surely be discovered and ordered off the ship before it left. “Come down from there, you little—“The crowd laughing. A moment of comic relief in all that gravity. His glasses sparkled in the sunlight as if he was a lookout with binoculars. Priests and
ministers of all denominations. His mother there to see him off, no doubt.

Another great gust. What might have been a beam of wood breaking with a single snap. My father on his feet again. We will soon see how vital that beam of wood was to the house. The sound of sleet has stopped, but the wind is worse, so it must be snowing. The curtain on the landing billows inward as though the window is ajar.

No news for two days now. Rumours. Rumours of everything. That everyone is safe. That everyone is lost. That this ship is still afloat. That this one sank after it was crushed by ice. All the ships will soon be home. All the ships are lost. The entire fleet gone down.

I spoke to Herder, asked him what he thought. He looked at me. “You haven’t slept in days,” he said. He knows about the Triple A. I told him I’d run out but would soon be getting more. He said I was a no-booze, no-snooze kind of drinker. “Not the worst kind. Not by a long shot.”

Asked me if it was because of Smallwood I was losing sleep. I said it was. “As unlikely as it seems, we’ve become good friends,” I said. He looked at me again. I shook my head. “Nothing more than friends,” I said.
“Good
friends.” Smallwood doesn’t think of me as a woman. I mean, he doesn’t think of women as women. I’m not sure he thinks of them at all. I suppose he might if one could help him get ahead. If he discovered her by chance. Women are not part of his strategy. Or wouldn’t be if he
had
a strategy. Smallwood has goals, but he does not have plans. And his goals are always changing. All he is sure of is that he wants to be remembered.

If the S.S.
Newfoundland
is lost, will Smallwood be remembered? To be overlooked by history, rightly or wrongly, his greatest fear. To be demoted to a kind of
non-existence. His life erased, as if it never happened. What does he see in the courtroom? A mass of soon-to-be-forgotten souls. Lives that will never be recorded, never read about by future generations. The fate of most women. Hence his disinterest. The exceptions he talks about as if they are a kind of sub-group of famous men. Not women with masculine natures, but women chosen arbitrarily by fate to be remembered. Women who, like monarchs, succeed to the throne of fame by an accident of birth.

In the six months since I helped him get the job, this is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him. I didn’t think I’d miss him this much. And now, with all these rumours of disaster.

What, given all that he knows me to be and how I am commonly regarded, must he think? “Fielding,” he hopes he will have the chance to say one day. “Sheilagh Fielding. I knew her when I was just a court reporter.” One of those memorable characters a man encounters on the road to success, a character powerless but eccentric, and long since surpassed by him, an amusing reminder of his early days when others fancied him to be on a par with her, when only he believed that this job was temporary, a paying of dues for the life to which he would soon be moving on.

No one can stand to stay indoors. I have never seen so many people on the streets. People walking who haven’t walked the streets in years. Even on those streets that have been shovelled free of snow, like the ones downtown, there are no carriages or cars. Because in carriages or cars you cannot stop to talk to strangers.

I spent a whole day out there myself, walking, talking. Everyone exchanging rumours. Mostly optimistic ones. Reassuring ones. Remembering past storms that, in spite of all the worry they caused, did not take any lives. People commending the skill of the sealing captains and their
crews. If anyone could bring a ship home safely through a storm like that,
he
could. They could. The Keanes. They probably made port somewhere and even now are sipping cups of tea, their only concern being how worried we must be. For
them
. People laughing. Imagine. They’re worried about us. But the laughter never lasts. And people move on to see what the next person coming down the road will say.

It feels, outdoors, even when we’re only walking, like we’re
doing
something. Like our itinerant vigilance will somehow help. Even if, from where people are, the Narrows are not visible, people glance constantly in that direction while they talk. Through the Narrows they departed and through the Narrows will return. As if a straight line through the Narrows would lead them to the answer, if only they could follow it.

If I know old man Keane. If I know Captain Westbury. If I know George Tuff. Names, legendary names, to shore against the storm. Names that, in the past, have warded off misfortune. Remember how George Tuff kept these twenty men alive and brought them home. That’s right. No need to give up hope. We’ll cry if it comes to that, but for now we’ll stay strong for one another. Never mind the wind. Don’t forget to say your prayers. Make sure you go to church. God bless you now, my love. My dear. My darling. Duckie. My son. Misses. Skipper. Every old man, especially an old man who has children, is referred to with respect as “skipper.”

“Any minute now we might see the flags on Signal Hill. That’s right.” The signal flags they fly from the Box House. Mercantile flags to let the merchants and pilot boat operators know which ship is on its way. No flags for four days now.

Everywhere, heads nodding. Women in head scarves conferring on street corners. Children gravely watching from a distance. They say the
Southern Cross
went down off Port
aux Basques. All hands were lost. “I won’t believe it until they bring his body back to me.” People crying in the streets. Women consoling a mother whose son or sons were on the
Southern Cross
. Whose husband was. Or father. Brother.

Women, when they see me walking by myself, assume the worst. “Did you lose someone, my love?” Then remember who I am, that I have no siblings, that my father is a doctor and I am—Fielding.

“There is a friend of mine,” I tell them. “A
close
friend on the
Newfoundland
.” They nod, thinking they know what I mean by “close” but not asking for a name. “Well. No word, yet, my love, about the
Newfoundland
. Don’t forget to say your prayers. I got two boys on the
Newfoundland
. They’ll both be coming back. They’re all right, you just wait and see. Your fella, he’s all right too, I bet. Did you hear about the
Southern Cross?”
Somehow comforting. That the
Cross
was lost. As if it increases the other ships’ chances of survival. God singled out someone else for sorrow. The unthinkable happened, not to mine, but hers. Not to me, but her. He must have spared mine. Me. He would not take them all.

The courts are closed. The stores are closed. But my father has not missed a day of work. Few doctors have closed their surgeries. Supplies of every conceivable form of sedative are running low. Laudanum. Patent medicines. Alky. The police are seizing moonshine, giving it to doctors. No alcohol-related arrests are being made.

My father discontinued my supply of Triple A, but I got hold of some juneshine. Now and then I drift off to sleep but wake as though from the impact of a fall. Over and over. Better to stay awake and write. Impossible to read. Everything seems like a non sequitur. No book, not even the Bible, addresses the one thing that seems worth addressing. I have not gone to church, nor have I prayed. Given to fits of repentance when scared. Who said that? Saved while in a state
of dread. Converted while terrified. There are other ways to look at it, I know. The balm of grace. Solace in a time of sorrow. The inconceivability of hopelessness. All is never lost. We will see them all again. Every one of us is loved except the damned. And who are they? No two people can agree. Blessed are they who mourn. The Sermon on the Mount. Even that, the most beautiful of all things ever written, seems like nothing but mere words tonight.

Smallwood. The only way I could imagine him losing weight was amputation, but perhaps his bones are even smaller now. The Smallwoods are not sealers. They’re a seafearing family. Smallwood’s father went to Boston years ago and had it been possible to walk there he would have rather than get on board a ship.