The Custodian of Paradise (38 page)

My leg was thinner, shorter, my foot smaller. It would not return to normal. Or, rather, “its deficiency will not reverse itself.” My doctor. Nor would that of my lungs. But, as my “constitution” was “robust,” I would otherwise be fine. Perhaps live as long as I would have if I had not fallen ill.

“There is one other matter.” He seemed embarrassed, or guilty. “You will be unable to conceive. The disease often has this effect. We are not sure why.”

Unable to conceive. “Conceive.” A verb without an object. As if he were telling me I would never think again. Telling me they had had to remove my imagination. Conceive.

I felt like telling him, In that case, I have as many children as I will ever have. He assumed I had none. Would never be a mother. I had long since decided not to have more children. Or thought I had. Yet I felt a surge of sorrow. Unable. Never. Felt that I had been forced to renounce even the possibility of children, however certain I thought I was of not wanting more.

I must have looked appropriately aggrieved. He put one hand lightly on my shoulder.

Not long after I began to wonder if he had decided never to contact me again, I received a letter from my Provider.

Spring of 1924. More than two years in the San. Two years without a drink, not counting the occasional bottle that some of us shared after it seemed to bribe itself past the doctors and the nuns. But I went back to drinking the day I left the San.

After two years indoors, I was declared “cured.” On the day of my release, I was given two dollars and a fortifying bag of apples. I had become so unused to fresh air that, as I lumbered away from the San,
dragging my bad leg as if someone sad to see me go were clinging to it, I thought the doctors’ diagnosis must be wrong, for I could not catch my breath.

The air was dissolving barriers, making its way into passages in my lungs that had been closed for years. It felt harsh, corrosive, my throat scorched as though I had swallowed the wrong way something that no amount of coughing could expel.

Even as I coughed, bent over on my cane to keep from falling, I looked back at the doors and saw two nuns watching me, impassively, grimly, it was hard to say. I realized that I was not so much cured as merely non-contagious. I wondered what the two nuns thought my chances of survival were, how long they thought it would be before I was back again.

They turned away before I did. I managed to control my coughing sufficiently to straighten up and look around. It was June, late spring. A cool wind that betokened fog was blowing from the east, but the day was partly sunny with low, racing clouds, their undersides dark by contrast with the bright blue sky. Some seagulls went flying by, two of their number fighting, one with its beak clenching the other’s, which held what looked like a heel of bread.

Many times in the past two years, I had, while looking out the windows of the San, seen such scenes of commotion, but that was nothing like being in the midst of it. The wind whose existence I had for years inferred from the sound it made and its effect on the world outside my window blew my clothes flat against my body in a manner I had once known well but had forgotten. I saw the wind move through the new leaves like a wave, the leaves’ silver sides upturned, sunlit, glittering like coins, the sound like that of a distant stream.

On the road, cars and horses whose drivers seemed alarmingly certain of their destinations and usefulness went by. I felt as though I were still in my bed, still on the ward whose windows had swung open all at once, admitting the elements that indoors seemed so incongruous, as if some large wild animal, panicked by confinement, was trying to escape. This, it all seemed to say, is the pace of
the world to which you have returned. This is how you used to live and what you will have to keep up with from now on. I had to get indoors, had to find another sanctuary.

   
Chapter Eleven
   

LOREBURN

A
LMOST EVERY NIGHT
, I
HEAR THE PLANES PASS OVERHEAD
. A
S
I did when, in defiance of the curfew, I went out walking in St. John’s. On those few nights when the sky is clear, I see them, an endless swarm of blinking lights, squadron after squadron in formation, a hundred miles from the air base but already in descent.

When it’s cloudy or foggy, there is only the eerie drone of engines. The largest are the cargo planes. The smallest are the bombers. It sounds as though they’ve come to bomb what’s left of Loreburn.

The ones that make the least noise carry troops. David flew in such a plane from Boston to St. John’s. They vary the flight paths. Rumours of planes being fired at from German submarines. Absurd, impossible, most people said. But just in case. Rumours of other impossibilities. Anti-aircraft guns being offloaded from subs and set up in our own woods to shoot down our planes, their muzzles pointed upward while the German gunners scanned the sky with their binoculars in search of planes. Rumours of a destroyer that somehow made its way undetected and now lies at anchor and in camouflage in some fjord along the coast.

In the kitchen window of Patrick’s house, the faint blue of morning has at last begun to show.

I get up, go to the front room and stand at the window. I can see no boat in the bay, though some of the water is obscured by trees. No
wind, no sounds from outside but the usual ones of waves and seagulls, muted more by distance than by my being indoors.

There is the same unthreatening but leaden sky as there has been since the day of my arrival.

I look at my watch. Seven-thirty. Long past sunrise. Later than I thought. Perhaps this is not the first light of morning, just the light of a day that is as bright as it will get. The sky is grey, not neutrally so like before, but grey as I remember the sky being when, watching the weather as a child, I knew that snow was on the way. But it is not, I am certain, cold enough for snow.

My fears now seem more foolish than ever. It may just be because of Patrick giving me the gun that I have been so terrified by the sound of what I am no longer sure were voices. Voices, a gunshot that I heard weeks ago but have not had the courage to investigate.

I pick my cane up from the floor beside the sofa, make my way through the house to the porch and go outside. It is colder than I thought, not many degrees above freezing and although I am wearing a vest over my long-sleeved dress, and despite the lack of wind, I feel the shock of the air like cold water on my skin.

Yes, it
even feels
as though the first snow of the year is not far off. But it is only mid-October.

I draw a deep breath. I decide against going back inside for a sweater or a coat, thinking that if I do I will stay inside all day beside the stove or the fireplace.

Hugging myself for warmth with my free arm, I make my way to the beach path, my bad foot twisting on the uneven sod despite my cane.

I see no footprints but my own and Patrick’s on the path, which is more dust than mud now, though wet or dry it would register a new footprint.

I follow the path to the last bend, the one beyond which, I know, I will see the wharf and beyond that the open bay.

I will not pause at the turn in the path, I decide, heart thumping. I will, as quickly as possible, get it over with—round the bend, and if there is a dory or a boat moored at the wharf or anchored in the bay,
I will seek out their owners on the reasonable assumption that they are visitors who mean me no harm.

I am part terrified of meeting
him
and part eager to do so. As much simply to get it over with as to satisfy my curiosity I would like to meet him face to face.

I speed up, aware, even in the midst of my suspense, of my lopsided, lurching gait, and of the sight I would make emerging, cane flailing, from the woods, to someone watching from the beach or from a boat out in the bay.

I all but crash through the canopy of spruce, forgetting to duck as tree limbs lash my face.

I see first that there is no vessel at the wharf and, looking to my left, that the bay is empty. No boat at anchor. None in sight anywhere, from Loreburn beach to the far horizon that I scan with my lorgnette. Nothing. If there were visitors, they are gone now.

Unless they landed elsewhere on the island. Though Patrick made mention of no other places that were suitable for landing, no other abandoned settlements on Loreburn. He was quite certain the island was uninhabited.

Is the island large enough that someone might be living on some other part of it, or be in the habit of visiting some other part of it, without his knowledge? It seemed massive from the dock at Quinton, amorphously suggestive of some horizon-spanning island, but, curiously, not so large when we drew close to it—too close, perhaps, to gauge its full dimensions.

I look at the green-mantled headland to the east, above which the white gulls are teeming, innumerable, preoccupied, oblivious. Again, as when I first saw them, I have the sense that I have happened onto some great work-in-progress, some great construction site or city whose inhabitants are profoundly unaware of other species, other purposes or points of view, unaware of even the possibility of being watched or marvelled at.

I make my way down to the beach, the rocks sliding beneath my feet so that I move as much sideways as forwards. I imagine what it
would be like were I in flight from something or someone while those rocks slid crazily about, or in hopeless pursuit of something or someone far better able than me to navigate this surface. I picture myself falling and getting up, fighting with my cane to keep my balance.

I see, between the first growth of alders and the last tier of beach rocks, a strip of grass less than a foot wide and decide that, despite its narrowness, it is preferable to these rocks. Vowing that, on the way back, I will find the path that I know must lead from Patrick’s house to the rest of Loreburn, I walk as though on a tight rope, one hand grabbing leafless alders, one on the knob of my cane, until I reach the cart road at the bottom of the hill of houses.