The Custodian of Paradise (40 page)

These mock spells earn me disapproving looks of consternation from their mothers, who seem unsure of my intentions.

Their names are David and Sarah
. Their birthday is April
17,1927
. They have had eleven birthdays. I have celebrated eleven times.

Each April 17, for eleven years, including one here at the section shack, I have thrown a one-woman party. Twice in the San when I was barely able to move.

How strange it was in New York, wondering what they might be doing, what their birthday wishes were. What sort of party they were having. What gifts my mother gave them. And what went through her mind as they unwrapped them.

Do they each make a wish and blow the candles out together? Or is there a cake for each of them?

Here in the shack I
made
a cake and gave anyone who visited a piece. Told them I was celebrating
my
birthday. By midnight, more than half of it was left so I threw it in the fire. Happy Birthday, David and Sarah.

I look at my cane. The last birthday present my mother gave me. The only one I still have.

What, on
my
birthday, does my mother do? May 22. There have been eleven of those since they were born. All it ever seems appropriate to do is wish them well. Best wishes
to you both on this
my
special day. Here’s to you. One last drink. And may it be tomorrow when I wake.

Every Sunday, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, the church caboose goes by. The sectioners line the tracks to receive the blessing of one of the clergy on board.

Priests, ministers, pastors all stand side by side and, according to the denomination of each section shack, one of them makes, from the slow-coasting train, the sign of the cross.

I always watch from my doorway as they pass Twelve Mile House. The first couple of times, one of them shouted, “What are you?” meaning what denomination, but my lack of reply discouraged him. Now the riders of the church caboose go past my house in silence, staring down at me with disapproval.

The one good, lasting side effect of my illness is that I seem to have developed an immunity to hangovers. All I feel upon waking is hunger, though my weight remains the same or even decreases no matter how much I eat. “It’s a good sign, that appetite of yours,” one of the men who comes to visit and who can spot a drinker at a glance tells me.

I climb the ladder on the side of my shack, pull a rocking chair tied to a length of rope up after me, and sometimes sit out rocking on the roof and drinking until early in the morning, nodding off in the chair and waking to the sound of chirping birds, the sky faintly blue, the Bonavista dimly visible for miles.

My rocking chair, about which I walk from time to time, following the doctors’ orders not to remain seated for too long, my “ginger beer” bottles and my lamp, because of the glow from which I cannot see as far as the edges of the roof-—I must make quite a sight to anyone watching from the nearest section shack.

I sometimes hear footsteps in the gravel between the rail ties, but though I say hello no one answers.

My first thought, the first time I heard them, was that it was some man who, wondering if I wanted “company,” lacked the nerve to declare himself. Or changed his mind. Or else was flummoxed by my being on the roof.

But after the footsteps went by, receded into silence, they returned minutes later from the other direction, this time stopping right in front of my shack.

“Who’s there?” I said. Whoever it was had no lantern, no light by which to navigate the tracks and keep from stumbling on the ties. There was no answer but neither did the footsteps continue. I felt certain I was being stared at by someone who knew that, because they were outside the circle of light from my lantern, I couldn’t see them. I grabbed the lantern and turned the flame down low, just short of extinguishing it. But my eyes, accustomed to the light, could make out nothing in the darkness.

The footsteps, the sound of boots crunching on the crushed stone between the ties, resumed. Unhurriedly. Almost lazily, as if my unseen companion wished to make it clear that it was not because I challenged him that he was moving on.

I remind myself it could be anyone.

One sectionman visiting another. Men who know the tracks so well they do not need a light, men who do not wish to disturb others who are sleeping. Men buying or selling or drinking juneshine. Better to do it out here than in front of disapproving wives and impressionable children.

But always, on the way back up the track, the footsteps stop when they draw even with my shack. Whoever it is sometimes stands there for minutes, staring, I am certain, at me, at my shack, my window. As if the shack was once his and I displaced him from it.

Lately I have been turning off the lamp and waiting for
him. I hear the footsteps at a different time each night. Anytime from just after dark to just before sunrise.

No pattern. Most nights I do not hear them at all. Again, no pattern. Not every other night, or every third night. I might have to live in darkness for weeks to catch a glimpse of him.

And lately, too, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been hearing things, so irresistible is the notion that my Provider followed me from New York, and from the San. That the footsteps I hear are those of his delegate, the same man, both brazen and elusive, who in New York was my protector.

My Provider. My protector. I know it is absurd that any man would or could go to such lengths, undetected, to follow me.

In the San, the other patients told me that, in my delirium dreams I often spoke of my Provider. By Provider they thought I meant God, thought I was praying, beseeching God to sustain me through my illness or, if his Plan was otherwise, to have mercy on my soul. “Faith is a wonderful thing,” Nurse Nell said.

“What did I say about my Provider?” I asked her.

“You speak like you’re afraid of Him, as you should be,” Nurse Nell said. “You ask Him questions. You ask Him for advice. You ask Him what He wants from you. You tell Him you know He would not hurt His children.”

There are no crowds here among which to blend in as he, as they, did in Manhattan. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone but me has lived along these tracks for years.

From coast to coast the railway runs and so do the section shacks. A community six hundred miles long and fifty feet wide. Impossible to infiltrate.

I went up on the roof again tonight despite the cold.

He stopped directly opposite my shack. I tried to provoke him into saying something.

“Lovely evening for a walk. I suppose you don’t need a light if you know how far it is between the ties. How fast do you think you could go without tripping and falling down? There must be others who share my curiosity, depending on how far you walk, how many shacks you pass.

“You must wonder what I’m doing up here. I’m not the walker I used to be, but I still like it outdoors. And there’s nothing out here flat enough to rock on but this roof.

“I use the trolley if I have to travel far. You’ve probably seen me going by your shack. It’s not hard once you get it going, is it?”

Nothing.

“That’s all right, don’t say a word. Your silence speaks volumes. More people like you, that’s what we need. If more people went out walking after dark, staring into other people’s windows, the world would be a better place. But try telling that to people who insist that a visit is not a visit unless you see their face and each person goes through the motions of answering when spoken to.

“Well, they can have what they call their ‘conversations.’ Me, I prefer to be stared at in silence by someone lurking in the darkness while I speak.

“Do you do this at every shack or only mine? Every shack, I dare say. That would explain the rifle shots I hear some nights. Have the sectionmen been shooting at you? Most of them are all right, but there’s the occasional crank who objects to being spied on by strangers after midnight. Don’t let their kind discourage you, though. What odds if some trigger-happy sectionman shoots you dead some night? More people like you willing to sacrifice everything for a worthwhile cause, that’s what we need.”

Still nothing. He’d never stopped for so long before. I thought I could hear him breathing.

“You do realize, do you, that you may have to share
these tracks with a train from time to time? You deserve to leave something more behind than a stain on a cowcatcher or to have the only words you ever spoke, an exclamation of surprise or even an expletive, drowned out by a ten-ton locomotive.”

A sniff that might have been a kind of laugh. I had the feeling that if I screamed and shouted for help he wouldn’t speak or move.

“I’ve been courted by shyer and slyer men than you, so if it’s a date you’re looking for, there’s no need to feel ashamed. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I asked a man one time. He said many a cat had had his tongue. But he used a synonym for cat. I forget what it was. So what’s got your tongue? Perhaps you have an eye for a finely turned orthopaedic boot. Some men do, you know.”

No sectionman would stand there, listening to this.

Might he be in the habit of coming down the Bonavista on the train? And going back by train? Somehow, somewhere debarking and reboarding, though there were no scheduled stops anywhere near my shack.

At last, as if he had grown tired of my rant, he began to walk away, his only acknowledgment of my soliloquy being that he seemed to kick the gravel and send a spray of stones ahead of him that pinged off the iron rails.

When I could no longer hear the sound of his footsteps, I climbed down from the roof and, in my haste to get indoors, left the rocking chair behind. The wind came up later that night and I heard the empty chair rocking slowly back and forth on the roof above my bed.

No amount of Scotch could convince me to go outside and climb up on the roof to get the chair or make me so oblivious to the rocking on the roof that I could get to sleep.

I took the chair down at first light and will never again go up on the roof.

I have asked my visitors and neighbours if they have heard the footsteps on the tracks at night, and got all sorts of responses. One woman admonished me not to ask such things in front of children, though there were no children around when I asked.

The old men who come to visit seem mystified by my question. No one has ever encountered my “ghost,” which I fear is how he is now being spoken of.

I’m told that no one visits the shacks on either side of mine at night, since such a visit would involve at least a two-mile walk in the cold. Certainly no one without a light would venture out.

I believe my questions have enhanced my already considerable reputation for oddness and eccentricity. I am looked upon as the tall, lame, cane-wielding woman who lives by herself and, perhaps because of her fondness for drink, is given to hearing things at night.