The Custodian of Paradise (41 page)

On a day in late October when everyone but him must have known that the first storm of the winter was imminent, a Sunday afternoon, he knocked on the door of Twelve Mile House.

I had been trying to nap, and getting up, peeked out through my bedroom curtains. There he was. I might not have recognized him had I not known that he was coming.

In New York, where he had seemed nothing more than skin and bones, he must have weighed twice what he did now. He was hatless, his balding head browned and blistered from whatever sun there had been the past two months. There was so little flesh on his face that the tip of his normally pointed nose curved inward like a beak.

He wore exactly what he’d been wearing when I saw him last. That threadbare Norfolk jacket, which it would not surprise me thirty years from now to hear that he was buried in. A once-white shirt whose buttonholes were joined with twine. Tweed trousers that flapped like sails behind him. The soles of his boots were entirely detached and tied to them like skate blades.

He wore about his neck a strange contraption, something like I’d seen cigarette-girls wearing in New York, except that he carried not cigarettes but a battered suitcase on which rested a large book with ribbons hanging from the edge of its spine, unmistakably a Bible.

The old man at Eleven Mile House would not have sent him on to me if he thought the storm was soon to start. So I decided not to answer the door. It would take Smallwood half an hour at the most to walk to Thirteen Mile House, where they were sure to take him in.

Stepping back from the curtains, I listened until he stopped knocking, then peered out again to see him plodding, shoulders hunched, down the tracks.

He need never know that I was here. Or, if one of the others told him about me, we could easily avoid each other. I lay down again and closed my eyes. I was sure he wanted to encounter me no more than I did him.

I was thinking of our last moments together at Hotel Newfoundland when I heard what might have been a battery of hens pecking at my kitchen window. I swung off my bunk and looked out through the curtains. In the fifteen minutes since Smallwood had knocked on my door, the storm had not only begun but closed in so that I could see nothing but white outside. A great gust of wind shook the shack.

I hastily put on my work clothes, and over them a seaman’s coat that an old man at Six Mile House had leant me.

I took off my boots, pulled on my Wellingtons, wrapped a scarf around my neck.

The trolley was parked outside the shacks, on a set of siderails from which it was easy to push it on to the main track.

At the last moment, I remembered the snow bell. It hung above my door inside the shack, a length of rope attached to it that was tied to a hook outside, above the door.

I unhooked the rope, made my way across the track and tied the rope to a tree, knotting it several times. The rope at knee height, I tested it, pushing it with my leg until I heard the gonging of the bell. Then I set out on the trolley to find Smallwood.

He will go to his grave thinking it was me who rescued him.

It
was
me who dragged him from the bunk. He was alternating between delirium and complete unconsciousness. I dragged out the tub in which I took my baths and, cramming the stove with coal, filled every metal receptacle I had with water from my indoor pump. I poured the boiling water, as well as some cold, into the tub until it was about half full. Then I went to the bunk, hurriedly removed Smallwood’s clothes and carried him to the tub.

He was limp but far from heavy in my arms, all bone blades and tips, a skin-sack of bones that seemed to rattle when he breathed.

He stirred slightly as I lowered him into the water, but his eyes remained closed. I arranged his arms so that he hung by his armpits in the tub, his head tilted back and resting on one of the handles.

His body was like that of some just-liberated prisoner of war. Sixty pounds at most, I guessed. I had seen throats like his in the San, all sinew and Adam’s apple, the throats of men deemed beyond help by the doctors.

As I smoothed his long hair back from his forehead, I looked down and through the steam saw bobbing just above the surface the one boneless part of him. The pink tip of it anyway, buoyed up by the water. It looked like a closed, hairless eye, a sleeping Cyclops.

Not exactly Penis Rampant. Penis Reticent. Penis Oblivious. It sounded like the Latin name for something. I added more hot water to the tub.

“You were singing.”

“Singing what?”

“‘The Ode to Newfoundland.’”

“I thought I was a goner.”

“Me too. Both of us. Until I heard the bell.”

“Who taught you that?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been here so long I don’t remember.”

It was three days since his rescue. He was soon to leave, ignoring my protest that, despite the fast-melting snow, he was in no condition to continue with this mission of his.

“Nearly there,” he said. “I can’t quit now.”

Three days. He had begun eating after the first day. Fried potatoes and trout.

I told him about my illness and my time at the San. He tried not to look at my boot or notice as I limped around the shack.

Each of us was taken aback by how much the other had changed. I was only twenty-seven. He was twenty-six.

He asked me what I was playing at, being poor or being a man.

I let him think I performed the duties of a sectionman.

He derisively called “my” letter to the
Morning Post
a masterpiece. I merely looked at him, waiting to play my trump card.

When I told him I would not join his union, all he did was smirk.

“I was here,” I said. “In this shack. The day of the storm. I saw you knocking on the door. I decided I would let you perish. But something changed my mind.”

“What?”

I shrugged. “I told myself that I should at least do as much for you as I would for a total stranger.”

“Guilt.”

“Don’t mention it. You would have done the same for me. For the same reasons.”

I left the shack for a few hours. He was gone when I got back.

Even attempting to find him would not have been possible if not for the railway tracks and the trolley car. I could not even see the car from the shack.

There was nothing on the Bonavista bigger than a stunted spruce to impede the snow and wind, the former just dry enough to drift like sand, the latter, which had been a light westerly breeze when I looked out the window, now howling from the northeast, the gusts against my back sending me stumbling forward, arms extended lest there be some unseen obstacle in front of me.

I felt the upward slope of the railbed beneath my feet and slowly climbed, keeping myself from sliding backwards by grabbing clumps of grass with my gloved hands. Once I crested the bed, I stopped and looked about, hoping a momentary lull in the wind might reveal the trolley car.

But there
was
no lull, so, guessing that the car was on my left, I headed east and tripped over the snow-bell rope, causing the bell above the door of Twelve Mile House to clang. I grabbed the rope with one hand, as I should have done upon last leaving the shack, and walked forward, hoping to find the trolley before I used up all the slack.

I found it by banging my bad knee against it. The pain was such that I fell to both knees and would have fallen prostrate had I not remembered the trolley, which I grabbed with one hand a fraction of a second before I would have hit the wheel face first.

I paused to let the pain subside, wondering how much damage I had done to my leg, afraid to feel it to see if it was broken.

What I had thought was the wind was the sound of my breath, magnified by my scarf as though I were wearing a snorkel. I was alarmed by how rapid and shallow my breathing was and, in a moment of panic, almost pulled off the scarf as if, without it, my breathing would return to normal. I felt as though I were immersed in the sounds of my own body and doubted I could rescue anyone or even preserve my own life in such a state.

I struggled to my feet and was relieved to find that my left leg held my weight as well as ever. Without my corrective boot with its thick heel, my gait was even more lopsided, almost as if I were wearing but one shoe and the other foot was bare.

My hand still on the trolley, I managed to compose myself and, feeling about the machine with both hands, found the steps. I climbed up, sat down and groped about until I had hold of the crank, whose handles, when the car was stationary, were always upright.

I pulled down with all my strength and felt the car begin to move.

Smallwood, after he got no answer at my shack, had continued east towards Thirteen Mile House, which meant I would have to drive almost straight into the wind. But at least, I told myself, I know which way to go.

I continued cranking the handle until I felt the trolley glide in a semicircle, then right itself on the main track.

Surely no trains would have been dispatched, with a storm so obviously on its way. Or any that had been dispatched were certain to be stalled somewhere.

I pulled harder on the crank. I could not hear the wheels, the grinding and squeaking of which were usually audible a mile away, but I felt the trolley moving and a corresponding increase in the wind against my face.

How would I find Smallwood? The most I could hope for was that he was keeping to the tracks and I would collide with him, or
that he had laid down on the track and the wheels of the trolley would bring up solid against him without doing him serious injury.

One mile from my house to Thirteen Mile House. I prayed that the man in Thirteen Mile House had strung his snow bell across the tracks. You were supposed to do it for the sake of others who might somehow have lost their way. If I reached Thirteen Mile, rang the snow bell without having found Smallwood, I would knock on the door. And hopefully find Smallwood safely inside, holding forth to the family about God knows what.

What a strange congress that would be. An unprecedented gathering for the inhabitants of Thirteen Mile House. Twelve Mile Sheilagh and the esteemed unionizer himself arriving on the same day, in all likelihood staying overnight or even longer. Me arriving at the door clad like a sectionman. The first time Smallwood had seen me since New York.

I kept cranking the handle, but slowed down in case I should overtake him. I braced myself for the surprise of a collision, not that I expected an especially jarring one, given Smallwood’s height and weight. It was possible, if he lay down lengthwise between the rails, that I would run right over him without knowing it.

My arms weary, I let them drop to my sides, thinking it would do no harm to rest. The chill in my belly that I had been feeling lately was more pronounced than ever. It was as though I had just finished drinking a glass of ice water, a prospect that, despite my circumstances, appealed to me.

I felt my inner clothing begin to cool against my skin, though my face was hot. Wondering if I was feverish again, I was tempted to remove my scarf and feel the wind and snow on my forehead and my cheeks, hear something other than my breath, something other than my heartbeat, which was still thudding in my head.

Flecks of sleet pinged off the trolley wheels. I hoped for a while that the snow would change to rain but then remembered that there had been sleet when the storm first started.

If anything, there was less of it now, a thought that so disheartened me I thought I would be sick.

I heard a voice, wind-borne, somewhere up ahead, seemingly far
distant. It was, as unlikely as it seemed, that of someone singing, the pitch and volume rising and falling, though the melody was either elusive or that of some song I didn’t know.

Who else could it be but Smallwood? Hopefully not some ’shine-inspired sectionman belting out a shanty in the doorway of his shack, one so drunk and spellbound by the storm that he had forgotten to play the snow bell out across the tracks.

Enlivened by guilt, I pumped the crank faster, coasting now and then to listen. The voice, though still audible, seemed not to have grown any louder.

He might be singing to fight off despair or the urge to lie down in the snow and go to sleep, singing to focus his mind.

I marvelled that he was able to sing, able to summon sufficient breath to make himself heard above the storm.

I could not call out to him for the wind was in my face and would blow away from Smallwood whatever sound I managed to make.

Back to cranking the trolley.

I was more exhausted than I’d been on my worst days in the San. I dropped my arms to my sides again and let my head drop to my chest, telling myself that I was resting, that I had not given up, and that once I caught my breath and regained my strength, I would resume the pumping of the crank.

I raised my head when I heard the voice again—or
a
voice, at least, not singing this time but speaking, and much closer.

Its owner, it seemed, was directly in front of me. I pulled the brake on the trolley and said, “SMALLWOOD. SMALLWOOD, IT’S ME, FIELDING. WALK THE WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING. LET THE WIND TAKE YOU TOWARDS ME.”

“NOOOO!” A protest. A refusal to be misled, to be drawn towards the siren voice of this projection of his mind. It was a mistake to have identified myself.

“WALK TOWARDS ME,” I shouted. “DON’T RUN AWAY. WALK TOWARDS ME OR STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”

“NOOOO.”

Without considering the folly of it, I got down from the trolley, limping badly, my unsupported left leg giving way with each step as though its foot were asleep, pain shooting up my thigh into my hip where the bone was most attenuated by my illness.

Even hobbled as I was, it took me no time to overtake him. I saw him the instant before I would have collided with him. He was hatless, his head white like that of a hooded hawk. There was no sign of his suitcase, though the rope from which it had hung was still looped about his neck.

He was ill prepared for the weather, not even wearing gloves. I grabbed the neck collar of his jacket, at which he struggled with such fury to free himself that he pulled us both over the side of the railway bed, the two of us tumbling in tandem as I wrapped my arms around his skinny frame.