The Custodian of Paradise (45 page)

It was something I could imagine my mother doing, she who had abandoned me when I was six. It might all be true. My Provider had once been a priest. Father Thomas. But that was not what he meant when he said that I had been twice fathered.

How could
any
stranger not attract notice or altogether avoid detection on the Bonavista. But
this
man—this man would be the talk of St. John’s within hours of arriving there. Yet he had often been there, had lived in that house on Patrick Street for weeks at least, who knew for how long. Yet there had never been talk of him.

It seemed inconceivable, all the more so out here. Not even if this blizzard had been raging since my first day on the Bonavista could he have concealed himself so perfectly. I had overheard nothing, been told nothing, about him. Had not, as I surely would have been if anyone had seen him, been warned about him by the older men.

Two
strangers somehow escaping notice on the Bonavista,
two
men no one knew keeping company out here where the appearance of an unclaimed dog was the talk of the section shacks.

Yet he had written as if no explanations were necessary.

Bitterness towards my mother lingered in his letter despite what he called the “restoration” of his life.

I thought of how my father would have greeted the sight of him, at last a man tall enough to be my
real
father, a man whose height and presence in St. John’s my father would be certain bore out his suspicions.

He and his delegate removed my clothes. They must have put me on the bed. Two men undressing me, raising my arms above my head, pulling off my dress and then my slip and underwear.

The massive fingers of the man who rescued me and lifted me from the snow as if I were a child fumbling with the buttons of my slip. The two of them working—how?—frantically, methodically, in silence or whispering instructions to each other, lest they wake me?

And what if I had woken? Why would it have mattered if I saw their faces, given how unlikely I was to see them again unless they wished me to?

How he held my wrists when I tried to remove the mask. Not just so that he would not perish in the storm, not just so that he could breathe and thereby rescue me. As if he were playfully testing my strength.

Two men brought together by war. It sounded as if they could not have been more unalike. One close to seven feet tall, with shoulders more than a doorway wide. The other? Featureless. A man about my mother’s age, I guessed.

Two pairs of hands undressing me, though I could imagine only one. Two men who saw my body as no one had seen it since the San, as no one but the nurses at the San, not Prowse, not the doctors or my father, have ever seen it.

The man he calls his delegate must have held me in his arms while I was naked and put me in the washtub while my Provider saw to the disposition of my parts, my torso, my arms and legs, arranged me in a swoon-like pose while the other, perhaps in one hand, cupped my head.

How tenderly, almost lovingly, he wrote about my body.

I have no idea where they could have gone to in this storm.

The trolley is on the tracks in front of the section shack.

They would not strike out like that, in a storm at night, without a plan, with no expectation of survival.
He
would not.

The one who saved me could carry an ordinary man on his back for miles. Perhaps, farther up or down the tracks, the storm is not so bad.

No evidence remains that they were here. I have hidden the letter. Wiped the floor so that Smallwood, if he lives, will not see those giant bootprints. Outside, their footprints have long since been filled in by the snow.

Smallwood is gone. It seemed for a while that those words might have a different meaning.

Gone. Dead. His body cold beneath those blankets. His mouth open in mid-breath.

For two days and two nights, I heard, even above the roaring of the wind, a sound like someone slowly drawing a shovel back and forth on cobblestones. Air scraping through his throat and lungs as he inhaled, then a long, suspenseful pause when it seemed his body could not bear to breathe it out, could not endure the scraping of it back against the grain, the withdrawal from his body of something it was too thin to contain.

I once weighed more than twice what he does, for most of my life ate better, lived in comfort while he lived in squalor. And it was me who came down with an illness that left me lame and him who
walked
across the island.

But it seemed, these past two days, that however long overdue it was, his turn had come.

I could not sleep because of that sound, at once hating it and dreading its cessation, covering my ears, then straining until I heard that ghastly, reassuring rattle.

I assumed he had pneumonia and I knew, from years of listening to my father note the chances of his patients, that it was almost always fatal. I kept getting up and putting cold compresses on his forehead, having no idea what effect, if any, they were having.

On the pillow in which his head made almost no impression there was a halo of perspiration. I told myself that, if he survived, it would be thirty years before he looked this old again.

But I was certain beyond hope that he would die. And I was for the first time certain, too, that I still loved him, though I could
think of no one thing about him that appealed to me, no discrete characteristic or even mannerism that I found attractive, let alone irresistible. It was the sum of him I loved for which no description but “Smallwood” would suffice, as none but “Fielding” would suffice for me.

At some point I fell asleep and woke to, perhaps was woken by, silence as startling as a clap of thunder. The wind had dropped, but I could not hear Smallwood.

I scrambled out of bed and to his room. He was, I saw instantly, sleeping deeply, the blankets wrapped round him, his chest rising and falling.

He was recognizably himself. In his face, even though his eyes were closed, there was that look of optimism that is as unwarranted as it is unassailable, that look because of which he is taken by so many for a fool, but a likeable one, because people find hilarious the degree to which his expectations exceed his prospects.

I bent over him and kissed him on the forehead.

The silence that woke me did not last long. It was merely the wind changing the way it did the night the sealers died.

I backed out of Smallwood’s room.

Smallwood is gone.

He saw me from his bedroom and thought he was hallucinating. Even after I satisfied him that he wasn’t, he went on looking at me with astonishment. I explained what I was doing there and told him I knew of his walk across the island.

He presumed that I had rescued him and I let him think I had. He did not thank me, looked more resentful than grateful because I had put him in debt to me. As if he would rather have died than owe me his life. When I spurned his offer to make me a member of his union, he shook his head.

“Even the women who make the tar have joined,” he said. The “tar ladies,” they are called. Brigades of women who, for next to nothing, brew the tar with which the men paint the ties to keep them from rotting, dipping their long-handled brushes into the
cauldronlike tar cars from which blue smoke rises in a plume that can be seen and smelled for miles.

I didn’t tell him that, occasionally, I was conscripted into one of these brigades and became reluctantly a tar lady.

We traded insults in the same petulant manner as on our last encounter in New York. I layered mine in irony so thick that he was mystified, which further incited him.

I fed him rabbit and potatoes, which he ate somehow both ravenously and begrudgingly, his expression saying that the least I could do was feed him.

Momentarily losing my temper, I told him that I had been in the shack when he first knocked.

I saw him glance at my orthopaedic boot from time to time.

“I’d rather wear this than those,” I said, pointing at his ragged shoes, the soles of which were hanging from the insteps by lengths of string. “I wear this because my right leg won’t stop growing. They say the heel will have to be three feet high by the time I’m forty. My father says he will stop short of nothing to make me taller. ‘I will go to any lengths to make you grow to any length.’ How lucky you are with two legs the same length. The same as one of mine, I mean.

“My father, when I told him how much I liked the San, would not hear of me relinquishing my hard-won independence.

“‘We can’t have you readmitted to the San,’ he said. ‘I made inquiries, and the doctors mumbled something about a raving villain vivisecting a conniver. Or perhaps it was the gravely ill and reinfecting a survivor. At any rate, if it’s a shack on the Bonavista you want, then it’s a shack on the Bonavista you shall have. I don’t care if it leaves me penniless.’ Or maybe he said
‘with
a penny less.’ I’m not sure.

“And about my choosing the Bonavista he either said he would ‘miss the cut and thrust of our debates,’ or ‘amidst cut-throats and reprobates.’ But at any rate, he pulled some strings and here I am.”

He sniffed.

“You are not half the man you were when you were half the size you should have been,” I said.

He must have seen by my face that I was summing up his prospects. He looked at my leg, my boot as though to say, Who are you to take a dim view of someone else’s future?

“Fielding,” he had called me. Not since I had moved into the section shack had anyone called me that. On the Bonavista I was “Miss” to everyone.

“Fielding” brought back to me, as not even the presence in the shack of Smallwood himself had done, my inevitable return to St. John’s, the resumption of my life.

“Still drinking,” he said, again looking at my boot as if to say how typical of me that I had failed to learn my lesson, how typical that I was still drinking in spite of the harm it had done me, perversely persisting in a vice that had left me lame.

I felt, as he looked at me, that I was a fate that he had narrowly escaped, that he could not credit his former fondness for me, that it mystified him how he could ever have mistaken me for anything other than what I so obviously was. Perhaps, I thought, this is how my Provider felt when he found that note from my mother on his pillow.