The Custodian of Paradise (6 page)

In St. John’s, far from having stayed indoors on nights when the weather was bad, I had stayed out longer than usual, walked farther, the feeling of having the city to myself, which I relished, being heightened because streets that on clear nights were almost deserted were completely so on nights when there were storms. On rainy, windy nights,
I would stop and look downhill to survey what I could make out of the city. I composed my column in my head as I slashed my way through snowdrifts with my cane. Everywhere there was the sifting sound of snow on snow, the wind howling high above me, the real storm raging up there unimpeded by houses and trees. I heard the ocean in it, the wind still blowing as it had a hundred miles from land. The clacking of what might have been branches brittle from the cold. Dead leaves and twigs raining down, then being carried off or buried by the storm.

There were no large trees in Loreburn like there were in St. John’s, no oak, maple, ash, chestnut, planted a hundred years ago to replace the stunted spruce, to disguise the barrens by which St. John’s was still enclosed.

Someone in a pseudonymous letter to the editor had written of my habit of working by night and sleeping by day: “While others man the brigade, she sleeps through the conflagration of the day and goes out at night to kick through the ashes, to find out what has fed the flames, to turn up with her cane the words of her column, which she lugs home like a scavenger.” It wasn’t bad. I suspected its author to be an assistant to one of the archbishops, or else a politician, someone afraid of provoking me into making them a special target in my column.

I had never been able to write while sitting at a desk, nor without saying the words aloud. Sometimes I walked about the city at night, spoke whole sentences as if reading from a book. I often startled passersby at night when, having paused in some dark and public place to concentrate, I suddenly resumed my declamation. My unintended victims would gasp “Blessed God” or something like it, then hurry away, looking furtively behind them. I would mutter “Sorry” distractedly and then, to reassure them, set off at a purposeful pace in the opposite direction.

I sometimes gestured with my cane as though writing the words in mid-air. And so unsuspecting walkers were likewise terrified by the sudden appearance in front of them of my gesticulating cane, thrusting out from a darkened doorway. I had once knocked a man’s
hat clean off his head. I was recognized, sometimes by people who had heard of me but never seen me, a mere description being enough, for who else could it fit but Sheilagh Fielding? “What are you doing, woman?” people said. “You must be mad. You’re a danger to yourself and others, a public menace is what you are, a public menace.”

It was commonly believed that I went out walking at night because of my limp, because I couldn’t stand people gawking at my cumbersome boot. I
had
been self-conscious upon first leaving the San. The first time I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I was shocked by the sight of this weirdly moving mechanism that from now on would be me. How light, how graceful my good leg looked and felt because of its partner’s leaden clumsiness.

What struck others most, I think, was the incongruousness of a woman of my size being hobbled by a limp, the conjunction of superabundance and deficiency. I believe they thought my height and my limp were somehow connected, both proceeding from the same flaw in my nature.

When I could put it off no longer, I tried to sleep. For days, I had done little more than doze for widely separated intervals of minutes.

But sleep, as had been the case since my mother left my father and me when I was six, would not come.

I went outdoors, leaving the shotgun behind, figuring that to carry both it and my cane would be a nuisance. I followed the path from Patrick’s house along the edge of the beach towards the others.

The town was flanked by meadows. In the one on my side of Loreburn, I saw the wild dogs that Patrick had warned me about. Or one pack of them. He hadn’t said how many packs there were. I watched through my lorgnette as they skirted the edge of the woods in mass pursuit of some small game, a rabbit I guessed, the whole pack weaving in unison. I could only infer the rabbit’s course from that of the dogs and the furrow of commotion in the grass. The rabbit, perhaps only to conceal itself long enough to catch its breath, perhaps to fool the dogs into thinking it had got away, stopped. The dogs did likewise, falling silent.
They sat back on their haunches, waiting, scrawny chests heaving, scattered randomly on the hillside. They were beagle-like mongrels, all ribs and legs and gapped, scrawny fur as if they were slowly being blown bald by the wind. They ignored the horses, who returned the favour, paying them no more attention while they grazed on the hill above the houses than they did the ceaseless screeching of the seagulls overhead. And then, abruptly, the whole thing started up again as the rabbit, having regained its breath or lost its nerve, took flight.

Surely the dogs were aware by this time of my presence on the island. But perhaps Patrick stayed often enough in the house that they found its being occupied unremarkable.

There were, at least, fifteen of them and only one of me, whose limp and laboured movement I had no doubt they would quickly notice. I decided it was wise to be afraid of them and vowed never to venture this far from the house without the gun again.

I would never know the outcome of their pursuit. They went off into the woods, still yelping, which I took as a hopeful sign for the rabbit.

I half-expected to see, on the beach some morning, people who, like their pets and horses, had taken to the woods, descended from a handful that had stayed behind after the Loreburn experiment had failed. A pack of feral people.

I had discovered in the archives that in 1860 the island had been settled by three families, three couples, each of whom had brought three children with them who over the years had married each other and married into families from elsewhere. The population had peaked at forty-five.

There were seventeen gravesites in the yard beside the church, some marked by headstones, some by wooden crosses, some by stones laid flat that had sunk into the earth and been overgrown by grass.

At one end of the yard, halfway between the church and fence, stood a plain stone cross, the largest by far of all the monuments, marking the gravesite of Samuel Loreburn, “fisherman and minister.”
All the other upright markers were engraved on their west-facing sides, most brightly lit near sunset, while his was engraved on the side facing east, facing the sunrise, the daily resurrection that he alone was allowed to see. In death, he still presided over his congregation of relatives. All day, all night, through all the seasons of the year for years on end, the dead of Loreburn attended in silence to his silent sermon. I imagined them all lying there with their hands behind their heads, staring at his inscription as though it were the key to their salvation. Inscryption was more like it:
HERE LIES SAMUEL LOREBURN, A GOOD MAN WITH MANY FAULTS WHO FAILED HIS PEOPLE AND HIS GOD AS ALL MEN MUST
.

At some point every day, no matter what the weather, the horses zigzagged in single file down the slope of Loreburn, winding their way among the houses, forgoing the steeper shortcuts for the road, like animals being slowly led or herded towards some destination. They made their slow, unmistakably habitual descent, plodding purposefully, headed somewhere that must have been easiest to reach by this route, paying the houses no more attention than they did other inanimate obstacles like trees and rocks. At the bottom, still in single file, they left Loreburn by an opening in the woods, a path that I made up my mind, in spite of Patrick’s advice, to follow some day.

After being informed of David’s death, but before receiving the notebooks from Sarah, I had half-hoped, half-dreaded that I would hear from her. In the days after the one on which I learned of David’s death, I went to the post office frequently. I could think of nothing else but hearing from his grief-stricken sister that might make my own grief more bearable.

Though I had yet to use the party-line phone in the basement of the boarding house to either make or receive a call, I taped a note to the wall beside it saying that Sheilagh Fielding, of Room 37, was expecting a call that might come “at any time of any day.” It doesn’t matter, I told myself, that, if Sarah calls, I will have to maintain the pretence that we are sisters. Contact with her of some kind, an acknowledgment from
Sarah of the existence of a blood relative named Sheilagh Fielding, might be of some help.

I thought of contacting her myself, finding out where she lived and trying to reach her by phone—and commiserating with her about the death of our “brother.” But I doubted that I would be able to maintain my self-control, resist breaking down and blurting out the truth at what would surely be the worst possible time.

I dreaded
that
more than I hoped that Sarah, by seeking me out, might alleviate my grief, more than I hoped that after that first letter or phone call, we would keep in touch and the Sarah of my imagination would at last be real.

But Sarah had not contacted me. Nor I Sarah.

My fifth night on Loreburn, while I was staring at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, I decided that I would try to read my journals and to fill in the many blanks, the gaps in my story that had occurred when I could not bring myself to write or was physically unable to. And what for so long had proved impossible was no longer so. For nights and days on end, while it rained or was so foggy that I dared not leave the house for fear of getting hurt or lost, I read and wrote to the point of exhaustion, pausing only to sleep fitfully on the kitchen bed. I wrote what follows at one sitting:

I was fifteen when my father booked passage for the two of us on a ship whose ports of call before New York were Halifax and Boston. We would travel together, though for weeks he hadn’t spoken to me except when the conveyance of information made it absolutely necessary. Doubtless he was concerned with how it would look if he did not go with me. His sister had died a few years ago. There was no one he could trust with our secret, no one who could be his delegate and my chaperone on this journey to New York, make sure I did not debark in Halifax or Boston or blurt out my secret to someone on the ship.

“Sheilagh’s going to see her mother,” he told the many people on the waterfront who knew him, some of whom were his patients and
a few of whom would be our fellow passengers to Halifax. I felt sorry for him as he moved about in uncharacteristic conviviality, talking to anyone who would listen about this ex-wife of his he had spoken to no one about in years. The measure of how embarrassed they were to be reminded of it could be read in their faces and the looks they exchanged when he moved on from one group to another.

I stood wordlessly beside him in the first-class queue, a full head taller than him and almost everyone else, craving the inconspicuous-ness of other girls my age but also wishing I could bring myself to help him carry off this charade. How unprecedented it would have been for me to look around and smile excitedly and earnestly at the prospect of anything, let alone that of visiting my long-absent mother. But I couldn’t help thinking that the women who were there could somehow tell that I was pregnant just by looking at my face, my pallor, by a certain something about my carriage or my amplitude that men could not detect. I was terrified of meeting the gaze of any woman for fear that my eyes would betray my secret.

Also, I had, a month before, been expelled from Bishop Spencer School. All that was known publicly was that I had admitted to writing an infamous, mischief-making letter. The anonymous letter had been sent to the editor of a newspaper about the poor conditions prevalent in the dormitories at Spencer’s brother school, Bishop Feild.

My admission was false. The real author of the letter was my father, who had written it in such a way that the blame had fallen on a boy named Smallwood, who I had told my father was the one who made me pregnant. I had guessed correctly that, because Smallwood came from such a notoriously poor family, my father would never confront him or them demanding satisfaction, a hastily arranged marriage that would save his and his daughter’s reputation. But I could not bring myself to let Smallwood take the blame for what my father had done. Or to tell my father that I knew that he had written the letter.

Doubtless there were people on the waterfront who felt sorry for my father for having been scandalized, first by his wife, and now by his daughter, who perhaps even admired him for shouldering their
reputations, pitied him the mortification of this scene that he was so transparently staging. I hoped that someone, anyone, thought well of him, no matter what the implication of that might be for me.

Not long after the ship cleared the Narrows, my laying-in began. I became sick, though whether from the rolling of the sea or the baby inside me I wasn’t sure. I imagined the water in which the baby was immersed rising and falling in sympathy with the motion of the sea, the little vessel bobbing up and down, sinking as the ship rose, rising as it sank. Though my father said it would make me feel better, I would not let myself throw up, for I could not imagine surviving such a convulsion. Nor could I, when I closed my eyes, see anything but that slowly bobbing baby whose eyes, in the heaving darkness of my womb, were always closed.

I did not emerge from my berth once throughout the voyage. My father had come with me so that he—and not the ship’s doctor, who might have discovered my pregnancy—could attend to me. As it was, the ship’s doctor, who said that he was more or less a specialist in seasickness, offered his assistance, which my father politely but emphatically declined. I frequently heard voices outside our door, those of other passengers who walked my father back to his berth after meals, commiserating with him, saying what a shame it was that his daughter, on her first trip abroad, was missing everything that first class had to offer. I heard my father say many times, when people wondered if I might improve were I to mingle, that I wanted neither to mingle nor to have visitors.