The Custodian of Paradise (39 page)
Out of breath, I stop and look up the hill. It occurs to me that, had there been visitors recently, they might have waited out the darkness and the cold in one of the abandoned, boarded-up old houses. What an unlikely sight it would be, smoke issuing from the chimney of one of these decrepit houses, a dead dwelling come to life, a door nailed shut for decades swinging open as though any moment the new inhabitants of the house might emerge to start their day.
But from where I stand, I can see no evidence of a door having been forced open or broken down, or a square of plywood having been removed from a window.
I begin to make my way up the winding road, each level of which is almost perfectly parallel with the ones below it.
Forgoing, because of their steepness, the shortcut paths the horses use, I follow the road that goes more from side to side than up, looping one way, then the other. The road, two ruts as dry and dusty as the path but with a strip of high grass down the middle, bears no footprints but my own.
It looks as if Patrick, in his last visit to Loreburn, did not visit the village. Perhaps he never does. Nor is the wild hay that grows between the loops of road disturbed except in the usual places where the horses pass.
I scrutinize more closely than I ever have before each house as I walk, climbing higher than I ever have without stopping to rest,
without turning and taking in the view, though I look down as I climb to see if the backs of the houses are, like their sides and fronts, undisturbed.
Nowhere do I see so much as a fresh splinter of wood, a nail newly pried loose. Nothing but the usual monochrome of grey.
I look to the top of the hill, just able to spy the empty belfry of the church, the nooselike strand of rope, the cross-topped steeple.
I decide that I had better check the church as well.
My legs, the bad one especially, are aching from my journey along the beach and my winding ascent of the hill, but I continue to climb.
I stop just above the last row of houses to turn and survey the scene below and on either side, looking for any signs of visitors—the remains of a fire, a distant plume of smoke, a flash of artificial colour among the trees, movement among the branches, hikers on the headlands. Anything.
“HELLO,” I shout.
I turn just in time to simultaneously hear and see the horses headed towards me, the first not fifty feet from where I stand. Before I can step off the road, I find myself surrounded by them, horses on either side of me, behind me and in front of me.
They are not panicked, not quite galloping, but seem more urgently intent than usual on getting to wherever it is to which Loreburn is a shortcut.
I know they want only to get by me and tell myself that I will be all right if I keep perfectly still and leave the manoeuvring to them—the tumult and commotion, the thudding clamour of their hoofs, the alarming volatility of a herd of a species I have never before encountered in such numbers and at such close proximity.
Snorting, blasts of breath, audible and visible, issuing from their noses and their mouths, their heads higher than mine, their large eyes seeming, from my lower vantage point, to be rolled back in fright, they might be in retreat from something.
I remind myself that I have never seen them hit an obstacle while descending the hill, and an obstacle, I am certain, is all I am to them.
An obstacle who startled them by shouting, who spooked them into this restrained stampede.
I can smell them, their breath, their teeth and tongues that are green from eating grass, their mud-spattered chests, their hides that reek of urine and manure.
All of it, all of them, part round me, the herd breaking like water round a rock, some horses, their view blocked by those in front, stepping to one side at what seems like the last possible moment to avoid a collision with me.
Finally, as I stand there trembling, perched lopsidedly on my cane, the last of them brush past me, the flank and mane of a white, sway-backed mare whisking my forehead as though on purpose, a final flourish of mischief.
Even as I fight to catch my breath, it occurs to me that it might have been the horses I heard on the night of the voices. Why have I not thought of this?
My last thought, before I make off in the direction of the church, is that it could just as easily have been the dogs that I heard, could have been the pack I didn’t see though they were just feet away. If it had been them, they might now be tearing me apart.
Patrick had been right, for more reasons than he knew. It had been foolish of me to venture out without the shotgun.
I turn and watch the horses wind their way among the houses, only a few of them shortcutting down-slope through the grass, most of them taking the same route in reverse as I did.
The herd is as orderly as if they are the lead attraction in a street parade, though they seem, like the dogs, to have no leader. I have yet to see the same horse at the head of the herd twice as they go down or up the hill.
At the bottom of the hill, they turn east, left, before they reach the beach and follow a path that leads to that opening in the stand of spruce, the path I have yet to follow.
I watch their rumps disappearing one by one. Their performance complete, they are filing offstage. Even from this height on the hill,
I can’t see the path among the trees, can see no clearing or body of fresh water to which the horses might be headed. Nor can I see the horses themselves, not even a moving commotion of branches or a rising cloud of dust.
I wish I had a horse of my own so that I could follow them, or at least follow the path, for how they would react to the sight of one of their own species ridden by one of another I’m not sure. Would they turn on a tamed horse, or run from it? Or would my horse quickly become one of them, refuse to be ridden any more, escape and be absorbed into the herd?
I would like to see them at night, or even just see them grazing, staying put
somewhere
instead of plodding eerily through Loreburn past grass and wild hay that is surely as good as anything that grows elsewhere on this island. But they leave it all untouched as if they suspect it is contaminated or believe it would be unwise to stop among the houses—though judging from the age of the houses, it is certain that none of these horses was alive when Loreburn was last inhabited.
These horses might be descended from ones that, even when Loreburn was lived in, ran wild, either impossible to capture and break or not worth the trouble of it.
Perhaps it is Patrick’s occasional presence on the island, the proximity of his house to these, that inclines the horses to forgo the prize grazing that is offered by the hill.
Convinced by my confrontation with the horses that the main drama of the day is behind me, I make my way among the stones of the little cemetery and pause at Samuel Loreburn’s wooden cross. I fancy that his prostrate family/congregation are not lying on their backs but on their stomachs, not resting with their hands folded on their chests and heads uptilted, not staring at the sky or at the inscription on the cross as they attend to his sermon, but face down, stretched out full length with their arms extended, supplicant, obeisant, loomed over eternally by their eccentric patriarch, able to see nothing but the shadow of the cross that seems not so much to mark his resting place
as literally to embody or contain the man himself, as if Samuel Loreburn, alone of all those who come to or was born at Loreburn, is still alive.
It is, I know, a fanciful notion largely inspired by the “voices” I still think I heard and the gunshot that may have sounded only in a dream.
Yet what a homiletic monument to extinction, transience, it all seems, the houses, the sunken headstones, all but overgrown by grass, some of them so blank and smooth they might still be awaiting their inscriptions, while the inscriptions of others are barely legible, as if the mason had had time for but a single, cursory tracing of the letters and numbers that are so shallow they can no longer fill with rainwater.
I imagine how the headstones must have looked decades ago when they were deeply grooved, how they must have looked on a sunlit, summer Sunday morning following a storm, all of the inscriptions glittering, rain-written, spelled out in water that would not evaporate for days.
I imagine not a piecemeal abandonment, not depopulation by gradual attrition, but a full-scale evacuation, sudden but controlled and orderly, as if the residents of Loreburn had somehow known the day of departure would come, had lived in constant preparation for it, for some peril whose arrival, though known to be inevitable, defied exact prediction.
Overseen by Samuel, they make their hasty but composed escape, load their boats high with their belongings, and as per some plan drawn up long ago and memorized by all, board up the houses and leave Loreburn, a fleet of fishing boats weighed down to the gunwales, setting out for who knows where.
I have been lulled by Patrick’s phlegmatic indifference to all things Loreburn-related into believing that the town is no more than it seems to him to be, a place unremarkably founded and unremarkably abandoned, no more or less interesting than countless other such places in the world.
In all likelihood, his view is accurate, however annoying his taciturn lack of curiosity about everything might be.
But I cannot help imagining that behind all those doors and windows lie rooms so abruptly abandoned they look just as they did on any average day, tables still set for meals, wood piled high beside pot-bellied stoves, beds unmade, closets and dressers crammed with clothes, books left open and face down on the floor, little household projects like knitting cast aside—a Pompei whose disaster cry was a false alarm, or warned of something less spectacular than a volcanic eruption, something that must have been, in its own way, an intervention just as final and profound, a modest apocalypse still unheard of in the outside world.
What
do
those houses look like inside? As empty, as bare and desolate as Patrick says they are.
As is the church, no doubt. I look at it. Would they have taken the pews away? I walk around it. It seems absurdly small, unworthy of being called a “church.” More of a freestanding chapel.
I look for evidence of visitors. The plywood shutters are still in place. The large rectangles on the side deface the structure, hide the Roman arches of the windows like desecrations.
It seems that, except for that plain, once-white wooden cross, the church’s churchness has been erased.
There are steps at the back that lead up to a shuttered door. Again, no sign of visitors. Except for the trail that I made through it, the wild hay around the church lies undisturbed. Nothing anywhere, not so much as a single freshly broken branch or twig, not a single blade of grass bent against the grain.
If I heard voices, they must have come from farther away than it seemed that night. My doctor in St. John’s told me that the symptoms of withdrawal might persist for years and that they might include, besides the tremors and dizziness and even mild convulsions that I have grown accustomed to, vivid hallucinations. Visual ones, I had assumed he meant. But that these hallucinations might be auditory did not occur to me until now.
I dared not ask the doctor what he meant by “years.” That he hadn’t specified or even speculated how many made me dread the answer. Forever? I couldn’t bear the thought. Nor the thought that
some of the symptoms of my withdrawal hadn’t yet begun, though it was months since my last drink.
Voices that might return tonight. Or begin again while I am out here, in broad daylight. There would be no running from them.
On the way back to the house, I feel a wave of dizziness and lean on my cane with both hands until, quickly, blessedly, my head is clear again.
Chapter Twelve
September 29,1924
M
Y FATHER, WITH THE HELP OF SOME CRONY AT THE
office of the railway, has arranged for me to stay at a section shack on the Bonavista branchline, the sort of shack usually occupied by the men who maintain the railroad. They and their families live in shacks strung out at one-mile intervals across the island, and on the peninsula branchlines, the nearest to St. John’s is the Bonavista.
I have been assigned some token tasks in exchange for my pay, which is less than one-third that of the men, most of whom I am stronger than despite my limp and lingering illness, for they, their wives and children are malnourished.
In spite of the isolation, I hope each morning to find that a letter from my Provider has been slipped beneath my door. I fear that he might be interfering in the lives of my children and want him to tell me he is not.
I try not to speculate about him and his motives, try not to think too much of the children. Or of Smallwood.
It is common knowledge that I am “fresh from the San,” though no one could be “fresh” from that place. I am largely left alone, but a few of the older men who have probably known survivors of tuberculosis come by with winter vegetables from the little “farms” they cultivate behind their
shacks. And with rabbits and trout. The staple foods. There are so many ponds and lakes that more of the Bonavista is below water than above it. The waters are teeming with trout that I catch using a stick of bamboo, some nylon line, a single hook and earthworms that lie stranded on the grass after it rains.
“Why do you want to live in such a Godforsaken place?” my father said. To him, all places but St. John’s are Godforsaken. He didn’t wait for an answer, perhaps fearing he would inadvertently make me reconsider. His relief was transparent.
She does not wish to move back in with me. Or even to live in St. John’s. Or to write for a newspaper
.
During my stay in the San, he had grown used to my absence. Grown accustomed to the most that he could hope for by way of peace of mind.
Who knows how long my sojourn here will last? No one but Herder asked me. He wanted me to resume writing for him and was as perplexed as my father when I told him I meant to live on the Bonavista for a while.
Perhaps Smallwood wonders where I am. Though I hope not. “Whatever became of Fielding?” is not how I wish to be remembered. Perhaps Miss Emilee thinks of me. To persist in someone’s memory. To be remembered. Not memorialized. Commemorated.
She was not unloved who is remembered
.
The unqualified love of a single soul. I do not have it. I never have. Though in that letter that
he
sent me in the San, he wrote that he hoped I had found strength in the knowledge that I was not forgotten. An indirect way of saying that he loved me? The first letter, on the ship.
All who are loved have no reason to despair
.
Whom do I love as I long to be loved? My children, whom I do not know.
Must I withhold love from my father because he is not capable of love? There is no argument, no case that can be made for love. One loves or one does not.
It seems I have always known that it was here. For the Bonavista, no word will suffice, not even one from a long-forgotten language. From before the obsolescence of silence.
Cold and calm in late September. And all one sees of water is what it reflects—the sky, the shore—and all of it is fading now. Between sunset and moonrise, there is nothing but the inside of this shack, lamplit; lamps in the windows double and disperse the light.
I hear the night train, a blast of its whistle for every shack, each approaching blast louder than the one before. The locomotive, whistle blaring, shakes my shack as it goes by. The cars behind it shake it less, a rattling succession of anticlimaxes until the whistle sounds again, and again, as though the train is hurtling down some never-ending hill.
Bedtime on the Bonavista, and I know that, if I dimmed my lamp, I would see the others dimming too, as though withering in the train-borne breeze.
All lights out
might be the message of the whistle, the sole purpose of the train to mark the end of day, a roaring reveille, the silence in the wake of which seems so heavy it makes me drowsy for a while.
But only for a while. I never fail to fall for it, the promise of sleep, for the notion that my body
and
my mind know what is good for them, sleep unabetted, uninduced, sourceless, irresistible.
Each evening, my ears still ringing from the last blare of the whistle, I lie down, fully clothed, on my bed, hoping to fool my body. I am merely lying down to think. See—would I leave my boots on if my purpose was to sleep? No. Think, close my eyes the better to reflect and concentrate, is all I mean to do.
And always I step back in fright from the brink of sleep. My whole body gives a jolt as it braces for the
impact. Something within has saved me yet again from a non-existent peril.
My hands folded on my stomach, my boots beyond the end of my too-short bed, I open my eyes and stare at the planks on the ceiling. I lie there long after I am certain that sleep of the kind I crave will never come. Until I feel, as I no longer do when I am standing, the difference in the weight of my two boots. One buttoned boot, and my new boot with its thick and clunking orthopaedic heel.
My new boot. For my new, ancient-looking leg. The heel held in place with a metal strap and extra nails. The doctor told me to be careful with it. I would many times knock it against things, he said. Or I would rely too much on my right leg and there would be even less strength in my left one than there could be. I would tire far more easily than I had before.
A sturdy boot and a matching spare.
Night after night, after the charade of bedding down, I struggle out of bed again. To read, to write and afterwards to drink. The Prohibition Law is still enforced, despite rumours that it is soon to be repealed. But booze of all kinds is easy to come by out here. There is a still in every clump of junipers.
Wooden crates whose labels of “ginger beer” are meant to fool no one are weekly unloaded from the train. Juneshine. Callabogus. For those, like me, with more money and a greater thirst, rye and even Scotch. The latter I drink on Saturday nights. Rye and spruce beer otherwise. From the same chipped enamel mug I use for tea, though I sip from my flask when I’m outdoors.
I sense from some of the men I “work” with that I am regarded as “lonely.”
Work. I take away the brush they clear from the sides of the railbed, pile it on my trolley car, which I have only
recently been deemed strong enough to operate alone, and pumping the handle, make my way to the nearest body of water, on the shore of which I burn the brush.
It is a job that any child could do.
The men paint the ties with long-handled brushes that they dip in boiling vats of tar. They shore up the ties with gravel, and the railway bed with soil brought in by the train for that purpose, there being no soil on the Bonavista that would not, in a matter of days, either blow away or settle so deeply that more would soon be needed.
They replace rusty spikes, warped nails and rotting ties and leave it to me to clean up after them, wordlessly moving on from one task to the next.
I have displaced no one from their job. The work I do was formerly done by some of the men’s wives for nothing and they are glad to be rid of it.
I suspect the real source of my pittance of an income to be my father, though I sign a railway receipt every two weeks.
When I see a man half my size slashing at a stand of alders with a machete, I feel like grabbing his arm and showing him, using nothing but my cane, how it should be done. My cane that, after all these years, I wield as expertly as if it were a sword.
The men appraise me, stare at me as I lurch ungainly about, my lame leg moving forward as though in parody of something. I dress much like the men, as much as available clothing allows—coveralls large enough to fit me; beneath those, checkered shirts and once-white undershirts.
I wear leather-palmed, khaki-coloured gloves, as they do. Also what they call a “sod,” a grey peaked cap that, no matter how tightly I tie my hair back, often blows off in a gale and is retrieved by one of the men because I cannot move fast enough to catch it.
They appraise my face most closely of all, my face that not even the smudges of soot from the brush fires can disguise. The face of a young woman who, though she looks older than she is, is still attractive. I look at myself in the mirror in my shack. Let down my hair. My eyes are unchanged. My lips that in the San were cracked and scabbed are smooth again. But mine is also the face of a woman not only St. John’s-born but of the quality, not of the bay or the scruff like the sectionmen.
Whatever you’re here for, their kind but intractable faces say, you’ll never belong, no matter what. You are, for reasons we cannot fathom, a visitor in our lives.
Mabe they think it has something to do with my illness, which of course it does. What would they think or say if I told them of my children or my Provider? They think I’m out here because of my leg. Also true. And because of my history, my time at Bishop Spencer and my brief stint as Fielding the Forger, some sketchy version of which they know.
But none of these, nor all of them together, explain to their satisfaction what I am doing here or how long I plan to stay or might be capable of staying.
I have deserted my place in favour of finding one among them, which I cannot, ever, do. They are waiting for me to come to this realization, to reconcile myself to it. Waiting patiently, for they know the outcome is certain.
I stand daily as close to my bonfires as I can to warm myself, for it is the cold, the sheer length of time spent outdoors at this season of the year, that affects me most. My bones—all of them, not just those of my afflicted leg—have been made by my illness more susceptible to cold, porous, desiccate, something.
There are times when I feel a kind of chill in my belly, a weight like the one that heralded my illness in New York, and
I fret that my illness is returning, that this feeling portends a relapse, partial or complete. But so far it has always gone away.
I stand close to the fire, on the leeward side of it, back on to it so that I can endure the smoke, and look out across the water that some days, depending on the size of the pond and the strength of the wind, is whitecapped, the waves all racing away from me towards the distant shore.
The water, because the sky is uniformly overcast, is grey, even black. And all around the water the treeless boulder-littered bog of Bonavista. Blueberry bushes, their leaves a russet red, bobbing in the wind, the few remaining alder leaves crackling like bits of ancient parchment.
The memory-stirring smell of fall; real particular memories, but other kinds as well, intimations of some life beyond recall or never-lived, once-hoped-for, now-forgotten things, an elusive imminence that in the end yields nothing, only tantalizes.
We knock off work early enough to make it home by twilight, some heading up the tracks, some down, silent with hunger and fatigue.
Only on those homeward marches as, one after another, the sectionmen reach their homes and bid the rest of us goodbye, do I feel some sense of camaraderie and a suspension of the awkwardness that otherwise is always there between us.
“Good night, miss,” they say when we reach my shack, a staccato chorus in which there is no scorn or irony, only a kind of faint tenderness because, unlike them, I live alone, but, like them, have worked all day, am bone-weary and, they think, not far from sleep.
Fall on the Bonavista. It seems portentous of anything but winter. Portentous of nothing. Wholly itself. As if out here it is always fall. Snow always on the way but never here. Remnants of a summer that no one can remember. A season
that prevails, persists throughout the camouflage of winter and the fleeting dream of summer. Fall is real, indigenous, definitive, a prelude with no successor.
Every house has a name, two words of which it shares with every other house. My house is Twelve Mile House. The numbers, passed down through generations, are spelled out like ancestral names above the doors of every shack, including mine.
Twelve Mile House’s line of succession was interrupted when the family that once lived here moved away. Some man whose last name I do not know as good as abdicated, renounced the family profession, the legacy of generations, and no one has yet been found to take his place.
The families always accompany the men. Children spend their entire childhoods here. Some men and women their entire lives. They have no choice, for the trains run throughout the year. This is not seasonal employment like working “on the boats.” All or nothing. All
and
nothing for the children for whom there are no schools and whose parents cannot read or write. No place to play but in the woods, away from the trains, away from the cinders and sparks that in summer their fathers have to stamp out with their boots. Away from the wheels. Childhoods, whole lives spent out here.
The children, though some have seen a train go by ten thousand times, always stop to watch one do so yet again, to watch awestruck from a distance as the great machine that dictates the terms of their existence passes by. Such an anomalous spectacle making such an all-inclusive din cannot be ignored.
No more than the anomalous spectacle of me can be ignored as I pump my two-man trolley down the tracks. I must be the most unusual thing that most of these track-children have ever seen.
They throw things at me from the cover of the trackside alders and blasty spruce—apple cores, small trout, half-eaten
sandwiches—while their mothers, standing in the doorways of the shacks, warn them to leave me be.
It seems they like to regard me as some sort of witch, whom their parents are unable to defeat and whose troublesome presence they have no choice but to endure. My height, my limp, my buckled boot, my cane, my flask, my working side by side with men, all confirm me as a witch.
I oblige by tracing what they think are spells in the air with my cane, letting the trolley coast, drawing circles and X’s and triangles, which causes them to duck and seek cover.
