The Custodian of Paradise (57 page)

I, too, thought of paradise as a house, one in which, always in some impossible-to-pinpoint room, God could hear it: the lost laughter, the lost music. The sound of a great throng of people engaged in animated but lighthearted conversation
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In the absence of his delinquent children, it fell to him to maintain the great house and the measureless compound of paradise, to preserve it for a day that he knew would never come. “I picture an old man making the rounds of his vast estate for the umpteenth time. In my paradise it is always twilight and in the sky above the eastern gate through which Adam and Eve were driven, you can see, like the promise of a sun that never rises, the glow of the flaming sword of the angel whose back is always turned to God, the angel whom he posted there for all eternity to keep anyone from intruding on the solitude of paradise.”

And that’s how it started, Miss Fielding, the very serious but entertaining game of inventing synonyms for God and imagining what it was like after he cast out his fraternal twins and paradise was deserted but for him. The “hermit of paradise,” we called him. “The recluse of paradise.” Even the “charlatan of paradise,” because we could not shake the notion that the fall was “fixed.” My favourite was the “custodian of paradise.” “We are all three of us, you and I and Miss Fielding, custodians,” I said, “withdrawn from the world to preserve, to keep inviolate, something that would otherwise be lost.”

If not for you, we would have lost ourselves in such speculations, and in books lived lives of the mind as if the world we read about had vanished long ago. You were our link with the world. Your mother, too, of course, and your children, but we never intervened in their lives. There were times when it seemed that it was for your sake that we read so much, as if our goal was to understand and control all the forces that were acting upon you—as if you were somehow representative and our goal was to perfect you
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Sometimes he went to Newfoundland alone, sometimes we went together. I never went alone. We also corresponded with a few people in St. John’s whom we paid a pittance to keep us informed of new developments in your life
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We travelled nowhere except between New York and Newfoundland. He must have made the crossing more than fifty times, perhaps thirty times with me. Thirty times that prospect of the island when it first came into view. Thirty times Manhattan as it looked from the porthole of a ship
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“Time to book passage for the island,” I’d say, and my delegate would smile
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It was often necessary for us to be apart. Sometimes for long stretches of time. He called these separations our “sabbaticals.”

It seems to me now that he is merely on sabbatical in Newfoundland and will soon return
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I hope you will give some thought to this man who sacrificed so much for others. I know that he would want you to remember him
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Now you are solely my charge. Men of my stature are conspicuous. And I would be all the more so if travelling alone. Once in St. John’s, I could not, without the help of my delegate, conceal myself from you as I have done in the past and must still do. Perhaps you have already guessed my method of concealment. At any rate, I will do my best, under these new circumstances, to watch over you. It would please me greatly to receive an answer to this letter
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Your Provider

I like it that my minder was a Newfoundlander, though it may seem selfish to say it given what drove him to minding me. But it feels less strange to have been followed and watched all these years by, as you say, one of my own
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To think that all along it was a Newfoundlander who tracked me in Manhattan and back here in St. John’s and on the Bonavista. I suppose it is partly from the simple fact of knowing his story that I feel less strange
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I can’t help but think of his family. Their son survives the war without a scratch. And yet, as though he was killed, does not come home. He renounced them as absolutely as my mother did the Hanrahans
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But I feel sorry for him. As surely a casualty as all the others in the Regiment. The strangest casualty of all, perhaps. The transformation that occurred in him in that one hour at the Somme. His becoming my minder was the most unforeseeable of all the consequences of that slaughter. I owe him far more than I realized
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He returned so many times to Newfoundland in spite of the dreams he knew he would have there and upon returning to New York. The Unknown Newfoundlander. The Unnamed Newfoundlander. From Fortune. I’ve never been there. The son of a fisherman, no doubt, who would have been a fisherman himself and had a wife and children
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Sent from Newfoundland to France so that he could be one
of the sixty-eight who at that roll call heard his name. Seven hundred and seventy-eight. Less than one in ten
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How it must have overwhelmed him to have been singled out like that. I’m glad he never fired a shot. I could go to Fortune. Easily find out his name, speak with his surviving relatives. And thereby make things worse for them. No. Better that I never know his name
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Sheilagh Fielding

My dear Miss Fielding:

I have never written to you about my own experience of war
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No man is prepared for what he sees and does in war. But he was even less prepared than most. Younger than the rest of us, most of whom were boys. He was the kindest person I have ever known, the one least inclined to bitterness and recrimination. He should never have gone to war
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Most of my memory of the war was displaced by dreams. That is, I remembered the war when I was asleep but while awake remembered nothing but my dreams
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I dreamt of the new weapons that were used. Armour-plated tractors with guns the size of cranes. Machines with hoses from which fire gushed like water. Canisters that seeped yellow gas that in seconds did more damage to the lungs than illness could in years
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I dreamt of two opposing settlements of trenches filled with men who crawled about like rats below the ground and at intervals swarmed out of their trenches in the hope of claiming the closest enemy trench as their own. The front-line trench kept changing hands. Control of it might have been the sole object of the war
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The history of humankind had led to this. This is how men created in God’s image and possessed of free will thought it best to spend their time. The most prized thing in all of creation was a trench dug in the mud
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I dreamt that all of humankind lived in trenches, the trench being the most sophisticated dwelling place yet conceived of by our species. From a God’s-eye view, I saw that all the land masses of the world were treeless mud flats in which trenches had been clawed since time began. Nothing existed above ground, nothing whatsoever
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I often laughed out loud and was looked at as if I had lost my mind, though I somehow remained sane through it all. No one is innocent in war. All are guilty. There is neither justice nor injustice, courage nor cowardice. The dead are killed in the act of trying to kill. It is not what is done to them but what they who are supposedly doing His bidding do to others that once convinced me there could not be a God
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Your Provider

Not to anyone have I ever written as I do to you. Not from anyone have I received such letters as I receive from you. I no longer care that I have never seen your face and, as it seems, must never know who you are. If such must be the terms of our correspondence I happily agree to them. I hope you will never write to me to tell me that you will never write to me again, that the letter I am reading is the last one from you that I will ever read. Your letters, which I once dreaded the sight of, now help sustain me. As does writing back to you. In part through my own fault, there are few people who at the sight of me will smile and take my hand. I have not been enfolded in someone’s arms since you saved my life. I fall asleep alone. Wake up alone. Read and write and eat alone. Drink alone. But I do not regard life as merely something to be endured
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Sheilagh Fielding