The Custodian of Paradise (62 page)

She cannot see beyond the dark doorway. It is as if a ceremony for which it is necessary that the church be dark is taking place inside.

She closes the breech of the shotgun. It clicks shut loudly, loud enough, she is certain, for whomever is inside the church to hear.

As best she can, she raises the gun with one arm and fumbles about until she finds the trigger with her finger.

She slowly makes her way up the snow-covered wooden steps, which creak beneath her feet.

How odd, to be ascending the steps of a church armed with a gun. Again she feels as though she is re-enacting some scene from long ago, something which made the continued habitation of Loreburn unthinkable.

When she reaches the top of the steps she drops her cane and holds the shotgun with both hands, pressing the stock against her shoulder, her arms quivering from the weight.

At first, the darkness in the church seems absolute. She fears that, any second, someone will come lurching from it and carry her with them back down the steps before she has a chance to use the gun.

She is by no means certain that, whatever happens, she will pull the trigger.

At first, it looks like someone has drawn oblongs on the walls with white, incandescent paint, but then she realizes that these are the boarded-up windows, their perimeters traced with light from outside.

As her eyes further adjust, she sees two rows of pews separated by a narrow aisle that leads to an elevated altar that is bare aside from a small pulpit on the right.

On the back wall of the altar is a large plain wooden cross.

At the sound of the striking of a match from within the pulpit, she aims the gun.

“Merely lighting the lamp,” a voice from within the pulpit says. The voice that she heard years ago from behind the curtain of the window of the house on Patrick Street. And before that too. Where?

“I have taken sanctuary in a consecrated church,” the voice says as the light of the lamp flares up, illuminating the area around and above the pulpit. “You are welcome to join me if you wish.”

Twenty-five years. Not since she was still a child have they spoken to each other. A child who had two children and was roaming through the streets at night in search of something on which a universal prohibition had been placed, craving what it was illegal for anyone to buy or sell, let alone a child.

Their transactions had seemed strange to her but surely stranger still to him. Talking through a curtain to a girl who’d never seen him. Taking money from her in exchange for a kind of moonshine called callabogus. Waiting for her in the dark behind that curtain and that window.

After a certain number of nights, he would have recognized her footsteps. And the clinking of her cane. Here she comes.

Sitting there while she stood outside the window in the cold, appraising her, assessing her. He let her stand out there for hours while he scrutinized every inch of her, noted the way she held herself.

Something in his own life had made him decide that the time had come to intervene in hers. The birth of her children.

It is hard to imagine the setting in which the terms, the limits of this intervention were devised. The site of his ruminations. That book-crammed flat in Lower Manhattan. Two thousand miles away from her he plotted his intervention as would a kidnapper the abduction of a stranger. All so he could talk to her on Patrick Street.

“Come out where I can see you,” she shouts, her voice as shrill as a girl’s.

“Yes,” the voice says. “Where you can see me. How eager you must be to see me after all this time.”

“Come out,” she shouts again.

She sees two massive hands grip the opposite sides of the rail of the pulpit. A figure raises itself slowly from within. It seems that it will never stop rising, but when it does it sways unsteadily.

“Such an absurd little church,” the voice says. “A church for children. A place for them to play at saying service. Not a Catholic
church until just recently when I made it one. I was preparing for morning Mass when you arrived.”

Now she can see his face. That of an old man, it doesn’t match the tone of the letters.

Short, close-cropped grey hair. Forehead a mass of liver spots and wrinkles. A wide mouth whose lower lip sags in what might be the after-effect of a stroke. Blue eyes?

“May I descend all three steps?” he says, smiling.

“Stay put,” she says.

“I have a chalice in my hand,” he says. “Merely a chalice.”

“Put it down.”

“It is hardly a weapon, Miss Fielding. There is nothing in it but some wine.”

He descends the pulpit.

“Take the lantern,” she says, “and set it on the floor.”

He complies, then stands up straight, still elevated on the altar, the chalice in both hands in front of him. He is dressed in black. Black jacket and soutane, black slacks, black shoes. A white collar at his throat.

“Well. You have seen me. Just a man, after all. And not the one I was when we first met. Why are you afraid of me?”

“What do you want? What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here, Miss Fielding? A woman alone, living like a hermit on an island in the winter. Loreburn. Population: one. Until recently.”

She says nothing as she watches him place the chalice on the floor in the halo of the lantern light.

She can now see well enough to make out the plumes of frost that issue from his mouth when he breathes or speaks. She glances at the pulpit and sees that inside it lies a sleeping bag, a canteen and a khaki knapsack.

She tries to imagine him being taken to Loreburn and left here without supplies on the eve of winter. He will not last many more nights in this church now that the real cold has set in. Which means that she will have to take him back to Patrick’s house.

His clothes do not look as though he wore them while making his way from the church to Patrick’s house and back again. In fact, they look, except for a few creases and wrinkles, almost new.

His shoes, which are not suited for walking on Loreburn in the snow, gleam as if they have recently been polished. The lamplight flickers in them.

There must be other clothes in that knapsack. The ones he is wearing he must have brought for this occasion. Their meeting. And whatever else he has in mind.

Still standing on the church floor, two steps below the altar, she cannot guess his height, but it seems inconceivable that it is less than seven feet.

“You look ridiculous, Miss Fielding, with that shotgun in your hands. A woman in a church aiming a shotgun at an old man. I believe you think that all of Loreburn is yours and I am but an interloper who must be forced to leave.”

“How did you get here? Is there a boat? Is someone waiting for you somewhere?”

“A delegate, you mean? No. There has been but one. Now I am alone. Like you.”

She lowers the barrel of the gun, the better to look him in the eye.

He is off the altar and has one hand on the barrel of the gun before she can even think about the trigger.

He is almost behind her when the gun discharges. It falls from her hands, but he keeps his one hand on the barrel, with the other grabs the stock, then breaks the gun in half across his knee as though it is the toy of some misbehaving child.

He throws both halves aside, then clutches the hand that gripped the barrel, which, judging by his expression, must have burnt him badly though he did not cry out in pain.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You might have hurt yourself with it.”

“Did you burn yourself?”

“I haven’t touched a gun in more than twenty years. Not since the war.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but think I might need it.”

“Sit down,” he says, pointing at the steps that lead up to the altar.

She all but falls onto the steps, and supporting herself on her hands, leans back to look up at him.

“Are you all right?” he says. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

“What in God’s name do you want?” she says, gasping out the words, remembering the ease with which he snapped the gun.

He sits, then kneels in the front pew, hands clasped as he rests on his forearms.

“I told you in a letter long ago,” he said. “My daemon is memory. It has always been.”

“No point changing daemons in midstream.”

“There it is at last. That famous sarcasm. Better you draw on your courage now than on your wit.”

“You think
you
have courage.”

“I have done courageous things. But also others of which I am ashamed. As you have. But you are still young. And I am old.”

“I shouldn’t have insulted you. But can you blame me for being scared?”

“I suppose not. Here I am, dressed as the priest I used to be—”

“How is it that no one ever spoke of your visits to St. John’s? That no one ever remarked at the sudden appearance and disappearance of a stranger of your height? Why were there never rumours of the sort that my father would have seized upon?”

“The answer, Miss Fielding, is so simple. I once told you that the one physical trait that could not be disguised was height. A statement that you left unchallenged.”

“I still—”

“Miss Fielding, each time I debarked from a vessel in St. John’s, I did so in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, a wheelchair pushed by my delegate, whom I pretended was my son.”

A wheelchair.

“I liked wearing my disguise. People said all kinds of things in
front of me, spoke as if I wasn’t there. You’d think that old and crippled in a wheelchair I could hear no voice except my own.

“On the ship that brought you back home from New York the first time, I passed you in the hallway in my wheelchair. You had read my letter by this time. You smiled at me. A very kind thing given your circumstances. ‘You have a lovely smile,’ I said. You thanked me and moved on.”

“I knew that I had heard your voice somewhere.”

“On the Bonavista we travelled by train from St. John’s in a private berth. Me in my wheelchair when we appeared in public. We rented a summer house where I stayed while my delegate, disguised as a hobo, rode the Bonavista back and forth for weeks. He often walked past your shack at night on his way from one depot to the next. On the day of the storm, when the trains stopped running and the nearest depot was closed, we drove by trolley down the Bonavista. We stopped beside your shack in which I told my delegate to wait when, after looking through the windows, he said that it was empty. I wanted him to be there in case you returned before I did. Had you done so he would have nailed his hat to the outside of the door. A signal to me to knock four times, then wait until he let me in. The point was to make sure that you were, shall we say, asleep, before I came inside. Chloroform. But it never came to that.”

“Why was it so important to you that we never meet?”

“I worried, Miss Fielding, though you may doubt it, that I might, by revealing everything to you or to others, destroy you and your children. When we first spoke you were so young but already so troubled. Already drinking to excess. And then there was Dr. Fielding. Imagine what he would have done if you or someone else made him aware of my existence. And imagine the effect
that
would have had on your children.”

“I have no idea what you want. What you have ever wanted from me.”

“I think you do.”

“My mother’s account of your courtship differs somewhat from yours.”

“Yes. I believe that she convinced herself that what she wrote to me and what she told David was true. I would not have thought that self-delusion so absolute was possible. But which one of us do
you
believe?”

“I don’t know what to believe. Did she leave me because you somehow forced her to?”

“No. She could have chosen to stay. She chose to leave. She foresaw the consequences of both choices. She chose against loyalty and love. As she did with me. And our child.”

“I have no way of knowing if that’s true.”

“Have I ever lied to you, Miss Fielding?”

“As I said, I have no
way
of knowing.”

“Did your mother ever lie to you? Do you think she ever lied to Dr. Fielding?”

“Two very different questions.”

“Whose answers are the same. Let me make it simpler for you. Name one person to whom you are sure that your mother did not tell, shall we say, a significant lie. Her parents? Her fellow sisters at the convent? Her two husbands? Your children? You?”

“Considering her circumstances—”

“What you call her circumstances proceeded from a lie. A false pledge. A broken pact. Even before she met me, your mother’s life was a series of betrayals and abandonments. I think her parents, if they were still alive, would agree with me, don’t you? She renounced them for the convent. But kept her trust fund just in case. To swear an oath, to pledge oneself for all eternity to something or someone is all very well, but best hold something in reserve lest that oath or pledge should need to be revoked.”

“She was young—”

“I, too, was young, Miss Fielding. Do you really believe that, if not for me, your mother would have kept her convent vows? Remained a nun?”

“My mother and my children are strangers to me.”

“I did not take your mother by force from the convent. To that
cottage on Cape Cod.
In
that cottage on Cape Cod. I have proof that I hoped it would not be necessary to show you, that my child, my first child, was not the issue of an evil act committed by its father. Proof that your mother lied about me to your son.”

“The proof that you spoke of in your letter to David? Half of one page was torn out.”

“By him. Not me. He did it for your sake. To spare you. I can assure you that he knew the truth. All of it. As you soon will.

“When David found the correspondence between your mother and me and confronted his mother about it, she told him that I blackmailed her into leaving you with Dr. Fielding, threatened in a letter to take your life unless she abandoned you. More lies. I proved as much to him by sending him some of the letters that she wrote me.”

“You still have not
proven
anything to
me
.”