The Custodian of Paradise Read online

  “We’re the only ones who lives here, lady,” a boy said to a faint chorus of giggles from the other children. I guessed there were four of them but resisted the urge to turn around.

  “She looks like a scarecrow,” the boy said to further giggles.

  “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE,” their mother shouted at a volume and a pitch the likes of which I had never heard issue from a woman’s throat before. “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE, ALL OF YE, RIGHT NOW.” The unnatural bellow of her voice echoed all around, out across the water, down to the point and back again, ringing in my ears.

  The children ran in silence from the wharf and up the path.

  I felt the woman staring at me.

  “My love, what in God’s name are you doing here?”

  What folly it would be to attempt to tell the truth. Her voice was so different, so much softer and more wistful than the last time she had spoken, that I momentarily wondered if there might be two women on the wharf behind me. In the voice was an entreaty, an invitation to me to reply in the knowledge that we were now alone, the woman believing that, if not for the presence of her children, I would have made some deeply personal admission that only another woman could understand.

  “I have told you why I’m here,” I said quietly, trying not to show how moved I was by the kindness in the voice of this woman I had yet to look at.

  “What is she doing here?” the woman said barely audibly, under her breath. I could feel myself being appraised—my clothes, my thick-soled boot, my stature, my cane. I was suddenly aware of what an offputtingly incongruous spectacle I was, sitting there on the wharf with my two massive trunks beside me.

  “We live here,” the woman said. “No one else but us. We run the light.”

  I had not seen a lighthouse, but then I had not looked out my window until the boat was almost at the wharf.

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “Down around the point. Where the rocks and the reef are.”

  I felt like turning round but was aware of how absurdly dramatic it would be to do so now. And when this woman saw my face, well—she would find nothing in it, nothing in my eyes especially, that would reassure her.

  “What are we going to do with you?”

  It went on like this, the woman alternating between addressing me and then herself, as if I couldn’t hear her. As if someone not right in her mind must in all her senses be deficient.

  “You’re being selfish,” she said, though not severely. “Making us responsible for you.”

  She was right. If I did somehow get to Loreburn, it would not be possible for any of them, and especially not for this woman, to forget that I was out there. How she would fret for me on winter nights. But it could not be helped.

  “All I want to be is left alone, out there,” I said. I looked at the fishing boat. I imagined the woman, her husband and children coming out with hampers on Sunday afternoons. Better they think that I was crazy, unreceptive to such kindnesses. Alone. I knew that even this isolation-bound, lighthouse-inhabiting woman was wondering why anyone would want to live alone.

  I had crammed into my improvised luggage as many of my belongings, as much of my former life as I could manage. Twenty years before, I had seen the immigrants at Ellis Island. I imagined myself in steerage, dressed not much better than the others, but looking somehow aloof, like some recently deposed aristocrat, some woman of affluence, the only visible emblem of whose past life was her cane.

  How bereft I was of all that was so precious to other people. The immigrants had brought with them ancestral photographs and heirlooms, keepsakes, letters from which they hoped their descendants would piece together some sort of family history. I had brought none of the few family photographs I possessed. They were in a box in a closet in my room just as they had been for years, looked at by no one, not even me. I had astonished my landlord by giving him three years’ rent the day before I left. I warned him that a friend of mine would come to check on the room from time to time and make sure that he didn’t, in my absence, rent it out to someone else. But I had made no such arrangement. Both keys to the room were in one of the trunks.

  I was wearing most of my keepsakes. Of these, all but my cane were self-acquired. My cane, my silver flask concealed in the inside pocket of my vest, attached to it by a silver chain. My lorgnette. My black ivory cigarette-holder. All had been affectations of my young womanhood, my later school years, of which I had assumed I would divest myself and which I might have done had things not turned out as they had. My ancient, thick-soled boot, if not for which I might have been mistaken from a distance as the Fielding of my school days on the grounds of Bishop Spencer in St. John’s. Though no one else would have named it as an heirloom, there was my leg itself, which made the cultivation of a “look” redundant.

  It had been decades since I had gone shopping for clothes. I infrequently ordered them from special catalogues. Six foot three. “Galoot of a girl,” my father said when I was thirteen. “You’re not growing like a horse, you’re the size of one already. Soon I’ll have to measure you in hands.” Seven years it was by then since my mother left.

  The two trunks might have been mistaken as storied family relics, but I had bought them in a used furniture store on Duckworth Street. Though they looked like the least-esteemed loot of some disappointing salvage operation, they proved to be quite sturdy. Stood on its end, one was a foot taller than me, the other about my height. How companionable they looked, standing side by side. Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. There was not much in them now that was “precious” in the sense that most people would have used the word. I had even left behind my typewriter.

  Letters of a sort were what I planned to write on Loreburn. There would be no need to make legible transcriptions of letters that would not be read and that I might burn no sooner than I finished writing them. I have come here to write a long letter to myself. And to read. The woman behind me would take this utterance as conclusive proof of madness.

  Likewise if she knew that each one of my trunks contained fifteen bottles of Scotch wrapped carefully in burlap bags. I assumed, because there was neither Scotch nor the smell of it seeping from the trunks, that the bottles were still intact. The insides of the trunks I had upholstered with clothing, linen, bedsheets and pillows. Each trunk also contained thirty packages of cigarettes and a carton of matches.

  I was about to turn and face the woman directly when I heard heavy footsteps on the wharf. The woman moved away abruptly. Soon I heard whispering. She and a man I took to be her husband. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know, Irene.” More heavy footsteps. I saw, peripherally, a man’s boots, even closer to the edge of the wharf than my own. Assuming he had come to help his wife bring me to my senses, I did not look up. It now seemed absurd to have counted on my physical stature and my manner to convince the people of Quinton that I could manage by myself in Loreburn, that the very look of me would reassure them.

  “You want to go out to Loreburn?” the man said, as if that was all I wanted, to go out there and come back again. He sounded young. Young enough to be fighting overseas, which he probably would have been if he had no children.

  “I intend to live in Loreburn,” I said. “It seems like a good place to write a book, which is what I plan to do. But I need someone to take me there. And bring me things from time to time.” The shape that I presumed was Loreburn was back again.

  “Let’s just take her up to the house, Patrick,” the woman said.

  A wave of despair that nearly sent me pitching headlong off the wharf washed over me. All I want to do is live in the place of my own choosing. Where, even if only for a while, I cannot be found. I felt a hand grip me by the upper arm and a voice thick with condescension say “Come on now, missus, you’ve got to stop this nonsense now.” I did not reply, just held my arm motionless with what seemed like great effort. But when the dizziness passed, I realized that no one was holding my arm and no one had spoken.

  “Patrick,” the woman said, “she must have r
un away from a home or something. We’ll send for her people and we’ll keep her here until they come to get her.”

  “I don’t have any people,” I said. I realized too late that I had said “people” with a touch of sarcasm, even distaste.

  “Where are you from?” the man said, his tone seeming to say that his wife had spoken for herself “Where are you from?” he said again, exactly the same as before. As if he were talking to a child.

  “St. John’s,” I said. I sensed that this man, Patrick, was gauging our chances of ever reaching Loreburn, or his own of ever getting back.

  “Well, there’s nothing out there,” he said. “It’s like here, only older, more rundown. Just some old houses and a church. All boarded up. A road that’s half grown over.” He sounded as if he was simply telling me what to expect, spoke in a kind of “Don’t say I didn’t warn you” way.

  I felt a surge of hope.

  “I’ll pay you,” I said.

  “No.”

  “It’s not a one-time thing,” I said. “I’ll need you once a month.”

  “Then I’ll come out once a month.”

  “I’ll have to give you money for supplies.”

  “All right.”

  I heard retreating footsteps, a rustle of skirts. Irene departing in silence. Perhaps meaning that he had given her some sort of signal that he would “handle” the problem of this woman from St. John’s. My hopes fell again.

  I looked up at him, slowly raised my eyes the length of him. Dark green coveralls smeared with stains that looked like blood. He stood with his hands on his hips, the sleeves of his ragged once-white shirt rolled up past his elbows. Sinewy, hairless forearms the same thickness from his elbows to his wrists. Hands gapped with scars, knuckles nicked with scabs, some recent. The palms of his hands so creased and cracked they seemed to be covered in waxed paper. He did not look down at me when I looked at his face, but neither did he seem self-conscious. Oblivious to the possibility of conveying an impression. Hair black and thick. His face tanned as deeply as his arms. A body as muscular as a limited diet would allow. I didn’t know exactly what running a light entailed, but he did not look like a lighthouse keeper.

  “Do you fish too?” I said. “As well as run the lighthouse?”

  “Irene runs the light,” he said. “The government thinks I do. They won’t let a woman run it. I’m a fisherman. I don’t have anything to do with that light. She’s up all night sometimes, when it’s foggy or stormy. And then she stays awake all day with the children.”

  “Sheilagh Fielding,” I said, realizing that he would never ask me what my name was. “It’s nice to meet you, Patrick.”

  I told him there were some things I needed that I had had no room for in my luggage. A month’s worth of kerosene or, if need be, seal oil, to light my lamps with. Flour, oats, sugar, tea, molasses, a sack of potatoes, a bag of onions, canned food. I ate because I knew I had to, not because I enjoyed it. Food held no more appeal for me when I was not drinking than it did when I was.

  Because I had done so much walking in St. John’s, I had clothing and footwear for every conceivable kind of weather. A spare pair of walking boots, the right one with the same thick, limp-corrective sole.

  As I told him all this, he said nothing. I took his silence to be acquiescence.

  I wondered how to broach it, the matter of one of the things I might need him to bring out to me each month.

  “There’s something that I might need a lot of,” I said. “Something that you might not want to bring me. At least, not so much of it. But I might not need any. It depends.”

  “Booze,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, somehow offended by his guessing correctly what I meant. I was accustomed to people smelling it on my breath, but it was now months since I’d had a drink and even so I had eaten two peppermint candies just in case my body and my clothes might somehow still smell of Scotch.

  “Scotch, to be exact,” I said. “It’s on the note I’ll give you.”

  “I’ll bring it to you,” he said. “I couldn’t stand living in Loreburn by myself without more Scotch than you can drink.”

  I stifled my drinker’s perverse urge to assert my ability to match anyone when it came to drinking. I wondered how long it would have been after Patrick had passed out on his folded arms that I would have called it a night and made my surefooted, albeit cane-clumping way to bed.

  “I can’t stand to live anywhere without it,” I said, and instantly regretted saying it. Although my drinking was known to all of St. John’s, I was not given to making such admissions.

  “Well, we better get ready,” he said. “You’ll want a few hours of daylight when you get there.”

  He had left me on the wharf and followed the path up through the trees towards the house. He had returned after a longer time than it should have taken to fill the boxes of fresh vegetables he carried. I guessed that he had been delayed by an argument with Irene. Now the boat was loaded and we were on our way to Loreburn. I faced forward on the gunwale behind him as he stood at the wheel.

  “I’m going to live in one of those boarded-up houses I’ve heard are out there,” I said. “Like the ones in Quinton. I’ve lived in worse.”

  “They’re not like the houses in Quinton. A lot older. But there’s a place out there where you can stay,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said, half-expecting him to tell me that there was someone living in Loreburn who would take me in, a family like his, perhaps. Despite his and Irene’s assertions that Loreburn was deserted.

  “There’s a place,” he said. “A house. Part of one. Some rooms that I fixed up. A few years ago. After they stopped using Loreburn as a fishing station in the summer. A kitchen. A place to sleep.”

  What was he telling me, that he and his family had some sort of second home in Loreburn? A summer place where they went when they felt the need to get away from Quinton, which was itself as remote a getaway as could be imagined?

  “Has anyone been in touch with you about me?” I said. “Please tell me if so. Has anyone written to you? Given you money and instructions to take care of me?”

  “Sounds like you ran off from someone or something.” An observation. No invitation in it for me to explain myself.

  “This place. It’s some sort of hunting camp?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Nothing but rabbits on Loreburn.”

  “Then what sort of place? Why did you fix up those rooms?” I couldn’t help it that my tone was accusatory, suspicious.

  “For myself,” he said. “Irene and the youngsters don’t go there. Nothing for them to do out there.”

  “And what is there for you to do out there?” I said.

  “It’s just a place that I fixed up for myself,” he said. “It’s good enough for winter. You can stay there while you write your book.”

  “You have heard from someone, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, will you promise me that if someone does contact you—”

  “I won’t tell no one where you are.”

  “What about Irene?”

  “I can’t speak for her.”

  “You understand,” I said, “that I need to be—alone to write my book. Completely alone.”

  He neither spoke nor nodded, just looked out across the water as if surveying it for obstacles.

  “Do you stay out there when the weather’s bad, when you can’t make it back to Quinton, is that it?” I said.

  “I don’t fish nowhere near Loreburn,” he said. “There’s no fish there any more.”

  How forthright he was in telling me, proving to me, that my guess was wrong. Yet he offered not one word more of explanation.

  “If I stay there,” I said, “where will you go? During the times when you used to go to Loreburn? I don’t want to put you out.”

  “The house is fixed up already. You might as well save yourself the trouble of fixing up some place of your own.”

  �
�It’s really very generous of you. It is. I mean that. But I have no idea how long it will take me to write this book. It might be years. You never know with books.” And indeed, I had no idea how long “it” would take.

  He nodded and looked up as if in consultation with the sky.

  I could well imagine Irene contacting someone about the presence on Loreburn of a woman who would surely perish there unless someone intervened. But Patrick must not have been concerned about Irene or else he would not be going to all this trouble. He must have somehow, in a matter of minutes, reassured her.

  I knew I would stay in his “rooms” and not do something absurd like forswear them in favour of restoring a house of my own. But I felt, aside from trepidatious, faintly cheated from having been reprieved of the challenges I had set myself and for months had been anticipating and mentally preparing for, even looking forward to. I felt like assuring him that contrary to my appearance, my manner and my gender, and my conspicuous disability, I would have been able to do what needed to be done.

  “There’s not much there,” he said, as if I had been thinking out loud and he was reassuring me that he had by no means spared me everything. “I can bring you a few things next time I come out. Pots and pans.”

  “I think I have as many pots and pans as I need,” I said. “I have dishes, utensils, oil lamps. Those trunks hold a lot. And they’re very heavy.”

  “There’s a stove and a chimney.”

  What did he see when he looked at me? A lame woman who he probably thought was in her fifties, though I was only forty-one. Surely the tallest woman he had ever seen. I wondered if he thought, as many men still did, that I was beautiful. I wanted to assure him that he would not be leaving me to die. I looked closely at him. I doubted he was capable of keeping from me or anyone else the sort of secret I suspected him of keeping, of entering into some sort of clandestine arrangement with an outsider.

  He was clearly not going to ask why I was doing this, why it was necessary to come all the way out here, to impose upon myself such absolute isolation, just to write a book.

  “Do you want to know what my book will be about?” I said, thinking that, by playing out my own pretence, I might discover his.