The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “Sometimes,” he said. “I just tells ’m clothes and shoes. From Sally Ann. If anyone asks to look inside, I’m s’posed to drop everything and run. They’d have to be some fast to catch me. But no one ever asked me yet.”

  He’ll wind up in jail one day because of me or someone like me, I told myself. I pictured him dropping a bundle by accident on some busy downtown street, the bottles breaking, the juneshine and spruce beer soaking through the paper onto the ground, the whole mess reeking of illicit alcohol.

  But I kept on buying juneshine from him. And the spruce beer to wash it down. From just such a boy as my unacknowledged son might one day be.

  The spruce beer came in dark green, long-necked bottles, stoppered, like the juneshine, with cork. It had to be kept cold, or else it all but exploded when you pulled the cork, froth shooting from the bottle like champagne. The spruce beer was even cloudier than the juneshine, with whole spruce twigs on the bottom and spruce needles swirling about like some ingredient used to insoluble excess.

  Every evening, I performed the same ritual. Carefully poured into a glass a small amount of juneshine, a quarter of an inch or less. Then put a tea strainer on the glass and poured the spruce beer through it an ounce or so at a time. By the time the glass was full, the tea strainer was as well, with little twigs and needles. I thought of some man from the Brow making his way home through the woods at twilight, bent beneath the weight of a load of spruce and juniper branches, smeared from head to toe with turpentine. It was by no means an unpleasant image. Nor was that of his wife, picking the sticky black berries from the juniper branches, then notching both kinds of branches and skinning the bark from them until nothing but bare wood remained. Then the juneshine and the spruce beer being made, one after the other, in some sort of makeshift cauldron that the couple stirred with two-by-fours or shovels. I liked the idea of this covert, illicit, almost occult labour going into the making of the glass of junibeer that I would soon be drinking. And the idea that the junibeer was made from trees just like the ones I looked at every day, trees that grew not far away, on the Brow that was visible from almost everywhere I went.

  I had to keep the whole matter hidden from my father. He rarely opened the icebox and even then only after work when he was thirsty. He ate only one meal a day, a large lunch that he had delivered to his surgery, and after consuming which, he took a nap. Nevertheless, I cleared the icebox of spruce beer and juneshine before I went to bed. After he came home, I waited for an hour until I was sure he was asleep and crept downstairs to replenish my supply. Once asleep, he was all but unwakeable, so I knew it was highly unlikely that he would catch me in the act. I sampled the junibeer twice each evening, drinking a small amount before I went to bed, and a larger amount before I went to bed the second time, enough to make me sleep soundly until morning.

  At my first taste of junibeer, I almost retched. It was not the taste so much as its breathtaking potency that surprised me. Black spots of the sort I sometimes saw when I stood up too fast swarmed before my eyes. My usual cure for this was a deep breath, which on this occasion I couldn’t manage. After the impulse to gag passed, I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me and my body had forgotten how to breathe. I went out onto the back steps, gasping to no effect several times until at last air rushed in all at once and I gulped it down like water.

  After that, I used less juneshine and more spruce, experimenting until I found a proportion that was drinkable. The main difficulty with concealing my new habit from my father was the smell. I stoppered the juneshine as quickly as I could after pouring it, but still the kitchen reeked as if a juniper tree had been left in it for days. The smell of the spruce was not as strong, but it mixed with that of the juneshine to create an odour of hyper-fermentation. I burnt wood in the fireplace instead of coal and closed the flue for a while so that smoke spread through the house, explaining to my father when he came home that I had done so by accident. The next nights, I left all the windows open. But I knew some long-term solution was needed, so I smoked more cigarettes than usual, using the cheapest, most acrid smelling tobacco I could find, the Yellow Rag I had long ago forsaken for Royal Emblem.

  “It is a most unladylike habit,” my father said, “smoking cigarettes.”

  “So is having children out of wedlock,” I said.

  “It is even reprehensible in men. I don’t know why you took it up. I have never so much as smoked a pipe.”

  “All the lawyers at the courthouse smoke,” I said. “And the other reporters.”

  “All of whom are men.”

  “Yes, but it’s hard to resist taking it up when everyone around you is doing it.”

  “Suddenly you are following the crowd?”

  “I don’t plan to make a habit of conformity, believe me,” I said. Unsure just how volatile the junibeer might be, I kept it far separate from my lit cigarette—the junibeer on one end of the table and the Yellow Ragarettes on the other, I went back and forth between them, sipping, smoking, sipping, smoking. It wasn’t long before I was rolling Ragarettes while lying in bed, while writing, while sitting in the courtroom. It also wasn’t long before I was drinking junibeer as more than just a cure for sleeplessness.

  I was as careful as I could not to be seen sipping from the flask, but I dropped it on the floor of my office one day and two of the bailiffs saw the junibeer that spilled out. The bailiffs grinned at me and then at each other but said nothing. But in no time, word of the contents of my flask got around.

  “So what’s your poison these days, Fielding?” one of the prosecutors asked me.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and he shook his head and laughed. I would have left the flask at home from then on, but I found it too difficult to get through the day without the junibeer.

  “Two months on her first real job and she’s on the ’shine and the cigarettes,” one lawyer said.

  “Junibeer,” another lawyer standing next to me announced one day. “You smell like the inside of the Black Mariah on a Sunday morning. You’ll be dead in six months drinking that stuff.”

  I suppose it was inevitable that word of the flask would get back to my father.

  “I was told,” he shouted upstairs to me one night when he got home from work, “that you were seen at the courthouse with a flask of something.”

  I got dressed quickly and went downstairs, smoking a cigarette, still feeling the effects of my first nightcap.

  “Junibeer,” I said.

  “Are you insane, girl?” he said. “Do you realize that you could be arrested?”

  “It seems unlikely,” I said.

  “In the courthouse? Surrounded by police and prosecutors? And judges?”

  “And criminals,” I said. “Your name is mud among them.”

  “You’re drunk. You’ve been drinking.”

  “Been drinking but not drunk.”

  “Why have you taken to drinking?”

  “It helps me sleep.”

  “I could have given you something for that.”

  “No laudanum, thanks.”

  “Junibeer. Do you know what that can do to you? I’ve treated people who became ill because of drinking that. People have died. Where do you get it?”

  “Not from anyone you know.”

  “What must they be saying at the courthouse?”

  “They call it Fielding’s Remedy.”

  “Because I’m a doctor. Fielding’s Remedy. Dr. Fielding’s Remedy, they might as well be saying. You are to promise me you will never drink again.”

  “It would only be a promise that I would break. It would only be a lie.”

  “You won’t stop breaking the law?”

  “I won’t promise that I’ll never drink again. Perhaps it really is time that I left this house.”

  “Do you realize that I was one of those who signed the petition for prohibition? One of the prominent citizens whose name appeared on that list that was published in the papers? I didn’t just vote for proh
ibition.”

  “I would have voted against it. If I had the right to vote.”

  “Don’t tell me that, on top of everything else, you’ve become one of those awful suffragettes?”

  “Cigarettes, suffragettes and junibeer. It’s quite a threesome, isn’t it?”

  “My God—”

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t become one of those awful women. God knows what women would vote for if they had the vote. Even if they did have it, I’d be too young.”

  “Junibeer. The young woman they all think is my daughter, thrown in jail.”

  “So could you be. The junibeer’s in your icebox at the moment.”

  “Good God, girl, you’ve lost your mind. You’re drunk. And have been in public. What a disgusting spectacle. And people blame me for everything you do.”

  “Whereas they only blame me for some of what you do.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. As you say, I’m drunk. It’s not as if you can put a notice in the paper. Dr. Fielding is no longer to be blamed for what his daughter does.”

  “Is this how you intend to spend your life, blackening my name? No doubt you’ll still be at it when I’m gone.”

  “At some point, people will blame only me for everything I do.”

  “I wish that were true. But such a day will never come.”

  “It will come sooner the sooner I move out.”

  “No. I won’t have you moving out. A girl your age. Dr. Fielding’s daughter in some dive. Disgraced again. What sort of place, what sort of dump could you afford? A room in some boarding house. You have no idea. I have seen such places. The way people live. The things that go on. You have no idea how such places are regarded.”

  “If you would like to supplement my income, perhaps I could afford a decent place—”

  “There is no decent place for a woman by herself. A woman living alone. Other men’s daughters are well on their way to getting married.”

  “If you are waiting for some man to take me off your hands—”

  “I am not waiting. I am not an idiot. You have—disqualified yourself. You will never marry well. That confession. Those Forgeries. Now this—”

  “And I haven’t exactly saved myself for marriage, have I—”

  “Do not speak to me like that. My God, you cannot be mine.”

  “Regarding what you call this. I think we could come to some arrangement.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Not laudanum. But you are a doctor. You could prescribe something else for me.”

  “Something you would fill your flask with and take with you to court.”

  “What if I promised to take my medicine at home?”

  “Prescribe something—”

  “Yes, and I also don’t mean some patent medicine like Brown’s Bronchial Elixir or Beef Iron and Wine.”

  “You are too young. I could not prescribe alcohol for you.”

  “Then prescribe it for yourself. Diagnose yourself with some disorder of the nerves. I have heard at the courthouse that half the doctors in town are prescribing for themselves.”

  “I doubt that any are prescribing for their underage daughters.”

  “As I said, prescribe it for yourself. Have the prescriptions filled yourself. What druggist would doubt that the father of Sheilagh Fielding needed help to calm his nerves? People will blame your condition on me.”

  “People will think I have taken to drink.”

  “They will think you are doing what most of them are doing. Finding a way past prohibition.”

  “I have been a teetotaller all my life. Before prohibition, my colleagues teased me because I didn’t drink. Wouldn’t have a brandy with them. Or even smoke cigars.”

  “You are my father. People will accept that as an explanation for any change in your behaviour. And they will assume that you take your medicine at home, to help you sleep. It’s not as if you’ll be going to work drunk or smelling of alcohol.”

  “A sorry state of affairs. You need only turn aside from alcohol.”

  “I do not wish to turn aside from it. I don’t plan to be a dipsomaniac, a common drunk. But I find it makes me—I think less about some things that I would rather not think about at all. And sleep. It helps me sleep. I worry less about not sleeping.”

  “This arrangement. It amounts to blackmail. I go along with it or else. You go on dealing with these moonshiners from the Brow. Go on breaking the law. Risk winding up in jail. Jail would be the end of both of us.”

  “Father, for most people, finding ways to get their hands on alcohol has become a game. They drink more now than they ever did. The law will be repealed. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Blackmail. Shameful. Further proof that you are no child of mine.”

  But he agreed to the arrangement. Wrote himself prescriptions for alcohol. Went to several druggists in the vain hope of disguising “his” level of consumption. When he came home from work, he left the alcohol for me in a brown paper bag on the kitchen table where I found it in the morning after he had left the house. By tacit agreement, the delivery was never made in person. The alcohol never passed from his hands to mine. I kept the bottles at all times in my room, in a dresser drawer so that not even by chance could he set eyes on them. I never drank in his presence. Was never in his presence when I had been drinking. He returned the empty bottles to the druggists to have them refilled, collecting them from the back porch where I left them. I mixed the raw alcohol, known as “alky,” with anisette and with a kind of carbonated soft drink that had no brand name but was simply called “aerated water with sugar.” Unlike the Juneshine, it was as clear as water. Alky, anisette and aerated water. Triple A, I called it.

  It tasted much better than the junibeer and did not leave me feeling so queasy in the morning. At first, I did as I promised him and drank only at home. Though I could have used a glass, I preferred to drink from the flask, roaming about the house with it in the inside pocket of my vest, sipping from it while I read or wrote. I took one mouthful in the morning, then put the flask in my dresser drawer and headed off to the courthouse. At lunchtime I hurried home for a drink that would tide me over until afternoon.

  My father was right. Word that he was self-prescribing the Cure soon got around. But I was right as well. I was assumed to be the cause of his “condition,” the reason his nerves were so constantly on edge that he could not make it through the day without his “medicine.” Dr. Fielding’s Condition was my nickname for a while.

  “It is a humiliation,” my father said, “facing those same men week after week. A doctor should not be looked down upon by druggists. I can tell what they think of me. That I am malingering. Just another person pretending to be sick so they can get the Cure. A doctor taken to drink. Writing himself prescriptions for it. Worse than the worst of his patients. All this I endure so that I can bring home this ‘alky’ for a mere girl who is forbidden it by law. I am breaking the law, committing crimes to get you your supply. I must be losing my mind. To think that I agreed to such a thing. If word got out.”

  I broke off my arrangement with P.D. He came to the house with a delivery of juneshine and spruce beer that I had ordered weeks ago. I paid him for it but told him he could keep it, sell it elsewhere perhaps, and keep the surplus profit for himself.

  “Will they be angry when you tell them I don’t want their juneshine any more?”

  He shrugged. “Ya gave up drinkin,’ did ya?” he said.

  I decided it was better to say yes than to tell him that I had a new supplier, especially as he might repeat what I said to them, who might choose to blame their loss of a customer on him.

  “Just as well,” he said. “Them what drinks junibeer for long goes cracked.”

  I continued to see him every day. He would come to the house to collect my court stories in the afternoon and to receive his customary penny.

  “What are you planning to do with the money?” I said.

  “I’m goin’ away as
soon as I can,” he said.

  “Away?” I said. “Away from St. John’s?”

  “Away from Newfoundland,” he said. “Boston, maybe. Or New York.”

  One day, a new printer’s devil came by to get my stories.

  “Where’s P.D.?” I said.

  The boy, who could have passed from a distance for P.D., shrugged. “My name is P.D. now,” he said.

  I asked Herder about P.D.

  “He never showed up for work,” he said. “That’s all anybody knows.”

  March 12, 1917

  I am not yet twenty, yet feel sometimes like I have lived a hundred lives. I have created two. And feel certain that there will not be others. Their names are David and Sarah. But I do not think of them by name. By those names or by other ones. I sometimes wish that she had never left that note. I should have left it on the pillow, as if to say to her, I do not wish to know their names. Or: I have my own names for them. Or: why do you presume I care what you will call them? But I took it with me as though accepting the terms of some bargain we had made. The note the last part of the bargain. The last stage of our transaction. If you give me your children, I will let you know their names. You will take nothing of your children with you but their names. I keep that piece of paper with me, always. As if otherwise I might begin to doubt that they exist.

  Sometimes, when I go to bed, I put the note beneath my pillow. And am surprised to find it still there in the morning. In spite of it, I have no dreams. None of New York. None of that suite in her house. No dreams of my children. While awake, I think of them, but I have yet to see them in my dreams. What I imagine them to be, imagine them to look like. You may have their names, but you may not dream of them. A bargain made a thousand years ago. To dream of them. What a torment it might be.

  Was it both of them I heard? If not, which one? Daughter. Son. Sarah. David. Their initials are transposed. Daughter David. Son Sarah. I cannot dream of them because they cannot dream of me. I have gone to sleep clutching that piece of paper in my fist and, waking with an empty hand, searched the blankets in a panic. I have dreamt of doing that and woken with the piece of paper balled up in my fist like the one thing I salvaged from the dream.