“He’s quite a writer,” Sharpe said, to which I replied, “He is more likely to write a story describing lawyers as brave men with great skill than he is to have written that.”
But there is no more talk of Smallwood. Rain for two days, but now the wind has changed. Slant-driven sleet is clattering like stones against the windows and the walls. Not even my father, exhausted though he is, can get to sleep. Better sleet than snow in wind like this. Though not, perhaps, for sealers.
I wonder if my father hopes that Smallwood perishes out there.
A gust just then. Something somewhere in the moorings of the house began to break. Some piece of wood that no one has laid eyes on for more than twenty years just came to life.
The blessing of the fleet. Ten thousand on the waterfront. Women crying as if their men were off to war. Smallwood standing like a sealer in the rigging of the S.S. Newfoundland. Absurd. Absurdly touching. Hoping to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. Despite his spectacles. Despite his size. He looked, at that height, like some delinquent stowaway who would surely be discovered and ordered off the ship before it left. “Come down from there, you little—“The crowd laughing. A moment of comic relief in all that gravity. His glasses sparkled in the sunlight as if he was a lookout with binoculars. Priests and ministers of all denominations. His mother there to see him off, no doubt.
Another great gust. What might have been a beam of wood breaking with a single snap. My father on his feet again. We will soon see how vital that beam of wood was to the house. The sound of sleet has stopped, but the wind is worse, so it must be snowing. The curtain on the landing billows inward as though the window is ajar.
No news for two days now. Rumours. Rumours of everything. That everyone is safe. That everyone is lost. That this ship is still afloat. That this one sank after it was crushed by ice. All the ships will soon be home. All the ships are lost. The entire fleet gone down.
I spoke to Herder, asked him what he thought. He looked at me. “You haven’t slept in days,” he said. He knows about the Triple A. I told him I’d run out but would soon be getting more. He said I was a no-booze, no-snooze kind of drinker. “Not the worst kind. Not by a long shot.”
Asked me if it was because of Smallwood I was losing sleep. I said it was. “As unlikely as it seems, we’ve become good friends,” I said. He looked at me again. I shook my head. “Nothing more than friends,” I said. “Good friends.” Smallwood doesn’t think of me as a woman. I mean, he doesn’t think of women as women. I’m not sure he thinks of them at all. I suppose he might if one could help him get ahead. If he discovered her by chance. Women are not part of his strategy. Or wouldn’t be if he had a strategy. Smallwood has goals, but he does not have plans. And his goals are always changing. All he is sure of is that he wants to be remembered.
If the S.S. Newfoundland is lost, will Smallwood be remembered? To be overlooked by history, rightly or wrongly, his greatest fear. To be demoted to a kind of non-existence. His life erased, as if it never happened. What does he see in the courtroom? A mass of soon-to-be-forgotten souls. Lives that will never be recorded, never read about by future generations. The fate of most women. Hence his disinterest. The exceptions he talks about as if they are a kind of sub-group of famous men. Not women with masculine natures, but women chosen arbitrarily by fate to be remembered. Women who, like monarchs, succeed to the throne of fame by an accident of birth.
In the six months since I helped him get the job, this is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him. I didn’t think I’d miss him this much. And now, with all these rumours of disaster.
What, given all that he knows me to be and how I am commonly regarded, must he think? “Fielding,” he hopes he will have the chance to say one day. “Sheilagh Fielding. I knew her when I was just a court reporter.” One of those memorable characters a man encounters on the road to success, a character powerless but eccentric, and long since surpassed by him, an amusing reminder of his early days when others fancied him to be on a par with her, when only he believed that this job was temporary, a paying of dues for the life to which he would soon be moving on.
No one can stand to stay indoors. I have never seen so many people on the streets. People walking who haven’t walked the streets in years. Even on those streets that have been shovelled free of snow, like the ones downtown, there are no carriages or cars. Because in carriages or cars you cannot stop to talk to strangers.
I spent a whole day out there myself, walking, talking. Everyone exchanging rumours. Mostly optimistic ones. Reassuring ones. Remembering past storms that, in spite of all the worry they caused, did not take any lives. People commending the skill of the sealing captains and their crews. If anyone could bring a ship home safely through a storm like that, he could. They could. The Keanes. They probably made port somewhere and even now are sipping cups of tea, their only concern being how worried we must be. For them. People laughing. Imagine. They’re worried about us. But the laughter never lasts. And people move on to see what the next person coming down the road will say.
It feels, outdoors, even when we’re only walking, like we’re doing something. Like our itinerant vigilance will somehow help. Even if, from where people are, the Narrows are not visible, people glance constantly in that direction while they talk. Through the Narrows they departed and through the Narrows will return. As if a straight line through the Narrows would lead them to the answer, if only they could follow it.
If I know old man Keane. If I know Captain Westbury. If I know George Tuff. Names, legendary names, to shore against the storm. Names that, in the past, have warded off misfortune. Remember how George Tuff kept these twenty men alive and brought them home. That’s right. No need to give up hope. We’ll cry if it comes to that, but for now we’ll stay strong for one another. Never mind the wind. Don’t forget to say your prayers. Make sure you go to church. God bless you now, my love. My dear. My darling. Duckie. My son. Misses. Skipper. Every old man, especially an old man who has children, is referred to with respect as “skipper.”
“Any minute now we might see the flags on Signal Hill. That’s right.” The signal flags they fly from the Box House. Mercantile flags to let the merchants and pilot boat operators know which ship is on its way. No flags for four days now.
Everywhere, heads nodding. Women in head scarves conferring on street corners. Children gravely watching from a distance. They say the Southern Cross went down off Port aux Basques. All hands were lost. “I won’t believe it until they bring his body back to me.” People crying in the streets. Women consoling a mother whose son or sons were on the Southern Cross. Whose husband was. Or father. Brother.
Women, when they see me walking by myself, assume the worst. “Did you lose someone, my love?” Then remember who I am, that I have no siblings, that my father is a doctor and I am—Fielding.
“There is a friend of mine,” I tell them. “A close friend on the Newfoundland.” They nod, thinking they know what I mean by “close” but not asking for a name. “Well. No word, yet, my love, about the Newfoundland. Don’t forget to say your prayers. I got two boys on the Newfoundland. They’ll both be coming back. They’re all right, you just wait and see. Your fella, he’s all right too, I bet. Did you hear about the Southern Cross?” Somehow comforting. That the Cross was lost. As if it increases the other ships’ chances of survival. God singled out someone else for sorrow. The unthinkable happened, not to mine, but hers. Not to me, but her. He must have spared mine. Me. He would not take them all.
The courts are closed. The stores are closed. But my father has not missed a day of work. Few doctors have closed their surgeries. Supplies of every conceivable form of sedative are running low. Laudanum. Patent medicines. Alky. The police are seizing moonshine, giving it to doctors. No alcohol-related arrests are being made.
My father discontinued my supply of Triple A, but I got hold of some juneshine. Now and then I drift off to sleep but wake as though from the impact of a fall. Over and over. Better t
o stay awake and write. Impossible to read. Everything seems like a non sequitur. No book, not even the Bible, addresses the one thing that seems worth addressing. I have not gone to church, nor have I prayed. Given to fits of repentance when scared. Who said that? Saved while in a state of dread. Converted while terrified. There are other ways to look at it, I know. The balm of grace. Solace in a time of sorrow. The inconceivability of hopelessness. All is never lost. We will see them all again. Every one of us is loved except the damned. And who are they? No two people can agree. Blessed are they who mourn. The Sermon on the Mount. Even that, the most beautiful of all things ever written, seems like nothing but mere words tonight.
Smallwood. The only way I could imagine him losing weight was amputation, but perhaps his bones are even smaller now. The Smallwoods are not sealers. They’re a seafearing family. Smallwood’s father went to Boston years ago and had it been possible to walk there he would have rather than get on board a ship.
Chapter Seven
LOREBURN
I WROTE THOSE WORDS WHEN I WAS HALF SARAH’S AGE. A GIRL. Seventeen and soon to meet the man I fear has followed me to Loreburn. Fear it, yet fear even more that I have hidden too well for him to find me.
March 23, 1917
I went out one night in search of junibeer, in search of anything. P.D. (the Second) told me that something called “callabogus” (pronounced like Galapagos), a mixture of spruce beer, rum and molasses, was being sold in the west end late at night. He gave me an address on Patrick Street, a street corner that I should not visit until after midnight.
I walked westward on Water Street, tapping every lamp post with my cane, clearing my throat, coughing, letting bootleggers know that a customer was coming, hoping to be accosted, hoping for a voice from some dark doorway and then a quick transaction that would not involve me being raped or robbed or mistaken for a prostitute.
Patrick Street was dark, the lamps long since extinguished. I heard no footsteps but my own, no one’s breathing but my own. I did not smoke, lest I disguise the telltale smell of someone else’s cigarette, but I smelled nothing. I decided I would stop and wait, just stand there in the street in the hope of enticing some juneshine maker and street-watcher from his house. Thinking it might be so dark “they” couldn’t see me, I struck a match and lit a cigarette, keeping the match lit for as long as possible, then drawing deeply on the cigarette to make it glow.
I heard the sound of a window opening on my left, slowly, carefully, bit by bit, opened thus many times before I guessed. I saw, approaching the window, that the curtain was tacked so tightly to the frame that it might have been a pull-down shade.
A great exhalation of breath from behind the curtain.
“How are you, tonight?” a man said. His voice deep and quavering as if he was about to cry.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you tonight?”
“It’s late,” he said. “Too late perhaps.”
“What do you mean?”
“Late. For a woman to be out all by herself. In the cold. And the snow.”
“I can’t sleep. I thought perhaps a walk would help.”
I wondered if, in spite of the darkness, he could see me through the curtain. I felt like pulling it aside.
“I can’t sleep either,” he said. “It’s an awful thing, the sealers. What those poor men must be going through. Is that what’s keeping you awake? You have someone out there, do you? Your husband—”
“No,” I said, thinking that the more desperate I sounded the more money he would ask for. Then I changed my tone. I might have happened onto a man keeping a silent vigil in the darkness for his brother or his son.
“Do you—?”
“No,” the voice said. “No one. I know where all my children are tonight.”
“That’s good,” I said. I felt suddenly ashamed, thinking of the women who each passing night were aging years waiting to hear about their sons, while my two children, whom I had never seen and had left with another woman, were in their beds.
“I know where all my children are as well,” I foolishly said, gulping down the last two words.
“Your children. Yes,” he said.
“It’s just an expression,” I said.
“Is it? Oh yes. I see what you mean. I’ve heard that expression.”
Which worried me more than if he had said that he thought it a curious thing to say. I wondered if I should elaborate or if that would only make things worse.
“The truth is that I’m thirsty,” I said.
“Yes.” Unsurprised.
“Whatever you have—” I half-shouted.
“Shhhhh—”
He named a price. “Just pass me the money and I’ll get something for that thirst of yours.” His voice quavering again.
I took the money from my purse and pushed it through the side of the curtain. Felt his fingers close momentarily about mine and hold them tightly, fingers so large I thought at first he was taking the money with both hands.
“I’ve waited for so long,” he said.
I withdrew my hand.
“Here. To help you sleep, my dear,” he said. A bottle like the ones P.D. had used for juneshine appeared on the windowsill, though I could not see his hands.
“Waited?” I said, but the window slowly closed. Looking to see if others were about, I pulled the bottle cork and smelled it. It was nothing I had had before. Presumably callabogus. I put the bottle under my coat, which I then tied tightly at the waist. I turned and walked east for half a minute until, in a gap between the row of houses, I made my way uphill. My heart pounding in my chest.
Where are you, Smallwood?
“Out there,” they say. They might mean the known edge of the world. The darkness of the sea at night. Out there. They do not quite believe that it exists.
I keep going back to that window on Patrick Street, though I swore I would never go near it again. I stand in other streets at night, clearing my throat, coughing, smoking, as obvious about my intentions as I can be short of shouting them. No takers, though. Enough of a risk to sell to anyone, but to sell to a woman, a “girl” my age who even before Prohibition was not old enough to drink. No takers, though I light up and smoke until I am standing in a circle of stamped-out cigarette butts.
No takers. So I go by that window on Patrick Street again and again. And it is always like the first time. Waiting. Wondering if the window will ever open.
The sound of that window. Like the shutter in confession, I imagine. Sliding slowly. That voice behind the curtain. Like a priest behind the screen. Inviting disclosure. Your sins, my child. The promise of discretion. Those things he said. And the way he said them. As if he knew me. Had known me all my life. Never again, I swore, not after that remark I made about knowing where my children were. Not after hearing the tone of his voice. Tender, wistful. How unsurprised he seemed to hear me speak of children. But then “I’ve waited for so long.” As if he would rather have been paid in different currency. Except he did not sound like that.
But I must have my callabogus. I must have something, for without something I cannot get to sleep. A day without something and I feel as though, unless I steel myself against it, I will lose control. I discover that my teeth and fists are clenched but have no idea how long they have been that way. There is a knot in my stomach that will not let me draw an easeful breath. I feel nervous, feel always that I will have to take some test, that some matter of suspense will soon be settled.
But there is no test. And there is no revelation or announcement that will put me out of my suspense. Every sound and movement startles me. The most commonplace events seem ominous.
No takers. And so, each night, or as many nights as I can afford, I go back to that window in the west end of the city. Hands shaking with dread, cold, unnameable things, I light up a cigarette, a Yellow Rag, and wait. He must like to make me wait. Seems not to mind that I stand there, so conspicuous, outside his house. A six-foot, three-inch woman known to everyone. A r
ecurring sentinel mere feet from his window. No matter how long he makes me wait, no other customers come by.
He must have other customers. I go there later, thinking to shorten the wait, but the wait is always an hour, no matter when I get there. I think he sits there in the dark, the window and the curtain closed, watching the rise and fall of my cigarette and consulting his watch, waiting out the pointless passing of an hour. The house is about a half-mile from the car barn where the streetcars are repaired at night. I see the blue glow of a welder’s torch that I cannot hear on a distant patch of snow. About that distance, too, from the railyard where the locomotives and their trains are turned around. Riverhead Station. The end of the line for eastbound trains, the start of it for us. Sometimes I hear the engine of a late-arriving locomotive. For a while the streets are busy with carriages and cabs, passengers who just debarked heading home at last. Then silence again.
He knows how much I need what I can only get from him. What a relief to hear that window, the wooden frame sliding in the wooden groove. How long would I stand there before I gave up in despair and went back home? For as long as I could stand the cold. Until the first faint light of morning.
At first I thought he made me wait to discourage me from objecting to his asking price. I have waited for so long. For what? He said it as he held my hand in his. Mine felt like a child’s. How easily he could have crushed it. As if he were saying that he had waited all his life to touch me. Me. Not just any woman.
He may be nothing more than a man who knows of my father’s obsession and out of sheer mischief hopes to make it mine as well. I could ask others about him, but he might hear about it and never sell to me again. Who lives in that little house on Patrick Street? Number 43? Unthinkable. I am tempted to spy on it by day, but afraid, also. That he or someone he knows will see me. I must do nothing to jeopardize my supply until things are back to normal. But there are other jeopardies that, when things go back to normal, will remain.
The Custodian of Paradise Page 22
