The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  When it’s cloudy or foggy, there is only the eerie drone of engines. The largest are the cargo planes. The smallest are the bombers. It sounds as though they’ve come to bomb what’s left of Loreburn.

  The ones that make the least noise carry troops. David flew in such a plane from Boston to St. John’s. They vary the flight paths. Rumours of planes being fired at from German submarines. Absurd, impossible, most people said. But just in case. Rumours of other impossibilities. Anti-aircraft guns being offloaded from subs and set up in our own woods to shoot down our planes, their muzzles pointed upward while the German gunners scanned the sky with their binoculars in search of planes. Rumours of a destroyer that somehow made its way undetected and now lies at anchor and in camouflage in some fjord along the coast.

  In the kitchen window of Patrick’s house, the faint blue of morning has at last begun to show.

  I get up, go to the front room and stand at the window. I can see no boat in the bay, though some of the water is obscured by trees. No wind, no sounds from outside but the usual ones of waves and seagulls, muted more by distance than by my being indoors.

  There is the same unthreatening but leaden sky as there has been since the day of my arrival.

  I look at my watch. Seven-thirty. Long past sunrise. Later than I thought. Perhaps this is not the first light of morning, just the light of a day that is as bright as it will get. The sky is grey, not neutrally so like before, but grey as I remember the sky being when, watching the weather as a child, I knew that snow was on the way. But it is not, I am certain, cold enough for snow.

  My fears now seem more foolish than ever. It may just be because of Patrick giving me the gun that I have been so terrified by the sound of what I am no longer sure were voices. Voices, a gunshot that I heard weeks ago but have not had the courage to investigate.

  I pick my cane up from the floor beside the sofa, make my way through the house to the porch and go outside. It is colder than I thought, not many degrees above freezing and although I am wearing a vest over my long-sleeved dress, and despite the lack of wind, I feel the shock of the air like cold water on my skin.

  Yes, it even feels as though the first snow of the year is not far off. But it is only mid-October.

  I draw a deep breath. I decide against going back inside for a sweater or a coat, thinking that if I do I will stay inside all day beside the stove or the fireplace.

  Hugging myself for warmth with my free arm, I make my way to the beach path, my bad foot twisting on the uneven sod despite my cane.

  I see no footprints but my own and Patrick’s on the path, which is more dust than mud now, though wet or dry it would register a new footprint.

  I follow the path to the last bend, the one beyond which, I know, I will see the wharf and beyond that the open bay.

  I will not pause at the turn in the path, I decide, heart thumping. I will, as quickly as possible, get it over with—round the bend, and if there is a dory or a boat moored at the wharf or anchored in the bay, I will seek out their owners on the reasonable assumption that they are visitors who mean me no harm.

  I am part terrified of meeting him and part eager to do so. As much simply to get it over with as to satisfy my curiosity I would like to meet him face to face.

  I speed up, aware, even in the midst of my suspense, of my lopsided, lurching gait, and of the sight I would make emerging, cane flailing, from the woods, to someone watching from the beach or from a boat out in the bay.

  I all but crash through the canopy of spruce, forgetting to duck as tree limbs lash my face.

  I see first that there is no vessel at the wharf and, looking to my left, that the bay is empty. No boat at anchor. None in sight anywhere, from Loreburn beach to the far horizon that I scan with my lorgnette. Nothing. If there were visitors, they are gone now.

  Unless they landed elsewhere on the island. Though Patrick made mention of no other places that were suitable for landing, no other abandoned settlements on Loreburn. He was quite certain the island was uninhabited.

  Is the island large enough that someone might be living on some other part of it, or be in the habit of visiting some other part of it, without his knowledge? It seemed massive from the dock at Quinton, amorphously suggestive of some horizon-spanning island, but, curiously, not so large when we drew close to it—too close, perhaps, to gauge its full dimensions.

  I look at the green-mantled headland to the east, above which the white gulls are teeming, innumerable, preoccupied, oblivious. Again, as when I first saw them, I have the sense that I have happened onto some great work-in-progress, some great construction site or city whose inhabitants are profoundly unaware of other species, other purposes or points of view, unaware of even the possibility of being watched or marvelled at.

  I make my way down to the beach, the rocks sliding beneath my feet so that I move as much sideways as forwards. I imagine what it would be like were I in flight from something or someone while those rocks slid crazily about, or in hopeless pursuit of something or someone far better able than me to navigate this surface. I picture myself falling and getting up, fighting with my cane to keep my balance.

  I see, between the first growth of alders and the last tier of beach rocks, a strip of grass less than a foot wide and decide that, despite its narrowness, it is preferable to these rocks. Vowing that, on the way back, I will find the path that I know must lead from Patrick’s house to the rest of Loreburn, I walk as though on a tight rope, one hand grabbing leafless alders, one on the knob of my cane, until I reach the cart road at the bottom of the hill of houses.

  Out of breath, I stop and look up the hill. It occurs to me that, had there been visitors recently, they might have waited out the darkness and the cold in one of the abandoned, boarded-up old houses. What an unlikely sight it would be, smoke issuing from the chimney of one of these decrepit houses, a dead dwelling come to life, a door nailed shut for decades swinging open as though any moment the new inhabitants of the house might emerge to start their day.

  But from where I stand, I can see no evidence of a door having been forced open or broken down, or a square of plywood having been removed from a window.

  I begin to make my way up the winding road, each level of which is almost perfectly parallel with the ones below it.

  Forgoing, because of their steepness, the shortcut paths the horses use, I follow the road that goes more from side to side than up, looping one way, then the other. The road, two ruts as dry and dusty as the path but with a strip of high grass down the middle, bears no footprints but my own.

  It looks as if Patrick, in his last visit to Loreburn, did not visit the village. Perhaps he never does. Nor is the wild hay that grows between the loops of road disturbed except in the usual places where the horses pass.

  I scrutinize more closely than I ever have before each house as I walk, climbing higher than I ever have without stopping to rest, without turning and taking in the view, though I look down as I climb to see if the backs of the houses are, like their sides and fronts, undisturbed.

  Nowhere do I see so much as a fresh splinter of wood, a nail newly pried loose. Nothing but the usual monochrome of grey.

  I look to the top of the hill, just able to spy the empty belfry of the church, the nooselike strand of rope, the cross-topped steeple.

  I decide that I had better check the church as well.

  My legs, the bad one especially, are aching from my journey along the beach and my winding ascent of the hill, but I continue to climb.

  I stop just above the last row of houses to turn and survey the scene below and on either side, looking for any signs of visitors—the remains of a fire, a distant plume of smoke, a flash of artificial colour among the trees, movement among the branches, hikers on the headlands. Anything.

  “HELLO,” I shout.

  I turn just in time to simultaneously hear and see the horses headed towards me, the first not fifty feet from where I stand. Before I can step off the road, I find myself surrou
nded by them, horses on either side of me, behind me and in front of me.

  They are not panicked, not quite galloping, but seem more urgently intent than usual on getting to wherever it is to which Loreburn is a shortcut.

  I know they want only to get by me and tell myself that I will be all right if I keep perfectly still and leave the manoeuvring to them—the tumult and commotion, the thudding clamour of their hoofs, the alarming volatility of a herd of a species I have never before encountered in such numbers and at such close proximity.

  Snorting, blasts of breath, audible and visible, issuing from their noses and their mouths, their heads higher than mine, their large eyes seeming, from my lower vantage point, to be rolled back in fright, they might be in retreat from something.

  I remind myself that I have never seen them hit an obstacle while descending the hill, and an obstacle, I am certain, is all I am to them. An obstacle who startled them by shouting, who spooked them into this restrained stampede.

  I can smell them, their breath, their teeth and tongues that are green from eating grass, their mud-spattered chests, their hides that reek of urine and manure.

  All of it, all of them, part round me, the herd breaking like water round a rock, some horses, their view blocked by those in front, stepping to one side at what seems like the last possible moment to avoid a collision with me.

  Finally, as I stand there trembling, perched lopsidedly on my cane, the last of them brush past me, the flank and mane of a white, sway-backed mare whisking my forehead as though on purpose, a final flourish of mischief.

  Even as I fight to catch my breath, it occurs to me that it might have been the horses I heard on the night of the voices. Why have I not thought of this?

  My last thought, before I make off in the direction of the church, is that it could just as easily have been the dogs that I heard, could have been the pack I didn’t see though they were just feet away. If it had been them, they might now be tearing me apart.

  Patrick had been right, for more reasons than he knew. It had been foolish of me to venture out without the shotgun.

  I turn and watch the horses wind their way among the houses, only a few of them shortcutting down-slope through the grass, most of them taking the same route in reverse as I did.

  The herd is as orderly as if they are the lead attraction in a street parade, though they seem, like the dogs, to have no leader. I have yet to see the same horse at the head of the herd twice as they go down or up the hill.

  At the bottom of the hill, they turn east, left, before they reach the beach and follow a path that leads to that opening in the stand of spruce, the path I have yet to follow.

  I watch their rumps disappearing one by one. Their performance complete, they are filing offstage. Even from this height on the hill, I can’t see the path among the trees, can see no clearing or body of fresh water to which the horses might be headed. Nor can I see the horses themselves, not even a moving commotion of branches or a rising cloud of dust.

  I wish I had a horse of my own so that I could follow them, or at least follow the path, for how they would react to the sight of one of their own species ridden by one of another I’m not sure. Would they turn on a tamed horse, or run from it? Or would my horse quickly become one of them, refuse to be ridden any more, escape and be absorbed into the herd?

  I would like to see them at night, or even just see them grazing, staying put somewhere instead of plodding eerily through Loreburn past grass and wild hay that is surely as good as anything that grows elsewhere on this island. But they leave it all untouched as if they suspect it is contaminated or believe it would be unwise to stop among the houses—though judging from the age of the houses, it is certain that none of these horses was alive when Loreburn was last inhabited.

  These horses might be descended from ones that, even when Loreburn was lived in, ran wild, either impossible to capture and break or not worth the trouble of it.

  Perhaps it is Patrick’s occasional presence on the island, the proximity of his house to these, that inclines the horses to forgo the prize grazing that is offered by the hill.

  Convinced by my confrontation with the horses that the main drama of the day is behind me, I make my way among the stones of the little cemetery and pause at Samuel Loreburn’s wooden cross. I fancy that his prostrate family/congregation are not lying on their backs but on their stomachs, not resting with their hands folded on their chests and heads uptilted, not staring at the sky or at the inscription on the cross as they attend to his sermon, but face down, stretched out full length with their arms extended, supplicant, obeisant, loomed over eternally by their eccentric patriarch, able to see nothing but the shadow of the cross that seems not so much to mark his resting place as literally to embody or contain the man himself, as if Samuel Loreburn, alone of all those who come to or was born at Loreburn, is still alive.

  It is, I know, a fanciful notion largely inspired by the “voices” I still think I heard and the gunshot that may have sounded only in a dream.

  Yet what a homiletic monument to extinction, transience, it all seems, the houses, the sunken headstones, all but overgrown by grass, some of them so blank and smooth they might still be awaiting their inscriptions, while the inscriptions of others are barely legible, as if the mason had had time for but a single, cursory tracing of the letters and numbers that are so shallow they can no longer fill with rainwater.

  I imagine how the headstones must have looked decades ago when they were deeply grooved, how they must have looked on a sunlit, summer Sunday morning following a storm, all of the inscriptions glittering, rain-written, spelled out in water that would not evaporate for days.

  I imagine not a piecemeal abandonment, not depopulation by gradual attrition, but a full-scale evacuation, sudden but controlled and orderly, as if the residents of Loreburn had somehow known the day of departure would come, had lived in constant preparation for it, for some peril whose arrival, though known to be inevitable, defied exact prediction.

  Overseen by Samuel, they make their hasty but composed escape, load their boats high with their belongings, and as per some plan drawn up long ago and memorized by all, board up the houses and leave Loreburn, a fleet of fishing boats weighed down to the gunwales, setting out for who knows where.

  I have been lulled by Patrick’s phlegmatic indifference to all things Loreburn-related into believing that the town is no more than it seems to him to be, a place unremarkably founded and unremarkably abandoned, no more or less interesting than countless other such places in the world.

  In all likelihood, his view is accurate, however annoying his taciturn lack of curiosity about everything might be.

  But I cannot help imagining that behind all those doors and windows lie rooms so abruptly abandoned they look just as they did on any average day, tables still set for meals, wood piled high beside pot-bellied stoves, beds unmade, closets and dressers crammed with clothes, books left open and face down on the floor, little household projects like knitting cast aside—a Pompei whose disaster cry was a false alarm, or warned of something less spectacular than a volcanic eruption, something that must have been, in its own way, an intervention just as final and profound, a modest apocalypse still unheard of in the outside world.

  What do those houses look like inside? As empty, as bare and desolate as Patrick says they are.

  As is the church, no doubt. I look at it. Would they have taken the pews away? I walk around it. It seems absurdly small, unworthy of being called a “church.” More of a freestanding chapel.

  I look for evidence of visitors. The plywood shutters are still in place. The large rectangles on the side deface the structure, hide the Roman arches of the windows like desecrations.

  It seems that, except for that plain, once-white wooden cross, the church’s churchness has been erased.

  There are steps at the back that lead up to a shuttered door. Again, no sign of visitors. Except for the trail that I made through it, the wild hay around the
church lies undisturbed. Nothing anywhere, not so much as a single freshly broken branch or twig, not a single blade of grass bent against the grain.

  If I heard voices, they must have come from farther away than it seemed that night. My doctor in St. John’s told me that the symptoms of withdrawal might persist for years and that they might include, besides the tremors and dizziness and even mild convulsions that I have grown accustomed to, vivid hallucinations. Visual ones, I had assumed he meant. But that these hallucinations might be auditory did not occur to me until now.

  I dared not ask the doctor what he meant by “years.” That he hadn’t specified or even speculated how many made me dread the answer. Forever? I couldn’t bear the thought. Nor the thought that some of the symptoms of my withdrawal hadn’t yet begun, though it was months since my last drink.

  Voices that might return tonight. Or begin again while I am out here, in broad daylight. There would be no running from them.

  On the way back to the house, I feel a wave of dizziness and lean on my cane with both hands until, quickly, blessedly, my head is clear again.

  Chapter Twelve

  September 29,1924

  MY FATHER, WITH THE HELP OF SOME CRONY AT THE office of the railway, has arranged for me to stay at a section shack on the Bonavista branchline, the sort of shack usually occupied by the men who maintain the railroad. They and their families live in shacks strung out at one-mile intervals across the island, and on the peninsula branchlines, the nearest to St. John’s is the Bonavista.

  I have been assigned some token tasks in exchange for my pay, which is less than one-third that of the men, most of whom I am stronger than despite my limp and lingering illness, for they, their wives and children are malnourished.

  In spite of the isolation, I hope each morning to find that a letter from my Provider has been slipped beneath my door. I fear that he might be interfering in the lives of my children and want him to tell me he is not.

  I try not to speculate about him and his motives, try not to think too much of the children. Or of Smallwood.