The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  My Provider. My protector. I know it is absurd that any man would or could go to such lengths, undetected, to follow me.

  In the San, the other patients told me that, in my delirium dreams I often spoke of my Provider. By Provider they thought I meant God, thought I was praying, beseeching God to sustain me through my illness or, if his Plan was otherwise, to have mercy on my soul. “Faith is a wonderful thing,” Nurse Nell said.

  “What did I say about my Provider?” I asked her.

  “You speak like you’re afraid of Him, as you should be,” Nurse Nell said. “You ask Him questions. You ask Him for advice. You ask Him what He wants from you. You tell Him you know He would not hurt His children.”

  There are no crowds here among which to blend in as he, as they, did in Manhattan. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone but me has lived along these tracks for years.

  From coast to coast the railway runs and so do the section shacks. A community six hundred miles long and fifty feet wide. Impossible to infiltrate.

  I went up on the roof again tonight despite the cold.

  He stopped directly opposite my shack. I tried to provoke him into saying something.

  “Lovely evening for a walk. I suppose you don’t need a light if you know how far it is between the ties. How fast do you think you could go without tripping and falling down? There must be others who share my curiosity, depending on how far you walk, how many shacks you pass.

  “You must wonder what I’m doing up here. I’m not the walker I used to be, but I still like it outdoors. And there’s nothing out here flat enough to rock on but this roof.

  “I use the trolley if I have to travel far. You’ve probably seen me going by your shack. It’s not hard once you get it going, is it?”

  Nothing.

  “That’s all right, don’t say a word. Your silence speaks volumes. More people like you, that’s what we need. If more people went out walking after dark, staring into other people’s windows, the world would be a better place. But try telling that to people who insist that a visit is not a visit unless you see their face and each person goes through the motions of answering when spoken to.

  “Well, they can have what they call their ‘conversations.’ Me, I prefer to be stared at in silence by someone lurking in the darkness while I speak.

  “Do you do this at every shack or only mine? Every shack, I dare say. That would explain the rifle shots I hear some nights. Have the sectionmen been shooting at you? Most of them are all right, but there’s the occasional crank who objects to being spied on by strangers after midnight. Don’t let their kind discourage you, though. What odds if some trigger-happy sectionman shoots you dead some night? More people like you willing to sacrifice everything for a worthwhile cause, that’s what we need.”

  Still nothing. He’d never stopped for so long before. I thought I could hear him breathing.

  “You do realize, do you, that you may have to share these tracks with a train from time to time? You deserve to leave something more behind than a stain on a cowcatcher or to have the only words you ever spoke, an exclamation of surprise or even an expletive, drowned out by a ten-ton locomotive.”

  A sniff that might have been a kind of laugh. I had the feeling that if I screamed and shouted for help he wouldn’t speak or move.

  “I’ve been courted by shyer and slyer men than you, so if it’s a date you’re looking for, there’s no need to feel ashamed. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I asked a man one time. He said many a cat had had his tongue. But he used a synonym for cat. I forget what it was. So what’s got your tongue? Perhaps you have an eye for a finely turned orthopaedic boot. Some men do, you know.”

  No sectionman would stand there, listening to this.

  Might he be in the habit of coming down the Bonavista on the train? And going back by train? Somehow, somewhere debarking and reboarding, though there were no scheduled stops anywhere near my shack.

  At last, as if he had grown tired of my rant, he began to walk away, his only acknowledgment of my soliloquy being that he seemed to kick the gravel and send a spray of stones ahead of him that pinged off the iron rails.

  When I could no longer hear the sound of his footsteps, I climbed down from the roof and, in my haste to get indoors, left the rocking chair behind. The wind came up later that night and I heard the empty chair rocking slowly back and forth on the roof above my bed.

  No amount of Scotch could convince me to go outside and climb up on the roof to get the chair or make me so oblivious to the rocking on the roof that I could get to sleep.

  I took the chair down at first light and will never again go up on the roof.

  I have asked my visitors and neighbours if they have heard the footsteps on the tracks at night, and got all sorts of responses. One woman admonished me not to ask such things in front of children, though there were no children around when I asked.

  The old men who come to visit seem mystified by my question. No one has ever encountered my “ghost,” which I fear is how he is now being spoken of.

  I’m told that no one visits the shacks on either side of mine at night, since such a visit would involve at least a two-mile walk in the cold. Certainly no one without a light would venture out.

  I believe my questions have enhanced my already considerable reputation for oddness and eccentricity. I am looked upon as the tall, lame, cane-wielding woman who lives by herself and, perhaps because of her fondness for drink, is given to hearing things at night.

  “A man from New York is on his way,” a woman shouted to me from the doorway of her shack. Her announcement must have been a warning to me, that I would soon be dealt with by this man from New York.

  I stopped the trolley and, so out of breath I could barely speak, said, “What man from New York?”

  She shrugged and made a face as if she thought it was news enough that a man from New York was coming and she couldn’t imagine what else about him I expected her to know or thought was relevant.

  The men confirmed her declaration. A man from New York was coming. He had weeks ago set out on foot from Port aux Basques, walking the tracks, every inch of the mainline and the branchlines, in an effort to unionize the sectionmen who could not be contacted by post because they couldn’t read. Nor, as the railway was opposed to the union, could this man from New York make his way from west to east by train.

  I thought of Smallwood right away. Who else could it be?

  Once a week, as the train was going by, the engineer would throw me a copy of a St. John’s newspaper, usually the Evening Telegram or the Daily News, neither of which, I was certain, would make mention of this attempt to unionize the railway whose trains delivered their papers across the island.

  But I scanned the next paper, which turned out to be the Morning Chronicle, and found a small item about this unionizer from New York who was identified as “J.R. Smallwood.”

  The “J.R.” made me smile in spite of myself. I had no doubt that Smallwood had supplied the name himself. He had probably even written the story and sent it to the Chronicle, who reprinted it verbatim.

  Over the next couple of weeks, whenever I was told or overheard that a man from New York was on his way, I interrupted.

  “He’s not from New York,” I said. “He’s not even from St. John’s. He is, God help us all, from Gambo, the hamlet of Gambo. He is a bayman of short stature with the touch of Midas in reverse. Every time he touches gold it turns into lead. He is a false prophet preaching socialism who, in exchange for unionizing you, will steal your souls.”

  The sectionmen stared at me, mystified, almost frightened it seemed, for I had never spoken to them before in that fashion.

  “His name is Joe,” I said. They looked in need of reassurance that my preamble had been nonsense. “He’s as harmless as his name. He’s the fellow that because of me had to leave school. But at one time we were friends. I knew him in New York.” I stopped. “Never mind,” I said. “You should all join the union. It could mean more money. Tw
o and a half cents an hour more maybe, according to the papers.”

  All anyone talked about for days was Smallwood. I burned the newspapers that were thrown to me from the train. What the source of their information was I didn’t ask.

  “He’s wored the soles clean off his shoes,” a woman told me. “His feet is all bandaged up. He’s almost starved to death. He reads the Bible as he goes. Nonstop. Knows it forwards and backwards. Says grace at every meal. He’ll be comin’ down the Bonavista any day now, lookin’ for a place to sleep. It’s a wonderful thing he’s doin’, no matter what you says.”

  On a day in late October when everyone but him must have known that the first storm of the winter was imminent, a Sunday afternoon, he knocked on the door of Twelve Mile House.

  I had been trying to nap, and getting up, peeked out through my bedroom curtains. There he was. I might not have recognized him had I not known that he was coming.

  In New York, where he had seemed nothing more than skin and bones, he must have weighed twice what he did now. He was hatless, his balding head browned and blistered from whatever sun there had been the past two months. There was so little flesh on his face that the tip of his normally pointed nose curved inward like a beak.

  He wore exactly what he’d been wearing when I saw him last. That threadbare Norfolk jacket, which it would not surprise me thirty years from now to hear that he was buried in. A once-white shirt whose buttonholes were joined with twine. Tweed trousers that flapped like sails behind him. The soles of his boots were entirely detached and tied to them like skate blades.

  He wore about his neck a strange contraption, something like I’d seen cigarette-girls wearing in New York, except that he carried not cigarettes but a battered suitcase on which rested a large book with ribbons hanging from the edge of its spine, unmistakably a Bible.

  The old man at Eleven Mile House would not have sent him on to me if he thought the storm was soon to start. So I decided not to answer the door. It would take Smallwood half an hour at the most to walk to Thirteen Mile House, where they were sure to take him in.

  Stepping back from the curtains, I listened until he stopped knocking, then peered out again to see him plodding, shoulders hunched, down the tracks.

  He need never know that I was here. Or, if one of the others told him about me, we could easily avoid each other. I lay down again and closed my eyes. I was sure he wanted to encounter me no more than I did him.

  I was thinking of our last moments together at Hotel Newfoundland when I heard what might have been a battery of hens pecking at my kitchen window. I swung off my bunk and looked out through the curtains. In the fifteen minutes since Smallwood had knocked on my door, the storm had not only begun but closed in so that I could see nothing but white outside. A great gust of wind shook the shack.

  I hastily put on my work clothes, and over them a seaman’s coat that an old man at Six Mile House had leant me.

  I took off my boots, pulled on my Wellingtons, wrapped a scarf around my neck.

  The trolley was parked outside the shacks, on a set of siderails from which it was easy to push it on to the main track.

  At the last moment, I remembered the snow bell. It hung above my door inside the shack, a length of rope attached to it that was tied to a hook outside, above the door.

  I unhooked the rope, made my way across the track and tied the rope to a tree, knotting it several times. The rope at knee height, I tested it, pushing it with my leg until I heard the gonging of the bell. Then I set out on the trolley to find Smallwood.

  He will go to his grave thinking it was me who rescued him.

  It was me who dragged him from the bunk. He was alternating between delirium and complete unconsciousness. I dragged out the tub in which I took my baths and, cramming the stove with coal, filled every metal receptacle I had with water from my indoor pump. I poured the boiling water, as well as some cold, into the tub until it was about half full. Then I went to the bunk, hurriedly removed Smallwood’s clothes and carried him to the tub.

  He was limp but far from heavy in my arms, all bone blades and tips, a skin-sack of bones that seemed to rattle when he breathed.

  He stirred slightly as I lowered him into the water, but his eyes remained closed. I arranged his arms so that he hung by his armpits in the tub, his head tilted back and resting on one of the handles.

  His body was like that of some just-liberated prisoner of war. Sixty pounds at most, I guessed. I had seen throats like his in the San, all sinew and Adam’s apple, the throats of men deemed beyond help by the doctors.

  As I smoothed his long hair back from his forehead, I looked down and through the steam saw bobbing just above the surface the one boneless part of him. The pink tip of it anyway, buoyed up by the water. It looked like a closed, hairless eye, a sleeping Cyclops.

  Not exactly Penis Rampant. Penis Reticent. Penis Oblivious. It sounded like the Latin name for something. I added more hot water to the tub.

  “You were singing.”

  “Singing what?”

  “‘The Ode to Newfoundland.’”

  “I thought I was a goner.”

  “Me too. Both of us. Until I heard the bell.”

  “Who taught you that?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been here so long I don’t remember.”

  It was three days since his rescue. He was soon to leave, ignoring my protest that, despite the fast-melting snow, he was in no condition to continue with this mission of his.

  “Nearly there,” he said. “I can’t quit now.”

  Three days. He had begun eating after the first day. Fried potatoes and trout.

  I told him about my illness and my time at the San. He tried not to look at my boot or notice as I limped around the shack.

  Each of us was taken aback by how much the other had changed. I was only twenty-seven. He was twenty-six.

  He asked me what I was playing at, being poor or being a man.

  I let him think I performed the duties of a sectionman.

  He derisively called “my” letter to the Morning Post a masterpiece. I merely looked at him, waiting to play my trump card.

  When I told him I would not join his union, all he did was smirk.

  “I was here,” I said. “In this shack. The day of the storm. I saw you knocking on the door. I decided I would let you perish. But something changed my mind.”

  “What?”

  I shrugged. “I told myself that I should at least do as much for you as I would for a total stranger.”

  “Guilt.”

  “Don’t mention it. You would have done the same for me. For the same reasons.”

  I left the shack for a few hours. He was gone when I got back.

  Even attempting to find him would not have been possible if not for the railway tracks and the trolley car. I could not even see the car from the shack.

  There was nothing on the Bonavista bigger than a stunted spruce to impede the snow and wind, the former just dry enough to drift like sand, the latter, which had been a light westerly breeze when I looked out the window, now howling from the northeast, the gusts against my back sending me stumbling forward, arms extended lest there be some unseen obstacle in front of me.

  I felt the upward slope of the railbed beneath my feet and slowly climbed, keeping myself from sliding backwards by grabbing clumps of grass with my gloved hands. Once I crested the bed, I stopped and looked about, hoping a momentary lull in the wind might reveal the trolley car.

  But there was no lull, so, guessing that the car was on my left, I headed east and tripped over the snow-bell rope, causing the bell above the door of Twelve Mile House to clang. I grabbed the rope with one hand, as I should have done upon last leaving the shack, and walked forward, hoping to find the trolley before I used up all the slack.

  I found it by banging my bad knee against it. The pain was such that I fell to both knees and would have fallen prostrate had I not remembered the trolley, which I grabbed with one hand a fraction of a
second before I would have hit the wheel face first.

  I paused to let the pain subside, wondering how much damage I had done to my leg, afraid to feel it to see if it was broken.

  What I had thought was the wind was the sound of my breath, magnified by my scarf as though I were wearing a snorkel. I was alarmed by how rapid and shallow my breathing was and, in a moment of panic, almost pulled off the scarf as if, without it, my breathing would return to normal. I felt as though I were immersed in the sounds of my own body and doubted I could rescue anyone or even preserve my own life in such a state.

  I struggled to my feet and was relieved to find that my left leg held my weight as well as ever. Without my corrective boot with its thick heel, my gait was even more lopsided, almost as if I were wearing but one shoe and the other foot was bare.

  My hand still on the trolley, I managed to compose myself and, feeling about the machine with both hands, found the steps. I climbed up, sat down and groped about until I had hold of the crank, whose handles, when the car was stationary, were always upright.

  I pulled down with all my strength and felt the car begin to move.

  Smallwood, after he got no answer at my shack, had continued east towards Thirteen Mile House, which meant I would have to drive almost straight into the wind. But at least, I told myself, I know which way to go.

  I continued cranking the handle until I felt the trolley glide in a semicircle, then right itself on the main track.

  Surely no trains would have been dispatched, with a storm so obviously on its way. Or any that had been dispatched were certain to be stalled somewhere.

  I pulled harder on the crank. I could not hear the wheels, the grinding and squeaking of which were usually audible a mile away, but I felt the trolley moving and a corresponding increase in the wind against my face.

  How would I find Smallwood? The most I could hope for was that he was keeping to the tracks and I would collide with him, or that he had laid down on the track and the wheels of the trolley would bring up solid against him without doing him serious injury.