The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  One mile from my house to Thirteen Mile House. I prayed that the man in Thirteen Mile House had strung his snow bell across the tracks. You were supposed to do it for the sake of others who might somehow have lost their way. If I reached Thirteen Mile, rang the snow bell without having found Smallwood, I would knock on the door. And hopefully find Smallwood safely inside, holding forth to the family about God knows what.

  What a strange congress that would be. An unprecedented gathering for the inhabitants of Thirteen Mile House. Twelve Mile Sheilagh and the esteemed unionizer himself arriving on the same day, in all likelihood staying overnight or even longer. Me arriving at the door clad like a sectionman. The first time Smallwood had seen me since New York.

  I kept cranking the handle, but slowed down in case I should overtake him. I braced myself for the surprise of a collision, not that I expected an especially jarring one, given Smallwood’s height and weight. It was possible, if he lay down lengthwise between the rails, that I would run right over him without knowing it.

  My arms weary, I let them drop to my sides, thinking it would do no harm to rest. The chill in my belly that I had been feeling lately was more pronounced than ever. It was as though I had just finished drinking a glass of ice water, a prospect that, despite my circumstances, appealed to me.

  I felt my inner clothing begin to cool against my skin, though my face was hot. Wondering if I was feverish again, I was tempted to remove my scarf and feel the wind and snow on my forehead and my cheeks, hear something other than my breath, something other than my heartbeat, which was still thudding in my head.

  Flecks of sleet pinged off the trolley wheels. I hoped for a while that the snow would change to rain but then remembered that there had been sleet when the storm first started.

  If anything, there was less of it now, a thought that so disheartened me I thought I would be sick.

  I heard a voice, wind-borne, somewhere up ahead, seemingly far distant. It was, as unlikely as it seemed, that of someone singing, the pitch and volume rising and falling, though the melody was either elusive or that of some song I didn’t know.

  Who else could it be but Smallwood? Hopefully not some ’shine-inspired sectionman belting out a shanty in the doorway of his shack, one so drunk and spellbound by the storm that he had forgotten to play the snow bell out across the tracks.

  Enlivened by guilt, I pumped the crank faster, coasting now and then to listen. The voice, though still audible, seemed not to have grown any louder.

  He might be singing to fight off despair or the urge to lie down in the snow and go to sleep, singing to focus his mind.

  I marvelled that he was able to sing, able to summon sufficient breath to make himself heard above the storm.

  I could not call out to him for the wind was in my face and would blow away from Smallwood whatever sound I managed to make.

  Back to cranking the trolley.

  I was more exhausted than I’d been on my worst days in the San. I dropped my arms to my sides again and let my head drop to my chest, telling myself that I was resting, that I had not given up, and that once I caught my breath and regained my strength, I would resume the pumping of the crank.

  I raised my head when I heard the voice again—or a voice, at least, not singing this time but speaking, and much closer.

  Its owner, it seemed, was directly in front of me. I pulled the brake on the trolley and said, “SMALLWOOD. SMALLWOOD, IT’S ME, FIELDING. WALK THE WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING. LET THE WIND TAKE YOU TOWARDS ME.”

  “NOOOO!” A protest. A refusal to be misled, to be drawn towards the siren voice of this projection of his mind. It was a mistake to have identified myself.

  “WALK TOWARDS ME,” I shouted. “DON’T RUN AWAY. WALK TOWARDS ME OR STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”

  “NOOOO.”

  Without considering the folly of it, I got down from the trolley, limping badly, my unsupported left leg giving way with each step as though its foot were asleep, pain shooting up my thigh into my hip where the bone was most attenuated by my illness.

  Even hobbled as I was, it took me no time to overtake him. I saw him the instant before I would have collided with him. He was hatless, his head white like that of a hooded hawk. There was no sign of his suitcase, though the rope from which it had hung was still looped about his neck.

  He was ill prepared for the weather, not even wearing gloves. I grabbed the neck collar of his jacket, at which he struggled with such fury to free himself that he pulled us both over the side of the railway bed, the two of us tumbling in tandem as I wrapped my arms around his skinny frame.

  Had we not come to rest against some alders, we would have rolled into a track-side pond.

  “LET ME GO,” Smallwood screamed, thrashing about. I put one knee on his chest.

  “STOP,” I shouted, staring down at him. He looked as though he thought I was some death-heralding apparition.

  I pulled off my scarf. “LOOK,” I shouted.

  For a second, stunned, incredulous, he stared at me, then screamed, “NOOOOO” again and batted the air with his hands.

  With an upward thrust of his hips he managed to roll out from under me, got quickly to his feet and began to run. In seconds he was gone from view.

  “SMALLWOOD,” I screamed and set off after him.

  All but suffocating now that I no longer wore my scarf, I turned round to shelter my face from the wind. My forehead ached from the cold and the sleet-flecked snow. How stupid to remove that scarf. Stupid even to climb down from the trolley and run after Smallwood.

  I tried to puzzle out my location. The wind was northeast, assuming that, during the past few frantic minutes, it had not changed direction, so the railbed had to be on my right. I should, by heading the way the wind was blowing, find the slope of the bed and, having done so, the tracks, along which, with one hand on a rail, I would crawl until I found the trolley.

  The snow was knee-deep in places, which worried me as it seemed I had been scuffing through it until now. I remembered watching a snowstorm from my bedroom as a child and seeing man-high drifts form in seconds, then just as quickly vanish, the snow-scape shape-shifting like the surface of the sea.

  The wind propelling me, gusting against my back so that my coat fanned out like a sail, I plodded on until the snow was so deep I could go no farther. I stood there, buried to my waist.

  I managed to rotate slightly in the snow but, when I tried to raise the knee of my good leg, found myself tightly wedged in.

  I wondered if I should try to pull my feet free of my Wellingtons, frostbite being preferable to the alternative, then dismissed the notion as yet another born of panic. I had no choice but to continue to struggle.

  I did not even have my cane. I had taken it with me when I left the shack but had forgotten it when I climbed down from the trolley.

  I tried to create a cavity by moving my legs back and forth. The snow was as tightly packed as if it had fallen weeks ago.

  I clawed with my hands, but the snow I scooped aside was soon replaced twicefold. Keep your arms above the snow, I told myself.

  They would find me “standing” upright, perhaps, as they had the sealers, the snow by which I had been entombed blown away and me frozen in some posture of reconciliation or despair.

  They might be able to tell from the disposition of my limbs and my proximity to the railway bed and the trolley car what had happened, what grave but heart-rendingly simple errors I had made and what my last hours had been like.

  Close to safety, to survival I might be found. A stone’s throw from the trolley or the nearest section shack whose inhabitants had been oblivious to my dilemma.

  “HELP,” I shouted. And even with the roar of the wind in my ears and the hiss of sifting snow, I could tell that my voice was weak, my cry for help half-hearted. Death. My death. After surviving the San, to die like this, in a failed attempt to rescue Smallwood, who, had I only answered the door when he knocked, I would now be having tea with in my shack.


  An image, ludicrous: nothing but my head above the snow, seemingly disembodied, eyes wide open, mouth agape, my long hair fanned out behind me, my hat still on my head.

  I laughed. I still feel cold, I told myself. A good sign. My teeth chattered, my body shivered. I folded my arms.

  My body interred in snow, an exception in the landscape. And Smallwood somewhere nearby. Two frozen figures. A pair of statues situated and disposed to tell an age-old story, a myth illustrative of some universal human failing or desire, some fatal flaw of character.

  Notice how the woman seems to be … See how the man is trying to …

  I tried to rouse myself into panic, spite, indignation, bitterness. I thought of the sealers. No one knew why mere boys had survived while the strongest of grown men had not.

  Keep your arms above the snow.

  Those who recover you will remember you in dreams.

  Their names are David and Sarah. How sweet it would have been to touch them once, to hear them say my name. My mother leaving them notes on their pillows. Her name was Sheilagh.

  The snow was at my armpits now, the palms of my hands flat on the surface of it.

  A pair of snowshoes that might have fallen from the sky appeared in front of me. Before I could look up, they were flanking my head, the person wearing them standing behind me. I tried to turn around but couldn’t.

  A pair of enormous boots.

  I felt hands take hold of me beneath the arms and was about to protest that someone my size could never be pulled from the snow in this fashion when I felt myself rise as though propelled from below.

  I turned around and found myself looking straight at someone’s chest, at a black coat buttoned down the front. Tilting my head back, I saw what I took to be a hallucination—a green rubber gas mask. The person in the mask, his hands on my shoulders, moved round, backtracking in the snowshoes until he was in front of me.

  I guessed he was a full head taller than me. It felt strange to be loomed over like that, to feel as I now realized others did when standing close to me.

  “You,” I said. A man such as the father of a woman my size should be.

  He crouched down until his head was at my waist, then moved forward so that my upper body slowly fell onto his right shoulder.

  He stood, his legs unsteady for a few moments. He took three backward steps until he found his balance, then turned and walked straight into the storm.

  I felt like a child who had misbehaved to the point of having to be carried home against my will.

  One arm around my legs, just below my backside, he trudged through the snow, lurching from side to side but never falling.

  I saw nothing but his coat and the tails of his snowshoes. I pressed my closed mouth against his coat to avoid having the breath blown from my body.

  I suddenly remembered Smallwood and began shouting his name, thrashing about. My rescuer continued his forward, windward march. I struggled to free myself, then felt the sting of two slaps on my backside.

  Reaching up with one arm, I tried to grab his collar. Slap, slap, slap, each one harder, more emphatic than the one before.

  My backside stung so much that I almost forgot my other complaints, my aching left leg, my sleet-needled forehead, the undersides of my wrists so chafed with snow and cold that they were bleeding.

  I hung limp, sulking with humiliation, spiteful at the ferocity of my chastisement. My rump stung as if all that slapping had bared it to the snow. My eyes were hot with tears, because of Smallwood’s fate, my own helplessness, the obtuse single-mindedness of the man over whose shoulder I was slung like a bag of flour.

  Soon we were climbing the slope of the railway bed, my rescuer fanning his snowshoes out until their tails were all but touching, side-tracking up the slope that, in spite of the whiteout, he had somehow found. As he had the trolley.

  When he set me down, I raised my hands, meaning to remove the rubber mask, but he took hold of my wrists, around which his hands closed completely. He held me motionless and stared at me.

  I could not see through the snow-encrusted glass of the gas mask. As the mask was strapped on over a fur-fringed hood, I could not even see his hair.

  He pointed at the trolley with his gloved finger. When I climbed up, I saw, in the space between the two facing seats, Smallwood prostrate on the floor, his hands and feet bound with twine, his glasses still looped with string about his ears.

  He was motionless, the amount of snow on him suggesting he had been that way for quite some time. I wondered if he was still alive. Beside him, attached to his coat by twine that was looped through the only intact buttonhole of his jacket, lay my cane.

  My rescuer gestured to one of the seats. I sat down and took hold of the handles of the crank to keep from being blown off. Judging by how hard it was just to lift my arms, I doubted I could help him move the trolley.

  Unfastening his snowshoes and tucking them under Smallwood, he climbed up and sat facing me. He gripped his end of the crank and raised it with such force that I lost my grip and had to catch the handles on their way back up.

  They jarred my hands but I managed to keep hold of them. Soon, with no help from me, my arms were going up and down. We moved along the tracks much faster than I had ever been able to make the trolley move, faster, I suspected, than any two sectionmen had ever made it move. Too fast, I worried, given how much snow and ice might have built up on the tracks by now.

  I looked down at Smallwood. Perhaps all my rescuer had rescued of him was his body.

  I looked up. The man in the mask was still staring at me, the pumping of the trolley seemingly so effortless for him it required no concentration. I was his passenger, though to an observer it would have seemed that I was doing my share, my arms rising and falling as fast as his.

  My face was hot with what I feared was a relapse of my illness, a second bout that I would not survive.

  I felt drowsy. My head fell forward several times.

  Each time I woke, my arms were limp at my sides and we were moving more slowly, as if my rescuer was planning to stop and somehow secure me to the trolley. Each time, with alacrity, I grabbed the handles to assure him of my lucidity and strength, and the trolley picked up speed again.

  In between these blackouts, I looked at him through half-closed eyes. No word would do for him except “immense.” He seemed to be of another order of human altogether, twice as big in the torso, arms and legs as an average man. His knees, to make room for the crank, must have been splayed five feet apart.

  The coat was all but able to contain him, every inch of it drawn tight, looking like it would burst at the seams.

  His boots, which must have been custom-made, might have been twice the size of any I had seen before.

  “Who are you?” I said, though I did not hear the words, only felt them in my throat.

  He continued to stare at me.

  I wondered if he knew about the snow bells, if he was listening for them. He might, at the speed the trolley was going, not hear one if it rang.

  For all I knew, we had already passed a section shack and failed to hear the bell that would have meant salvation for us all. Unless it was too late for Smallwood.

  But he was cranking the trolley as if he had no doubt about his destination. Perhaps I would soon see his face, soon know his story, soon be sitting safely with him in some section shack.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I WOKE. I WAS LYING IN MY BUNK, UNCLOTHED BUT FOR A SLIP, the blankets tucked tight beneath my chin. I moved my arms just to make sure that I could, that I was not strapped in like some sailor below decks, riding out a storm.

  I put my arms outside my blankets, touched my forehead with the back of my hand. I was not feverish, my leg no longer throbbed but instead ached in a way that was almost pleasant.

  It would have been completely dark in my room if not for a dim shaft of light at the barely open door. I heard the wind outside and the whistle of it in the stovepipe in the kitchen, the clicking of slee
t against the window and the sound of sifting snow. The storm still on the rise. What a night it would be. I could somehow feel that it was yet but early evening.

  Climbing from my bunk, I saw no sign of my clothes. I went to my makeshift closet, an upright packing crate, and chose one of the few pairs of coveralls that I owned, along with a buttonless sweater that I put on first.

  Fastening the snaps of my coveralls, I padded, limping in my bare feet to the door that led to the kitchen, eager to hear from my rescuer the details of the last few hours, eager to see his face and hear his voice.

  I pushed the door open and heard the crackle of coal in the stove. There was a lantern, lit, but burning low, on the table. Looking about in search of Smallwood and our rescuer, I saw neither.

  There were two bunks in the other bedroom in which the children of the previous owners had slept. It seemed inconceivable that my rescuer was in one of these, but there was nowhere else that he and Smallwood could be.

  The absence of both of them from the kitchen seemed ominous. Perhaps Smallwood had, as I suspected, not survived, and my rescuer had, after putting me to bed, made off with his remains—to what destination or for what purpose I could not imagine, but it was with dread that I knocked on the door of the second bedroom that, like mine, was slightly ajar.

  There was no answer. I feared, as I slowly pushed the door open, that I would find the room empty and foresaw a night of fretful conjecture.

  The band of light widened to reveal the upper bunk empty and Smallwood in the bottom one, nothing but his head showing above the blankets that, as mine had been, were tucked in so tightly he was immobilized.

  Still unsure if he was alive, thinking that my rescuer might have forgotten to pull a sheet over Smallwood’s head, I stood still and, straining to hear above the roar of the wind, made out the sound of stertorous breathing, as if Smallwood was so tightly bound in blankets that his lungs could not expand.

  I backed out of the room and closed the door, leaving it just a touch ajar so that I would hear if he called for help or otherwise seemed in need of it.