The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  “Dr. Fielding. Sister Fielding,” some men said as they tipped their hats to them. The doctor seemed oblivious to their scorn, to the insult to his wife, seemed to think they had been greeted with respect or had been joked with good-naturedly, to which he responded by smiling and laughing, while she stared impassively ahead as if she had no choice but to endure such slights in silence.

  You may think that I was jealous of Dr. Fielding, but nothing could be more untrue.

  The woman I had loved had been a phantom. She had never existed. She had always been the woman Dr. Fielding married. A spoiled heiress who had drawn me into her experiment with religion, self-sacrifice and poverty. A woman whose frivolousness I had seen too late. An heiress. An erress. A woman given to making mistakes, grave ones, and capable of doing anything to avoid their consequences. Heiress. Erress. Murderess. All of these. Yet not undeserving of forgiveness. It is as much to save one’s own soul as to save one’s enemies’ that one forgives.

  I could simply have turned my back on her. There have been many times since when I wish I had. But why, having forgiven her, can I not forgive myself?

  Your Provider

  Prohibition was repealed at last.

  The post-Prohibition limit for liquor of any kind was three bottles a week and liquor stores were open only two days a week, on Fridays and Saturdays from two to six in the afternoon.

  It was not unusual for men to spend two hours in what were known as the Booze Brigades that stretched like Depression-era breadlines for a quarter of a mile. Prohibition supporters swore that if staple goods had been rationed, the queues for them would not have been as long as the Booze Brigades, clergymen that if their churches were burning down, the water brigades would not have been half as long.

  Aside from spending two hours outside in the snow, cold, rain or wind, those who manned the Booze Brigades had to endure the humiliation of being seen waiting to buy booze.

  Temperance Society volunteers, usually women, picketed the Booze Brigades, holding signs that read: YOU’LL NEVER SLAKE YOUR THIRST IN HELL and BOOZE FOR MEN OR MILK FOR BABIES? and DON’T CHOOSE BOOZE, and JOIN THE CHURCH LADS BRIGADE, NOT THE BOOZE BRIGADE.

  When a temperance volunteer spotted an acquaintance in the Booze Brigade, she and her fellows stopped and singled him out for a lecture intended to hound him into leaving his place in line out of sheer humiliation.

  “Look at you, Larry Scott,” shouted women with voices that carried half the length of Water Street, “skulking in the Booze Brigade, waiting to spend your family’s last five cents on booze, and you with five children and a poor wife with one on the way. You haven’t done a real day’s work in years—”

  On and on the lectures went, the more detailed the more effective, as the volunteer recited the names of every one of a man’s children.

  Whenever a crimson-faced man left the queue, collar up, head down, hands in his pockets, the temperance volunteers, in chorus, shouted, “Hallelujah, another soul and paycheque saved.”

  A Salvation Army band, consisting of a chest-drummer, a trombonist and a trumpeteer, went up and down the queue endlessly playing “When the Saints Come Marching In,” accompanied by a uniformed choir of men and women.

  That inconspicuousness was impossible did not stop men from trying to achieve it. To avoid blocking pedestrian traffic, the queue formed hard to one side of the boardwalk, up against the storefronts that Brigadiers faced, their backs to their tormenters, hoping not to be recognized, all but disguised in clothing they had borrowed from various friends to whom they had likewise lent their clothes.

  There was no chance of fooling the liquor purveyors who worked the line selling coupons for one, two or three bottles and knew everyone by name. If you did not have a coupon, you were denied entrance to the store. Each of the three playing-card-sized coupons was a different colour and when a red coupon, known as a Tripler, changed hands, the temperance women shouted, “Shame, shame, shame.”

  A yellow coupon, known as a Doubler, brought cries of “Shame, shame,” and a blue coupon, a Single, a mournful “Shame.”

  But coupons, once purchased, often changed hands again as “regulars” hired visiting dockworkers and men from foreign boats to stand in line for them and split with them the booze they bought.

  It was not illegal for women to buy liquor, but it was almost unheard of. I was a well-known member of the Booze Brigades for a while because Herder refused to be my supplier, telling me I drank too much and would soon be at the point where I could not write.

  Every Saturday afternoon, for the better part of a year, I took my place in the Booze Brigades rather than waste money hiring two men to do it. I needed six bottles, so I did hire one man, as my limit, like everyone else’s, was three.

  For the first time in my life since school, I attended regular public gatherings and became more to the people of St. John’s than someone to be gawked at from a distance.

  I drew so much wrathful attention from the protestors that, at first, men kept their distance from me—behind me, in front of me, there were long gaps in the brigade.

  Once the Temperance volunteers gave up trying to shame me from the Booze Brigades, men took advantage of my stature to literally hide behind my skirts.

  But until then, there was a confrontation between me and the leader of what I called in my newspaper column the Auntie Antis every Friday afternoon.

  Mrs. Enderby, a woman of great girth, especially from the waist down, tried to make a model case of me.

  “Back for more fuel, Miss Fielding.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Enderby. The fire is burning low, all ten of my naked children are out scouring the dumps in search of God knows what and my mister hasn’t left the house since 1918 when he came back from the war. There wouldn’t be a drop of booze in the house if not for me. All twelve of us would have to go without. The sight of a stone-cold sober six-year-old is not a pretty one, I can tell you. So I take it upon myself, not that I’m complaining, to go out every week and get the booze.”

  “Do you know the Seven Deadly Sins, Miss Fielding?” said Mrs. Enderby.

  “I know that gluttony is one of them,” I said. “But then, what an inspiration you are to the God-fearing parents of malnourished children everywhere.”

  “Gluttony is one of them. You can be gluttonous in many ways and drinking booze is one of them. And all the other six sins attend upon booze. Booze is the cause of them all.”

  “Such an all-purpose commodity. It should cost seven times as much.”

  “Mockery is but a form of pride.”

  “So is sanctimoniousness.”

  “And pride is the worst of all the sins.”

  “Why should pride get so much discredit? Mockery is every bit as bad. So is sanctimoniousness. A lot of sins never get the discredit they deserve. Thousands of them. There should be Seven Thousand Deadly Sins. And if anyone’s time would be best spent learning them by heart, it would be yours.”

  “So much God-given intelligence, so ill used and wasted. What a force for good you could be if you joined us. For every man who goes home from here humiliated but with money still in his pocket, one family will have food on the table tonight.”

  “Mrs. Enderby, you do an even greater service for the people of this city than you realize. Every man who leaves here without reasonably priced properly distilled liquor goes to a moonshiner and buys unreasonably priced improperly distilled liquor, one of whose minor side effects is death. Every moonshiner in the city would be out of business if not for you. Moonshiners hang your portrait on their walls. You are their patron saint, if not for whom they would have no patrons. Have you ever wondered where your anonymous contributions come from? From the modest, unassuming, yet-to-be-taxed entrepreneurs of St. John’s.”

  “Miss Fielding, we are two of a kind.”

  “If you mean that each of us, in our own way, is twice the size of a normal woman, I would agree with you.”

  “You know what I mean. Every one of these men is a
fraid of you.”

  “That must be why I’m Miss Fielding.”

  “You tower over them. In many ways. But you stoop to their level when it comes to booze and your defiantly abject ways.”

  “I stoop to conquer. And to liquor.”

  “You should stoop to conquer liquor.”

  “Touché. That’s French for ‘such wit.’ Some say I stoop to their level, others that I am high and mighty. Some say I live in the gutter, some that I look down on people from my ivory tower, especially when I get on my high horse, which is when they would most like to cut me down to size or take me down a peg. I am, according to one rival columnist, a hoity-toity member of the hoi polloi.”

  “Words, words, a flood of words. Would you be so eloquent if you were sober?”

  “If I may be so bold as to ask, would you be so bold as to ask if you were drunk?”

  “I have never been drunk. I do not drink. I never have. I never will.”

  “Really? Aren’t you worried that people who do drink will picket your house or single you out in public to give you the tongue-lashing, the dressing-down they presume to think you deserve? Are you not afraid of being followed about by men carrying signs that read: CHOOSE BOOZE?”

  “We are always recruiting, Miss Fielding. No matter how many times you decline an invitation, we will extend another one. But remember, your life, like God’s patience, is finite. They will expire at the same time if you do not reform.”

  “These coupons will expire unless this line moves faster.”

  “How do you see yourself, Miss Fielding?”

  “At the moment as a lady in waiting.”

  “A lady?”

  “In waiting.”

  “Meanwhile, you are setting a bad example for these men who know that, in spite of your appetites, you come from one of the better families of St. John’s.”

  “It will be a long time before the people of St. John’s go to costume parties dressed like me.”

  The men in the Booze Brigades, on the rare occasions when they spoke to me, said things like “You told her off” or “You set her straight,” which always made me feel guilty, for as sanctimonious as Mrs. Enderby and her followers were, it was true that most of these men could not afford to drink as much as they did and their families did go hungry because they spent their meagre paycheques or welfare vouchers on liquor coupons.

  But while I could not abide Mrs. Enderby’s self-congratulating lectures, I never spoke against her in her absence. Congratulated by the men for routing her yet again, I said nothing.

  It was when the Booze Brigades became so volatile that the ’Stab began to patrol them on horseback that Herder relented and insisted that I let two young men from his printers be my surrogates.

  “Consider it to be a raise,” he said. “But I am not responsible for the consequences.”

  I was happy no longer to be a member of the Booze Brigades, near-destitute men who set me to brooding too much.

  When I was no longer womanning the Booze Brigades, I often thought of the sight I must have made, Fielding in her costume of drab elegance, both hands on the knob of her cane, her whole frame out of kilter, tilted to one side because of her leg, but still a head taller than the men with whom she filed along the sidewalk. In winter, snow collecting inches deep on my hat and shoulders as it did on theirs, all of us shivering, faces red with cold, heads inclined against the wind.

  Liquor was supposedly dispensed in this public, tedious manner to discourage people from buying it. But the liquor taxes increased by half each year.

  At first many men were shamed into leaving their place in line. But for most men, no amount of humiliation was worse than a week without a drink, or a week of juneshine and callabogus. The number of Mrs. Enderby’s converts dwindled to almost zero.

  Sometimes, on Friday afternoons after Herder appointed two of his men to take my place, I would go far enough downtown to see the Booze Brigades without being spotted by any of my former fellows.

  I saw the men in their sod caps and overalls shuffle along, trying to ignore the Temperance, the Salvation Army band, and the ’Stab on horseback.

  I tried to think of how many people I knew who lived in generous-hearted hope and not in secret fear or despair cloaked in piety, submerged in devotion to some cause, some zealotry they hoped would pass for passion. Not many.

  Smallwood, who was now the prime minister’s unpaid assistant, came to mind. Smallwood was almost literally an errand boy for the prime minister, about whose corrupt regime I wrote week after week.

  Herder’s printer’s devil would deliver my six bottles of Scotch to me on Friday evenings—late on Friday evenings, at Herder’s orders, and the printer’s devil was under orders not to give me the Scotch until I gave him my column for Saturday’s issue of the Telegram.

  The printer’s devil, a twelve-year-old whom I knew only by his nickname, Gint, reminded me of P.D., whose fate I was resigned to never knowing. I had not seen P.D. since the night we met on Patrick Street, he burdened down with callabogus and carrying on his person what I worried might be the last letter from my Provider.

  I tipped Gint even more generously than I had P.D. in a pointless attempt to make up for what I feared had become of P.D. and for whatever part I had unwittingly played in the final misadventure of his life. Though for all I knew he was alive and well somewhere.

  I wrote “on the run” at night. I descended the stairs, went past the landlord’s locked and bolted door, the din of the Cochrane receding behind me just in time to hear the bell that, like a signal that my neighbours’ day was over, summoned them to evening prayers.

  I made my way down the steps and, by the route that most quickly took me out of sight of the Cochrane, began my walk and the composition of my column that I would type from memory when, early in the morning, I returned.

  A deadline to meet every day but Sunday, though even Saturday night I spent walking through the city, revelling in the freedom of allowing my mind to wander, to admire what, on other nights, I forced myself to ignore.

  On Saturday nights, I did not have to wait until my column was typed to take a drink, did not have to go out with mere water in my flask, to count on this mimicry of drinking to sustain me until my column had been typed and left for Gint outside my door.

  But there was always the danger on Saturday nights, especially with my flask full of moonshine, that my wandering mind would lead me where I did not want to go, back into the past and my confinements in my mother’s house, or into speculation about the welfare of my children, the details and progress of their lives, their whereabouts, how they looked, lying asleep in their beds, unwatched over in their rooms, their appearances, the colour of their eyes and hair, the kind of clothes they wore, the games they liked to play. Always the danger that I would think of my Provider and his delegate and decide to stay inside, lest one or both of them were watching me.

  A woman who did not know the colour of her children’s eyes, the colour of their hair, their distinctive complexions and facial expressions.

  On especially bad nights, I took from my pocket purse the note my mother left me, unfolded it and read by whatever light I could find. “Their names are David and Sarah.” My mother’s handwriting traced out ten years ago in ink that had begun to fade, on paper that had so often been folded and unfolded the creases were cracked.

  It was sometimes more exhausting on Saturday nights to concentrate my mind on events and objects close at hand than it was on other nights to compose my columns while the time allotted for me to do so ticked away, while I dared not look out through the Narrows for fear that I would see, in the east on the ocean horizon, the first blue light of morning.

  How an affair or even a brief liaison between my mother and my Provider, if there had been such, could have gone undetected in St. John’s I could not imagine. Nor how even a brief visit to Newfoundland by a man of such proportions could have gone undetected or been forgotten, let alone a stay of months or even years.<
br />
  And surely, if my father remembered such a man, he would not have spent the last two decades torturing himself with speculation about his identity.

  Even if my mother had been absent from St. John’s (or Newfoundland) and the timing of her absence was, in light of my birth date, even vaguely suspicious, my father would have seized upon it as certain proof of her infidelity and would have presented me with that proof, since he had made no efforts to keep secret from me, his sceptical “daughter,” his mistrust of my mother.

  I decided to embark upon an investigation I had been putting off since my return for fear of the consequences it might have. But such was my curiosity that I could put it off no longer.

  As the train on which I had returned to St. John’s had moved west along the Bonavista and joined the main line, heading south, I had mulled over the thought that had occurred to me while I was talking to Smallwood in the section shack. Might I be able to find out who had bought from Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes a pair of boots such as Smallwood said my rescuer had worn?

  Smallwood might, as I had told him, have seen boots bearing his family name nowhere but in some delirium dream. But it was possible that he had seen those boots, big boots as he had described them, indicating their size with his two hands as though he were speaking of “the one that got away.”

  I wondered what sort of records were kept in the Smallwood factory on Duckworth Street or the retail stores on Water Street. Such a pair of boots as would fit my rescuer might, even if there was no official record of them, be remembered, especially if they had been custom-made or had had to be specially ordered from some firm on the mainland.

  I was reluctant to go to Smallwood’s Boots and Shoes. I knew that word of my strange investigation would quickly spread, word that I had gone there, asking questions about a mysterious and probably non-existent pair of oversized boots. My curiosity would be taken as conclusive proof that I had lost my mind. At the very least, it would enhance my reputation as a dipsomaniacal oddball.