The Custodian of Paradise

by Wayne Johnston

  I suspect that my Provider’s version of the story is true and he didn’t rape my mother. If only I had the “proof” that he speaks of.

  Can you conceive of no reason why a woman would decide to leave her daughter?

  I still cannot. None that would be flattering to her.

  Perhaps I should have said “none that would be flattering to me.”

  He is here.

  I have been waiting for him, not only knew all along that he would find me but wanted him to, even made it easy for him.

  Strange thoughts, given that my hand trembles as I write.

  I am so afraid.

  How long he’s been here he doesn’t say.

  Perhaps as long as I have been. Who knows? It may have been him that I heard outside the first night I was here, his voice and someone else’s.

  Or only his, if he was talking to himself, or to me. Imagine him being here that long, keeping himself hidden from me for that long.

  There were never any footprints in the morning snow. I hope Patrick didn’t encounter him the night we parted on the beach. But the light at Quinton has been working without interruption as would surely not be the case had Patrick not returned. And Irene would have sent someone for me.

  And I have no reason, none at all, to think that he would harm a soul.

  It may have been upon his arrival that the dogs began roaming at night.

  In that case, he has been here for weeks. He must have come prepared for a lengthy stay, for the barn has not been broken into and none of my supplies are missing.

  The mare that has been missing. He might have killed her for food. But I would have heard a gunshot. Could the man who saved me on the Bonavista have killed her with his bare hands?

  It is clear that he has been watching me from the woods, following me as expertly on Loreburn as he did elsewhere.

  He is here.

  Only a couple of hours ago, he slipped an envelope beneath the storm door, which I locked at sunset after it began to snow. The first snowstorm of the fall and he is out there somewhere. I think I know where. He all but tells me in the letter.

  My dear Miss Fielding:

  What a succession of surrenders and retreats our lives have been.

  It seems that you will never stop running and I will never stop pursuing you, even though it is not me that you run from, though perhaps you think it is.

  What a fool I was to try to justify myself to him. Your son. I could have simply ignored his letters.

  Loreburn. Like a glimpse of the world as it will be when there is no one left alive. Even the houses will remain when I am gone.

  I can imagine the Loreburns setting sail, a makeshift fleet without a flag renouncing this republic.

  You would never know here that the whole world is at war.

  I hardly know now why I joined the first one. Perhaps in the hope that I would not return. “Flagpole,” I was called. By everyone except my delegate. One morning it snowed. Snowflakes the size of quarters. Neither side fired a shot until the snow gave way to rain. I was wounded that afternoon. A bullet broke my leg. Every night for years, from the time I forced your mother to leave New York until I joined the war, I drank myself to sleep. I quit when a doctor told me that, unless I did, I would not survive much longer.

  This war may be the one that ends them all. How strange if no one lives to tell the tale. No one to claim victory or apportion blame. Though the end might not come until a hundred wars from now. The unmet expectations of Judgment Day. No afterlife? It might be so. Though I have hope that is based on—nothing but the need to hope.

  We live from first to final breath. The same fate for the good and the bad. It might be so. Or it might not.

  But it will not be as foretold. Revelations is just a campfire ghost story. The sky will go on being blue. The moon, though every drop of blood on earth be spilled, will not turn red. The stars will shine as usual. The end of days. “God” dims the lights and goes to bed. How can things have come to this in a mere five thousand years?, I used to ask those whose faith I envied. It was from examining their own nature, not from second sight that the prophets foresaw the future.

  You, Miss Fielding, have given up because you lost a child. And because you think you are unloved. And think you have earned the right to regard all of creation with contempt. As if you were meant for a different world but were somehow stranded on this one. But you must not doubt that you have great courage.

  Your child died at the hands of strangers, mine at the hands of someone I once loved and who once claimed that she loved me.

  Your son was a brave man who might have lived to become a wise one if not for me.

  He sought you out. You were able, while he still breathed, to hold him in your arms.

  My child’s life had no duration.

  It spent its entire life entombed in the body of your mother.

  So many days and nights not knowing where your children were.

  David and Sarah.

  I know better than you do what Sarah looks like. I could many times have reached out and tapped her on the shoulder, touched her hair.

  I confess that I felt sadness when I learned about your mother’s death. I wonder what you felt or feel.

  Sarah, too, is broken-hearted, but young and strong as you and I once were.

  She doesn’t know what David knew, Miss Fielding. Because of all of us, you, Dr. Fielding, me, your mother and her husband, and because of David, she doesn’t know her real mother is alive.

  And what if word of the death of her half-sister in St. John’s, who is nothing to her but a name, should reach her some day? It would not touch her heart, let alone break it.

  It has long seemed right to me that one of us be spared the truth, that one of us survive. And that that one be Sarah.

  You should be proud of both your children, as I am proud of you. Your son lived almost selflessly. Your daughter is such a woman as you are and my other child might have been.

  I have come a long way. I have not been this close to you since that day on the Bonavista when I held you in my arms.

  I have come a long way, but can go no further. If you wish to meet me, you will have to seek me out.

  I am back where I began.

  I have come here for a purpose that by now you may have guessed.

  Your Provider

  That menacing last sentence.

  He says that he can go no further, yet the letter I am reading was slipped beneath my door.

  Either he came that far or someone else did. Another delegate?

  I am back where I began. Yes.

  Where else in Loreburn would he go for shelter? It’s as though he waited for the storm and for the darkness to announce himself. Knowing I would have no choice but to wait before I went to meet him.

  This storm is not like the one in which we “met.” Not a blizzard.

  The snow is again falling slantwise, but there is not much wind. Large, wet flakes that I can hear pattering against the window. An occasional modest gust and it sounds like someone throwing snow against the glass.

  At last light, there was not much on the ground. Half a foot by now perhaps. And should there be another half by morning, I will have to climb the hill in snow up to my shins.

  I feel as though, no matter when I set out for the church, he will know that I’m coming. Somehow he’ll know and be expecting me. It seems he cannot be surprised.

  Could I make my way, now, along the beach and up that winding road without a light? No. I would lose the way. I might slip and hurt myself.

  I dare not try to climb the hill without my cane, but dare not approach the church without the gun. I could never carry both and a light. Even by day, with no need of a light, I’m not sure I would make it up that hill encumbered by a gun.

  How strange it feels. If only I could take a drink. My hands are shaking. All those bottles in that trunk and I dare not, must not take a drink, must not sleep. I might wake up to find him standing over me.
>
  If I try to signal Patrick with the gun—I don’t even know if the sound of gunshots would carry all the way to Quinton in this snow. Perhaps. I could still hear the seagulls at last light and can hear the foghorn now. Irene is still awake.

  I’ll go outside and fire off six shots.

  My Provider will guess their purpose and if they draw him here then so be it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  IT IS STILL SNOWING WHEN SHE SETS OUT AT FIRST LIGHT. HE didn’t come to call despite the gunshots that, for all she knows, no one heard but him and her.

  She carries the gun, breech broken, chambers loaded. She has a box of twelve shells in her pocket.

  Now he knows I have a gun.

  She can see perhaps thirty feet in front of her.

  There is almost no wind. It is colder so the snow is drier than it was last night. Not so heavy to walk in but more slippery underfoot.

  She forsakes the path in favour of the beach rocks, which are bare for the tide has just gone out.

  The gun under her right arm, her cane in her left hand, her progress is slow and loud, the wet rocks clattering beneath her feet.

  Several times, as the rocks slide out from under her, she manages to keep from falling by planting the cane and leaning her chest on the back of her hand.

  These might be just some of the usual daybreak sounds on Loreburn, these clattering rocks, the cries of far-off, unseen gulls, the token shoreward shrugs of a tide in slow retreat.

  She stops at the bottom of Loreburn Hill and looks up. She can see only the first row of houses. Their snow-covered roofs make them look less old, almost lived in.

  She looks over her shoulder. Even if he heard the shots, Patrick might not be able to navigate to Loreburn in this weather.

  She brushes away the snow that has gathered on the gun. She is tempted to fire a shot to see if, despite being wet, the gun will work, but thinks better of it. She begins to make her way among the houses.

  The going is much easier on the road. The snow, knee-deep, is light enough that she can almost scuff through it.

  She knows that, as she cannot see the church, no one watching from the church can see her, but she feels certain she is being watched by someone just far enough away to be obscured by the snow, someone on the road ahead of her who leaves no footprints, looks back over his shoulder now and then to make sure she hasn’t lost the way, someone impatient at her plodding pace, who could have gone straight up the hill if he wanted to, taking the shortcuts the horses take.

  She winds her way up the hill, her heart pounding as much from exhaustion as from fear.

  At each turn in the road, she looks up, hoping to see the church, dreading being seen from it.

  She has the feeling that, despite its boarded-up windows and doors, every house she passes is occupied, as if her trek up the hill is a re-enactment of something that happened at daybreak in Loreburn years ago while the residents were sleeping, something that caused the place to be deserted.

  At last, when she reaches the point of no longer caring that she will be visible from the church, she makes out the middle spire, the empty belfry, the ragged nooselike piece of rope. She stops to catch her breath, then moves on.

  The pieces of wood that covered the church door have been pried free and lie partially buried in the snow at the foot of the steps. The grey but otherwise intact doors are outspread like wings, each one kept open by a stone.

  The church looks as if it is ready to receive the Sunday-morning worshippers of Loreburn. She has no idea what day of the week it is.

  She would not be surprised to be overtaken by other churchgoers, preceded up the steps by the six or seven families who comprise the population, Samuel Loreburn’s solemn congregation, come to hear their patriarch perform a service of his own devising and deliver a sermon of stern admonishment.

  She cannot see beyond the dark doorway. It is as if a ceremony for which it is necessary that the church be dark is taking place inside.

  She closes the breech of the shotgun. It clicks shut loudly, loud enough, she is certain, for whomever is inside the church to hear.

  As best she can, she raises the gun with one arm and fumbles about until she finds the trigger with her finger.

  She slowly makes her way up the snow-covered wooden steps, which creak beneath her feet.

  How odd, to be ascending the steps of a church armed with a gun. Again she feels as though she is re-enacting some scene from long ago, something which made the continued habitation of Loreburn unthinkable.

  When she reaches the top of the steps she drops her cane and holds the shotgun with both hands, pressing the stock against her shoulder, her arms quivering from the weight.

  At first, the darkness in the church seems absolute. She fears that, any second, someone will come lurching from it and carry her with them back down the steps before she has a chance to use the gun.

  She is by no means certain that, whatever happens, she will pull the trigger.

  At first, it looks like someone has drawn oblongs on the walls with white, incandescent paint, but then she realizes that these are the boarded-up windows, their perimeters traced with light from outside.

  As her eyes further adjust, she sees two rows of pews separated by a narrow aisle that leads to an elevated altar that is bare aside from a small pulpit on the right.

  On the back wall of the altar is a large plain wooden cross.

  At the sound of the striking of a match from within the pulpit, she aims the gun.

  “Merely lighting the lamp,” a voice from within the pulpit says. The voice that she heard years ago from behind the curtain of the window of the house on Patrick Street. And before that too. Where?

  “I have taken sanctuary in a consecrated church,” the voice says as the light of the lamp flares up, illuminating the area around and above the pulpit. “You are welcome to join me if you wish.”

  Twenty-five years. Not since she was still a child have they spoken to each other. A child who had two children and was roaming through the streets at night in search of something on which a universal prohibition had been placed, craving what it was illegal for anyone to buy or sell, let alone a child.

  Their transactions had seemed strange to her but surely stranger still to him. Talking through a curtain to a girl who’d never seen him. Taking money from her in exchange for a kind of moonshine called callabogus. Waiting for her in the dark behind that curtain and that window.

  After a certain number of nights, he would have recognized her footsteps. And the clinking of her cane. Here she comes.

  Sitting there while she stood outside the window in the cold, appraising her, assessing her. He let her stand out there for hours while he scrutinized every inch of her, noted the way she held herself.

  Something in his own life had made him decide that the time had come to intervene in hers. The birth of her children.

  It is hard to imagine the setting in which the terms, the limits of this intervention were devised. The site of his ruminations. That book-crammed flat in Lower Manhattan. Two thousand miles away from her he plotted his intervention as would a kidnapper the abduction of a stranger. All so he could talk to her on Patrick Street.

  “Come out where I can see you,” she shouts, her voice as shrill as a girl’s.

  “Yes,” the voice says. “Where you can see me. How eager you must be to see me after all this time.”

  “Come out,” she shouts again.

  She sees two massive hands grip the opposite sides of the rail of the pulpit. A figure raises itself slowly from within. It seems that it will never stop rising, but when it does it sways unsteadily.

  “Such an absurd little church,” the voice says. “A church for children. A place for them to play at saying service. Not a Catholic church until just recently when I made it one. I was preparing for morning Mass when you arrived.”

  Now she can see his face. That of an old man, it doesn’t match the tone of the letters.

  Short, cl
ose-cropped grey hair. Forehead a mass of liver spots and wrinkles. A wide mouth whose lower lip sags in what might be the after-effect of a stroke. Blue eyes?

  “May I descend all three steps?” he says, smiling.

  “Stay put,” she says.

  “I have a chalice in my hand,” he says. “Merely a chalice.”

  “Put it down.”

  “It is hardly a weapon, Miss Fielding. There is nothing in it but some wine.”

  He descends the pulpit.

  “Take the lantern,” she says, “and set it on the floor.”

  He complies, then stands up straight, still elevated on the altar, the chalice in both hands in front of him. He is dressed in black. Black jacket and soutane, black slacks, black shoes. A white collar at his throat.

  “Well. You have seen me. Just a man, after all. And not the one I was when we first met. Why are you afraid of me?”

  “What do you want? What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here, Miss Fielding? A woman alone, living like a hermit on an island in the winter. Loreburn. Population: one. Until recently.”

  She says nothing as she watches him place the chalice on the floor in the halo of the lantern light.

  She can now see well enough to make out the plumes of frost that issue from his mouth when he breathes or speaks. She glances at the pulpit and sees that inside it lies a sleeping bag, a canteen and a khaki knapsack.

  She tries to imagine him being taken to Loreburn and left here without supplies on the eve of winter. He will not last many more nights in this church now that the real cold has set in. Which means that she will have to take him back to Patrick’s house.

  His clothes do not look as though he wore them while making his way from the church to Patrick’s house and back again. In fact, they look, except for a few creases and wrinkles, almost new.

  His shoes, which are not suited for walking on Loreburn in the snow, gleam as if they have recently been polished. The lamplight flickers in them.

  There must be other clothes in that knapsack. The ones he is wearing he must have brought for this occasion. Their meeting. And whatever else he has in mind.