A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  “But smoke smells nice.”

  “That’s right.”

  Landish told him that electricity ran through the wires that were strung from pole to pole along the streets, and from the poles to the houses.

  They heard the wires humming when the wind was calm.

  Electricity ran like water did through pipes, Landish said. It flowed.

  There were no poles or wires or even gas lamps on Dark Marsh Road.

  One day Landish told him that a woman named Lucy would mind him for a while. Landish said that he was going for a walk with Lucy’s sister. Landish went down the stairs when Lucy was coming up. They didn’t say hello or look at each other. Landish was gone for an hour. Lucy had a wooden ballerina spinning top, painted white and red. They sat on the floor and the ballerina spun back and forth between them, one hand on her head, one arm stretched out. Lucy lay back on the floor and fell asleep until she heard Landish’s footsteps on the stairs. Sometimes Lucy’s sister, Irene, minded Deacon. She spun the ballerina too, but she talked more than Lucy and smoothed back Deacon’s hair.

  The “compensation” from Van was long gone. It seemed clear that, despite Van’s promise, no further compensation would arrive. Landish vowed that he would hold out as long as he could before accepting top-ups. That summer, by charging less than anyone else, he managed to find piecework here and there, digging holes for fence posts, clearing and burning brush. He was often paid in food from the gardens of his employers. He made mash from blight-blackened potatoes and called it “spudding.” Mimicking Deacon’s pronunciation, he called his rabbit recipe “rabid stew.” He made it from rabbits that he snared at the end of Dark Marsh Road. He made “turnip your nose.” He also made “homophone soup,” which was yellow pea.

  He made cabbage à deux, shredding the cabbage and mixing it with thrice-soaked, thrice-baked, hard-boiled beans. It was one of Deacon’s favourites. They went outside and walked for a long time after eating it, “venting their gustations,” Landish said, which Deacon said was just a fancy way of saying farts.

  “I’m not sitting on your shoulders,” Deacon said. He said a dose of Landish was ten times worse than a dose of Deacon.

  “The flatulent are petulant,” Landish said. He could get the boy to walk more often if he could stand to eat cabbage à deux more often.

  They had veg-edibles and Dark Marsh Fish. France’s bacon, henglish eggs. Cod au cretin. Black Forest Cram. Dark Marsh Toad. The traditional Easter Rooster.

  But Landish got fewer jobs as winter came on.

  “We’re down to the vestiges,” Landish said.

  Landish milked goats and cows that belonged to others who let them roam to graze on whatever they could find. Deacon didn’t like it when Landish milked other people’s cows. “Well, you can’t unmilk a cow,” Landish said, “so you might as well drink up.” He gathered up the eggs of wayward hens whose legs bore the bands of their owners. “Just-laid eggs from unlaid hens.”

  When the boy had a stomach ache from lack of food, Landish would lie beside him on the bed and rub his back and belly. The boy was paler than the newly perished. Landish pretended to eat so that Deacon could have more. He went to bed hungry and, unable to sleep, made up food puns: The Merchant of Venison. Broth fresh from the brothel. A sacrificial lamb was a mutton for punishment.

  Would the winter never end? Season desist.

  He should write Van and tell him they had dined tonight on Sham Chowder, Lack of Lamb, Crazed Ham and Duck à Mirage. Steam of Mushroom Soup and Perish Jubilee.

  Landish remembered the food they had when he was growing up, the holiday feasts. His father, who lived in the house once Gen of Eve was gone, spread a good board: imported fruits and vegetables, brightly coloured, many of them from the tropics, smoked meats, cheeses, jams and sauces, all manner of bread and cream-crammed pastries. He remembered the apparition on the Druken board of whole pineapples, coconuts, wreaths of grapes, bananas in layered bunches of fifty or sixty, brightly coloured and oddly shaped marrows. The board was as important a decoration as the Christmas tree and much of it was merely admired, never eaten.

  Deacon asked Landish how you got inside your mother from the Womb of Time, and how you got from her womb to the world.

  Landish told him about Dick and the happy couple. Deacon asked him what the happy couple did. Landish said they had no choice but to live in wedded bliss.

  He answered all of Deacon’s questions. Deacon laughed until he coughed. Landish swore that it was true. He added that he wondered if he should have waited until Deacon was older because at his age he might get it all mixed up. He said he had known men who were still confused about it when they died of old age.

  “You’ll see. But not until you’re older. If your parents hadn’t done it, you’d be purely hypothetical.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An idea in Just Mist.”

  Landish looked at him. If the boy were purely hypothetical, he wouldn’t weigh much less than he did now.

  Deacon looked inside his underwear and laughed again.

  “It grows on you,” Landish said. “I hope to God that something does.”

  Deacon knew when he was joking, so he knew that it was true. The father he had never met. The mother he could not remember. When he was hypothetical.

  The “contribution,” Landish called what a father did. Deacon was not old enough to make a contribution. Landish said he wasn’t sure how many he had made but he was almost certain that none of them had worked.

  If Deacon’s father hadn’t made a contribution, Deacon would still be waiting in the Womb of Time. More waited there forever than ever had or ever would be born.

  Landish tried to see and feel what Deacon did. He tried to remember when he himself was fresh from the Murk.

  Deacon seemed to see only what was good in others. He delighted in watching others enjoy themselves as if he were one of them, as if their fine clothing and conveyances, their large houses with their lavish furnishings were not things that he lacked, or was excluded from or deprived of, but were glittering spectacles in which all who merely witnessed them could share. He waved at everyone, even those he knew would not wave back. To him, everyone seemed equally deserving of attention.

  Even the story of his father’s death had not inclined him against Captain Druken. The point of the narrative might simply have been to relate a series of events that the two men had been equally unable to avoid, the allotment of blame being the prerogative of no one and nothing.

  Landish tried to leave unposed the question of how he would get along without the boy if he had to. But he thought and dreamt about it. He woke from dreams and, finding himself alone in bed, roared out Deacon’s name.

  “Here I am,” said Deacon, who’d been sleeping on the floor. Landish gathered him up into a hug and walked about the attic with him, saying “I thought you were gone. I dreamt that you were just a dream. I dreamt there never was a Deacon and that I lived alone.”

  “I’m here,” Deacon said.

  “Pull on my ears to make sure,” Landish said.

  Deacon pulled on his ears until Landish said he was convinced.

  When the boy was asleep, Landish would walk about the middle of the attic, the only part in which he could stand up straight and fully stretch out both his arms. At night, when he’d been drinking, he thought about the early lives of famous writers—Dostoevsky standing at the foot of an open grave, waiting to be shot, his death sentence commuted at the last second by the emperor to seven years’ hard labour in Siberia. It would take more than an emperor to convince a firing squad of Newfoundlanders that a man named Druken should be allowed to live. And they would think it a strange form of punishment that consisted of seven years of regular employment.

  Having children hadn’t kept Charles Dickens from becoming a writer. Paid by the word. How lucky for his wife and ten children that he didn’t choose to be a poet. There would have been fewer copies of his books in the stores than there were of him ar
ound the house. He imagined Dickens the poet trying each week to build a readership. Cliffhanger endings. Leaving his readers to wonder which word he would use to rhyme with “doldrum” in the next instalment.

  Tolstoy had sense enough to wait until he had his fill of one kind of life before moving on to another. A womanizing bachelor, drinker and decadent layabout for almost twenty years, he married, stopped drinking, became affrontingly industrious and began to rail against those whose careers as womanizing bachelors, drinkers and decadent layabouts had just begun. A world-famous writer whose fame would endure forever even if he never wrote another word, he realized and began to preach the virtues of obscurity, unable to find fellowship except in the company of writers who, having despaired of ever getting published, had given up writing.

  He had recently written of the emptiness of all pursuits, declared himself outraged by any man who upon reaching his allotment of three score and ten continued to fend off death by consuming food and drink, but he was over seventy and very much alive.

  Landish would lay a page flat on the embers and watch it ignite, scorching outward from the middle, curling up at the corners. He wondered if it was just a pose, this burning of everything he wrote. The great, uncompromising artist who accepted nothing less from himself than perfection. He took the pages he wrote and reread each one before he fed it to the fire. Everything he wrote struck him as a failed, forced imitation of something he had read. Sometimes, somehow without his noticing until he was reviewing what he’d written, phrases, even whole sentences from his favourite writers made it into his night’s work.

  What would have been the point of keeping the pages, storing them in some ever-growing pile, the accumulated futility of years, there, very there every time he pushed another heap beneath the bed or made room for another in the closet? It would be hard to convince himself that they were not the measure of how much of his life he had so far wasted.

  Perhaps he was all too typical a Druken, his nature inimical to creation, suited only for destruction.

  “What’s your book about?”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s finished.”

  “A secret.”

  “Not really. Just for now.”

  “You should read your book to me.”

  “I will when it’s finished.”

  “When will that be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to put people into words.”

  While Landish was writing, Deacon would stare at him. Landish would look up and Deacon would look away.

  Landish didn’t notice anything while he was trying to put people into words. Maybe he could hear them in his head. “Characters,” Landish called them. Landish could hear them but Deacon couldn’t. Deacon wasn’t a character. Landish didn’t notice Deacon. He acted as if Deacon wasn’t there. Landish shielded his face with his hand. He hunched over the table. He pressed down with his pen so hard that Deacon heard the writing from his bed. The table shook. Landish whispered as if he was talking to the people in his book. Deacon thought they must be more fun to spend time with than a runt like him. It bothered Landish when Deacon moved or made a sound. He looked at Deacon like he was about to shout at him but all he did was sigh and shake his head.

  When Landish took a break from writing, he put a blank piece of paper on top of the pile of paper and a beach rock the size of his fist on top of that. That meant that he wasn’t done for the night, just taking a break. He would read for a while, or nap, or sit and stare into the fire. The rock was to keep the papers in place. Landish told Deacon that he was also to think of the rock as a lock. He asked him to promise not to move the rock and Deacon promised. He made him promise with his left hand on the rock and his right hand held up like in court.

  “The book is not your rival,” Landish said, and explained what “rival” meant. Still, Deacon would look at the pile of paper on his desk and feel the urge to burn it in the fireplace. Other times, when he watched Landish feed page after page into the fire, he was glad. But then he felt bad for Landish, and thought how sad and angry he’d be if Deacon burned his book. It was Landish’s book. No one else was allowed to burn it. Deacon even felt sorry for the people in the book who Landish said would “go down in mystery.” But the next night he would be tempted again by the sight of the pile of paper on the table.

  “It’s about my father,” Landish said. “I haven’t even made up a new name for him yet. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

  But then he said it was about the adventures of Captain Druken, who lived in an attic in a city where no one lived except in attics and the sealers at the seal hunt all lived in one big attic on the ship and the Governor lived in the attic of Government House and the Queen lived in the attic of Buckingham Palace and had to walk through two hundred kitchens to get to her kitchen.

  Landish always looked at the map before he started work on his book.

  He told Deacon the map stood for the world, the way the world might look if you could see it from halfway to the moon, which was too high up for birds. There was nothing halfway to the moon but empty space, nothing to stand on while you looked down at the world. A round map called a globe was even better. Landish grew up in a house that had a globe in every room, but he said that even one was too expensive now.

  A place on the map that was called the key explained the dots. Five dots in descending size. It showed one kind of line that stood for railroads. There was a broken line that connected ports of call.

  But there were no lines of any kind on Newfoundland. There were no lakes, rivers or mountains. It was featureless but for its name, which was spelled out in three words instead of one. The map was made in England.

  There was no dot for St. John’s on the map. No dot about it. Not dot-worthy. A place of nil repute. The island bore nothing but the name of Newfoundland, as if every inch of it was just like every other inch.

  “Surely they could spare one dot for here,” Landish shouted.

  “Shhhhh,” Deacon said.

  “I’m sorry, Deacon,” Landish said. “I am besotted with dots.”

  He said he had never read or even heard of a book set in a place that didn’t rate a single dot.

  Deacon said, “St. John’s might get a dot if you wrote a book about it.”

  Landish said he might be right, but St. John’s should have a dot, book or not. And what chance did a book written in and about a dot-unworthy place have against all the books from places such as London and New York that had the biggest dots of all?

  Deacon wished he could make Landish go to bed, but sometimes everything he said only seemed to make him worse, make him talk louder and stride back and forth with his boots still on, the hobnails scratching up the floor that wasn’t theirs.

  He told Landish that no one cared about the dots, but Landish shook his head. He said most Newfoundlanders had never seen dot-acknowledged places such as New York and London. That’s why they didn’t care about the dots. But dots were important to people who lived in places that were deemed worthy of dots.

  “I don’t care about the dots,” Deacon said. “I don’t mind if we stay here forever.”

  “You will mind, though,” Landish said. “Here we are poor and it won’t get better, and that will matter more as you get older. Anyone can be an unread writer. Any fool can burn the fragments of a never-to-be-finished book.”

  Landish stayed up late, drinking, decks awash with grog when he was done.

  Deacon heard Hogan in the kitchen down below. Hogan would tell the nobleman, who would write a letter and push it underneath the door when he and Landish were asleep.

  Landish’s father went to the place from which no one knows the way back home. Was found dead in his house on a snowy day by his housekeeper, his arms on the armrests of a chair that faced the front-room window that was so thickly coated with frost and snow the room was as dark at noon as it would have been at twilight.

  “You’re an orphan, too, now,” Deacon said.

  “A brace of orphan
s,” Landish said.

  The Gilbert would soon be someone else’s, though her new owners would not be allowed to change the name. It would be sold by the Churches to the highest bidder. To Landish, his father left the laurel wreath of sealers: the white sealskin hat.

  On condition that they not hire Landish as a teacher or otherwise pay him for services he might be qualified or willing to perform, the Churches got the ship, the house and all its contents, and the money. Landish got the white fur hat.

  And the Churches sold it all to the nobleman, who not only kept many of Captain Druken’s things but left them exactly where they were, visible through the windows. Landish pictured the Druken house looking exactly as it had when he was last inside it, the nobleman roaming the rooms like some pale simulacrum of his father.

  Landish sat in the attic with the hat on his lap for part of every day for two weeks after Captain Druken died.

  He thought of Deacon’s father and he thought of Deacon’s mother. Outside, snow was falling. He heard the crunching sound of boots on snow packed hard by other boots. Carson was three months missing when the boy was born, his wife a widow when she gave birth to her first and only child. The boy was in the womb while his father lay in a place of ice so far from shore there was no shore, the sky a flat black wafer at whose rim a perfect pale of light remained until the sun came up again.

  What was the message of his father’s gift? Why should I care what you think of me when I am so highly thought of by the world that has already cast you out? He hadn’t so much bequeathed him the hat as he had shoved it in his face. Looking at the box, he fancied that the answer was literally contained within it, a note of explanation from his father sewn into the lining of the hat or that of the box. He felt like ripping box and hat apart just to satisfy himself that they held no secrets. It doesn’t matter if you destroy it, burn it, sell it, lose it, give it or throw it away. It will ever be an affront to you. He could not in this manner decipher the meaning of the hat, for how would he know, who would tell him, which conjecture was the one? It might take nothing less than the decipherment of his father to puzzle out the meaning of the hat, nothing less than the completion of his book.