A World Elsewhere

by Wayne Johnston

  He remembered again how his father’s face looked in repose. There was still the hint of the face of a man who in his youth might have been like Landish and had once had put to him by his own father the question the hat might be meant to pose to Landish: what do you want and what are you willing to do to get it and how much of what you could have are you truly willing to renounce in the name of virtue?

  He tried in vain to convince himself he didn’t care why his father wanted him to have the hat. Didn’t care what kind of final gesture of contempt or last attempt to change his mind it was meant to be.

  Perhaps his father meant to tell him that he was all too typical a Druken, his nature inimical to creation, suited for destruction, the only thing that distinguished him from them being the self-abhorrence that he mistook as proof that his basic nature was unlike theirs. His father and the others had not lamented or made excuses for their natures. All the self-abhorrence he could muster would not redeem him if he simply lacked the gumption to act according to whom and what he was. What would he have done if his father had not disowned him, if he had left everything to him, attaching no conditions to the inheritance of his estate, the Gilbert included?

  He wouldn’t have renounced his father’s fortune, though he knew it to have been immorally acquired. He wouldn’t have scuttled the Gilbert. He would have sold it to another sealing skipper or some wealthy merchant, someone who had provoked almost as much dark talk as his father had. He would have accepted his inheritance with the sincere intention of doing something more worthwhile with it than simply enlarging it by any means for which he could escape all blame. He would have convinced himself that, even tended by a Druken, a foul tree need not blossom forth in a foul manner. Would that have made him a better man than Abram Druken or merely an opportunistic hypocrite? It might be that the answer to such questions lay nowhere but in his book.

  Landish brought out the sealskin hat and Deacon smoothed it with his hand. “It’s soft,” he said. “Is that what a seal feels like?”

  “It’s something like what a pup feels like,” Landish said. “Their white coats are not as long as this. This hair is woven together.”

  Landish looked at the hat. Perhaps his father was taunting him. Do something with your life that rivals what I did with mine. Measure up to me. Win the laurel wreath of something. But that wasn’t quite it because writing didn’t measure up to sealing in his father’s estimation. Nothing did. Writers were ineffectuals who came close to not counting at all. His father might merely have been daring him to decline the hat. Tempt fate by declining it.

  There appeared in a local paper:

  IN MARCH OF EIGHTEEN NINETY-FIVE

  The news rings out from every bell:

  The Gilbert’s dead with God survive

  While Captain Druken burns in hell.

  Landish decided that it was time to take Deacon to see the Crosses.

  He knew that Deacon’s mother was buried in a boulder-strewn Catholic cemetery called Mount Carmel, but he had never been there. All he knew was that the graves (one empty) of Deacon’s parents were marked with wooden crosses. The graveyard was on the windward side of the Brow, across the Waterford, up the hill from the top of which you could just see the lighthouse at Cape Spear.

  Landish climbed the Brow with Deacon on his shoulders, pausing to rest from time to time.

  “We’re really far from the attic now, hey?” Deacon said when they were halfway up the hill.

  “Really far.”

  “Are we still in St. John’s?”

  “Not really,” Landish said.

  “Where are we?”

  “Nowhere—smack in the middle of it. You talk, I’m out of breath.”

  They walked until they reached the road that led to nowhere but the cemetery, and then they were offered a ride the rest of the way by others driving carts piled with tools, paint, tar and other things they needed to repair the gravesites.

  At first, Deacon was scared at the thought of his mother and other people being underground. He imagined them all lying on their backs with their hands folded on their stomachs as he and Landish did sometimes. He didn’t want to think about what Landish said were their “remains.” Landish said that he had never seen remains. Most people hadn’t—not after the remains were buried. He had seen animals when there was nothing left but bones, but people were in boxes with their clothes on, so they didn’t look like that.

  Two small white wooden crosses about three feet high stood side by side, one for her and one for Deacon’s father. There were no inscriptions aside from their names, just the dates of birth and death for her, and for him the date of his birth and the date that he was “lost at sea,” burned into the wood by what Landish guessed was pitch.

  Landish recited a verse he had composed the night before.

  “His date of birth by none forgot/His date of death recorded not/So think his way from death to birth/A timeless time upon this earth.”

  The cross bore his father’s name, but his father wasn’t there. His remains were in the ocean. Landish said it was too late to find them now. They wouldn’t turn up.

  “This is where my mother is,” Deacon said, pointing at the ground in front of the cross on the left. “This is where they put her.” Landish knew that, like him, Deacon had no idea who “they” were.

  “Her head is here and her feet are there,” Deacon said.

  “That’s right,” Landish said.

  “There’s no one buried there,” Deacon said, pointing at the other grave.

  “No,” Landish said, “but it’s good to have a cross for him beside your mother’s.”

  Deacon nodded. Landish remembered the words of the woman the boy could not remember, the woman who for months had written to him. He remembered well the face of the man Deacon had never met and had no picture of. He felt guilty at the knowledge of whose fault it was that he was gone. He wondered if, even as a powerless, unknowing apprentice to his father, he had ever been the smallest bit to blame for some man’s death.

  Landish borrowed an axe to hammer the crosses deeper into the rocky ground. He and Deacon propped them up with stones, and Landish, with some borrowed twine, anchored them to pegs that he made from branches that he cut and notched. They had picked wild-flowers on the way to the cemetery and they placed them at the feet of the crosses.

  Landish had been able to think of little he could say to prepare the boy for the visit. He had guessed that there would be no stone or marble monuments to Deacon’s parents, but he hadn’t been prepared for the makeshift, wooden, weathered crosses, or the sight of plots that for more than three years had been left untended.

  He didn’t pray or say words over the graves as he and Deacon stood there looking down. He wasn’t sure that Deacon knew that such things were ever done. He let the boy have his say and left it at that.

  It was dark by the time they got back to the attic.

  “Let’s go see your parents’ graves next,” Deacon said.

  Landish had not been among the hundreds who attended his father’s funeral and he hadn’t gone to see where he was buried.

  “All right,” Landish said.

  The gravesite was cared for by a man who was paid from a fund set up by Captain Druken before his death. The stone marking his mother’s grave had been removed to make way for a mausoleum that was about the size of a tool shed. The mausoleum contained the remains of Captain and Mrs. Druken. Abram and Genevieve. There was a sealed metal door that had no handle. Though Landish had never been inside it, he had been told that his parents lay in two marble coffins supported by a granite catafalque. The family name was spelled out above the door.

  The mausoleum was surrounded by lesser Druken monuments that relative to most others in the graveyard were quite large and ornate: trumpeting or sword-wielding angels crouching atop headstones, tall stone crosses, schooner-shaped stones, markers fashioned after figureheads, bas-reliefs of ships, sealing captains in uniform, seals like family totems lying peace
fully asleep on the graves of children. Seals instead of lambs.

  But the mausoleum was the centrepiece of this largest-ever gathering of Drukens, this Tomb of Time reunion on whose invitation list his name had once appeared, but from which it had been struck, though any sons whom he might have in lawful matrimony who made sealing their profession would be welcome, according to his father’s executor.

  Captain Druken wasn’t underground or underwater, just indoors. Deacon knocked on the door, then tried to push it open. He knew of houses that were not much bigger and they were made of wood and looked as if they would fall down in a gust of wind. Deacon couldn’t imagine anything that would knock the mausoleum down.

  It was all there, in the cemetery, the history of the Druken line, spelled out in epitaphs, inscriptions, chronologies, necrologies. The oldest grave that of a second mate, 1722. The first first mate, the first captain. Some of them lost at sea. “At repose within these walls lie Captain Abram Druken who died in the seventy-sixth year of his age and beside him his beloved wife, Genevieve, who died in the forty-second year of her age. ‘And all that handle the oar, the mariners, and all the pilots of the sea shall come down from their ships, they shall stand upon the land.’ Ezekiel 27:29.”

  Looking at the mausoleum, Landish could not help but think of the two wind-tilted wooden crosses.

  His father had set aside more for the mausoleum than Landish had so far spent on Deacon.

  “Why did they put them in a house?”

  “It’s called a mausoleum. Some people think that it’s better than being buried. But you can’t have windows. They’d get broken and people could see in.”

  “They might have been afraid of being buried.”

  “A mausoleum stands out more than a grave,” Landish said. “You notice it more. That’s what he wanted.”

  “It’s pretty small,” Deacon said, looking at it as though he pitied its occupants, or even the house itself.

  “Small for a house,” Landish said, thinking of the one he’d grown up in and had shown Deacon several times, though they’d never gone near it. “Two dead people don’t need a lot of room.”

  Deacon referred to it as “the little stone house.” He was not comparing it to the other monuments in the graveyard but to the other houses in the city, as if the hut-like stone house was the measure of the pitiful penury in which the Drukens had lived and died, the name Druken seeming to Landish to evoke for Deacon a humbly indigent couple whom everyone felt sorry for because they had nothing to their name but their little windowless house on the grounds of a graveyard.

  He asked Deacon what he thought about leaving Newfoundland.

  “Are you going too?” Deacon said, wondering if Landish was sending him away but determined not to cry.

  “Of course I’m going too,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Away from here. Somewhere else.”

  Deacon looked around him at the attic.

  “When will we go?”

  “I don’t know. As soon as we can.”

  He told Deacon it would be their secret. He mustn’t tell anyone, especially the nuns who were nurses too. He told Deacon not to even look like they were leaving soon.

  “I’m going to write to Van, asking for his help,” Landish said. He had told Deacon nothing about Van but that he had been his best friend at Princeton.

  “Van will help us,” Deacon said.

  “Maybe. It’s worth a try. He paid for everything at Lotus Land. I wonder how he feels about me now.”

  “He misses you.”

  Landish told Deacon about Van’s sister, Vivvie.

  Deacon imagined Van trying to find his sister, patting the bottom of the lake the way Deacon patted the floor when the room was dark and he couldn’t find his shoes. But Van’s little sister was in the dark and underwater. Deacon had never been underwater, not all of him at once. The washtub wasn’t big enough. He could sit or kneel in it, sit back on his heels. His head didn’t fit under except when Landish held him by the feet and dunked him, but even then most of him wasn’t in the water. Deacon thought about Vivvie, all of her underwater, so far under it was dark and her brother couldn’t find her. It would be hard to find someone so small. Her wet clothes weighed her down, dragged her down, Landish said. Her little shoes, her stockings, her dress with all the ruffles, even her hair which was so much longer than a boy’s. Van went down to the bottom of the lake and came up with a piece of wood that he thought was Vivvie.

  “Van is from the Land of Plenty,” Landish told Deacon. “We are from the Land of Scanty.”

  “Van will help us,” Deacon repeated.

  Dear Van:

  I told you when we parted that you would never hear from me again. Nothing short of needing your help to save a child’s life would make me change my mind.

  I have in my care a four-year-old boy who, because of my father, has no parents, a bright, sweet boy whom I love as much as any father-by-blood has ever loved his son.

  We are near penniless. We live in a two-room attic and often do not have enough to eat. I fear that, soon, certain well-meaning but deluded people may decide that the boy would be better off without me.

  I don’t want him to wind up back in one of the city’s denominational orphanages. Abominational, they should be called. He would be raised by clergy who believe that the best education for a boy is one that is beaten into him.

  In these orphanages, it is widely believed, the taking of liberties, physical and otherwise, is commonplace. Such an upbringing would be more than you or I could have borne as children, and this boy, Deacon, has even fewer reserves of strength than other boys his age.

  Even if he were healthy, it is likely that, as I am unmarried and not perceived as being, in every sense, a moral exemplar, the courts might take him from me. But I will do all that I can, legal and otherwise, to prevent it.

  Should you agree to my proposal, I could earn my keep by tutoring the children of the servants at Vanderland, or by any other means that you propose.

  I hope you will see fit to send funds for our transportation to Vanderland, which you may deduct from my wages under such terms as you see fit. If you do, we will then set out from Newfoundland before any person so inclined has the opportunity to lay claim to Deacon.

  I believe that, given all that has transpired between us, and all the material means and powers of benign force that you possess, I am not asking for too great a favour. Van, I write in memory of the friendship we once had and—who knows—perhaps might have again …

  Two months later, Landish received a brief reply in an envelope addressed to him in handwriting that he was certain wasn’t Van’s. There was no return address, nor any opening or closing salutations in the letter:

  I regret that the circumstances of the past make it necessary that we never correspond or meet or otherwise communicate again.

  “Van won’t help us,” Landish told Deacon.

  “But he’s your friend.”

  Landish shrugged.

  Deacon gave his leg a reassuring hug.

  “I don’t know why I hoped he would. I didn’t tell you this before, but he got me sacked from Princeton and I renounced him for all time. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. I don’t say that just because we need him now. It’s a terrible thing to consign someone to the outer darkness of your life forever. I should have known that, having been thus consigned by my father who can never change his mind now, never offer an apology or ask forgiveness. Perhaps it’s not too late for me. Perhaps I should write to him again and tell him how I truly feel.”

  My Dearest Friend:

  I know that your motives for doing what you did at Princeton were not malignant. I knew it then, but was so confused and hurt, so angry and hateful-hearted that I could think of nothing but revenge, which I had but one means of exacting from a Vanderluyden. Your actions were wrong-headed, meddlesome—and treacherous, I thought, but I no longer think so.

  We were both naive in our d
ifferent ways. Given your upbringing, how could you have understood how much harm your hoax would do to me? The reversal of a fortune like yours is inconceivable, impossible—and therefore, such a profound reversal of fortune and fate as I have suffered may have been inconceivable to you—as may the possibility that, even when the alternative to it was all but nothing, I would turn my back on the life my father sought to impose on me.

  I am sorry for having said what I hope will not be the last words I ever speak to you, for disowning you as if consigning you to non-existence, an act of greater hubris than any you committed.

  I feel better from just having written this letter. I want you to know that, even should you not change your mind about my request, even if I should never hear from you again, I will remember you fondly and cherish the time we spent at Lotus Land. I wish you well.

  Yours truly,

  Landish Druken

  Three months later, a letter from Van arrived:

  … It is unlike you to have burdened yourself with a beggar boy, especially as, by doing so, you’ve made a beggar of yourself, all out of stubbornness, pride and spite. You’re doing penance for a crime you had no hand in. You cut off your nose to spite your face—renounced your inheritance to spite your father because he wanted you to be what all fathers want their sons to be, his successor.

  Much has changed since the moment you vowed that I would never hear from you again. I moved into Vanderland on Christmas Day, 1895.

  At Princeton, when you and I lived at Lotus Land, I more or less offered you co-proprietorship of Vanderland. I spoke of us raising our families at Vanderland. I have begun my family, and you, in the oddest manner imaginable, have begun yours. I have a wife, and a daughter who is about the age of the boy you bought as if from a shop his mother pawned him to.

  You are in desperate circumstances, a state for which I am sorry but not responsible. It has taken me a long time to reconcile myself to the fact that you, my long-hoped-for, long-yearned-for life mate, are gone for good.