The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston Page B

need to be discreet about it, except around my father. No one could guess the meaning of those words. That simple sentence. Not even Prowse. The purse, with the note inside it, is beneath my mattress now.
    LOREBURN
    I put down my pen, looked around the front room at Mr. and Mrs. Trunk, thought of how absolutely non-judgmental they would be if I took a drink.
    It had been a while since I had opened the unsigned note from my mother. Yellowed and desiccated with age, it had so frequently been folded and unfolded that it barely held together at the creases, more of the paper having pulled apart than remained connected so that it now consisted of eight small squares that seemed to adhere by little more than habit or an ancient compatibility of once-interlocking shapes.
    How small the note was, about the size of a sheet from one of my father’s prescription pads. Folded three times, it was not much bigger than a postage stamp. I had often imagined pressing it into someone’s hand with my thumb and then, with both my hands, closing thatperson’s fist around it. The handwriting as neat and even as that on a birthday cake, it might have been written for the little girl I had been the day before my mother went away.
    I tried to write more but could not. I read a journal entry that I had written in the berth of a ship bound for Newfoundland.
    July 17, 1916
    Forgive me, my children. My babies. For I myself am just a child. I am leaving without ever having seen you. Leaving, without ever having seen it, the city of your birth. It feels as if my life is ending just as yours begins. Ended just as yours began. In the trunk, not only books, but other things that seem like bribes. It is crammed with packages of cigarettes and there is even a bottle of Scotch. And an envelope that contains not the long letter from my mother that like a fool I mistook it for containing, but money, bills that in the darkness I will scatter like confetti from the ship. “Their names are David and Sarah.” I felt that I had found and brought home something I was not old enough to keep, something valuable that must be returned to the rightful owner. My mind is brimful with bitter, accusatory words. Renunciation. The erasure of me from your future. Oblivious. But not
you
from
my
future. My crime is greater than theirs and my conscience cannot be appeased with bribes.
    Goodbye. I brought you here, smuggled you here inside my body from the place of your conception, the island city of St. John’s that you may never see.
    A man can be a father without knowing it. Can have children without knowing it. Better by far to feel, to know, no matter what, than to be like Prowse.
    I am returning to the country of my birth, where no one lives whose body has ever been sustained by mine, noranyone by whose body my own has been sustained. My father refused when they asked him to come and escort me home. When I close my eyes I feel myself plunge downward as if the ship is already far from shore, downward into an unforgetful, unforgiving sleep. It is as if, when my children were born, my soul followed theirs into the world and now is lost. It seems there is nothing left of me but matter, mortal matter.
    It is a calm, warm summer night.
    The fury of the storm inside me cannot bend a blade of grass.
    And then, in my berth, after I had been out to take the air, my first communication from
him
.
    I watched you walk about the deck tonight. Looking so desolate I thought you meant to jump. We would not have let you. Dressed all in black. Tall enough to be mistaken for a widow. I heard you say something. “I am a mother who will never be a wife.” I couldn’t tell if you were vowing to remain single or lamenting that you would never marry. To have endured so much so soon. And yet remain so beautiful. Did you notice how you were stared at by the crew members? We watched them as closely as we watched you
.
    I too am bound for Newfoundland, though not, like you, for the first time. Bound