The Custodian of Paradise Read Free

possibility evaporate and the return of the feeling of being pointlessly at odds with everything. It would never make me feel better to get up with the sun or to go to sleep when it got dark.
    “I need someone to take me out to Loreburn,” I said. “I’m going there to write a book. And I need someone who, once a month or so, can bring me what I need. Someone reliable.”
    “My love, you can’t live
there,”
the woman who had previously spoken said. “There’s nothing and no one in Loreburn.”
    “I will pay them, of course,” I said. “But it must be someone I can count on to bring me my supplies.”
    “My love, you’ll perish there all by yourself. You poor thing. You’re not right in your mind. You can’t be. They never should have dropped you off like that.”
    Once I started countering her objections or protesting my sanity, there would be no end to it. Especially since her objections were perfectly reasonable.
    “I need someone to take me out to Loreburn,” I said. “I will borrow a dory and row myself out there if I have to.”
    “My love, you couldn’t row a dory all the way to Loreburn. No one could. You’ll drift out to sea, is all you’ll do. Do you even know where Loreburn is?”
    I thought I could see it in the distance, an amorphous shape that grew smaller the longer I looked until it vanished altogether. I felt dizzy. Felt the urge to reach into my vest and take out my flask, which contained nothing but water. A long, restorative drink of Scotch was what I needed. But that, aside from being otherwise catastrophic, would only bolster their objections.
    “Mom—”
    “Shh.”
    “But, Mom, I’ll go get—”
    “Be quiet, I said.”
    The new voice had been that of a little girl. The boards of the wharf creaked slightly as I heard the shuffle of what were unmistakably the footsteps of a child. No, more than one child.
    Still facing the sea and unable, even peripherally, to make out anything of these residents of Quinton—they must have been keeping their distance from me or from the edge of the wharf—I turned slightly to address them.
    “How many people live in Quinton?” I said.
    “How many people live in Quinton?” the woman repeated, her tone incredulous.
    “We’re the only ones who lives here, lady,” a boy said to a faint chorus of giggles from the other children. I guessed there were four of them but resisted the urge to turn around.
    “She looks like a scarecrow,” the boy said to further giggles.
    “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE,” their mother shouted at a volume and a pitch the likes of which I had never heard issue from awoman’s throat before. “BACK UP TO THE HOUSE, ALL OF YE, RIGHT NOW.” The unnatural bellow of her voice echoed all around, out across the water, down to the point and back again, ringing in my ears.
    The children ran in silence from the wharf and up the path.
    I felt the woman staring at me.
    “My love, what in God’s name are you doing here?”
    What folly it would be to attempt to tell the truth. Her voice was so different, so much softer and more wistful than the last time she had spoken, that I momentarily wondered if there might be two women on the wharf behind me. In the voice was an entreaty, an invitation to me to reply in the knowledge that we were now alone, the woman believing that, if not for the presence of her children, I would have made some deeply personal admission that only another woman could understand.
    “I have told you why I’m here,” I said quietly, trying not to show how moved I was by the kindness in the voice of this woman I had yet to look at.
    “What is she doing here?” the woman said barely audibly, under her breath. I could feel myself being appraised—my clothes, my thick-soled boot, my stature, my cane. I was suddenly aware of what an offputtingly incongruous spectacle I was, sitting there on the wharf with my two massive trunks beside me.
    “
We
live here,” the woman said. “No one else but us. We run the