Climbing the steps, Patrick raised the latch and opened the storm door to reveal another door, this one with a window and an ornate glass knob. There was a keyhole, but he turned the knob and pushed the door open, giving it a slight but unmistakably practised nudge with his knee.
I followed him into a large windowless porch, which, by the dim light from the open door, I could see was almost empty. There was a long, makeshift table along one wall on which, neatly spaced in a row, stood several lanterns partway filled with oil.
Beside us, as crumpled as a pair of pants, were a pair of mud-encrusted hip-waders. I smelled what I thought was the oil in the lanterns, but when I sniffed he told me it was paint that I could smell. “I repainted everything about a year ago,” he said.
I saw what I thought was another table. Set into it, in a
round hole that it fit perfectly, was a large, white, enamel bowl, a washbasin big enough for sponge baths, and beside it a blue enamel jug, as well as an unwrapped, once-square, now-concave, butter-block-sized bar of soap. It bore the imprint of his hand and fingers. Or someone’s.
On the floor in front of the basin was a round wooden tub in which, I guessed by the size of it, you were meant not to sit but to stand. I felt that I was intruding on his privacy, that I had all but barged in on him while he was bathing.
“There’s more soap in the cupboard there,” he said, pointing, but I could not make out what he was pointing at. “The crank pump in the shed out back still works. If you want, you can warm up the water on the stove.” Meaning, it seemed, that he preferred to use cold water.
An image of my chilly self standing there half-naked or naked in the porch went through my mind.
I had thought I would have to lug pails of water from the nearest stream, had imagined chopping through the frozen surface with an axe every winter morning. But this and other such things I would be spared, all because of the intervention, the inexplicable generosity of this stranger and the apparent coincidence of my having chosen this very island.
A door frame to which no door was attached led from the porch into the kitchen. He raised his arms and let them drop to his sides as if to say that, as he had warned me, there was not much to it. There was a pot-bellied soot-blackened wood stove whose pipe ran up through a hole in the ceiling. On the stove was a cast-iron frying pan that still bore a trace of grease from some recent meal. “I should have washed that pan,” he said.
“Well, it’s not as though you were expecting visitors,” I said. “Or is it?”
“The stove was here when I fixed up the place,” he said. “That and a few other things that would have been more trouble to move than they were worth.”
Against the far wall was a table with four chairs. Opposite the table, a daybed on which lay blankets in such disarray it looked like someone might have slept in it the night before. Beside the bed, as if the sleeper had removed them just before retiring and meant to step straight into them upon awaking, were a pair of knee-high rubber boots.
“I’ll get my boots out of your way,” he said. “And I’ll fix up those blankets for ya.”
How strange it would be to live, for the first time in decades, in a place where there was no one for whom my floor served as a ceiling. No broom-handle thumping from below in protest of my typing or my lop-gaited pacing of the room.
“I closed off all the rooms upstairs,” he said. “All the doors are sealed and I chinked up all the drafts. And then I painted everything. Or papered it. Otherwise you’d freeze to death down here, even in the fall.”
“You really have fixed it up,” I said.
“There’s three more rooms.” he said. “There’s the front room. That’s what it was, anyway. And there’s two rooms to sleep in.” Neither the word “bed” nor “bedroom” seemed to be in his vocabulary.
On our way out of the front room, I saw a staircase that gradually faded from view the higher up I looked, the bare, newly painted wooden steps seeming to grow less and less substantial until, as though losing all substance, they petered out in darkness.
“Is it safe to use the stairs?” I said.
“They’re safe, but they don’t go anywhere. The upper storeys are all sealed off.”
Sealed-off rooms hung with squares of plywood whose shapes by day would be traced with light around the edges, light that seeped in like air between the cracks.
I said I hoped that he had not made the house so draft-proof
that I would smother unless I left a window open. He rubbed the back of his neck as if I had posed him some conundrum of carpentry he doubted he could solve.
“I’m only joking with you, Patrick,” I said.
“Well. I suppose it’s a lot less than you’re used to,” he said.
“On the contrary,” I said, “it’s a lot more than I’m used to, and a great deal more than I expected.” Or deserve, I felt like adding. Where would he go now to do whatever it was that he once did here? What years-old habit was he forswearing, supposedly on a whim of generosity?
He showed me the other rooms. The two bedrooms each contained nothing but one well-made-up bed, an enamel washbasin and jug and identical chests of drawers. As in the kitchen, there was nothing even faintly decorative except the floral-patterned paper on the walls.
In the front room, there was a long, lime-green sofa that faced the largest of the windows I had so far seen. An almost floor-to-ceiling window, it would have afforded an expansive view of the beach and the ocean if not for a grove of spruce trees that had probably not been there when the house was built or abandoned. Through the gaps in the trees, I could make out his boat at the wharf.
Perhaps I would read the notebooks here in this otherwise empty room while reclining on the sofa.
There were fireplaces in every room, but only the one in the front room was in working order. It had a wooden mantel that was even more conspicuously bare than the walls. My battered trunks would be the most stylish, least practical of all the furnishings. In the front room, standing upright, they would serve as peculiar cabinets for my Scotch and cigarettes.
“I brought everything out here myself,” he said.
“What a tremendous amount of work it must have been.”
And the purpose of all this work? The only room he ever used was the kitchen and, perhaps, this one. This one where, for
a man who couldn’t read and had no radio, there would have been nothing to do but lie on the sofa and look out the window.
How pointlessly and eerily restored the old house seemed.
“You’re the only other person who has seen this place since I fixed it up,” he said.
“
No
one else has seen it? Not even your family?”
He shook his head.
“Never? They must be curious. Have they never asked to
see
the place?”
He shook his head and stared again in that vague way of his at the floor.
I felt a faint sense of dread at being so completely at the mercy of a man who was a stranger to me and whose unwillingness to explain this place that he had “fixed up” was alarming.
“I’ll show you what’s out back,” he said.
He gestured wordlessly to the outhouse as we passed it, the door of which was kept closed by a revolvable bar of wood nailed to the jamb.
In the shed, stood against the wall with an assortment of tools, was a double-barrelled shotgun.
There were burlap bags of oats, flour, sugar, large canisters of tea, molasses, tomatoes, an eclectic assortment of canned food, large boxes of condensed milk.
“You could hide out here if we lose the war,” I said.
“You’re welcome to anything you want,” he said and moved on.
At the back of the shed there was a bin nearly full of glistening black coal and a scuttle just inside the door. “You won’t need to use the coal for a while. You shouldn’t use it at all if you don’t have to. It’s best to burn wood until the snow comes. There’s plenty of wood down where the wharves and stages were. No trouble to chop it up. There’s a chopping block and a sawhorse out behind the shed.”
He gestured to the crank pump he had mentioned earlier. He
put a wooden bucket on the floor below the pipe and pumped the crank with one hand several times before, after much sputtering and clanking from what might have been below my feet, a clear stream of water came pouring from the pipe.
“Ice cold,” he said. “All year long. It was working just like this when I found it. I never had to spruce it up a bit, except rub a bit of dust off, that’s all.” He put his cupped hands to the water, then raised them to his mouth and drank.
“Hurts my teeth,” he said, squinting, and indicating that I should taste the water.
Handing him my cane, I did as he had done. The water was so cold I felt it in the bones of my hands as I stooped slightly to drink. It
was
ice cold. At whatever depth in the earth it came from, it was always winter. I gulped from my hands. I hadn’t tasted water this pure in decades, nor realized until now how thirsty I was from the day’s exertions and anxieties.
“It’s delicious,” I gasped. It was so much so that, in sympathetic response to the taste of it in my mouth and the feeling of it in my throat, tears welled up in my eyes and went streaming down my cheeks. I laughed.
“My God,” I said, “this water is so good it makes me cry.”
As we were leaving the shed, he picked up the shotgun. “There’s a box of shells in the kitchen cupboard. And another one up there in the loft behind the food. You should keep this gun in the house. You never know. Someone might come ashore and—and steal from you.”
“Germans, you mean?”
“Anyone.”
He held the gun out to me at arm’s length as if it were a rifle, he a drill sergeant and I a private whose weapon he had just inspected and found satisfactory.
I was startled by the abruptness of the gesture. He must not share his wife’s concern, I thought, that I mean to do myself harm. I did not reach out to take the gun.
“I’ve got five or six of them,” he said. “I can show you how to use it.”
“I know how to use it,” I said.
“Ever fired one?”
“My father let me fire his. Into the air. On New Year’s Eve.”
“I’ll show you how to load it.”
“How to break the breech.”
“How not to shoot yourself.”
“What do I need a gun for?”
“I told you. And there’s some wild dogs out here,” he said. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. They’re not big dogs.”
At last I took the shotgun from him, but I could not bring myself to thank him for it.
It always surprised me how heavy and unwieldy guns were. Not at all as they seemed. (I’d had not a word from anyone yet as to exactly how David died. Better not to know, perhaps.)
“Leave it unloaded,” he said. “It might go off by accident.” When you’ve been drinking, he might as well have said.
“Is there anyone you know who’s in the war?” I said.
He shrugged as if to say that nothing in Quinton depended on the outcome of the war.
“Be careful,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to hurt yourself very bad to get yourself in trouble out here. Any kind of broken bone—”
“Might be the end of me.”
“Yes, it might.”
“So I’ll see you in a month?”
He nodded.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t be to blame if something happens to me.” I wished instantly that I hadn’t said it.
There was perhaps an hour of light left when we walked down to the beach, though I knew that light lingered longer on
the ocean than it did on land. It will soon be time, I thought, for Irene to run the light.
“You won’t be able to bring in all your things before dark,” he said.
“The trunks are waterproof.”
We went down to the beach, where I stood with my boots several feet apart, my cane planted between two rocks. Putting down my cane, I folded my arms for shelter from the fast-cooling breeze that was blowing shoreward. We stood there in silence. His boat bobbed slightly beside the wharf.
He might have been a visitor whom I had walked down to the beach, a visitor whose departure we had delayed to the point where further stalling was impossible unless he meant to spend the night. How quickly the house had become mine, me the host and he the guest. I was sharing what for him might have been the last look he would ever have of this spellbinding view of mine. Two friends about to part forever.
“You’ll do all right. I’ll be back. I’ll have everything you put down on that note.”
Surely he was keeping nothing from me. Yet how strange they had seemed, those signs of how recently he had been there. The slept-in daybed. The bar of soap. The footprints on the path. The frying pan. It did not seem possible that, since that last visit, he had grown so weary of the place that to relinquish it to me would not be a hardship, not deprive him of something precious.
As he headed out to sea, I looked over at the trunks. I foresaw long, nighttime conversations with them in that front room, not all of them having to do with what they contained. Sentinel servants, they would stand, discreetly silent, loomingly there in the lantern light, a tandem of shadows on the floor and on the walls, reflected in the window, omnipresent while I read and read in the hope that while my mind and body were preoccupied, sleep would creep into the room.
W
AYNE
J
OHNSTON
is the author of six previous novels, including
The Divine Ryans
, which won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award;
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
, which was nominated for the Giller Prize and first introduced Sheilagh Fielding to readers; and of
Baltimore’s Mansion
, which won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Born and raised in Newfoundland, Wayne Johnston now lives in Toronto.
B
OOKS BY
W
AYNE
J
OHNSTON
The Story of Bobby O’Malley
The Time of Their Lives
The Divine Ryans
Human Amusements