The Custodian of Paradise Read Online Free

problem of this woman from St. John’s. My hopes fell again.
    I looked up at him, slowly raised my eyes the length of him. Dark green coveralls smeared with stains that looked like blood. He stood with his hands on his hips, the sleeves of his ragged once-white shirt rolled up past his elbows. Sinewy, hairless forearms the same thickness from his elbows to his wrists. Hands gapped with scars, knuckles nicked with scabs, some recent. The palms of his hands so creased and cracked they seemed to be covered in waxed paper. He did not look down at me when I looked at his face, but neither did he seem self-conscious. Oblivious to the possibility of conveying an impression. Hair black and thick. His face tanned as deeply as his arms. A body as muscular as a limited diet would allow. I didn’t know exactly what running a light entailed, but he did not look like a lighthouse keeper.
    “Do you fish too?” I said. “As well as run the lighthouse?”
    “Irene runs the light,” he said. “The government thinks
I
do. They won’t let a woman run it. I’m a fisherman. I don’t have anything to do with that light. She’s up all night sometimes, when it’s foggy or stormy. And then she stays awake all day with the children.”
    “Sheilagh Fielding,” I said, realizing that he would never ask me what my name was. “It’s nice to meet you, Patrick.”
    I told him there were some things I needed that I had had no room for in my luggage. A month’s worth of kerosene or, if need be, seal oil, to light my lamps with. Flour, oats, sugar, tea, molasses, a sack of potatoes, a bag of onions, canned food. I ate because I knew I had to, not because I enjoyed it. Food held no more appeal for me when I was not drinking than it did when I was.
    Because I had done so much walking in St. John’s, I had clothing and footwear for every conceivable kind of weather. A spare pair of walking boots, the right one with the same thick, limp-corrective sole.
    As I told him all this, he said nothing. I took his silence to be acquiescence.
    I wondered how to broach it, the matter of one of the things I might need him to bring out to me each month.
    “There’s something that I might need a lot of,” I said. “Something that you might not want to bring me. At least, not so much of it. But I might not need any. It depends.”
    “Booze,” he said.
    “Yes,” I said, somehow offended by his guessing correctly what I meant. I was accustomed to people smelling it on my breath, but it was now months since I’d had a drink and even so I had eaten two peppermint candies just in case my body and my clothes might somehow still smell of Scotch.
    “Scotch, to be exact,” I said. “It’s on the note I’ll give you.”
    “I’ll bring it to you,” he said. “I couldn’t stand living in Loreburn by myself without more Scotch than you can drink.”
    I stifled my drinker’s perverse urge to assert my ability to match anyone when it came to drinking. I wondered how long it would have been after Patrick had passed out on his folded arms that I wouldhave called it a night and made my surefooted, albeit cane-clumping way to bed.
    “I can’t stand to live anywhere without it,” I said, and instantly regretted saying it. Although my drinking was known to all of St. John’s, I was not given to making such admissions.
    “Well, we better get ready,” he said. “You’ll want a few hours of daylight when you get there.”
    He had left me on the wharf and followed the path up through the trees towards the house. He had returned after a longer time than it should have taken to fill the boxes of fresh vegetables he carried. I guessed that he had been delayed by an argument with Irene. Now the boat was loaded and we were on our way to Loreburn. I faced forward on the gunwale behind him as he stood at the wheel.
    “I’m going to live in one of those boarded-up houses I’ve heard are out there,” I said. “Like the ones in Quinton. I’ve lived in