Read The Custodian of Paradise for Free Online Page A

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 simply 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 mythroat, tears welled up in my eyes and went streaming down my cheeks. I