The Custodian of Paradise (65 page)

David. One in a million. A million sons pulled from their mothers’ arms by a million others hunting phantoms of revenge.

How easy it is to believe that on this planet every soul is rank with malice. Yet also how untrue.

While the nations of the earth contrive their grievances that only war can solve, and their best minds, when the war is over, scour the Record for enemies and scapegoats on whom the next war will be blamed, there will be some who live as Patrick does, and as David did. As my Provider and his delegate sometimes did, holed up in their book-lined trench, thinking of another time, another war.

Here, on this island, the last advance of history began. The first beachhead of the last great expedition of humankind. The staging ground for the invasion of two continents. And perhaps their re-invasion.

Words of war in a time of war.

But on this eastmost edge to which they came from western Europe five hundred years ago to give it what they must have known was one last try, it seems possible that some version of the great experiment might still succeed.

The clouds close in again. I can hear but cannot see the colony of gulls. I can hear the horn at Quinton but cannot see the light. There is nothing in the world but water, a patch of it the size of a pond on
which it seems we make no progress. Not even by looking at the water can you tell that we are moving.

Wakes that will never fade lead back to the ports from which the last invasion force was launched. It is not for recent crimes but for those of his ancestors that the enemy must be repaid.

His ancestors, our ancestors. For all sides are descended from the enemy.

A thousand westward wars have led to this one. Armies contend for what their forebears have a thousand times contended and will again when this war is forgotten.

Unless this war is the one that ends all worlds.

A ghost planet affronting its creator as Samuel’s children, when they left this island, must have galled the soul of Samuel.

Better not to think on such a scale. From that height David looks like all the others who have died.

I have never been to war. Never fought in one or been caught up in one like David, my Provider and his delegate. Never seen one. Mere children have seen what I have only read about, endured what I have not, died though my survival was assured.

No bombs have fallen on this city, no battles have been fought here in my lifetime or that of either of my fathers. I have never been a witness. I have no testimony. I have lost less than others who have never been to war.

A son whom I met but once. They have lost sons who before the war they spoke with every day. Whose childhoods they remember. Whom they hugged and kissed good night and told stories to at bedtime so few years ago that the manner of their deaths is inconceivable.

What if mine is but a flesh wound next to theirs? Grazed by sorrow. In which case their survival is a miracle, for I am still uncertain of my own.

Every night, overhead, I will hear the drone of bombers whose pilots know nothing of the course of history that they are trying to reverse.

When the squadron of bombers has passed and they head out across the ocean and rise up above the clouds, the young men in the cockpits will see nothing but the stars.

   
Acknowledgments
   

The author wishes to thank his editor and publisher at Knopf Canada, Diane Martin, the executive publisher at Random House of Canada Limited, Louise Dennys, his publicist Sharon Klein, his agent Robert Lescher, his former agent Anne McDermid and also Deirdre Molina, managing editor at Knopf Canada.

Bestselling novelist W
AYNE
J
OHNSTON
was born and raised in the St. John’s area of Newfoundland.
The Custodian of Paradise
is his seventh novel; among his previous works of fiction are
The Divine Ryans
and
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
. He is also the author of an award-winning and bestselling memoir,
Baltimore’s Mansion
. He lives in Toronto.