Free A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston Page A

for its name, which was spelled out in three words instead of one. The map was made in England.
    There was no dot for St. John’s on the map. No dot about it. Not dot-worthy. A place of nil repute. The island bore nothing but the name of Newfoundland, as if every inch of it was just like every other inch.
    “Surely they could spare one dot for here,” Landish shouted.
    “Shhhhh,” Deacon said.
    “I’m sorry, Deacon,” Landish said. “I am besotted with dots.”
    He said he had never read or even heard of a book set in a place that didn’t rate a single dot.
    Deacon said, “St. John’s might get a dot if you wrote a book about it.”
    Landish said he might be right, but St. John’s should have a dot, book or not. And what chance did a book written in and about a dot-unworthy place have against all the books from places such as London and New York that had the biggest dots of all?
    Deacon wished he could make Landish go to bed, but sometimes everything he said only seemed to make him worse, make him talk louder and stride back and forth with his boots still on, the hobnails scratching up the floor that wasn’t theirs.
    He told Landish that no one cared about the dots, but Landish shook his head. He said most Newfoundlanders had never seen dot-acknowledged places such as New York and London. That’s why they didn’t care about the dots. But dots were important to people who lived in places that were deemed worthy of dots.
    “I don’t care about the dots,” Deacon said. “I don’t mind if we stay here forever.”
    “You will mind, though,” Landish said. “Here we are poor and it won’t get better, and that will matter more as you get older. Anyone can be an unread writer. Any fool can burn the fragments of a never-to-be-finished book.”
    Landish stayed up late, drinking, decks awash with grog when he was done.
    Deacon heard Hogan in the kitchen down below. Hogan would tell the nobleman, who would write a letter and push it underneath the door when he and Landish were asleep.
    Landish’s father went to the place from which no one knows the way back home. Was found dead in his house on a snowy day by his housekeeper, his arms on the armrests of a chair that faced the front-room window that was so thickly coated with frost and snow the room was as dark at noon as it would have been at twilight.
    “You’re an orphan, too, now,” Deacon said.
    “A brace of orphans,” Landish said.
    The Gilbert would soon be someone else’s, though her new owners would not be allowed to change the name. It would be sold by the Churches to the highest bidder. To Landish, his father left the laurel wreath of sealers: the white sealskin hat.
    On condition that they not hire Landish as a teacher or otherwise pay him for services he might be qualified or willing to perform, the Churches got the ship, the house and all its contents, and the money. Landish got the white fur hat.
    And the Churches sold it all to the nobleman, who not only kept many of Captain Druken’s things but left them exactly where they were, visible through the windows. Landish pictured the Druken house looking exactly as it had when he was last inside it, the nobleman roaming the rooms like some pale simulacrum of his father.
    Landish sat in the attic with the hat on his lap for part of every day for two weeks after Captain Druken died.
    He thought of Deacon’s father and he thought of Deacon’s mother. Outside, snow was falling. He heard the crunching sound of boots on snow packed hard by other boots. Carson was three months missing when the boy was born, his wife a widow when she gave birth to her first and only child. The boy was in the womb while his father lay in a place of ice so far from shore there was no shore, the sky a flat black wafer at whose rim a perfect pale of light remained until the sun came up again.
    What was the message of his father’s gift? Why should I care what you think of me when I am so highly thought of by the world that