The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  We got out again to look at the front of the train.

  Tom Dobie: That’s a lost cause there.

  It was buried. The whole side of the hill just a white slope, no sign of a track. Snow whipping past us horizontal. There was no edge to the snow where your eye could rest.

  Tom: We’ll make Brigus before the train if we start walking now.

  He pointed to the trees, but I didnt see Brigus, just the tops of trees. The boys were to snowshoe there, at least get into the woods.

  Isnt it a little treacherous out there.

  Tom: If you start in snow you’ll have fair weather for the rest of the trip.

  May I join you?

  Yes boy you can come along.

  The driver had an extra pair of bear paws, he called them. Oval snowshoes with no tail. Made by someone unhandy to make a wooden bow, Tom Dobie said. I took a satchel with chocolate and an extra pair of socks and a roll of canvas I thought might be useful. I’ll pick up my suitcases in Brigus. The driver laughed: I’ll race you. The boys each had a pack with a tumpline over the forehead. The driver wished us luck.

  We left the train in the storm and I followed the backs of the three boys. They were entering a whiteness, a flat and bright canvas. We crossed a fluorescent slope and ducked into the white trees. When we were among the trees the wind died down. I tugged an evergreen by a branch, just to see its coat of snow slip off. Bright green needles underneath. We shoed through some small valleys of plump snow. There were no shadows.

  Lift your racquets like this, Tom Dobie said. Pretend like youre a partridge. He called the snowshoes racquets. I was sweating from the exertion.

  They were cousins, Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys. Tom Dobie went shares with them on a cod trap.

  So, I said, about your father. Bob Bartlett gave me his name.

  You were talking to Bob Bartlett.

  He was in New York.

  We havent seen him now in two years.

  He’s on his way. But your father.

  Yes, that was my father and Bob Bartlett probably dont know he destroyed himself last winter. But that house, I know that house, she’s run into cruel hard times, hey boys. The Georgian one by the Pinch, he said to Tony and Stan.

  They said, No sir she’s all broke up.

  Tom Dobie was quiet and smouldering. He was dressed the way the men dressed, with a muffler and a peaked cap. But he was wearing old seaboots that fit a man and were meant for summer. They were his father’s. Such was the fate of the son. There was the doomed whiff.

  Arent your feet cold.

  My feet are all right.

  I said that my own father was dead. That he’d died when I was seven.

  It was just last winter, Tom Dobie said. We had a rough time of it down the Labrador. We couldnt make a go of it. It’s just me and mother now.

  We had a boil-up in a droke — a sheltered bunch of trees. We walked for another hour. At the edge of a frozen bog they pointed to a grey-and-white caribou stag. He sniffed the air and the weight swivelled in his chest. Gone in a second. We walked over to his tracks.

  Tom Dobie: How about here, boys.

  Yes, good as any.

  Then I realized they planned to camp overnight.

  Perhaps, I said, we should have stayed with the train.

  No sir we’ll get to Brigus faster than you ever went directly.

  I was not happy about this. But there’s exuberance for you. I had left the train and now it was getting dark in a woods I did not know with these three strangers.

  They made a bivouac, chopping small trees for a lean-to, limbing the boughs and making a floor of them. The boys had spent the winter doing this, catching rabbits in central Newfoundland. They had made a trapline and boxed the rabbits and shipped them into St John’s aboard the train. They had each cleared a hundred dollars from T. J. Edens and now they were heading home to go sealing.

  I put the canvas over us — a canvas I would later paint on — and we slept together. I slept well. I woke up with Tom Dobie’s arm over my shoulder. His young, relaxed face. It was sweet. I could hear dogs.

  In the morning they fried bacon. Stan Pomeroy had caught a rabbit in one of eight slips he’d set overnight. The slips were not wire but made from sail twine. The rabbit was in one they called a hoist, a snare at the end of a sprung branch. He’s pretty to see, Tom said, a rabbit hung in its hoister.

  Stan Pomeroy chopped through the back legs with an axe and pressed the front paws off with a knife. He tugged the white fur off like unrolling a sock and then jointed the purple body and fried it in the bacon fat. They shared it out.

  No thanks, I said.

  They looked at me.

  I dont eat meat, I said.

  You dont eat meat. Boys he dont eat meat.

  Give me some of that bread. I’ll be fine on bread.

  Tom: Is it like a religious thing?

  It’s a belief. That we’re better off when we dont eat animals.

  You mean youre going to live out here and not eat any-thing.

  There’s grain and vegetables and beans and rice. There’s a lot you can eat. I’ll eat fish. I’m not opposed to fish, and I confess I like eggs. I’ll even eat a chicken.

  Too bad we never snared you a grouse. All year round. Boy youre gonna starve on that.

  They ate into the rabbit and bacon with some bread and tea. I shared out my chocolate, which they all admired, and I noticed they did not eat but saved. We drank the tea stark naked — without milk or sugar. Tom Dobie poured the bacon fat into his mug and gulped it down. The enamel mug was caked with the fat. It was becoming a smaller and smaller volume for anything to be poured into.

  What’ll you do when it fills up.

  I’ll just ream her out, he said, and start over again.

  It was a raw clear day, the snow packed down, the day after a storm.

  I opened my eyes to this. Another day of snowshoeing. I prepared to march. I am a man of acts, but I tell you, each act begins like exercising a stiff muscle.

  Lift your legs high, sir, Tom Dobie said again. They were having a good laugh at my struggle.

  We made it into Brigus that afternoon and Stan and Tony kept marching — they were on their way to the north end of the harbour. The train, said Tom Dobie, will be along shortly. We had been hearing it through the morning, straining in the distance.

  We sat there at the station with our snowshoes. I took out my pencil and sketchbook.

  I accept inertia and I can live within it for a long time. Travelling is pleasant because you can assuage any guilt at inactivity with the excuse that you are moving. As though you had anything to do with the forward progress of a train. Well, this is the whole pleasure of capitalism, to pay for the efforts of others. To jockey yourself into position to make your skill prized and worth the attention of others.

  The train hauled itself out of the hills. Pried through the mat of spruce up by Thunderbolt Hill and curled and sunk away. A few townspeople were walking up to the station. I knew their names, for Tom Dobie was there to tell me. Jim Hearn a pharmacist. Bud Chafe he’s got a shop.

  The train sounded and then it was seen and heard sandwiched together. The horror of its brakes, the joints freezing up, the panic and patience of its Clydesdale stance and exhaust. The freezing breeze caught up with the train like a cloud shadow. The canvas mail was thrown off and crates marked CHAFE rapidly traded for the crates Chafe sent back. I found my bags. Men climbed down the perforated steps clogged with dirty snow, snow jammed into the works and yet the works still working.

  I thought, What the hell. What the hell am I doing. Where the hell is this and what is a place like this all about. Several times a day I checked myself. What are you doing, my son. What’s it all about. If I were to offer anyone advice, it would be to ask yourself that question. Or never ask. If you dont want to inspect the creak in your soul that’s okay. Go ahead and die unaware. I’m not being facetious.

  My yellow suitcase in the flat snow. I took out a smal
l map that Bob Bartlett had given me. As I said, it was because of Bartlett that I was here. Because I happened to meet this ship captain at a lecture five years before and mention my interest in Newfoundland, because of that spur I was in his hometown. Life’s occurrences arrive both through determination and through chance. I looked at the map. Then up. Tom Dobie was at the suitcase.

  Sir, he said.

  I was concentrating on becoming the man I wished to present. I wanted to look focused and not self-conscious. I had held an abstract of the land in my mind and was stepping, it seemed, for the first time into its geography.

  Sir I knows where you wants to be going.

  Call me Kent.

  Okay, Kent. You be wanting the Bartletts I reckon.

  I want to go to that Georgian house that your father was going to show me. It’s marked here on this map.

  Kent, she’s all stove in.

  I’d like to see it. And to myself: He underestimates my endurance.

  We followed the postman who had come on his old pony to collect the four-oclock mail. Swift, they called the pony. With the toe of each seaboot Tom Dobie smudged the wheel tracings in the snow. All the houses had ladders on their roofs.

  We walked to the Pinch. We came upon the Georgian house that Bob Bartlett said I could have. The house he hadnt seen in two years.

  The roof had broken from the snow. The windows and the spine of it had all gone. She had exhausted herself.

  Well that is very welcoming.

  You’d have to be as foolish as Bud Chafe’s dog to live in that house.

  So I guess.

  I was disheartened.

  Like I was saying, Rupert Bartlett he’s just over there.

  He pointed to a very bright, merry house billowing with woodsmoke. So much for endurance.

  10

  Rupert Bartlett: So youre the painter.

  I am the man.

  It was not the right thing to say to me, but I understood this is what is thought of me. It wasnt that I was embarrassed by the honour, but I preferred sometimes to be a human being on a quest for the good life, and not a painter.

  Get in, he said, and hapse the door.

  I said so long to Tom Dobie and shook hands with Rupert. His grip and arms were strong. He was a man who kept his sleeves rolled, even in winter.

  Rupert said, When you meet someone youve heard so much good things about, you dont want to meet them.

  Or like them, I said.

  Yes, there’s that too.

  He pushed my suitcase up against the foot of a grandfather clock. It was a new clock, with a pair of stuffed grouse, half white, nesting on top. Rupert had this ginger moustache. He was in his twenties, a svelte man used to doing lots of work with his forearms. He was like me.

  No, leave them on.

  There was a split chimney that arced over the hallway and pushed fireplaces onto either side of the house so you could walk under its heart. Mother did that, he said. One year when father was down the Labrador, she was tired of walking around the hearth, so she blew this hole right through the middle of it.

  I followed him into the dining room. It was hot. There was a red sofa and a big family album. There were evening lamps and books, a piano. There was a good coal fire on.

  I took off my coat.

  No one was there, just an open book of essays by Emerson. A set of brass binoculars in a leather cover flung on the chair cushion. What Rupert had seen us with and then flung. Rupert was a flinger of things. Effeminate but physical. A marathon runner.

  A maid came with a tray of tea.

  This is Emily.

  Pleasure to meet you, Mr Kent.

  She was lovely, a pale young face and green eyes. I was in a place where they introduced the servants.

  You wouldnt have, I said, anything to eat?

  Youre hungry my goodness yes.

  A piece of cheese would be fine. I’m a vegetarian.

  Oh really. Well then you must be hungry. What is it to be a vegetarian?

  As long as it’s not a mammal.

  Some of that turre, Emily.

  Rupert sent her off to make me up a plate.

  The name Emily made me ask him about the Emerson.

  I like, Rupert said, to read work by men my own age.

  And this was a young Emerson.

  I prefer Thoreau.

  Yes, the lover of life.

  Rather than your professional dreamer.

  And he quoted Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

  That’s me, I said.

  Welcome to the woods.

  Rupert pushed two fingers into his red moustache. He explained that his brother, Bob, was returning from a failed venture. A ship, the Karluk, had sunk under him, men were stranded on a Russian island in the Arctic. But his last telegram said he would be home in a month.

  Rupert was here for the winter. He was dormant. His father was upstairs in bed. The fact of this made him realize he had a story. He livened.

  Father was washed overboard, Rupert said. He was going through the water like a duck. They hauled him up like a wet seal, put him in bed. Said his back was awful sore. He’d lost his false teeth. Mother turned him over and found his teeth dug in his back.

  We went up to see him. His wife, Mary, was there reading to him. The Bartlett parents both snug in bed. It felt odd to be so intimate, as if they were my children and I’d come up to tuck them in. William Bartlett was in fine shape, big wrists. He laughed about the teeth.

  Yes if the lads hadnt pulled me out I’d still be in cold storage.

  William Bartlett was arranging a ship for the seal hunt. Forty years he’d captained a ship — he would captain one for fifteen more. Yes, he said, he could remember Brigus when you were either a Bartlett, a Pomeroy, or a sheep.

  Rupert was staying out of the seal hunt. He was gearing up for the Labrador fishery later in the year. He was the younger son and yet he seemed older than his father. Less exuberant. I could tell he was in a funk. He was restless and almost sooky about it, to use a Newfoundland expression. They had been expecting me for weeks.

  I was more than welcome, the father said. To bide as long. I could have the run of the. His son Bob’s room or the.

  He did not know I was here to stay in Brigus for the rest of my life. I told him about my family. How I’d come ahead to secure a house.

  Well there are other houses. We’ll find you one. My daughters have one across the.

  He pushed his arm to the side.

  Rupert and I went back downstairs to the red sofa. There were biscuits and cheese, cooked potatoes and carrots, and a sweet pickle. There was a dark meat.

  That’s bottled turre, Rupert said. A seabird.

  It’s fine, I said. It tasted very gamey. I picked up the binoculars and applied them to the Head, as they called it. Just a quiet arm of land.

  How come no one’s ever built out there.

  There is a house, Rupert said.

  There’s nothing out there.

  She’s well hidden. In this light you’d never see it. Halfway to the lighthouse. Out by the naked man.

  Pardon?

  There’s a pile of stones near the headland. We call it the naked man.

  There are no lights on.

  No one lives out there. Is it just you and your wife?

  We have three children.

  It’s a little tight, Rupert said. And a little out of the way.

  I like out of the way.

  It’s a snug little house for all that, he said. I’ll look into it. He wiped his hands on his trousers. He was nervous. Youve arrived, he said, during the hungry month. You’ll be wanting friends around you. That’s how we get by.

  Rupert had liked how I smiled at that youngster. The Dobies are good people, he said, and it was tragic what happened to the father. It should not have happened, that. What a mistake. I am a man, he said, who believes the world belongs to children. Though I dont have any children.

  Rupert
was a stiff man with that fastidious moustache. It could make you nervous. The Bartlett lip. Representing everything formal and unfeeling in the world. But the Bartletts were not cool men. They had been handed a stiff, severe lip and did their best to work around it. Rupert’s shoulders were tight and this was a Bartlett trait too, something Methodist, and I knew the word methodical applied and that was Rupert to a tee. Struggling to rid himself of Methodism. True. He did not press his pants. He had two years to live and we were both oblivious to it.

  11

  I stayed the night in Bob Bartlett’s bed. The sheets were fresh and rough. There was a big hardcover book on the night table: Warren’s Household Physician. On the shelf Hudson’s Bay scotch whisky, seven volumes of the classics, skate blades, an enamel cup, leather skates. There were crates on the floor of baking powder and Sunshine Biscuits (USA). Maxwell House tea, Prince Albert tobacco. They used this room for storage.

  I missed my wife beside me. Kathleen became most herself in sleep. I loved it when, nearly morning, she’d push me. Then she’d tug at my head. She was deeply asleep, but aware too. She wanted me. She’d haul my neck to her. Nuzzle her face in my shoulder, tug on my cock. That demand of me, almost unconscious. The reason she could do it, to be selfish.

  There was a toilet across the hall, and I got up in the dark to use it. The toilet was a new thing for the Bartlett house. The first to have it in Brigus. But someone was in it. Then out came a woman carrying a kerosene lamp, her dark hair down, in a nightdress. It was Emily. I stepped back. The lamp lit up her wrist. Light poured down the inside of her arm.

  Pardon me, she said.

  So she slept here.

  In the morning the sisters, Eleanor and Emma Bartlett, came over. Emily brought in porridge, eggs, toast and coffee, and a jar of English marmalade, and I told my story. I knew the gesture I gave was Gerald Thayer’s: it was a way of pushing the hand out as though dealing cards. I didnt know what I was telling the Bartletts, but I laughed at the fact that I was even speaking in a Thayer sort of manner about New York. My strength was devoted to noticing my push into the world, rather than the content of what I was saying as I pushed. I saw that Rupert was impressed by the New York material, in a way that I did not deserve. I was coated with the success of the city, as though I had built every brick of it. I was my own man, but these gestures appropriated from others kept rising up. I doubted at that moment whether Rockwell Kent even existed. And what made me laugh was knowing that other people were left thinking me such a strong character, when no character existed at all.