The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  Rupert said his brother was back in St John’s on board the Morrissey.

  I said, I thought he was captaining a collier. I thought he was in Holyrood.

  Yes, but the Morrissey was put in dry dock to have her keel caulked. So Bob is there and soon he’ll be captaining a collier.

  You mean he hasnt left yet.

  The news was wrong. He’ll be here in a jiffy.

  Bartlett would offload coal — I had ordered seven tons of the coal. When I made my order Bud Chafe’s pencil stopped.

  Seven tons. Let’s see. Youve come in here and tried to buy four small potatoes, one onion, and seven tons of coal.

  I said, I’m sick of being cold. My family is coming and by God I want to stoke that house like a furnace room. Seven tons, I figure, will do me a year.

  I can sell a gallon of spuds. A gallon’s as small as I go.

  By the time Bartlett rounded Conception Bay the ice had come in. We saw the collier, black with soot, at the ice edge. I watched through binoculars. Men coated in coal dust, pointing out a direction for Bartlett to steam through. He was trying to make it to the Bartlett wharf and tunnel. You heard the stokers encouraging the engine, the steam pressure build, black plumes belching from the sole stack, and you knew he was ramming her through the ice. I passed the glasses to Tom Dobie.

  Tom: He won’t do it.

  Men from Brigus were hired to help the crew punch through two hundred yards of ice. I got an afternoon at it. They used saws and pikes and poles to lever out the ice pans. They gripped ropes and tracked the collier through the cut channel. They were halfway into port when Bartlett got impatient. He waved them off. I had not seen him in action before. The men drop-ped their ropes and jogged away from the front of the collier. Bartlett guided the collier back to the mouth of the harbour and gave her full throttle. His momentum split the ice and carried him in a few boatlengths. A seam of black opened up ahead of him around Molly’s Island. He was fine and skilful until he got about a hundred yards from the tunnel entrance. He could have set her there and towed the coal ashore on sleds and ponies. But he ground the collier deep into the pack and wiggled her furious arse. A pan of ice nosed up and pushed a neat, silent hole through the neck of the bow. The collier sat there on top of the ice, quiet now, with a wide wound plunged through the side of her. Then she slipped down to sea level. Bob Bartlett and three crew stepped over the side and walked ashore, as if that was that. The crew all slunking backwards, watching the collier lean to port and sink, heavy with coal. Bartlett refused to look, just walked straight to the Bartlett tunnel and got a hand up onto the wharf apron.

  I watched the deck creak through the ice, the water curl over the bow and lick at the masts. I had ordered seven tons of that coal. Now on the bottom of the harbour.

  24

  I was out of wood and getting cold. I was still sleeping in a tent in the upstairs bedroom, the room above the stove. A green canvas, heavy. Just to keep the heat in.

  Wet sleet was on the kitchen window. Night. It looked like a fringe of silver tinsel. This was a time when I thought I was a good artist. Before I knew for sure that I was mediocre. Or is it middlebrow. What is the difference. It is true that I wrote letters to cubists, telling them they were wrong. Art should make you interested in life, not in art. Art is a by-product of living. I was against many things, and I believed the way to be against them was to rant and argue and never be conciliatory. I loathed diplomacy.

  I slept in the tent in a room on the second floor. Bad to worse, I thought.

  25

  I went over to the Bartletts’ to see Bob. Rupert showed me in. The Newfoundland men were short, like me. Except when sitting down. When they sat down they appeared taller.

  Bob Bartlett was talking to Bud Chafe. Bud’s son Charlie was still missing in the Arctic. Bob was saying he was all right, he would be fine, Bud. He just needed to get a ship back to Wrangel Island. If the men kept their heads Charlie would be all right. Bud said, Is it money. I have money.

  Bartlett came over to me. He had his mother on his arm.

  My best girl, she is.

  And we shook hands. His big tough hand.

  So what made you come finally. Besides me. New York to Brigus is twelve hundred miles.

  I’ve wanted, I said, more than anything to live on the ocean.

  Probably for no other reason than you were born inland.

  He thought, when he met me, that my wish to come was eager rather than lasting. I told him of a bath I’d had. It was in Gerald Thayer’s basement in Manhattan. When you dunked your head under you could hear the subway go by. It was the only time you heard the subway and I loved it. But all else about New York I could eschew. I wanted to explore the hem of the coat of a continent. It was the chunk-shunk of the subway underwater or this.

  He said he had a bath coming to him. He was lousy. Almost always was on board boats. Lice, he said, won’t go to an unhealthy person.

  We stood in his Artic Room — the old way of spelling Arctic — which had green-and-gold wallpaper, but you could hardly see the walls for the congestion of framed photographs of Bartlett in the North. It was my first time in this room. The picture frames touched each other clear across the length of the wall. I wondered but did not ask if there was room for a brother’s exploits. Or if Rupert considered exploits. I wondered later if this was part of why he’d signed up early, got commissioned, and threw himself into France and almost begged to be destroyed by a fresh young war and blown up in a new way.

  Bob: You sure took the farthest house from town. Dont you find it a bit of a march?

  Me: An artist must walk a lot.

  Oh you’d like it down north, then.

  The photographs of Bartlett glinted in square slants like a panel of windows in a ship. There was a photo of that first day of April, when Peary had forced Bob Bartlett to return to the Roosevelt. That was the morning, Bartlett said, that Peary betrayed me. He took the coloured man, Henson.

  Betrayed you.

  In small ways I can see the rationale.

  It is a powerless moment, isnt it. When someone tells you what to do.

  It has humiliated me. It’s dampened my passion for other people’s witnessing my deeds.

  Bob Bartlett could not live in a world that had no audience, and when the audience was broken into individuals, he could not stand their accolades to his face.

  I love printed praise, he said. I think the world of newspapers.

  I stared at this photo of Bartlett’s argument with Peary, an argument only because Bob had defined it as such — it was of two men staring at each other in the distance of a foreground of white, Peary’s mouth open, a hand gesturing, while Bartlett stood at slouched attention, as if carrying a heavy bucket in either hand.

  A photograph, he said, is much like the physical image of an inner, fleeting, unspoken moment. This one here, that’s when Peary came back to Greenland with Crocker Land sighted. We discovered new land. It’s the last land in the world to be found, and we found it.

  Crocker Land. Named after George Crocker, Jenny’s father. We leaned against the mantel and had a drink. Bob took coffee. I touched a soldier brick in the fireplace — called that because it stands on end. Bud Chafe said he had to go. Mrs Bartlett was seeing to dinner. Rupert was on the stair, his nose in Emerson. The middle brick is the keystone. It checks the gravity of all the others.

  Bob Bartlett did not seem perturbed by the collier. It was as if that was the risk you took. Coal, he said, is a more intimate cargo than bananas. He had spent four years of service in the West Indian fruit trade aboard the Corisande. I hate, he said, to eat a banana. But at least it never got into your coffee. Coal gets into everything — it’s like a woman in love.

  Rupert said they were about to have supper and would I stay. They left me to the Artic Room. At the end of the photographs was a window and I saw Tom Dobie in the road talking to Emily Edwards. I watched them turn. I decided to speak a word just as Emily turned back for the door.
I said the word reckless. It was a strong word, a word I could not say aloud. I was saying it to be a shit disturber. There was a politeness or restraint going on out there between Tom Dobie and Emily Edwards; restraint stood like a third figure between them at the Bartlett gate and then it pushed that beautiful young woman towards the house, she wasnt even looking back, and I felt Tom Dobie in the corner of my eye. I was impressed with how much you can see out of the corner of your eye. Then Tom went home and Emily stamped her boots by the clock with the white partridge nesting above midnight. Eleanor, the sister, was laying out silverware, placing the forks and spoons face down in the old-fashioned way, and Emily Edwards ran in to help her. I walked into the parlour and sat myself in a chair with strong arms and listened to Rupert Bartlett, that quieter younger brother with two years left to live, speak to his older brother as though he were his father.

  26

  Jenny’s father, the word magnate applies. Part of the allure of Jenny was her father. George Crocker financed dry docks and port facilities, had sunk a fair bit into railroads then sold the lot, and was now financing Peary’s polar ambitions. And so the big circle of how I got to meet Bartlett and ended up bringing my family to Newfoundland.

  They spoke, Jenny said, more since she’d returned to Luis. George Crocker’s tastes ran through his daughter, and marriage appealed to him. Jenny called our son George, after him. He wanted heirs.

  George Crocker had an aquiline nose and the same cliff of forehead he’d given his daughter. His shirts were English. George Crocker was an American with a European flair — the capitalist European. Once Jenny had become the wife of Luis Starling, he allowed me to design letterhead for his offices on the West Coast, San Francisco and Seattle. I needed the money. And now that his daughter was out of my hands he became fond of her, and me. George Crocker recognized a part of himself in Jenny, appreciated the daring. It was her lack of caution — she was living her life in a real way. He was encumbered by a love of money and he loved the Crocker name.

  27

  Gerald Thayer: Do you remember a distinct image from a book, or are you left with a general sweep.

  Me: Definitely a general sweep.

  See, that’s the difference between you and me right there.

  Gerald often exclaimed at a homecooked meal. He’d push back from the table and say, How much. How much would you pay to get a meal like this in a restaurant?

  And if that restaurant had a flag hoisted after sunset, he’d walk in and tell them to take it down. Yes, he hated to see flags aloft at night.

  Cocks, he said. Why dont you paint men’s cocks.

  Their penises.

  Yes, their genitalia. All your men have bushes. They look like big strong women. They are made of wood and their cocks have all been whittled off.

  Well thanks, Gerald.

  Or you stick a thigh in front of the cock. Every time. Youve got a problem with cocks, I think. Tits you paint. Vulva and asses you reveal. Men’s asses even. As long as theyve got a perky ass. I doubt you’d ever paint my ass. But the cock — what is it with you. Everything about you is grand and Greek except for the —

  Just lighten up on me.

  Gerald loved to bicycle in the snow. I have seen him cross a street and from his arms a barking. Then a set of ears. He was a man who liked to rescue dogs.

  The problem with you, Kent. Is youre not swayed by the modern world. You like something, you do something. Your art, for instance. It is not really new art. It is not abstract. You dont like abstraction. And so you can’t follow it.

  What youre saying is, Gerald, an artist should follow the modern world, and whatever form it presents, the art should mirror it.

  That’s kind of what I’m saying.

  But I’m a realist, Gerald. I’m ashcan. I see the dirt and yet I see the spirit behind the dirt. I’m a good drawer. Forgive me, but I can draw a straight line.

  You went to a technical school.

  You have a problem with that.

  Let’s not get into it.

  I think it’s too late not to get into it.

  Okay, I want some cocks out of you. And filth. Youre no stranger. You speak of dirt, but there is no dirt in you. Give me snot. Give me a torn shirt. It’s all starry nights and bowsprits and men hanging like Jesus from the crow’s nest.

  Me: Youre talking woodcuts. You have to reduce the real to its strongest elements in a woodcut. You have to have things lit from behind. That makes them monumental. As though you were looking at a slide photograph.

  But the flaws are what are important. That’s what’s human. You draw gods.

  So we got into it.

  Art, I said, should be three things: full of sex, in a surrounding different from your own, and imbued with an unexpected intelligence. And there should be something unscripted in it.

  I’ll try anything once, Gerald said — he was ignoring me — I’ve even tried some things a second time. But you. You try only a few things, and you try them all the time.

  I’d met Gerald through his father, the painter Abbott Thayer. When you lose a father early, as I did, you look for fathers. Gerald Thayer was working on a book about his father’s theory of camouflage in animals. He wanted me to help illustrate it. I learned a lot about painting from Abbott Thayer, and not just technique, but reasons for painting. I lived with the Thayers for several winters. The extreme cold of their house that Abbott Thayer insisted upon — and we all had to sleep outdoors. Abbott Thayer believed temperature controlled the mind. Yes, he was a stoic, and his son, Gerald, while inheriting this stoicism, compensated for it with a lavish hand. Abbott Thayer led miserable hikes through the Adirondacks, and it was Gerald who packed the smoked salmon sandwiches, the Bordeaux, and the corkscrew. I can hear Gerald now: Leaving easy life behind, we turned the winter kind to us who faced its cruelty like men.

  I love to see principles, especially unorthodox ones, get handed down from father to son.

  28

  What was I thinking. Was I thinking. I spent all day chopping through four feet of ice. To get to a pile of slush, the slush you get when youre ice fishing. To retrieve some old wet birch. And haul an armload of the heavy wet wood up the hill and into the house to dry. It’ll take a week before you can burn it, Tom Dobie said. Sodden. The tiny house frozen and smoke from smouldering wet wood. It did not look good.

  29

  What is integrity anyway, except constancy in character. And what if maintaining a constancy is false. What if one assumes that the soul is not thoroughly unwavering. Why honour the man who does not change his opinion. Who does not alter his course. Who is methodical and predictable. Why praise the pattern. What if there is no accurate measure of a man’s behaviour. A few things: the pulse of the world is always shifting between poles. I have become attached to the ontological. I believe in atheism and the power of the ontological. The reason I do not believe in God is because I am happy with this world. I believe in slim books. I believe in the shape a boat cuts through ice. Sometimes we need God. Our hunches are not intuitive, or they are a blend of nature and the absorption of cultural ways. The third is will to know a truth. This is my book, this will to know.

  30

  The wind was a solid thing. It lifted the house. Bob Bartlett came over to see my progress. He shook his head. If I were to build a house from scratch, he said, I’d leave off the eaves. Eaves are overrated.

  He saw the tent I slept in and laughed.

  You know where that tent’s been?

  He told me. Past the Arctic Circle. Dogs and seal blubber, rotten tins of pemmican have slept in that tent. At various times.

  I feel a bit like an explorer, I said. In this house.

  Bartlett: I’m going in the woods now where there’s a blue bunch and cut me a dory. Game?

  Sure, I’ll come along.

  There was a grain of snow in the air still and this snow got into everything. It was the opposite of coal and yet snow percolated in the same manner. The air bit and had a curl to it tha
t got under your scarf.

  When you entered the woods the wind died down.

  There was a stand of dead spruce. The bark stripped the previous year. They’d used the bark as shingles on a store down by the water. Bartlett had left the trees standing to dry out. Fir, he said, is too greasy to cut in spring. There were a couple on a hill with their trunks bent up to reach the light.

  Those, he said, where theyre not boxy. Are excellent for runners on a sledge.

  We set to chopping out some trees.

  Me: I dont want to drop this on your head.

  Bartlett: Oh no not to worry.

  We chopped out about forty logs.

  Bartlett: I’ll come in later with the pony. I’ll squat the timbers then bring them over to Pomeroy’s.

  We hauled them together in the snow and made a brow by the trail. We sat on the wood and ate sandwiches. My feet were wet and cold. Bartlett started a boil-up with a sulphur match. We had trimmed the branches from the logs and with these, some old man’s beard and strips of birchbark, we made a blaze. Just seeing a kettle on a fire in the snow, that pleased him.

  Bartlett: You just fart?

  No.

  You always smell like that.

  It was sunny and crisp and I asked Bartlett what he was wearing. What he was wearing? He stripped off a foot. He wore swanskin up past the knee. Below this was his sealskin boot. Under that three pairs of wool socks.

  I said, Show me your foot.

  His foot was pink and dry. It was, as he’d say, healthy. He noted the tired heels of my leather boots. We’ll get you set up with some sealskin, he said.

  Feet were important to him, as they are to all travellers. He had seen many toes lost to gangrene, whole sides of feet carved away like soap under a doctor’s scalpel. The gangrene they got was from frostbite. Dry gangrene it was, not the gangrene you got from open, infected wounds. He was very proud not to have lost any toes in the North. I asked him about the Karluk, about what had to be done now.