52
It was nine years later in New York City. Tom Dobie had come to work on the Manhattan skyline. He looked me up. He assumed I would want to see him and he was right. I can forget people, but if you return to my mind and have made an impression, then I am eager to see you.
I was working on salvaging a life with wife number two, Frances. I had come into my own as an artist. I had commissions, I was writing a book about my travels with my son in Alaska, and I felt I deserved the acclaim. I had incorporated myself and severed my ties with Charles Daniel. I was making a lot of money, but I worked hard for it.
Tom Dobie: I been working with Jim Cole of Colliers. Jim he invented the safety belt and safety wire for ironworkers. They love us cause we got experience climbing tall masts of ships in storm. I’ll work this winter, then return to Brigus in summer to fish. That’s why they call us Fish here in New York.
You want a drink?
Yes let’s get a drink.
He was much older now. He shaved, but he had two patches of shadow on his cheekbones. His beard, if he let it grow, would start right under his eyes.
We walked down the road and dogs barked deep into properties. Up ahead a white truck with the words am but once painted on the back doors. I thought, So true. We are but once. We are but once, I said aloud, and Tom Dobie agreed with the tone, not knowing what I meant. And as we got closer I saw what the doors on the truck really said: am bul ance.
How’s Coaker?
He’s minister of marine and fisheries.
His party is the government?
His party, Kent, won eight seats.
This did not explain how he could be in government.
It’s a minority government. Coaker says it’s the proper thing.
So he’s become one of them. Did the regulations go through.
No sir the exporters are not regulated. But salt fish is on the decline.
Refrigeration.
Yes, that’s the key. Theyre doing away with salt fish. It’s too much time and work.
I believe it will make a comeback.
That’s an old-fashioned thought, he said. You got to use the freezer.
We reached the Green Dolphin and we both ordered beer. I asked him about Emily.
You havent heard.
I’m just asking about your wife.
She was pregnant, Tom Dobie said. That’s why we married. I was glad about it, he said, but I knew it wasnt mine.
She was pregnant when you got married.
When I got home from the army.
You were too young. When they sent you back.
They sent me back because of Emily.
But it wasnt yours.
Well I was happy to give her the breeze. See I’ve never been interested in that sort of thing, with women. Never really got into it. So she was pregnant and that looked good — I got leave from the army and we was both going into St John’s for work. We were to work until Christmas and then go back to Brigus for the winter. That was the end of my leave from the army. I’d be eighteen then and they’d ship me over. Emily got a berth aboard a schooner bound for Harbour Grace. The Neptune, her uncle captains her. She put on salt fish and cod oil. The schooner was going to put in at Brigus. I had more time so I took the train.
Anyway they left harbour and two days later this storm came over us. Knocked everything out of the water. We didnt hear from the Neptune. Never heard nothing. Two weeks went by and six schooners were lost. Then a third week and a boat come into St John’s. She’d heard the Neptune’s danger bell out on the water. Gave her fresh water. The captain said they were fine — they were going slow for St John’s. But then there were hurricane winds. Two months solid of nothing but storm. I wrote up the anxiety notice for the paper. Tony Loveys aboard her too. Gave her up for lost. We were all grieving. We been through some tough times there in Brigus.
Then we heard, we got a telegraph from Scotland. Neptune safe in Oban port.
Scotland?
She had crossed the entire Atlantic. I got a telegraph from Tony Loveys, he was bosun on board. Emily was alive, he said. But she was in hard shape. During the crossing they’d thought she would die for sure. She admitted she was pregnant. Her fingernails turned black. They decided they’d have to keep her on deck, wrapped in a sail for three days, but after that, if no sign of land, they were to bury her in the sea.
She was wrapped up in a sail.
No, boy — that was if she perished. But she hung on.
And they spotted land. It was the Hesperus towed them in.
The crew made arrangement for passage back to Newfoundland aboard the Nova Scotia. The doctor decided it’d be wiser for Emily to stay on, what with the war and all. She was halfway through the pregnancy. So she stayed. She stayed with this Scottish family, and that’s where she met this man.
Me: You never wondered who the father was.
Tom: She loved me, but she’d gone and done something.
And this Scottish fellow.
I think she thought this might be a good thing. He’d been married, he was an older man. His wife died early. Emily had the baby. I hope he takes good care of her.
Tom looked at me then, So youve done all right.
I’ve prospered. But not because the kaiser came through.
Still waiting for your Iron Cross.
Tom said that after the war he left Newfoundland and he’s been working foreign ever since. Now with the scaffolding. Remember Stan?
Stan Pomeroy, yes.
I never even told Emily the truth there. That Stan liked her.
I think we all knew that.
It got me riled. All I wanted was a life with Emily. And yet it felt wrong. I couldnt figure it out. It wasnt until he was dead that I figured something out. Did you know that? When he perished, do you know what we did? We had him, me and Tony Loveys, we had him in the twenty-five-foot skiff. It was rocking with fish, fish in the skirts and the vees, and me and Tony we’d never witnessed the like. Stan’s body in the middle of the cod trap. We hauled him aboard and Tony was bawling. I told him to roll out the canvas sail from the cuddy across the loose fish and the gangboard. Now put Stan’s body on it. Strip off his shirt and haul off his boots. His wet trousers. We got him naked. And I got naked too. I stripped down to nothing and I told Tony Loveys to do the same. Jesus Christ do it, I said. Now lie down like I’m doing. We got to warm him up. Get on the other side of him. Hold him close, push your heat into him. Rub his hands, rub his legs. But his back is solid cold, Tony said. I said, Hold yourself, Tony. Can you imagine being Stan? Lying there with the two of us buck naked around you. Youre probably just ears by then. Listening to the likes of me calling to you, rubbing your chest, pressing you.
The thought of it, I said, makes me want to get up and move.
Yes, you want to achieve less the image of a corpse.
It’s alarming, I said.
It jolts you alive, Kent. It woke me up. I watched Stan’s mouth, I waited for breath. But no breath. Just the chill in his body. I was turning cold too, and Tony Loveys got up out of it and pulled his clothes back on and stood over us, shivering and yelled his frigging lungs out, Get us back home out of it. He was hysterical, and all I could think of was Stan Pomeroy.
You loved him.
We were young men, Kent.
53
A few years later I returned to Newfoundland for a weekend. This was after my second divorce and I was on my way to Greenland on board the cutter Direction. It was not a planned stop. We hauled in for repairs and fresh provisions. I looked up Tom Dobie. He was working in a slaughterhouse. I found him having a smoke outside the building. A cow beside him. It wasnt much of an operation. He shook my hand — I noticed he was missing an index finger. He finished the cigarette. He savoured it, measuring out his puffs. Then he took the cow in by a rope through a r
ing in its nose. I went in to watch. Inside, a basin and a rut in the floor. He tied the cow to a ring set in the floor so its head was low. Took a pistol and fired right into the forehead. The cow shuddered, buckled immediately, and went down. Tom shoved a twelve-inch length of bamboo cane into the hole the bullet had made and wiggled it about. The cow went berserk, working out all of its reflex actions. He hoisted its rear legs onto two hooks and yanked the cow to the ceiling, its nose an inch from the ground. He sharpened a knife on a strop and skinned the entire carcass, even the face. The eyes bulging out of its hideless face. He slit the belly and chest and out plopped all the organs on the floor. A splash of blood whipped across the gutter. He whistled and a boy came down a hallway with a wheelbarrow. The boy tipped the wheelbarrow and had all the organs in the wheelbarrow in four shovelfuls. Then whisked on. Tom used a saw and cut the cow in half down the middle. And there were the two halves of a dead cow ready to hang. The butchering took about ten minutes. He went out for another smoke.
I asked him about the pistol. It’s not a real gun, he said. It has a .22 cartridge inside that fires and the vacuum pushes a steel pin into the cow’s head.
He was in hard shape. We went and had a drink near the finger piers. Tom Dobie said to me, If I had three hundred and fifty dollars, I could economize and get along on that to supply myself.
He’d been looking around St John’s and sizing things up.
Take oil clothes. A fisherman has to pay four dollars a suit for oil clothes. If a man had the money he could buy flour bags and have them made out of that. Flour bags are the very best thing you could make oil clothes from. They’d last you for three years. I could make them for sixty cents, and then the oil costs about one dollar, but you’d have a number-one suit. Mother knitted my underwear and I dont waste very much. Take a pair of rubber boots. Theyre worth three dollars. In the fall we have to pay four dollars for them.
Last year he worked the salmon racket. And it was a failure.
Salmon, he says, have a magnetic pulse in their heads. They swim on the north side of the bays. No fish in the middle of the bay, five hundred feet of water.
He did not make five cents at the salmon. It was after the fifth of August by then and he had to go back to Brigus. Mother set out six barrels of seed potatoes last year and we got forty-five barrels. But this year we only got sixteen barrels because of the canker. Total failure. Mother, she got to look after everything while I’m away. Cabbage, turnips. Also beets. Last year she had to cut three thousand hay and stow it away for the season.
They had four sheep and one horse last year, but they had to sell them all and last year Tom Dobie had to sell his cart wheels. Two hundred and fifty dollars, that would get them through the winter.
He’d been to the lighthouse department, but they had nothing to offer him. He’d been to the department of postal and telegraphs and been told they had more men than they needed.
If I only had a chance I could get along. If someone would back a note for me at the bank, I would come home in November and pay it all back and have a little for myself.
I asked if he’d been on the dole.
When the prime minister gave the dole I took the shovel and went over to Bell Island and worked there. I bid there two years and later on went to New York. That’s when I saw you. I followed a horse there for a bit and then got onto the big steel. Afterwards I came home and got a job in construction.
Now he was laying brick and digging foundations and working at this here slaughterhouse.
Yes sir, until after Christmas and then I’m going home.
I heard they might open up another ore mine.
Well there’s three hundred idlers there now and they will get the first of the work.
And what about the fishery.
I dont have much edge for it.
Are you a believer in motor boats?
Oh yes. But I recall when rowing was the only means to go fishing. Sure when you were out in Brigus that’s how we done it. They got more time to fish now since they have the six-horsepower coaker. You can get there much quicker than by rowing, and you can remain out until half an hour before nightfall. When you had oars you had to leave after dinner to get in. Of course gasoline is high and quite an expense in the motor boat.
You think a man without a motor boat can compete with a man owning one?
No. Not very well. When I first met you, I was — what? — sixteen. I didnt know what the world was. I thought the world was mine. But I had a limited vision because of the poverty of my family and the small view they had of the world’s offerings.
Me: The very opposite is true of me. I had reduced circumstances, but I expected the world. I came from a family used to the world. Because of my background I was used to expecting, and expecting puts you in a position to receive.
Youre sitting there saying that, he said, with a big shit-eating grin.
Youre misreading my face. I’m not pleased about it.
Youre excited by it.
Tom, I want to back your note.
Out on the hill, as our cutter left port, the sheep’s laurel blanketed the slopes like small pink popcorn. Warm wind, but it was still cold off the land. Carrots were up, beet leaves, turnip, peas. The comfrey too, in big stands, as though someone, just below the surface, was grasping it in handfuls. The hopeful vegetables. I was leaving all this, tended.
54
I spoke to Kathleen before she died. She had become, after our divorce, more religious. She had become more herself and rebelled against my atheism. But her private Christianity, over thirty years, had ground her down. And now she had cancer.
Is Jesus still your saviour?
Kathleen: I couldnt say. Except that he’s not a comfort any longer. I’m shedding skins. I’m losing a lot of friends. I’m honest with people now. I might have to get some new friends. I’m interested in different kinds of people now.
What kind.
Well, there’s not many around here. A lot of the things that I thought were me arent me. I’m sick of a bunch of the old stuff. You helped me. What I’m really interested in is art and writing by women. I was looking at my bookshelf and thought, Who wants to read it? The fundamentalist, one-way dogma has to go. Though I still believe in immortality. The integrity of our personhood. I definitely experience a spiritual reality that I hope will translate into immortality. I’ve had an injured state of mind and been annihilated. And now I wonder why people must be so relentlessly themselves. You, for instance. Were a bulldozer.
Yes. But why couldnt you just let it not affect you.
I wanted to be with someone who was forgiving.
I could see the kindness in that now.
In the end, she said, it’s all about repercussions. The sum of your acts, and your concern for or indifference towards those who have loved you. The question is not have you been loved, but have you loved.
55
The thing is, I am a man of ambiguity. But I portrayed assurance. I had to convey that. Give it off. I did not want anyone to sense a whiff of doubt.
I have become a public man living a quiet country life. I have a dairy farm. My house in Ausable Forks burnt down and I rebuilt it. I will defeat entropy. I love hosting parties and my neighbours put up with me. When youre a little more famous, your neighbours will submit. But my friends are New York friends. I have given up on marrying myself to the rural as if it were the only truth. My only belief now is that if you keep moving, perhaps the laws of nature will forget how old you are.
When I was eighty-six, I received a strange letter. The envelope said Office of the Premier, Province of Newfoundland, Canada. The premier, a Mr Smallwood. What a fine letter. He’d felt compelled to write me, he said, for in compiling facts for his Encyclopaedia of Newfoundland, he had discovered my fifty-year-old correspondence with the government of Newfoundland, his government. He was shocked by the tre
atment I’d received. He’d been prepared, he said, to write a letter of apology to my son or daughter. He was then mightily pleased to hear that I was still alive, happily living out my time in Upstate New York. He wrote:
Would you come back here? Would you be this Government’s guest on a visit back to Newfoundland, including Brigus? Please forgive us for past injuries, and please be magnanimous enough to be our guest some time at your convenience.
With assurances of my highest regard,
Joseph R. Smallwood
I was stunned.
And vindicated. The premier had read my correspondence and was shamed. They wanted me to return.
56
And so the next summer I returned, with my third wife, Sally. I have lived with Sally for longer than I did my first two wives put together. And yet there are events in youth that form you so strongly that a mere year can live within you for the rest of your life. Part of me has always regretted the failure of my Newfoundland plans. That is the reason for this book. To discuss openly the very events that caused my will to be rebuked.
We flew into St John’s in the dark. There was trouble with the plane’s braking. The runway slick with rain. There was a family in the seats beside ours. A girl held a goldfish bowl in her lap — she had held it the entire flight. One goldfish. We touched down and veered, lurching a little to one side. We skidded along the tarmac, until the tarmac ended. The highway lights through the dark trees. The plane pushing its wings a little into the woods. Then we stopped. I was pleased to be with Sally — I have learned in old age the grace of how to be a good husband. I thought, If we die here on this tarmac in Newfoundland, it will have been a good life. I will have died where I once thought I would die. We looked at each other and prayed there would be no fire. The intercom and then the pilot, Welcome to St John’s. We heard sirens, the flash of emergency vehicles in the dark, the applause of the passengers, the happy goldfish, but we used the stairs down to the ground. It was woods. Behind us, a line of idling taxis perched at the end of the runway, their low beams shining in our faces, fire trucks in the distance. The taxis had beaten the fire trucks, to take us to the terminal. The rain began again and we sat in a taxi. It is nice, Sally said, in the rain, to sit in a car.
The Big Why Page 28
