The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  My father sat throughout my visit with the book open on his lap, staring at the dedication while I darted nervous looks at him from time to time, praying he was not becoming suspicious. He started asking me questions, which, I was certain, I would give myself away in answering.

  “Did you tell him Charlie Smallwood says hello?” my father asked. I hadn’t, but I assured him that I had.

  “What’s he like?” my father said.

  “He’s very old,” I said, as though that were a trait the judge had carried with him all his life.

  “Very old,” my father said, nodding, as if this conformed nicely to the image of the judge he had already formed.

  “His hands shake pretty badly,” I said, “and he has a long white beard.”

  “He never said anything about the Boot, did he?” my father said. “Did he make the connection between the name Smallwood and the Boot?” I assured him that the judge had not mentioned the Boot. “What did he say?” my father said. “Tell me everything he said.”

  “He didn’t say very much,” I said. “We didn’t stay long. He was pretty busy.”

  My father went out on the deck after I had gone to bed. When I heard him I got up and looked out the window at him. He stood with his hands on the rail and spoke as if the judge were standing just below him. “Friends. As you and I might have been had we gone to school together. You old bastard. You wouldn’t have given me the time of day.”

  The next day, I spoke to Prowse on the playing grounds before the first bell. “That inscription. And that note you included with the book,” I said. “The note to my father. Did your father really write those?” I thought I had recognized the handwriting as Prowse’s, but did not tell him so.

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t show my father the book,” Prowse said, looking hangdog. “I would have told you, but I wasn’t sure how you’d react. Anyway, he would have killed me for bringing you to see the judge. So I wrote the inscription and the note myself. No harm done, I hope.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No.”

  At the mid-year evaluation of the following year, I was second of sixteen, first runner-up for the Knowling Scholarship, which Prowse won, largely on the strength of his whopping grade of three hundred and eighty-five out of five hundred for character. “Everybody knows you should have won,” Prowse said. He said he and the other boys were thinking about starting a petition, asking that the Knowling be appealed, but I talked him out of it for fear of getting into trouble.

  All my marks had gone dramatically up, except my mark for character, which had stayed at forty-five. Its being not only so low, but also fixed, never-changing, was the point. It could not change, Reeves seemed to be saying; my other marks could go up or down, as the case might be, but my character, my fundamental self, would stay the same. I might as well have had forty-five stamped on my forehead. I was what I was, my character was my fate and my fate was forty-five.

  Two days after the mid-year evaluation was released, my father showed up drunk at the college gates, roaring to be let in. It was late afternoon in mid-December and the Townies had already gone home. The ’Tories rushed to the windows to see what was going on.

  “Who is it?” Slogger said, but I had recognized my father’s voice right off. I ran out of the dorm and across the field, to shouts of mock encouragement from the bay boys.

  “It’s Smallwood’s old man,” I heard someone say. “He’s absolutely pissed. Go get him, Smallwood, go get him. Ask him if there’s any left for us.”

  “Headmaster Reeves,” my father roared, shaking the bars of the gate. “Whoremaster Reeves, Charlie Smallwood would like to have a word with you, Whoremaster Reeves. Let me in. Or perhaps you would like to join me, sir; we could have a little chat right here outside the gate. It won’t take but a minute, sir, I assure you. It concerns my son, you see, my son whom you have judged to be unsuitable, an honest mistake, I’m sure. Perhaps you would better understand him if you spent some time with me, perhaps then you would see him in an altogether different light.”

  By the time I reached the gate, the porter, a little old fellow named Antle who stayed in a hut by the gate to monitor the comings and goings of the boys, was beside himself. He wore a sod cap and, as if he had never left the Feild after graduation, a school blazer bearing the crest of Bishop Feild.

  “Be quiet, sir, be quiet,” Antle was saying, standing well out of reach of my father’s hands, wringing his own. “If you don’t be quiet, they’ll have the ’Stab on you.”

  “I have friends in the constabulary,” my father said.

  “Go on home, father,” I said. “Go on home now.”

  “Joe,” my father said, as if the last person he had expected to run into at the school was me. He looked like he’d come straight up from the waterfront, for he was wearing his coveralls with the row of pencils in the pocket and a pair of black, salt-stained leather boots, and he had his toting pole in his hand. He was bareheaded, his hair sticking up like he had just removed his stocking cap, though there was no sign of it.

  “Go get Headmaster Reeves, Joe,” he said. “Tell him your father, Charlie Smallwood, would like to have a little word with him.” At the word little, he made a motion with his thumb and index finger not very far apart.

  “He’s not here,” I said. “He had to go to a meeting somewhere. Why don’t you just go home?”

  “WHOREMASTER REEVES,” my father shouted, throwing back his head, eyes closed as if the better to hear himself, the better to revel in the sound of his own voice. The boys at the windows of the dorm were in hysterics. “You tell him, Charlie,” Slogger shouted.

  “Hello, boys,” my father shouted. “You’re all good boys, all suitable, I’m sure. But you’re no better than my Joe, I don’t care what Whoremaster Reeves says, you’re no better than my Joe. He’s got some backbone, Joe does. WHOREMASTER REEVES.”

  He grabbed the bars of the gate and shook them again. “Charlie Smallwood is no good, chop him up for firewood,” he said, further inciting the ’Tories. I turned and looked at the headmaster’s residence. I had lied about Reeves not being there, but there was no sign of him at any of the windows. Antle looked beseechingly at me.

  “The ’Stab will be here soon,” Antle said, on the verge of tears. “The headmaster won’t stand for this; he’ll call the ’Stab for sure.”

  “I don’t care about the ’Stab,” my father said.

  “What will the headmaster think?” Antle said. “Oh my, oh my.”

  “I’ll go out and talk to him,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Antle said. “Oh, no, I’m not allowed to let you out. And if I open the gate, he’ll come in. I can’t open the gate.”

  “Open the gate,” my father said.

  Without giving Antle a chance to go through the motions of trying to stop me, I climbed the gate and dropped down on the other side to a burst of applause from the boys. I took my father by the arm and tried to turn him around, but he wrenched himself free and made a grab for Antle through the bars of the gate, barely missing him, then tried to poke him with his toting pole.

  “The ’Stab — ” Antle said, all but falling down to elude my father.

  “I’ll stab the ’Stab,” my father said. “And I’ll stab you while I’m at it.”

  My father put one boot up on the lowest horizontal bar. “If he can climb out, I can climb in,” he said. He tried to hoist himself up but could not get a purchase on the ice-coated gate with the other boot and, even as I was putting my arms around his waist to keep him from going any farther, he fell backwards, knocking both of us to the ground. A great mock cheer went up from the dorm, though with the wind knocked out of me and the back of my head smarting from where it had hit the ground, I was only half-aware of it.

  “Are you all right, Joe?” my father said, getting up on his knees, staring down at me, his toting pole in his hands as if he had felled me with it. “Are you all right? I didn’t hurt you, did I? You hit your head, let me see.”

&n
bsp; “I’m all right,” I said.

  On his hands and knees, he stared at the snow-covered ground and shook his head.

  I managed to stand up and, grabbing him under the arm with both hands, helped him to his feet.

  “Let’s go home,” I said. This time he was compliant, allowing me to drag him away from the gate but at the same time shouting over his shoulder.

  “I’ll be the judge of your character someday, Reeves,” he said. “Judge not lest ye be judged. The boot will be on the other foot someday. Do you hear me, Whoremaster Reeves?”

  I led him towards home. After a while, he stopped hurling imprecations over his shoulder and, as he often did after such an outburst, became quite remorseful.

  “I’m sorry, boy,” he said, his head down as he shuffled along, his toting pole in one hand like a spear. “I’ve gone and made matters worse, like always. That’s all I ever do is make things worse. I’m no good, Joe, I’m no damned good and that’s the truth. But you are, boy, it’s not right what they’re doing to you, it’s just not right.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “We’ll go home and have some soup. I’ll tell Mother they let me have a night pass and I met you on the way home.”

  “Good enough, boy,” my father said, “good enough. God bless you, Joe, you’re a good boy. The best of the brood. And what a brood it is. That’s one thing that I’m good at. There’s nothing more potent than booze, you know.”

  The next day, when I walked into class a few minutes before the bell and took my seat, a hush fell over the boys. No one said anything, though some of them had been at the windows of the dorm the day before. At lunch-time, I joined up with the Townies on the playing field. Prowse, though I was certain he had heard, said nothing about what happened, and the other boys followed his lead. I told them Reeves had gated me a “whopping dollar,” as Prowse called it, for leaving the grounds without permission.

  “I’m not going to pay it,” I said.

  “If it’s a question of the money — ” Prowse said.

  “He didn’t fine me because I left without permission,” I said. “He fined me because my father called him ‘Whoremaster Reeves.’ ” Prowse and the others, who I was sure had already heard this from the ’Tories, laughed.

  “You’re probably right,” Prowse said, “but — ”

  “I’m thinking about quitting,” I said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Prowse said. “You’ll be quitting over nothing. Boys here have been caned so badly they couldn’t walk for days.”

  “He knows I’d rather be caned than fined,” I said. “He knows what a dollar means to me. He wants me to go to my uncle and ask for it and humiliate my father.”

  “I told you,” Prowse said. “If it’s a question of the money, there’s no problem. We’ll take up a collection. Reeves will never know.”

  I shook my head bitterly.

  “If you quit, he’ll say that he was right about you all along,” Prowse said. “You’re not the only boy he’s got it in for, you know. A few weeks from now, he’ll be picking on someone else and all this will have blown over.”

  In the end, I relented and let them pay my fine. I didn’t say a word about it to my father.

  After we got back from Christmas break, the masters informed us that we were all to go, one by one, to Reeves’s office. Throughout the day, we took turns. When one boy came back, the boy who sat behind him left. The boys who came back looked terrified and ignored all whispered questions as to what was going on. When it came my turn, Porter, who had just come back, said Reeves had said I should wait until last. I looked across the room at Prowse, who had not yet had his interview. He shrugged. The interviews went on until it was Prowse’s turn. He grinned and winked at me as he left the room, but when he came back he did not look at me. Finally, the next-to-last boy came back to say that Reeves would see me now.

  When I entered his office, Reeves stood facing the window that overlooked the grounds, ominously tapping it with his swagger-stick pointer. The back of his high-shaven neck was flushed a livid crimson. It was for some reason the only part of him that went red when he was mad, and I had never seen it redder. He was wearing his tasselled mortarboard and his headmaster’s gown.

  He turned around, looked at me through his small round spectacles. He thrust out at me a piece of paper, then withdrew it when I reached for it.

  “What is it, sir?” I said.

  “What is it, sir,” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is, sir, as if you don’t already know, sir. It’s the letter you wrote to the Morning Post, sir — ”

  “No, sir, I didn’t — ”

  “It’s the letter you wrote to the Morning Post, which thankfully was read first by a friend of this school and sent to me and which reads as follows — you may recite along with me if you wish:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  The masters at Bishop Feild do not treat us properly. They keep most of our meal money for themselves and with what’s left they buy the cheapest food that they can find. We are always so hungry we cannot concentrate on our work. Then they tell us we are lazy and cane us for making mistakes. They make us buy our notebooks at the school and charge us twice what they are worth. Also, our dormitory is always cold, as there is never enough coal to go around. Three boys had to leave school for good last year they got so sick. Everyone is always coughing. One boy got bitten by a rat.…

  “It goes on and on. A pack of malicious lies. It’s signed, ‘Yours Sincerely, The Boys of Bishop Feild.’ ”

  “I didn’t write that, sir,” I said. “It can’t be in my handwriting.”

  “It isn’t in anybody’s handwriting,” he said. “It’s composed with words and letters cut from books. ‘Our dormitory is always cold.’ You gave yourself away there, Smallwood. The letter is postmarked St. John’s during Christmas vacation, when the only dorm boy in St. John’s was you.”

  “But — ”

  “Can you imagine, Smallwood, how much damage this letter might have done? Imagine what a time the Catholics would have had with it.”

  “But I didn’t write it, sir; I swear.”

  “Are you telling me that someone else did?”

  “I don’t know — no, sir, I don’t know who wrote it. What did the other boys say?”

  “Never mind what they said.”

  “I didn’t write it, sir. Anyone could have put that bit about the dorm in just to get me into trouble.”

  “That’s just like you, Smallwood, to try to put the blame on someone else. Get out of my sight.” I stood there, staring at the letter in his hand. “Get out!” Reeves said, smashing his pointer on the desk.

  Prowse called a meeting of all the boys, Townies, ’Tories, Lepers, on the athletic grounds that afternoon. Eager to hear what Reeves had said to the others, I showed up early, stood in the shelter of the entrance to the gym, facing the harbour. Beyond the Narrows, the water was as black as slate. The metallic smell of an approaching storm was in the air. Snow eddied across the open field and down the unpaved icy length of Bond Street. It would be so dark by five o’clock that the snow as it fell would be invisible. Finally, the others began to arrive, hands stuffed in the pockets of their overcoats, heads bent to keep their caps from blowing off.

  It turned out that Reeves had tried to get each of them to admit that I had written the letter, claiming that he had already been told by one of the students that I had and that he was merely seeking confirmation of my guilt. Prowse demanded that each of the boys swear an oath, bare hands on their hearts despite the cold: “May I die this night if I wrote that letter.” Everyone, Slogger and the other ’Tories, the Lepers, the Townies, me and finally Prowse, swore the oath.

  Then Prowse revealed that Reeves had threatened that unless he was soon told who had written the letter, he would mark them all so far down for character that the diploma they received upon graduation would be worthless.

  “You did this, didn’t you, Smallwood?” Prowse said, suddenly turning on me, putting his
face to within an inch of mine. “You were the only dorm boy in town over Christmas.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, as though at the memory of some warning I had been too proud to heed. “I didn’t write any letters to anyone,” I said, staring at him.

  “You’ve got to tell us if you did it, Smallwood,” Prowse said, turning up his collar as the wind blew a gust of snow across the field. “It’s a good joke, really it is, a great joke, but it goes too far.”

  “I’m not going to admit to something I didn’t do,” I said.

  “There’s a lot riding on this for some of us, you know,” Prowse said. “We can’t afford to be marked down.”

  “But I can, is that it?” I said. “Someone might have put in that bit about the dorms to frame me.”

  “Are you accusing someone?” Prowse said.

  “No one in particular,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone that smart.”

  “The evidence points to Smallwood,” Slogger said. “We’ll have to tan his arse until he confesses. You might as well confess, Smallwood, and spare yourself a caning.”

  I looked appealingly at Prowse.

  “We’ve got to do something, Smallwood,” Prowse said, almost sheepishly. “Look, I don’t know if you did it, but we’ve got to do something.”

  “I did it. I sent the letter.”

  We turned and there was Fielding, her cane planted in the snow in front of her, her back to Spencer. She must have gone up on the road and come down on the Feild side of the fence, then marched across the playing grounds unnoticed to us, unheard because of the wind.

  “I did it,” Fielding said. “It was me. I did it to get back at Smallwood.”

  I looked at Prowse, who seemed almost at the point of panic he was so confused. It was a crucial moment for him and he knew it. Everyone looked at him.

  “What shall we do with her, Prowse?” Slogger said.

  Prowse looked at me, and for a second, I thought he was going to overrule Fielding’s confession with one of his own. “She’ll — she’ll be expelled,” said Prowse. “That’s enough.”