It seemed to me that she had lost something by this admission, that the balance had tilted in my favour. She must have seen by my expression that I thought so, for she shook her head as if I had said something she felt it was beneath her to answer. She went into “the San” and closed the door.
I lay awake for hours after I went to bed, listening to the tap-tap-tap of her typewriter on the other side of the wall, measured, unconcerned, unceasing, as if to emphasize that nothing momentous had occurred, that nothing I said or did could register on her scale of significance.
She was gone when I woke up in the morning. On the table was a note, instructing me to lock the door behind me when I left. And there was a postscript: “Don’t mention it. You would have done the same for me, if I were a forty-five-pound dwarf.” I did not until then realize that I had not thanked her for saving my life. She would not have had to save it if she had opened the door in the first place, I told myself, which of course I had not known about until last night. I wondered if that “forty-five” was just an accident, or if an allusion to my lack of character was intended. She was so inscrutably ironic, it was hard to know what to think about anything she said.
The note infuriated me and I tore it to pieces, then picked them all up and put them in my pocket so she would not know how much she had got to me. I wrote several notes of my own, but every one seemed lame compared with hers and I crammed those in my pockets as well.
I looked at the door of her padlocked study. I had a sudden urge to break it down, to take the axe from behind the stove and hack the door to pieces. I wanted to read that history of hers to see if I was in it, for I was sure I was. And her journal. Fielding’s books, her revenge upon the world, in which, I had no doubt, she portrayed herself as hard done by and stacked the deck against tokenly disguised versions of everyone she had ever known. I went so far as to take the axe into my hands. But in the end, all I did was leave and lock the door behind me.
Fielding was the sole hold-out among the sectionmen. Six hundred and ninety-nine joined the union, one did not. Sleep-tormenting numbers, numbers to obsess about, 699 and the one that got away. I remembered my mother quoting from the New Testament about their being more joy in heaven over finding the one that went astray than over the ninety-nine who were never lost. And presumably more grief if the one that was lost was never found.
Fielding had found me when I was lost. It was irksome to have your life saved by someone who seemed to value it so little, especially when she had once valued it so much. She had saved me only because she had known she could not live with the guilt she would have felt had she left me out there on the tracks to die. That was all it was, I told myself: guilt, not love. She had more than atoned for what she had done to me at Bishop Feild. I was now so far in her debt I could never pay her back.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Fourteen:
NIGHTS IN THE SHIP
An Irish planter in Newfoundland describes the manner of his recruitment in County Cork, by what means he was transported to the New World and reports thereof his first impressions:
I walked bent over from the waist,
My head erect, my hands upraised.
Three days had I been in the stocks,
And now for rum did roam the docks.
My shape betrayed my circumstance,
As did the split seam in my pants.
“There be one not long released,”
Some man did say — then all sound ceased.
I woke, the world was all a motion,
Asail were we upon the ocean.
’Twas dark, I heard the sound of retching.
“Fret not,” said he, “it be not catching.
Of what I have you need not fear.
It’s nothing more than mal de mer.”
And yet I soon did have it too,
And like this man my guts did spew,
Though he for puke did have me beat —
A week it was since I had eat.
“Where bound are we?” said I, ’twixt heaves.
“For Newfoundland, I do believe.”
“For Newfoundland” said I, in shock.
“My God, there’s nothing there but rock.”
“Not so,” said he, “ ’tis paradise.
The man who sold me said so, twice.
I used to him indentured be,
But soon, thank God, I will be free.”
Whate’er became of this poor soul?
When they took us from the hole,
They sent him one way, me another.
We neither one did see the other.
Clara
I DID NOT ACTUALLY make it to St. John’s. I made it to Avondale station, within thirty-six miles of the city, where I was met by a train at the end of which was a private car occupied by the director of the railway, who told me the pay cut would be rescinded and he would be honoured if I would agree to be the railway’s guest for the last leg of my trip.
I knew what he was up to, knew he did not want me, in my state, looking the way I did, to stagger down the tracks and walk into the station in St. John’s, where the press might — I liked to think so anyway — be waiting for me, a walking martyr for the sectionmen, a barely breathing symbol of the railway’s miserly intransigence. But I was too exhausted to resist his offer. I rode the train the thirty-six remaining miles into St. John’s.
Fielding, the renegade of Sectionville. I often imagined her out there on the bog of Bonavista, in her hermitage beside the railway tracks, imagined what her shack must have looked like late at night when she was writing, the shutters of her study creased with light, the shack otherwise unlit. I pictured her in her paper cell, composing what she fancied was a masterpiece, her history, and her self-justifying journals. What nagged me most was the expression that had crossed her face when I had shown her Prowse’s book, which I now regretted doing, not because it had hurt her, but because it hadn’t. Glee, scorn, contempt, recognition, it was hard to say exactly what it was.
The last of my siblings was born less than a month after I returned to St. John’s, on my birthday, Christmas Eve. That was the last of the children, my mother predicted; the coincidence of our birthdays on the eve of Christ’s birthday was a sign, the circle had closed, she had come back to where she had started. I stayed at the old house on the Brow for a while before I found a place of my own.
Because of how I had fared there, none of the other boys had gone to Bishop Feild. So as far as my father was concerned, there was no reason to think any of them would amount to more than I had or was ever likely to, which did not appear to be much, for a more unpromising-looking twenty-five-year-old could not have been imagined. My father strode, guilt-ridden, about the house from deck to deck and launched into an entertaining monologue of self-mockery and theatrical despair. I was surprised at how much I had missed his drunken eloquence.
“Maybe if you hadn’t burned that Book,” he obscurely shouted up the stairs to my mother.
“What’s that book got to do with anything?” my mother shouted back, her voice quavering. He seemed to have discovered that any mention of the book was a torment to her.
“I don’t know,” my father said, “nothing, I suppose. But you never should have burned that Book. Nothing good will come from burning books.”
“That’s all I hear about when anything goes wrong,” my mother said, “that book, that book, that book. I told you never to mention it again; I’m sick to death of it, that’s why I burned it in the first place.”
Clearly, she had not heard about Hines’s attempt to convert me. There was not that flicker in her eyes that in the past had signalled she was holding something back and would eventually get round to telling me in private what it was. How had Hines known that I knew about the book? I could tell just from looking at her that my mother did not know.
Newspaper publishing and politics. These were not exactly watchwords for security and stability in th
e late twenties in St. John’s, where papers and parties were popping up and folding all the time, the fortunes of papers often tied to those of the parties for which they were propaganda sheets, papers folding when parties did or vice versa.
Over the next couple of years, I published, which is to say I single-handedly wrote and printed, papers that were so short-lived that copies of them are now collector’s items. Newspaper publishing to me was little more than a branch of politics, and I had not completely given up on socialism. Each time I started up a new paper, I included in it a new manifesto, slightly amended from the one before, trying to find some version of socialism that Newfoundlanders might accept.
I gathered around me a group of young men and women who fancied themselves socialists and were greatly impressed with my socialist credentials. They were not like the socialists I had known in New York. They were uneducated even by comparison with me, and they were poor, though they had seen so little of the world they did not know how poor they were, and though they believed in the existence of the exploited and the destitute, they would not have numbered themselves among them.
I changed my mind about marriage. I saw that men of the sort I aspired to be had wives, were expected to have them, and children, too. I took my group on picnic rallies in Bannerman Park, and during one of these I saw standing alone against the iron fence a woman I knew would agree to be my wife if I asked her. It was presumptuousness at first sight. She was twenty-three, the daughter of a fisherman from Carbonear. Her hair was pinned up in Dutch-style buns on either side of her head.
When the rally was over, she strolled across the park with the rest of us, arms folded, head down, looking as though she wished she had not come. She was wearing a raincoat that, like all her clothes, was pulled up slightly at the back because of the way she hunched her shoulders. There was a physical awkwardness about her that appealed to me, that hinted at a lack of self-confidence, which, after Fielding, was exactly what I was looking for. I left the group I was with and caught up with her.
“Hello,” I said, falling into stride beside her and holding out my hand. “I’m Joe Smallwood.” She cast a furtive look down at me — she was several inches taller — then looked away in a manner that discouraged me until I saw that she was blushing, nervous to the point of speechlessness. She swallowed as if to make sure her voice would not break when she spoke.
“I’m Clara Oates,” she said, flashing a sheepish smile at me. She seemed not to notice my hand, so I dropped it to my side, whereupon she rolled her eyes and shook her head self-ironically as if to assure me that she at least knew she was gauche, even if she could not help being that way. With her emphatic strides, she covered so much ground I could barely keep up with her and I thought perhaps she was trying to lose me. She did not look at me throughout our conversation, though I kept looking up at her to see what impression I was making.
As was my wont, I did not so much talk to her as at her, addressing her as I would a public meeting, though she didn’t seem to mind. I argued in favour of socialism as though she were opposed to it; she smiled and nodded and, thus encouraged, I went on and on. It seemed I had at last met a woman who found it charming that I spoke to her as if all I wanted from her was her vote.
She was blue-eyed, pale, with a faintly pouting mouth that opened wide and roundly when she spoke. She sometimes lapsed into a kind of English, bay-girl accent.
We were married a few months after we met. On our wedding night, in our rented row house on New Gower Street, the walls of which were paper thin, I pretended to be experienced in what Fielding had called “matters carnal,” and she pretended to believe me. When the light was out, we stood up and started taking off our clothes, each of us taking off our own as if we were about to go swimming. She left on a nightshirt of some sort that came down to her knees and I, putting it down to the coldness of the room, left on my body-length, button-flyed longjohns. I started kissing her and at the same time unbuttoned my longjohns with one hand, using my free hand to support myself. Neither of us said a word. I had a great deal of trouble getting through the door, or even finding it, for that matter.
“You’re so tall,” I selfishly said, by way of explanation. I could feel her tensing up after that, and though I’m sure she knew it was my first time, too, she may still have thought her height was making it more difficult for me than it would otherwise have been.
We were both greatly relieved when it was over, though by tacit agreement we kept up the charade that it was no big deal for me. I was surprised that it was not nearly as enjoyable as masturbation and I wondered if it would always be like that.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?” she said. I shook my head, not trusting my voice at that moment, for my legs and arms were trembling. I sat up, swung my feet onto the floor. Clara put her arms around me, rested her chin on my head, the closest thing in that position she could come to putting her head on my shoulder. In addition to being so much taller than me, she weighed more than half as much again as I did and I felt foolishly childlike in her arms.
“It was wonderful, Joey,” she said and, at last managing to find my voice, I said I thought so, too. She didn’t smoke, but I lit up a cigarette as suavely as it was possible to do while wearing longjohns. For the first time, I realized how much she looked like Fielding had before the San.
I did not get the hang of sex. I knew the goal I was pursuing for myself, but what her goal might be and what, if anything, I could do to help her reach it and how I would know when she had, I had no idea. I assumed that it was something corresponding to mine and might even be triggered by it, the woman’s satisfaction following automatically on the man’s, except that hers didn’t and I couldn’t figure out why.
At first, she seemed not to mind, and even when she began to mind, she put the blame on herself, worrying that her not “peaking,” as she put it, would make her less attractive to me, and talked as if, like all her supposed shortcomings, it was somehow connected to her awkwardness, typical of a woman who had no better sense than to be taller than her husband.
She did “peak” from time to time, but it seemed to have nothing, physically at least, to do with me. I had the sensation that I was watching something I was not a part of, as I had when my body cried for the men of the Newfoundland while my mind looked on. She held me still and ground herself against me. She did not scream like the woman on the moss in the spruces had, only breathed ever more shrilly as if she were giving way to panic. I watched her and listened with such amazement, such detachment, that for the first time, I failed to “peak.”
Even amidst all that thrashing about, she noticed. “What about you?” she said, stroking my hair. I managed a kind of shrug, as if to say one miss for me was nothing. I kept my face buried in her shoulder. I wondered if it would have been different with Fielding. Would she have had to grind herself against me and hold me still to make sure I did nothing wrong? I also wondered if my mother had ever dared do that or if my father would have let her.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Fifteen:
THE WINTER OF THE ROWDIES
In 1817, the practice of having governors spend their winters in England is discontinued when Admiral Francis Pickmore is ordered by the king to winter in Newfoundland.
Pickmore returns to England in April, but is unable to give a satisfactory account of what winter in Newfoundland is like, being by that time six weeks dead.
The winter of 1817–1818, known variously as Pickmore’s Winter, the Winter of the Rals and the Winter of the Rowdies, is an especially severe one. The entire east and northeast coasts are blocked by ice from late fall until late spring. The merchants are further inconvenienced when eight thousand people left homeless by a series of fires begin looting their already depleted stocks.
Pickmore is succeeded by Sir Charles Hamilton, the first governor to survive a Newfoundland winter. He survives seven, in fact, but writes constantly to England predicti
ng that he will “soon perish like poor Pickmore, so drafty is our tumbledown old house.”
Hamilton demands that a new Government House be built, and England meets his demands not long after he leaves Newfoundland for good.
His successor, Sir Thomas Cochrane, announces his intention to build himself a house in which there will be no possibility whatsoever of catching one’s death from drafts. The death-by-drafts-proof house costs a quarter of a million dollars, but would, as Cochrane points out, have cost a good deal less had not the planner confused it with another house he was building in the West Indies and built a moat around it to ward off deadly snakes.
Fielding
WE LIVED “on the side of the hill.” It brought back to me memories of the years we spent on the hill when I was young, the years before the Brow. The poor neighbourhoods were still predominantly Catholic; their flag, the pink, white and green, still hung from makeshift poles above the doors of the houses that lined the unpaved, pothole-ridden, muddy streets. Lines of row houses that looked like motels, with each unit painted differently, faced each other down the undulating length of Gower Street.
A year after we were married, we had the first of three children, a son, Ramsay Coaker Smallwood. I was for a short time infatuated with him, the sheer fact of him, the sight of him in Clara’s arms or in his crib. I had taken the birth of children for granted all my life. My childhood had been full of bawling babies, the sound they made as much a part of the climate as the wind. But I had never regarded myself or one of my brothers or sisters as a hybrid of my parents, a commingling of two natures. I had considered the Smallwood children, physically at least, to be my mother’s. Their natures came from her by a process that, though set into motion by my father, was otherwise uninfluenced by him. But here was little Ramsay, every part of him undeniably shot through with Clara and me. It seemed both miraculous and off-putting to think of myself not as my self but as being jointly derived from Minnie May and Charlie Smallwood.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 23
