The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  After a few minutes, the passing of which we both pretended not to notice, the fisherman rose wordlessly and took out from beneath the prow a wooden spool of fishing line. There was perhaps a hundred feet of line, but only about every tenth knot was fitted with a hook. The sea was as calm as it ever gets, with the dory rising on tidal swells a hundred feet apart and not a crest in sight. The water was impenetrably black and strewn with dark green kelp, the air what he called green, meaning fresh, though to me it was pungent with the smell of brine.

  We lowered the hooks and smoked in silence until he deemed it was time to haul them in again. He knelt nearest to the gunnel and I knelt beside him. The line that had slid so easily into the water was unbelievably heavy. The two of us tugging with all our might took in at most three feet before I had to rest. He nodded, straining to pick up the sudden slack. “I finds it better not to stop,” he said, as if to rest or stop was just a matter of personal preference and to do the latter nothing I should be ashamed of. “Jus’ tell me when yer gonna stop, sir, so’s I won’t let go the line.” His teeth clamped on his cigarette, he went on pulling. I joined him every few minutes, taking breathers in between. Of the ten hooks, seven of them bore codfish that he said weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds and that we, mostly he, had dragged up through a hundred feet of water. When the last of the line was in the boat, he lay back against the prow, chest heaving. I looked at him lying there, eyes closed, in his tattered watch cap and layers of bedraggled clothing, the palms of his gloves worn through, his hands rope-burnt and bleeding, the butt of a burnt-out cigarette between his lips. And now he had to row us back. I had expended the energy of a day’s walk in about an hour; he, in the past few hours and the few to come, about five times that.

  The farther from the ice-free part of the coast I travelled, the more eccentric became the people I encountered. In many places, I could barely understand what was being said to me, and barely make myself understood. On one little island, a man hand-pumping water into a wash-pot in his porch informed me in explanatory tones: “For now we dips the bucket right into the well.” Since he was clearly not dipping a bucket, but was using a pump, I was mystified as to what he meant, not realizing until hours later that by “for now,” he meant “ ’fore now” — before now, in the past. He had, as far as I could tell, no other way of referring to the past except by this phrase, which to me meant the present.

  On another island I was told, until I could no longer stand not knowing what it meant, that I looked like my night had been nothing but a “dwall” from start to finish. “What’s a dwall?” I said to the man in whose house I was waiting out a storm, which earned me a long look. After an explanation largely consisting of other words I did not know, I was able to discover that to “dwall” was to spend a night neither asleep nor awake but somewhere in between. I at last had a single word to describe how I almost always slept.

  I dwalled every night on mattresses that consisted of “brin bags,” tightly meshed potato sacks filled with woodshavings or hay. I preferred the woodshavings to hay, which made the bedrooms smell like the stalls where they kept their horses.

  There was, of course, no electricity in any of the houses, no running water, no heat other than what the single woodstove in the kitchen could produce. In a few houses there were fireplaces, but they went unused for lack of coal or scarcity of wood. Many of the little islands had long since been denuded of whatever trees had once grown on them, and their residents had to set out like hunting parties across the frozen bays in search of wood on horse-drawn sleds on which I often hitched a ride, shielding myself against the chips of ice thrown up by the horses’ hob-nailed hooves.

  Often there were no schools. There might be a small church in which the most prominent citizen each Sunday morning spoke some sort of service. Perhaps there would be a visit or two a year from some missionary minister or doctor. They had never seen an automobile, a train, a motorized vehicle of any kind except a boat. They had travelled farther from their houses by sea than by land, and even then only as far as their fishing grounds, their longest land journey being the two-hundred-foot-long horse path that wound its way among the houses and the rocks.

  I had been prepared for resistance to the idea of unionizing from people who led such a solitary, atomized existence. What I had not realized was how cut off from the world in both space and time these people were. Most of them did not understand or even have a word for the concept of government. Had never heard of Sir Richard Squires. Did not know there had taken place any change in our status as a country. Had only the most rudimentary understanding of what a country was. And at the same time were destitute beyond anything I imagined when I first set out. And these were the people I had thought to unionize, organize? I was able to get across only the notion that I had come to try to help them. But as I had with me none of the forms of “help” they were familiar with — no supply boat, no medicine, no clerical collar — they regarded me as something of a crackpot, showing up from out of nowhere empty-handed but apparently convinced that my mere presence among them would somewhow improve their lot. Yet if I had told the head of any household that from now on I would live with him, he would have assured me I was welcome.

  It would take more than unions, and more than anything the Commission of Government might be inclined to do, to save these people. I felt ridiculous, useless, little more than an itinerant beggar, a deluded townie who fancied he had come to help them and who without them would not have made it through one night.

  In bed, on overcast nights, there was a darkness so absolute that I lit matches just to assure myself that I could still see. It was hard to believe in the existence of St. John’s, let alone New York, while confined to such a place.

  On moonlit nights, the glow from the ice and snow was such that you could see for miles along the coast or out to sea, everything looking as it might have after days of freezing rain. Somewhere out there, there was water; somewhere out of sight the sea began, the ice-field formed its own coastline, and along that line, when the moon was out, light and darkness met, the light ending so abruptly it was as though beyond the ice lay not water but the emptiness of space, the edge of the world, if a man were to fall off which he would fall forever.

  On clear nights, when there was no moon, the sky was more star-filled than dark. The light seemed to be shining down upon us through some threadbare fabric.

  Always, at night, the darkness making it more noticeable, there was the sound of the sea, each place with its distinctive sea sounds; in the rare open harbours there was the clattering of beach rocks and chunks of ice as a wave withdrew, or if there was no beach, the din of breakers crashing in a pattern that was constantly repeated on the rocks below the house.

  In the iced-in harbours, during the coldest nights, when there was not enough room for the expansion of the ice between islands that might be miles apart, fault lines formed. I could hear, as I lay in bed, the ice-fields grind together and boom as fault lines two miles long were created in mere seconds. Sometimes the booms were faint at first, the sound becoming louder as the crack in the ice drew near to the house, or fading into silence, depending on which way the fault was headed. If it grew louder, I would wait for it to pass the house like a roaring train, wait for it to pass and then recede. Some of the fault lines travelled more or less straight towards the house. I lay there, imagining that bearing down on me was a horizontal lightning bolt that would strike the house to pieces. There would be a final, deafening boom when the fault ran through the rim ice that coated the first twenty yards or so of shore, then the sound of shards and chunks of ice raining down upon the house.

  And there was the strange sound, too, when the tides were changing, of the water beneath the ice, a low rumbling as though from underground and vibrations that made the windows rattle.

  One night I heard a rumbling that I thought must be an avalanche, for it came from behind the house. I jumped up in a panic, only to be assured by a young man dressed like me
in longjohns and staring out the back window that “it’s the Lapoile ‘erd, that’s all, sir. Nuttin’ to get all worked up about.” His parents obviously concurred, for they were still in bed.

  He may not have been “all worked up,” but he was watching them nonetheless, watching them pass by his house on their way down to the ice, the Lapoile herd of caribou that he said always came by this time of year. I did like him and stood there with my hands and face pressed against the glass. All I could see at first was a torrent of shadows, but soon I could make out some slower-moving caribou. They were smaller than I had thought they would be, three or four feet high, each with racks of antlers so large and many-pointed they seemed head-heavy, barely able to look up to see where they were going.

  “Where are they headed?” I said.

  “Northeast,” he said. “Back ‘ome to the barrens for the summer. Lookin’ for food.”

  “Do you hunt them?” I said.

  “We got all we can use out in de smokehouse,” he said. “Not everybody got a gun and even less got bullets. Black bears gets more of them than we do.”

  Codfish, now caribou. Rather than subject me to which they had served me tinned bologna.

  All night long they passed the house, between the house and other houses, a deafening stampede that made even a dwall impossible. In the morning, when I got up, they were still going by. They stretched as far as I could see along the coast, between the rim ice and the rafted ice, a stream of antlers and moulting, shaggy, whitegrey rumps, winding its way along the base of the headlands, bound for the first fiord or riverbank that it could follow north.

  I was told that there were ten thousand of them in the herd, and that, like me, they were using the ice as a shortcut to get where they were going. I stayed put that day, doing nothing but watch them trot by in their mass migration. The smell of them was overpowering, a musky acrid smell. They trod their droppings underfoot, churned it with the snow, so for days afterwards their road-like trail stretched out of sight in both directions.

  I was not used to sleeping so close to the sea. I preferred nights when, because of a storm, the sounds of the ice were as various and deafening as thunder. Better I be kept fully awake than mesmerized into a dwall by the haunting drone of sea sounds. I thought, not of uncomplaining Clara grown accustomed to my absence or my children by whose progress through infancy I would not allow myself to be diverted more than momentarily, but of Fielding.

  I could only imagine for us a union so devoid of context that it was almost featureless. To invest it with detail, to try to imagine where and how we might be together and what it would be like only made me realize how foolish of me it was to brood on something that would not only never happen but that I didn’t really want.

  What a nuisance her existence was to me. I was certain that if I could somehow purge her from my mind, I would be much the better for it. How much easier might it be then to cleave to Clara, to not begrudge her that modest allotment of devotion that a proper sort of wife deserved. I was obscure and destitute, but soon not to be, I hoped. Married to Fielding, I was certain, I would have stayed obscure and destitute forever.

  And yet it seemed the woman had fated me to a life of furtively and shamefully attending to myself like a schoolboy in the dark. I wondered if enlisting in some rigorously prescriptive religion might constrain me from this habit, which I sometimes slipped out of bed to indulge in even with Clara sleeping there beside me. For days afterwards, I would feel guilt-ridden and depressed.

  Sometimes, to keep the length of the interval between our couplings from becoming a source of embarrassment between us, I gave in to her suggestion that we have what she playfully referred to as a “bout,” but I would find myself losing interest midway and, determined to see the act through to its conclusion, inspired myself by picturing Fielding reclining on the moss in the Spruces. Poor Clara, at such times, thinking something she had done had caught my fancy, would so fervently respond she would have to turn her face in to the pillow to keep from crying out.

  Lying in these houses on the southwest and west coasts, I would hear someone in the next room toss and turn on their mattress and it would remind me of my mother the night I stood outside her room. The sound of her breath indrawn through clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. Could she have been doing it to muffle moans of pleasure? I wondered. It seemed inconceivable to me. “Smallwood, get off me,” she had said dismissively when the squeaking of the bedsprings stopped.

  I visited almost every settlement on the south and southwest coasts, no matter how small. Most of the people there had never heard of unions, had not the faintest idea what a union was or what difference it would make to their lives if they belonged to one. Only in Corner Brook and a few other larger towns was I able to find anyone who would listen to me. By this time it was early spring and in some places, where there was not much sealing done, the fishery had started. In the Bay of Islands, my old stomping grounds from the days when I campaigned for Sir Richard, I signed up hundreds of fishermen to my co-operative union.

  Unfortunately, and unknown to me until too late, most of them, after six months, had not paid one cent of dues and my co-op had collected less than 6 per cent of the Bay of Islands catch. I had thought we were getting somewhere with the 6 per cent and had been as surprised as the fishermen to find out that all the earnings from it had been eaten up by overhead and we were bankrupt. Explaining to fishermen that they would have been no poorer if they had given their fish away or never caught it in the first place had been difficult, though not so difficult as getting out of the Bay of Islands unharmed after doing so.

  I made it unscathed to the mill town of Corner Brook, found a bed in a boarding-house and slept for thirty-six hours, not in a dwall but deeply, obliteratingly. When I awoke, I went without breakfast to the train station.

  Feeling humiliated by my failure, my ineptitude, I hardly glanced out the window as the train began its eastward run across the island. Just before nightfall we came to an unscheduled stop in the Topsails, where the snow on either side of the tracks was piled so high it was dark inside the train. We started, stopped, started, stopped, stalled in that eerie tunnel of snow for hours at a time, barely inching forward when we moved, the cowcatcher groaning against the snow that blocked the tracks. I had no food, having spent all the money I had left on my train fare home. What should have been a twenty-four-hour trip took nearly three times that.

  We arrived in St. John’s on a Friday afternoon. I walked home to Gower Street, up the hill from the train station with my suitcase only to find there was no one in the house. I guessed that Clara and the children, whom I hadn’t told that I was coming home, had gone to spend the weekend in Harbour Grace with Clara’s parents. Clara had left the door unlocked, as she always did when she went out while I was away.

  There was mail for me on the kitchen table, among it an invitation to a press reception at Government House. I threw it aside, sat there as the house grew dark. I was a would-be politician in a country in which politics was obsolete. A would-be unionist in a country where even the minority that understood what a union was were too poor to pay their dues. A reporter in a country in which reporters were told by a commission from abroad what they could and could not write. And if all this would ever end nobody knew.

  I picked up the invitation from the floor. It had always been the case that you were no one in St. John’s society if your name did not appear on the Government House invitation list, but this was especially so under the Commission of Government, when Government House was viewed as some far-flung wing of Whitehall.

  The commissioners wished to meet the press. There was a dinner party to which the publishers and editors of the long-established papers were invited, after which there was a reception for the rest of us.

  With my engraved invitation was included a reminder, bearing the commission’s letterhead, of what constituted “proper attire.”

  “While we realize,” it read, “that i
t would be unrealistic of us to expect some of those to whom invitations have been sent to attend dressed in the manner normally required at such functions, we do ask that you do everything within your means to make yourself presentable.” It read almost as though they wanted me to have the good grace to decline and settle for the honour of merely having been sent the invitation. I considered declining, telling myself that to attend such a lavish event would be hypocritical even for the somewhat compromised socialist-at-heart-if-not-in-practice I had become. On the other hand, I would, by staying away, be doing only what they wanted. I would go, I decided, dressed just as I was. How else could I go, having no better clothes than my Harris tweed slacks and Norfolk jacket anyway?

  By the time I set out for Government House, there was a northeast wind blowing in from the ice that for weeks had jammed the entrance to the Narrows. A freezing rain that I was certain would soon change to snow was falling, but as I had no money for a cab, I had no choice but to walk to Military Road from my house.

  When I knocked on it, the door of Government House no sooner opened than it began to close, and all that saved me from having to march straight back home was my sodden invitation, which I fished from my pocket just in time. A liveried fellow who reminded me of Cantwell, the Squireses’ butler, took it from me and, holding it by thumb and forefinger, looked doubtfully at it as if he thought I must have stolen it from someone or found it discarded on the ground.

  “You are Mr. Smallwood?” he said, as if he had heard of me, which flattered me, though his tone of incredulity did not. He spoke with a heavy St. John’s accent, which, given the way he was dressed, struck me as ridiculous.

  “Come in, sir,” he said, kindly, deferentially. “You’ll catch your death of cold in what you’re wearing. I might be able to find you something dry.”