“Two weeks,” she said. “The doctor said I’m passed the worst of it, the withdrawal part of it. I hope to God he’s right. This is the only place I’ve ever been that makes me miss the San. I can’t say I’m any happier to see you, though.”
Before I could react, Fielding held up her hand. “Sit down, Smallwood, sit down,” she said. “I take that last one back. It must be sobriety talking.”
I sat down.
“You know what I’m afraid of most?” she said. “I’m afraid that now that I’ve quit drinking, I’ll quit writing, too. Or I’ll keep writing, but it won’t be any good. And I might not even know it.”
“Maybe you’ll be a better writer,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get more work done than before.”
Fielding was silent for a while. Then she told me she was dreading being released because she doubted that “out there” she could resist temptation. I told her I was sure she could, but she shook her head.
“You may not believe it,” she said, “but I’ve appreciated your coming to visit me. In fact, I’ve got something for you. A token of my appreciation.” She took an envelope out of her coat pocket and handed it to me. Inside it were two letters, one that read:
Miss Fielding:
I’m leaving Newfoundland, for good, thank God. I was going through my files recently and found this. I thought you might like to have it.
Headmaster Reeves
The “it” referred to was the letter to the Morning Post. I had had only a glimpse of it before. Reeves had read it aloud while standing with his back to me. Though the glue with which the words had been pasted to the sheet had dried, the words, crumpled and shrunken, still adhered to the paper.
I sat down again. “Why would he send this to you?”
Fielding shrugged. “Perhaps he really thought I would like to have it. As a keepsake of sorts.”
“I guess he was right,” I said. “You’ve kept it for the past ten years. It must mean something to you.”
“Well, I don’t want it any more. You can have it if you want it,” Fielding said. She put up her hand before I could protest. “I just want to get rid of it, that’s all. I’ve had it long enough. If you don’t want it, I’ll throw it away or burn it or something. I just thought I’d offer in case it meant something to you. It means nothing to me any more.” She spoke the last sentence so pointedly I realized that she saw herself as having made a new beginning now that she had quit drinking.
But why was she offering me the letter? Her explanation seemed unconvincing. If I were in her position, I would have destroyed it the instant I set eyes on it. It was certainly not the kind of thing I would hand over to someone else, let alone the very person it had been designed to injure. It must be that it would mean something to her for me to have it.
I had not let drop the possibility that someone other than Fielding had written it. Since I had first suspected it might be Prowse, that night when he and I met at Sir Richard’s, I had thought about it a lot. And although I could come to no conclusions regarding Prowse, it had come to seem more and more unlikely to me that Fielding was the author of the letter. There was the question of why she had waited so long to get her revenge. Nearly three years. And why, having gone as far with her prank as she had, would she have been so stricken with remorse that to clear me she confessed? I was merely suspected of having written the letter; it could never have been proven that I had, and therefore the trouble she had saved me from was out of all proportion to what she caused for herself. None of this explained, of course, why she had given me the letter. If she wanted me to know the truth, why didn’t she just come right out and tell me what it was?
At any rate, now that I had seen it again, I could not stand the thought of the letter being destroyed. Perhaps I believed that as long as it existed, there was some hope of finding out for certain who had written it.
“I’ll take it,” I said. “And the note from Reeves, unless you want it?” She shook her head. I shrugged. “Then I’ll take that, too.” I put both letters back in the envelope and left.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Twenty-Two:
THE ISAAC MERCER MUMMER MURDER
Our history would not be complete did we not denounce the pagan practices to which people in this country have for so long clung and which some seek to preserve in the name of “culture,” “folklore,” “custom,” or “tradition.” No good can come of such things.
Mummering in Newfoundland has long been a way of getting revenge for past grievances. There are many recorded instances of people disguised as mummers setting upon their enemies or religious rivals and beating them severely. (Mummers, for the information of those fortunate enough never to have encountered them, are revellers who go about at Christmas in disguise, wreak havoc in the streets, barge their way unannounced and uninvited into people’s homes and, until bribed with food and liquor and lewd dancing, will not leave.)
Take the case of one Isaac Mercer, who on December 28, 1860, is set upon and murdered by a troupe of mummers in Bay Roberts, after which mummering is outlawed in St. John’s, which only serves to increase its popularity.
How often have we thought of poor Isaac Mercer at the bottom of that scrum of mummers thinking it was all in fun. A friend described him in a newspaper as “a cheerful, optimistic sort of fellow upon whom fortune always shone and who, it seems, incurred the wrath of dozens without even knowing it. He was the kind of man who never suspected that anyone thought badly of him and probably did not know until the act was well under way that he was being murdered.”
We were once in our youth visited by mummers. There was a knock on the door, followed by the question “Any Christmas here?” The mummers spoke ingressively, that is while breathing in, in order to disguise their voices. My father consequently misheard the question and opened the door to assure his interlocutor that no one who was not a Christian ever set foot inside his house — and in they came.
They wore fearsome masks, animal-heads, or had their faces covered with veils of lace or net curtains. One had between its legs a stuffed stocking that was so long it dragged the ground.
Another of their number carried a stick to which was tied a bladder full of peas with which he went about whipping all those whom he deemed not to be in the Christmas spirit, for some reason focusing his attentions mainly on me. Never will I forget the loud rattle of the bladder as he chased me through the house from room to room.
He did thereby incite to pursuing me another member of the troupe known as the Horse-chops who rode a kind of hobby-horse, which consisted of a stick with the figure of a horse’s head on top, a head that had movable jaws with nails for teeth, which I heard snapping viciously behind me. All of this took place as though set to music, the balance of the troupe having holed up in the kitchen, from whence could be heard the horrible accordion, the spoons and some sort of dreadful drum.
Even as I cringed beneath my bed, just out of range of the bladder and the chops, I heard them sing ingressively their beguiling “The Terra Novean Exile’s Song”: “How oft some of us here tonight / Have seen the mummers out / As thro’ the fields by pale moon light / They come with merry shout / In costumes quaint with mask or paint …”
Mercifully, the mummers departed our house only minutes later, going next door, where the inhabitants, unable to repel them, affected pleasure at the sight of them to save themselves, and thus were stuck with them for a night throughout which, my father assured me, nothing sustained them but our prayers.
The Morning Post
THERE WAS NOT a night when, after work, I did not pore over the letter to the Morning Post. Judging by the thickness of the paper, all the words and the individual letters the writer had used to make words had been cut from books and not from newspapers or magazines. One lower-case typeface was predominant, and although I did not know what it was called, I had seen it many times before in many books. All of the whole words were of this typeface and
were in every other way identical, so I presumed they were from the same book. The words fashioned from individual letters were of various sizes and appeared in various typefaces, one word sometimes composed of more than one typeface, and all these individual letters were upper case, presumably because it would have been easier to cut them out. Some were in what I recognized to be Gothic typeface, others in Italic, others in typefaces I had seen before but didn’t know the names of.
For some reason, the Gothic letters E, C, F and R seemed especially familiar. They were all of the same size, and so again I felt certain they were from the same book. If I had not by chance written them down in that order — E, C, F, R — I might never have remembered where I had seen them. I thought of them off and on for days and had given up trying to recall their source when, as I was headed to the paper one day, my mind on something else, it came to me.
“English, Colonial and Foreign Records.”
I hurried home and, consulting my legible copy of the History, confirmed my hunch. Those four characters and a couple of others from the Post letter appeared on the title page, as did the whole words three and note. Poring through the book, I found other whole words and letters that matched, in typeface and size, those from the letter to the Morning Post.
I was certain I knew now who had composed the letter. I was certain that my father had — or so it must have seemed to him in his drunkenness — killed two birds with one stone. He cut the words and letters from the book whose author, he believed, had patronized him: “Friends as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.” He composed from them a letter that he sent to a newspaper in the hope of causing trouble for Reeves, who, by slighting his son, had slighted him.
I took my father’s copy of the History from my dresser drawer and vowed that even if it meant destroying it, I would pry apart the pages from which, I was sure, the letter to the Morning Post had been excised.
I figured the easiest page to get at would be the title page, since it was only three pages in, though it was also the page I would most regret needlessly spoiling. The words I was looking for, or the gaps in those words where the letters should have been, would be about a quarter of the way down the page.
I started from the top right-hand corner, trying to cut the pages apart with a razor blade, using my intact copy of the History as a guide. I began, ever so slowly, to work my way towards the middle. I thought about all the things I would do once I had conclusive proof — confront my father, apologize to Fielding, write to Hines, asking him why, in the sermon in his church in Brooklyn, he had said, “There is a dreadful secret that involves a book and a man you never knew.” But then, if my father really did write the letter, Hines would be right in saying that I never knew him.
I had freed from the page above it a triangle of the title page that measured about an inch across, when the surface of the title page began to come off, so completely fused together were the two pages. I had almost despaired of my task when the title page reappeared again and I uncovered the first word, land. I kept going and had uncovered foundland when the last letter, s, of the Gothic-typed word Records appeared. Next came the other lowercase letters of the word: d-r-o-c-e. I paused, knowing that next, if my suspicions were right, should come a little window in the page where the R had been.
But the upper-case Gothic R was there. The F, the C and the E were also there, as were the words note and three, farther down the page. I confirmed from my copy that there was nowhere else in the book the letters could have come from. The letters and words had not been cut from my father’s copy of the History but from someone else’s, presumably by someone not my father.
FIELDING’S JOURNAL, APRIL 19, 1936
Dear Smallwood:
It’s been a long time since I faced the day, or even worse, the night, without a drink.
Often, though I’m so tired I can barely move, I cannot sleep and wonder if I ever will again.
I am mocked by thoughts of famous sleepers. The apostles who dozed off the night before the crucifixion. Rip Van Winkle. I tell myself that if I have to, I can go out and buy some sleep. I have put aside the price of one night’s sleep, one bottle of Scotch, put it in a can and taped the lid tightly shut. I don’t plan to spend it, but I need to know that if I wanted to, I could.
Even at three in the morning there are places I can go. Places I used to go. Tap, tap, tap on the window with my cane. “Is that you, Miss Fielding?” A man who expects such interruptions climbs out of bed to let me in. “Writing late tonight,” he says as the money changes hands.
I miss that, walking with a purpose through the streets at night when every house is dark. The elation of that long walk home.
When things were going well, I slept through the day, rose when the sun set, wrote in summer until midnight and in winter until three, then stayed up until sunrise.
It seemed that it was always night. I looked out on the rows of houses, the theatres, the shops on Water Street, cars parked in driveways — all part of some existence that for years had been on hold, that hadn’t changed since darkness fell.
I still walk at night, more than I used to, though for different reasons now. I cannot sit still doing nothing the way I could when I was drinking. I walk around my room, reading, smoking, for as long as I can stand it, then go out.
I walk through the neighbourhood where I grew up, past what used to be my father’s house, past Bishop Spencer, where I went to school. I pass the Newfoundland Hotel, where the Hope Simpsons occupy three suites, which they say they find “cramped.”
I go past the sprawling solitude of Cochrane’s house and then the hundred-year-old legislature, which from the outside looks the same as it did before the commissioners came. The old Colonial Building. How much older it seems now than it did two years ago.
I climb the steps and sit between the pillars, in this city, in this country that, at this time of night, still feels like mine. I am on the eastern edge of the island, on a peninsula joined to the rest by a strip of land so narrow it could vanish with one tidal wave.
I have never crossed the island. I have left Newfoundland but only from St. John’s by boat.
I think often, while sitting on those steps, of the core where no one lives and through which no roads or railways pass and where lakes no one has canoed or even seen go on for miles, the core that William Cormack and a Micmac named Sylvester walked in 1822 just to prove it could be done.
At some point I head home. From my fire escape you can see between two trees the lantern lights of dories as they put out through the Narrows, and you can hear their engines unless the wind is up.
In the houses of the Battery, the lights come on when mine go off. People whose lives are spent in counterpoint to mine, whose days start when the sun comes up and end when it goes down. Before the sun comes up, in fact.
They are out there on the water now, hooks baited, a hundred hooks on a thousand feet of line played out/hauled in by hand, waiting for the bottom-feeding cod. Almost no one can afford to buy their fish, but they catch it anyway and with it feed themselves.
As they start their day, I draw the blinds, lie down on my bed and pray for sleep. The can that holds a great deal more than the price of one night’s sleep lies out of sight, at the back of my closet.
What if this vigil I am keeping never ends?
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Twenty-Three:
WHITEWAY THE GOAT
Newfoundland is notorious for getting the best of absurdly onesided deals, yet Newfoundland herself has sometimes been taken.
No name in Newfoundland history is more synonymous with “goat” than that of William Whiteway, who in 1878, when the British respond to his request for a trans-island railway by offering instead to make him a Companion of St. Michael and St. George, declares that he will hold out for the railway. Henceforward, in Newfoundland, it is said of anyone who is hoodwinked that he was “Whitewayed.”
&n
bsp; The Barrelman
FIELDING WAS RIGHT. It was a time in Newfoundland when people did strange things. Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, I was given to starting up enterprises that everyone but me knew were doomed to fail. There was something about abject hopelessness that inspired a delusionary optimism in me, a belief that for me, if for no one else in Newfoundland, prosperity lay just around the corner. It was like the euphoria I felt in New York after going without food for days, or the warm drowsiness that overcame me when I almost froze to death on the Bonavista.
The country was crawling with destitute inventors, entrepreneurs seeking “backing” for one thing or another, and they were, I was convinced, undermining my credibility. How could I get backing for my sure-fire schemes when investors took me to be just another of the crackpots who were rolling up like capelin on the beach? Among my sure-fire schemes was an encyclopedia called The Book of Newfoundland, which I edited and thousands of copies of which wound up stacked like cod in some warehouse on the waterfront, for no one could afford to buy it.
I approached the manager of a radio station called VONF, the Voice of Newfoundland, and pitched to him an idea for a fifteen-minute program to be called “The Barrelman,” after the masthead lookout on a sailing ship, a program of local history and anecdotes, of which there were several years’ worth in my unsold, unread, unheard-of encyclopedia.
In October 1937, I began broadcasting to Newfoundlanders as the Barrelman on Monday to Friday, from 6:45 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. each night. I stated that the purpose of the program was to make Newfoundland better known to Newfoundlanders. No one was more surprised than me when it caught on.
“The Barrelman” began and ended with six chimes of a ship’s bell. “BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG. F. M. O’Leary presents ‘The Barrelman,’ a program dedicated to making Newfoundland better known to Newfoundlanders.” And there was a single chime before and after each commercial for products made or distributed by F. M. O’Leary Ltd., the company that sponsored the show and paid me fifty dollars a week to host it. I was at last making a decent wage and was able to buy a house for Clara and the children.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 35
