The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  I went to Labrador, was flown inland to where, ten thousand years ago, the earth dropped out from beneath the Churchill River. Suddenly, as suddenly as when the earth beneath the water first gave way, the falls were there, the mist from them billowing about the plane, while visible through it was that great plummeting convergence of white water. Below me, said the man whose dream it was to harness it, was the power to make turbines ten storeys high spin like toy propellers.

  By a corridor of conveyance that would carry this power from the wilderness of Labrador to the cities of the south, the gulf between Newfoundland and the New World would at last be bridged.

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, MARCH 17, 1989

  Dear Smallwood:

  I was there the night in ’72 when you made your farewell speech, in the drill hall in Pleasantville, a huge arching shell of a place that, because the Americans once owned it, reminded me of David. How cold it was that night. It would have been cold inside if not for the number of people who came to hear you say goodbye, two thousand of them crammed into a hall meant to hold six hundred. I stood by the wall as usual, to have something to lean against, though the metal was so icy to the touch I could feel it through my coat. There was a part near the top that buckled whenever the wind blew especially hard. I remember looking up and wondering if it would hold.

  Seventeen years ago. Others spoke on your behalf, telegrams were read. One, from Louis St. Laurent, with whom you signed the terms of union, made you cry. Then you spoke. For an hour you spoke. Embellished your accomplishments, made light of your failures or ignored them altogether. But it was exactly what they expected you to do. When you finished, they rose to their feet, cheering, crying, clamouring to see you or touch you as you left the stage, relieved that after hanging on too long, you were letting go at last.

  You were carried from the drill hall on the shoulders of two men. Raised above the crowd, you took the full force of the wind when you got outside. You turned your face away, held your hat up to your ear to shield yourself.

  They carried you to the new car they had bought you as a farewell gift and set you down. You waved one last time from inside the car, then drove off, moving slowly through the crowd that followed you to the gates of Pleasantville. Then you drove off up the boulevard beside the lake.

  When your car passed out of sight, the cheering stopped. There was an interval of silence, hesitation, a collective revery that lasted until the next great gust of wind sent everyone running back the way they came, laughing and joking as people will who are commonly afflicted by the weather.

  I walked back with the help of a man who did not introduce himself and called me Missus, and clearly wondered what I was doing out alone on such a night. “Here, Missus, take my arm,” he said when he saw me picking my way gingerly across the ice. He walked me to my car.

  I’m told that on the night of your last election, you had your chauffeur drive you around the city while you listened to the radio, as if you were still campaigning, as if you thought your chances of winning were somehow better as long as you kept moving. You almost, but not quite, outran defeat. Not until the next day was it certain you had lost, and not until weeks later did you admit it to yourself.

  You tried everything to stave it off. Ordered recounts where none were needed. That you offered to appoint to the Cabinet any member of the opposition who would cross the House was the worst-kept secret in St. John’s.

  You resigned at Government House in the drawing room where you were first sworn in as premier. That night, Tories, and no doubt independents who hated you then as much as they had in 1949, went out on their back steps and, in a celebration mocking that of referendum night, fired shotguns in the air. The pink, white and green appeared on flagpoles from which, for twenty-three years, no flags had flown.

  I always thought of you when I drove along the isthmus of Avalon. You can see the ocean there from both sides of the highway. And the ruins of the refinery at Come by Chance, the smokestacks like the skyline of some long-abandoned city. Failed and mothballed except for the token banner of flame that they tell me still flutters from one stack. It was that little flag of flame, its unwarranted cheerfulness and optimism, that reminded me of you.

  The country is strewn with Come by Chance-like monoliths, the masterpieces of some sculptor who worked on a grand scale and whose medium was rust. Quarries, mines, mills, plants, smelters, airports, shipyards, refineries and factories, to all of which paved roads still lead, though no one travels on them any more.

  You all but gave away Churchill Falls, which you had hoped would crown your career as Confederation had crowned Mackenzie King’s.

  They tell me you cannot read, write or speak, but can only understand the spoken word. You whose life was one long holding-forth have no choice now but to listen. You are a captive audience. Stroke-stricken. Struck. “He was always having strokes,” Prowse said, but he meant the judge, not you. You nod or shake your head, point to what you want. Your grandchildren read to you, letters, books.

  They made you a recording of the judge’s History, took turns reading it. Old Prowse speaking to you in dozens of different voices. I would love to hear it. I imagine you thinking, When the voices out there stop making sense, the voice in here will, too. Perhaps, after the next, you will be like a man my father once described to me, who knew the names of things but was unable to think in sentences. Your mind an inventory of the world. Like your Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, which I have heard is almost finished.

  I made you a tape, too, which by now you will have heard:

  Dear Smallwood:

  I am told that as neither of us can travel, this is the only way we can communicate. I have to confess I wrote this down and am reading to you now. It seems a shame we cannot see each other one last time. This is so one-sided, me talking to you, you not talking back, and me not even there to hear myself and to watch you listen. There was a time when I would have given anything to see you stuck for words. I still would, to tell you the truth.

  I think often these days of what my father said when I asked him if he believed there was an afterlife: ‘The grave’s a fine and private spot / Where none I think do ought but rot.’ It doesn’t seem as funny now as it did down through the years. It is unfortunately true that we cannot make the sun stand still, nor can we any longer make him run.

  I consider myself hugged and kissed by you, Smallwood, and am thinking now of you bidding me goodnight. You may, if it pleases you, do likewise with me.

  Field Day, June 6, 1959

  On this day 130 years ago a woman who was known to the people of this city as Nancy April and to herself as Shawnawdithit died in St. John’s. She was the last Beothuk Indian.

  When I was in my early twenties, I came down with tuberculosis and was confined for two years to the San. There was little to do but read and one of the books I read was Howley’s book about the Beothuks.

  Nancy was named April after the month that she was captured, as her sister was named Easter Eve after the day that she was captured and her mother Betty Decker after the boat on which she was transported from her place of capture to St. John’s.

  In 1823, the three of them were often seen walking the streets of St. John’s together, wearing deerskin shawls over the dresses they were given by the whites with whom they lived.

  When curious children gathered around them, Nancy made as if to chase them, which caused them all to scatter, at the sight of which she laughed out loud. Everywhere they went, people gathered round to gape. Of the three of them, only Nancy seemed unafraid. She sometimes went so far as to mimic the looks of wonderment on the faces of the people that they passed. She was perhaps too young to understand; or perhaps she was feigning unconcern to reassure her mother and her sister, who were sick.

  People reported seeing them so laden down with ironmongery, which they planned to take home with them, that they could barely move. I have often, since reading Howley, thought of those three women, not two months removed f
rom their world, wandering around in one full of things they had no names for, laden down with bits of iron that they found discarded on the ground but that in their world, if only they could make their way back to it, could be put to precious use.

  After a failed attempt to reunite them with their tribe, of whom there were by this time not more than two dozen left, they were sent to live with magistrate John Peyton and his wife in the town of Exploits, near the river of that name on which, for no one knows how long, the Beothuk depended for their livelihood, and where Nancy’s mother and her sister died in the fall of 1823.

  Nancy was for several years a servant in the Peyton household, where she learned very little English, but enough to tease Mrs. Peyton about how hard she worked her servants.

  A society to prevent the extinction of the Beothuks was created in 1828 by William Cormack, who brought Nancy back to St. John’s to live with him. Cormack suggested that she learn English and, in turn, teach him her language and way of life. She could not read, but she could draw quite well and name what she drew and some of what she saw. Cormack introduced her to people as “my interesting protégé.”

  She drew many sketches for Cormack, some depicting Beothuk dwellings, clothing, weapons and burial practices, and narrative maps showing where certain members of her tribe were killed or captured and the path of what is thought to have been their final expedition. When Cormack left Newfoundland, Nancy was sent to live with Attorney-General James Simms.

  I think often, too, of Cormack leaving Newfoundland in the spring of 1829, when it was certain that she would soon die, unwilling to wait a few weeks more. It is not recorded why he left, though as he was single and quite well off, it seems likely that, if he had wanted to, he could have stayed.

  She knew she was the last Beothuk. How, other than sad, this made her feel, she was unable to communicate. Nor can I imagine it, any more than I can a world that would seem as alien to me as ours must have seemed to her. “As for beds,” Cormack said, “she did not understand their use,” and instead slept on the floor beside them.

  I am not much better able to imagine the point of view of the men at whose hands so many of her people died. I like to think that in their place, I would not have done what they did, but that is something I can never know.

  But when I was in the San, I was drawn, morbidly drawn perhaps, to read and re-read Howley’s book, and I was young enough to think that Nancy and I had a lot in common.

  It was said of her that “she could not look into a mirror without grimacing at what she saw.” That sentence would not be out of place in my obituary. She was described as having been “stout but shapely before she fell ill.” Some people might say the same of me. We contracted tuberculosis at about the same age. I survived, for no other reason I can think of than because I understood the use of beds.

  My father could not bear to watch me die. When he was told my death was certain, he stopped coming to the San to see me. I had very few other visitors. It was partly my father’s abandonment of me that made me identify with Nancy. I fancied that Cormack had been in love with her and had gone away because he could not bear to watch her die. There are times when I still think it might be so.

  She made a great impression on people long before they knew that she would be the last Beothuk. But it is hard not to think of her as that, “the last Beothuk,” perhaps presumptuous to try in what is, after all, an address to absence, silence.

  She was buried on the south side of St. John’s, below the Brow, not with those whose graves she drew, not with those whose beads she wore, but with the Church of England dead, the Church of England poor, her grave unmarked. Her remains lie somewhere near the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, but where exactly no one knows.

  According to one person who knew her while she stayed with Peyton, she had left behind her in the interior two children about whom she “fretted constantly.” Nowhere else except in this one account are these children mentioned, so I am almost able now to persuade myself that they did not exist.

  When I was in the San, I liked to think otherwise, however, because I had two lost children of my own.

  I had a son and have a daughter who were conceived in St. John’s and born in New York. I met my daughter and my granddaughter for the first time two years ago.

  I met my son for the first and last time three months before he died in France in the Second World War in 1944. I saw him before that when he was five years old. Once, I stood behind him on a sidewalk in New York, without him knowing I was there, without my mother knowing. From time to time, even though they were holding hands, my son looked up at my mother as if to make sure that she was still there. That was the last time I saw my mother.

  I made the trip to New York by train and by boat, as I did when I first left Newfoundland in 1917 and again in 1920. The island looks the same now as it did back then.

  It doesn’t matter to the mountains that we joined Confederation, nor to the bogs, the barrens, the rivers or the rocks. Or the Brow or Mundy Pond, or the land on which St. John’s and all the cities, towns and settlements of Newfoundland are built. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if we hadn’t joined.

  I gave my granddaughter a copy of Judge Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland, a book that is not as easy to find as it used to be. Prowse, boomer that he was, was also a confederate. He presides throughout the History with his gavel and his Bible, calling Confederation with Canada “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Consummation has come and jarred one hemisphere.

  We have joined a nation that we do not know, a nation that does not know us.

  The river of what might have been still runs and there will never come a time when we do not hear it.

  My life for forty years was a pair of rivers, the river that might have been beside the one that was.

  On the day this country joined Confederation, I was hiding out from history, mine, yours, ours. I went back to a section shack on the Bonavista branch line that I once fled to years ago to write a book that I hope will one day be published. I stayed there for months, wondering, waiting — about what, for what, I hardly knew.

  I thought a lot about my parents: my American mother, who came to Newfoundland but went back home, without me or my father, when I was five; my father, who didn’t know I knew that he betrayed me and thought that if I found out, I would no longer love him. He was wrong about that, as he was about so many things.

  I sat alone in the section shack the night of the second referendum and listened as the results from each region were announced. The signal was weak, the numbers barely audible through a drone of static as if they were coming from a remote country I had heard of but had never seen.

  When I was certain that the issue had been decided, I turned off the radio and went outdoors. There was a ladder on the side of the shack that led up to the roof, where I kept a rocking chair and where I liked to sit on nights when it was clear, as it was that night, to look at the stars and to watch the trains go by.

  There was no wind. The moon, nearly full, was reflected in the ponds around the shack. I could see the glint of other ponds from what I guessed must have been ten miles away.

  It was July, but it was cool enough that I could see my breath, and a sheen of condensation lay on everything. I sat in the chair, rocking slightly, imagining, as it was almost impossible not to do on such a night in such a place, that I was the sole person on the planet.

  And then I heard the train, long before I usually did, long before it passed the shack, for the conductor, who was obviously a confederate, was blowing the whistle constantly. I saw the locomotive light far off in the distance. For a while, it looked as though nothing but a light was coming, but then I saw the dark shape of the train.

  It was not a passenger train. Perhaps it was a freight train with some cargo as oblivious to politics as the ponds that it was passing. Or perhaps this was a run purely for the sake of celebration, not so much of victory as the enemy’s defeat.

  For a few sec
onds there was nothing in the world but sound, the continuous blare of the whistle, the chugging of the train. The conductor saw me and waved his hat as he went by, grinning gleefully, as if he hoped I was an independent. To spite him, I waved back. I saw his mouth form the words We won.

  What did he imagine we had won? What, had he “lost,” would he have imagined he had lost?

  I watched the train until it disappeared from view, the sound of the whistle receding. Something abiding, something prevailing, was restored.

  I have often thought of that train hurtling down the Bonavista like the victory express. And all around it the northern night, the barrens, the bogs, the rocks and ponds and hills of Newfoundland. The Straits of Belle Isle, from the island side of which I have seen the coast of Labrador.

  These things, finally, primarily, are Newfoundland.

  From a mind divesting itself of images, those of the land would be the last to go.

  We are a people on whose minds these images have been imprinted.

  We are a people in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood.

  During the writing of this novel, I consulted many books, far too many to list here, but I acknowledge a special debt to D. W. Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland (London, 1895), and to Richard Gwyn’s Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary (Toronto, 1972).

  I would like to thank Anne Hart of The Center for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, and Ingeborg Marshall, an independent scholar and authority on, among many other subjects, the Beothuk and William Cormack.

  I owe personal notes of thanks to my tireless and supportive agent, Anne McDermid, and to my editor at Knopf Canada, Diane Martin, whose guidance, patience and advice helped immeasurably in the founding of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.