Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  In Morte d’Arthur Avalon is the place of death. I knew that when Arthur said he was going to Avalon “to heal me of my grievous wound,” he meant that he was going to a place beyond life, an afterlife, from which he would not return. But I did not think of him as having died or experienced “death” as that concept had been explained to me at school. Heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, Arthur had not gone to one of these afterlives; he had gone to Avalon, where he was healed. I believed, inasmuch as I was able to think it through, that though we did not live in the mythical Avalon itself, we lived in a place thought by Baltimore to be so much like it, so favoured as to be worthy of bearing its name. In the same way, although I knew that my father was not Malory’s King Arthur, I thought of him as a man whose name set him apart, Arthur Reginald, a King-like, Arthur-like man among mere knights or even lesser beings who had never been a child, a man who had simply “arrived” among us and, because of his Arthur-like qualities, had been given Arthur’s name and title.

  I had the vague notion that we turned around when we did so as not to cross over into the place where my father would receive a “grievous wound” and go from there to the mythical Avalon where, though healed, he would be apart from us. I thought that beyond the stream of fog lay not Avalon but another afterworld where the grievous wounds of people who had died remained unhealed, the Arthurian equivalent of hell or purgatory. It was, among other things, the lair of “the Baymen,” a tribe by which, as I would soon be told, our independence was undone, an inscrutably sinister domain.

  The rest of the island beyond the Avalon lay in outer darkness, beyond the uncrossable mist, unknown except in the lore of scorn, the place of the fearsomely dense people known as the baymen, who in the distant past had inflicted upon us a “grievous wound.” It would be years before I understood the nature of that wound: on July 22, 1948, in a referendum ordered by Britain, in which the choices were independence or confederation with Canada, Newfoundlanders voted by the barest of margins for confederation. On the Avalon, the vote was two to one for independence, and outside the Avalon two to one for Canada. “Forgive them Lord, they know not what they did,” my father said.

  OUTWARD FROM FERRYLAND Avalon grew, without help from its founder, Lord Baltimore, who died in 1632, not long after spending his one and only winter there. The colonists that Baltimore sent ahead of him to build his mansion house had indeed built it, he was told when he arrived, but had otherwise done little else but pass the time in “idlenesse and debauchyre.”

  By January, he was sharing his mansion house with fifty scurvy-ridden colonists, ten of whom, though the accommodations were far superior to what they were accustomed to, perished.

  He left Ferryland for good in the spring of 1629. The only thing of his that endured was the name he had chosen for his colony — Avalon, named after the birthplace of Christianity in England. He was a recent convert to Catholicism, and most of the settlers he took with him to the New World were Catholics.

  A Protestant, the duke of Hamilton, David Kirke, was given a patent to the entire island of Newfoundland, including the province of Avalon, in 1637, but it became a Baltimore family tradition to litigate against this patent, which generation after generation did for at least a hundred years. It was considered one’s family duty as a Baltimore to sue for the ownership of Avalon long after the last Baltimore who had set eyes on it was dead. The impossibly complicated and protracted litigation over Avalon makes the lawsuits in Bleak House seem expeditious by comparison. It is not known exactly when this legacy of litigation petered out. If an authoritative decision was ever rendered, no record of it remains.

  Twenty years after leaving the place, my father still likened people he met, or saw on television, to people who were famous or notorious in Ferryland for something — miserliness, ugliness, short-sightedness. Those of any profession whom he judged to be inept — athletes, politicians, actors — he dismissed with the observation that “Paddy Haley would have done a better job.”

  None of us, not even my mother, knew who Paddy Haley was; nor did we know anything of Nell Hines, whom he judged a good many people to be “more miserable” than, meaning tight with money and generally joyless. If he wished to impress upon us how large a man he met or saw was, he would tell us he “swore to god” that “he was bigger than Howard Morrey,” or had “a pair of hands on him twice the size of Howard Morrey’s.” I had no more idea than anyone who did not grow up in Ferryland when my father did what Howard Morrey’s dimensions were.

  Ferryland, though only forty miles south of where we lived on the outskirts of St. John’s, seemed to me impossibly remote, much farther from home than the isthmus of Avalon, which was in fact twice as far away. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this was because the road to Ferryland followed the coastline, and for most of the trip we were mere feet from the sea, which we could not smell or even see from where we lived. The all-but-landlocked harbour of St. John’s, which we saw about once a month and which afforded the barest glimpse of the sea through the Narrows, did not count. At the sight of the sea, my father always fell silent, as did the rest of us, taking our cue from him, sensing his uneasiness but having no understanding of its cause.

  We went often to Ferryland to see my father’s brother, Gordon, his wife, Rita, and their children. About ten miles from home the pavement ended, and the road from there was of graded gravel, the gravel plowed up on the roadside like banks of snow. Sometimes, in the summer, it was spread with a kind of faux asphalt tar to keep the dust down. It was the delusional belief of the Department of Highways that this tar slowed erosion caused by rain and retarded pothole formation. In fact the road, even in the driest summers, was cratered with potholes so large and so enduring that we gave them names. They were filled in from time to time, but it was never long before they assumed their usual dimensions; when it rained, my father eased the car suspensefully into road-wide puddles while we children, our hands and faces pressed to the back windows of the car, looked down to see how far up the water would come. When we got to Ferryland, we would examine the outside of the car for the high-water mark, which by then had dried to a mountain range of dust on the windows.

  The sudden transition from pavement to gravel marked a great divide, it seemed to me, a crossing-over in both place and time, into Ferryland and into the past, my father’s past. It was as if no time had gone by there since he left it. The past, which Ferryland was weighted down with, made it seem to me foreign or otherworldy in a way I did not then associate with time. Nor could I decide what to ascribe these sensations to, though I know now that once again it was the sea.

  The primary landmarks of Ferryland were the protected part of the harbour, which from the 1600s had been called the Pool; the Downs, the expansive, seaside meadows where it was believed that Baltimore had built his mansion house; Ferryland Head, a peninsula with a manned lighthouse at its tip; Gosse Island and Bois (pronounced Boyce) Island; the two rocks that because of their shape were called the Hare’s Ears, jutting a hundred feet out of the water just to the south of Ferryland Head; and the four-hundred-foot-high hill behind Ferryland whose crest was for obvious reasons known as the Gaze.

  The Pool, Hare’s Ears, the Downs, the Islands, Goose and Bois, Ferryland Head, the Gaze. My father recited these, invoked them as if he still oriented himself in space and time by his relation to them, the archetypal topography of Ferryland.

  A further change came over my father whenever we passed through the town of Calvert and went down the hill into Ferryland, a deepening of his already sea-sombre mood. Often he fell into a brooding silence, squinting through the smoke of the cigarette that once he was under the spell of Ferryland he shunted to one side of his mouth and forgot about. He ran one hand through his hair and, puffing up his cheeks, exhaled loudly as he did in other circumstances when he doubted he could take one more minute of boredom or anxiety. It was also a signal, when he was facing some nearly unbearable prospect or situation, that he had gathered his resolve, a gestu
re of acknowledgment that he had no choice but to attempt something he thought he could not do. We all fell silent when Ferryland came into sight, especially we four boys, for we could sense what he was feeling though we could not name it and we did not know its cause. My mother gave us an explanation that we pretended to accept: my father had left Ferryland on bad terms with Charlie, because Charlie wanted him to be a fisherman and my father did not want to be one.

  One day, I pointed to the house where he grew up, which was just up the road from Gordon’s and where one of his sisters, Millie, and her husband now lived.

  “That’s the house where you were born, isn’t it, Dad?” I said. It was my mother who answered.

  “That’s it,” she said. “That was Nan’s and Mr. Charlie’s house.” My father’s parents, whom I never knew. Charlie was nine years dead when I was born. There were no pictures of him around the house, or of Nan Johnston, who died when I was three. I did not really know until I was eight or nine that everyone had two sets of grandparents.

  “How come we never go there?” I said.

  “It’s too small inside for all of us,” my mother said. “That’s why Millie and Joe come visit us at Gordon’s.”

  “But it’s bigger than Gordon’s,” I said.

  “It just looks like that from the outside,” my mother said.

  This transparently untrue explanation was not meant to fool me, merely to indicate that any further questions would be ignored, that this matter of “The House” was one I was not old enough to understand. “That’s enough about Nan’s and Charlie’s now,” she added, which was a warning that, even later when she was not around, we must not ask our father about it. Not that I would have. I was too awed, too fearful of the possibility that if he talked about the house, he might cry or in some way lose control.

  Nan and Charlie were dead and at least partly for this reason, I presumed, were a forbidden subject. But so was my mother’s mother, Lucy, dead, and we talked about her all the time.

  That day my father climbed to the Gaze with his brothers, Gordon and Harold, and his sisters, Eva, Kitty and Millie, and visited the cemetery where Nan and Charlie were buried, while my mother kept us at her side in Gordon’s house. Though we had gone often with our mother to Lucy’s grave, we were not allowed to go with my father to see Nan’s and Charlie’s. With my father things were different, and there was no use asking why.

  When the Johnstons came back down the hill, my father was not with them and did not return to Gordon’s until half an hour later. We were told he had gone for a walk and that we were to stay put until he showed up.

  Later my brothers and I went to see Nan’s and Charlie’s graves on our own. We climbed to the Gaze, crawled under the fence and searched among the headstones for a cluster that bore the name of Johnston and then among that cluster for “Charlie” and “May.” May was Nan’s real name. “Nan” was a term of endearment for grandmother, but even people not related to her called her Nan.

  Their graves looked like ordinary graves to me, neither more nor less impressive than my grandmother’s grave back home, except that they faced the sea. A pair of sea-facing stones, round-topped, thin, white marble stones, side by side. They were hard to read because the black had faded from their inscriptions, and all that was left were the chiselled letters which were the same white colour as the stone around them. They were older than Lucy’s, too. Nan and Charlie had both died long ago; they’d crossed over into Avalon and we could therefore never go inside the house where they had lived. Lucy, too, had crossed over into Avalon, but her house we could visit anytime we liked. It did not make sense, but that was how it was.

  I looked out to sea from the Gaze. I fancied that out there, beyond what I could see, beyond the point where water and sky seemed to meet, lay the vale of Avalon to which Nan and Charlie had been borne, barge-borne by the hooded Queen and her assistant queens. Avalon was out there; it could not be as nebulously otherwordly as heaven. It had to be a material place, the ability to travel the great distance to which was made possible by death. Out there, waiting, was the barge that I both dreaded and longed to see, the barge that, when Arthur died, took him to Avalon, where he was healed. The black-hooded Queen and her assistants, I assured myself, would not seem so sinister when, after I received my grievous wound, they came to get me.

  Halfway up the hill behind the old house, a cartroad with a strip of wild grass growing down the centre of it led to another structure called the forge. No light had burned inside it for many years.

  The forge was not off limits to us like the house. The forge my father talked about not often but fondly. And when he did, and only then, he talked about Charlie, the Charlie of his childhood. He said “Dad” as a child recounting to another the exploits of his father would have said it. He took us to the forge from which the view of Ferryland was even more spectacular than from the house.

  The inside walls of the forge were stripped bare. Joe and Millie had removed and burned in their stove every piece of wood they could without bringing the roof and walls down upon themselves. The forge was a mere shell. Through the cracks in its warped clapboard the light shone, the wind shrieked. Snow gathered in shallow drifts on the floor; the rain seeped through. But Charlie’s tools remained.

  The all but immovable anvil was still there, its saddle gleaming as though made of silver, the rest of it burnished black and green. The anvil was encrusted with once-molten metal that had run down its sides and hardened like candle wax. Spills of reconstituted metal with borders as precise as pools of mercury lay hardened on the floor.

  The anvil. The recessed stone furnace with its floor of compacted ash. The black high-fire mark still scorched on the outside of the chimney and, as far up the chute as you could see, a stretch of soot like a permanent shadow of the smoke that had poured through it day and night for years. These would remain long after the walls and anything else made of wood were gone.

  My father told me the names and functions of Charlie’s implements. He would walk around, pointing, explaining. Inside the forge was the forge itself, in which a bed of coals had for years burned unextinguished, smouldering but never quite going out at night. There were the bellows, the anvil, the “slack” tub or dousing tub in which finished bits were tempered in brine, the hammer and tongs. These were the obvious ones, whose functions were easy to guess. But there was also the “swage,” a flat chunk of anvil-like metal with clamps, on which Charlie did his small-scale, most painstaking work, his etchings and inscriptions. There were the cutter, the chisel with its many fittings, the files and drills and the punches, which were chisel shaped but instead of attenuating to a blade had a decorative stamp on one end, a playing-card club or diamond, or Charlie’s initials, CJ.

  The heart punch had been Charlie’s favourite. Most of his work had a little heart on it somewhere. Why he favoured the heart my father didn’t know, but he showed me horseshoes bearing Charlie’s trademark heart and on the other side his initials.

  Once I pressed the tip of the heart punch into the palm of my hand, pressed it for so long that the shape of the heart was imprinted there. “Look what I did with the heart punch, Dad,” I said, holding out my hand for him to see.

  “My father died of a heart attack,” my father said. It was the kind of offhand revelation he often made, telling children things that other grown-ups never would. “Nan found him. Right here in the forge.” He pointed at a spot on the floor beneath the window. “Right there.”

  That day, on the drive back from Ferryland, I kept my hand hidden from everyone. When we got home, the print of the heart was still there. I rubbed the palm of my hand with my thumb, trying to erase the heart, but though I made my whole palm red, the heart was even redder and stood out just as clearly as before. When I went to bed, I kept my hand beneath the blankets, where I couldn’t see it, but my palm tingled and I lay awake, picturing the heart, reliving the moment when I held it out for him to see. The heart punch. I was a long time getting to sleep, but
I did, and when I woke up in the morning the heart was almost gone.

  IN THE MORNING, when he looks out the window, the horses are lined up on the hill as always. Over breakfast, his father grumbles that the line is especially long. He will spend the first half of the day fishing, the other half making shoes and shoeing horses without a break. The day will not end for him until long after dark. He will pass the horses on his way down to the wharf where his punt is moored, and for hours while he fishes he will think of them waiting for him on the hill back home.

  Men hitch their horses to the rail that runs the length of the hill, from the road past the house, then up to the forge. They go about their day’s work, coming back later in the evening to claim their horses, which are now tied to the rail for finished horses on the far side of the road.

  The horses and ponies stand side by side on the hill in the gloom of early morning, the zodiacal light of a sun soon to rise showing faintly in the east. The stunted Newfoundland ponies with their disproportionately large heads and overgrown blond manes move their heads from side to side, butt the larger horses out of the way so they can get their share of the hay his father spreads out on the snow. Plumes of steam issue from the noses of the animals, snorts of steam up and down the line. And steam likewise rises from the droppings they leave behind them on the path. There is so much steam it seems to be coming from the earth itself. There is a steaming trough worn in the snow by horse piss and manure, a yellow stream bed along which, before it has a chance to freeze, discoloured water flows and empties out across the road below, then farther down the hill into the Pool.

  There are hundreds of horses in Ferryland, and he knows all of them by name. The wind is calm. Smoke from the chimneys and steam from the horses rise straight up in perfect columns as though the town is quiet in the aftermath of some conflagration.