Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  I do not know it yet, but there is a symmetry here that it would be pointless for us to resist. The time of the year is the same, early September, which in Newfoundland means early fall. Even the time of day is the same, almost twilight. The sun is low in the west, barely above the grove of spruce on the hill beside our house; on our backyard, on the meadows between it and the pond, on the pond and on the Shoal Bay Hills falls the same sad yellow light, the last light of a September day when the air is clear and, after sunset, quickly cools.

  Years later I will wonder if my father saw me from the house making for the trash barrel and hurried out so we would meet, if there had been no tacit agreement between us to avoid each other and it was only me avoiding him and he thought I had done so long enough.

  “Hello, Wayne,” my father says.

  “Hi, Dad.” There is nothing I can do but meet him at the barrel.

  “I thought I’d burn this tonight while there’s no wind,” he says. “There’ll be a gale tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes,” my father says, as if he is sick to death of gales, though I know he will track the storm on his instruments and record the data in his book. “Southeast wind and rain. It’s on its way.”

  And by the time it gets here, it occurs to me, I will be gone. A storm I will not be here to see will come in from Petty Harbour and above the Shoal Bay Hills. About this time tomorrow night, hours after the wind comes up, the first drops of rain will patter on the kitchen window and on the window of the room I have slept in almost every night for the past ten years. But there is no wind now, none. The pond is so calm it reflects the trees around it and the sky. And when the sun dips below the trees, the pond is like black glass. On its surface are reflected the lights of houses near the water and the street lamps on the poles around the pond.

  “Let me get mine started first,” he says. The thick cardboard will take longer to light and burn than what I have in the box. My father stuffs the barrel with cardboard, takes a sheet of paper from the box, lights it with a match, then drops it in. The cardboard catches. At first there is a lot of smoke, but then the blaze gets going, flares up above the rim of the barrel. Both of us stare into the fire. Soon we will look up and be surprised at how dark it has become, how long we have been standing there.

  “I have something to tell you,” my father says. He tells me this story.

  He went away to college on an early September evening in 1948. A couple of hours before sunset, he left for St. John’s, planning to stay there overnight and, in the morning, catch the train for Port aux Basques. It would be his first crossing of the island and his first crossing of the Gulf, his first time off the island. He was twenty-three years old. The age that I am now.

  He said all but one of his goodbyes in the house. His father, on some pretext, had gone down to the beach. My father, leaving his suitcases by the car of a family friend who was waiting to drive him to St. John’s, walked down to the beach where Charlie was standing, looking out across the water.

  Charlie did not want my father to leave. He was crying when my father reached him on the beach. They hugged but said nothing. My father made his way back up the beach, sliding in his best shoes on the rocks. His father, who had continued to face the water, turned when he stopped hearing the clatter of rocks behind him, when my father reached the grassy slope that led up to the road.

  “Be a good boy!” his father shouted. My twenty-three-year-old father turned and looked at Charlie standing there a few feet from the water, not quite turned to face him, one arm lifted and dropped quickly in a gesture of resigned farewell.

  Then Charlie fully faced the sea again, put his hands on his hips, looked out across the Pool, between Bois Island and Ferryland Head, at the open water. He stood there in that reflective, stock-taking pose, facing the direction exactly opposite the one his son would soon be taking.

  So he left in defiance of his father. But surely something more must have happened on that beach. I look at my father as he stares into the fire. Before I can ask him to, he tells me more.

  He went away to college in September of 1948, crossing an island that was still a country but whose days as such were numbered. While he was away, Newfoundland the country ceased to be. At college in Truro, Nova Scotia, on April 1, 1949, induction day, the day Newfoundland joined Confederation, my father was set upon by a group of his mainland friends who hoisted him on their shoulders and, ignoring his protests that he would always be a Newfoundlander and the fact that tears were streaming down his face, carried him around the campus shouting, “Three cheers for the new Canadian!”

  He pauses again. There is no way I will let him tell me this much and not tell me the rest. “I skipped a bit,” he says.

  Something else happened while he was away at college, a few months before Confederation.

  His father died. I never knew this until now, had never taken notice of the date of Charlie’s death when looking at his headstone on the Gaze.

  Charlie died about halfway through the nine-month interval between the second referendum and induction day. Despite losing the referendum, he had died a Newfoundlander, in January of 1949. The two referenda in the summer of 1948, the two nights six weeks apart that he spent crouched beside the radio, arms around his stomach, rocking slowly back and forth as if silently trying to coax the anti-confederates to victory as the results were coming in, the excruciating closeness of the votes, the campaign between the inconclusive referendum and the next, then the months of waiting after their defeat for induction day — all this had proved too much for him.

  He had fretted himself to death as the countdown to Confederation proceeded, each day changing on a schoolroom slate that he hung on the wall in the kitchen the number of days left in the life of Newfoundland. Charlie died on January 14, 1949, the day after erasing the number 77 and hours after writing the number 76 on the slate.

  Throughout the three days of his wake and funeral, the slate, like a stopped clock, read 76. Afterwards, Nan could neither stand the sight of it, reminder, register that it was of the day he died, nor bring herself to erase the number, so she took the slate down and put it out of sight and out of mind on a table in the attic. She took the top of a tin biscuit box and with the box turned upside down enclosed the number-bearing slate and left it there. That she did this was not discovered until some years later, when Nan herself died and Eva, plundering the house for keepsakes, found the slate where her mother had left it; not knowing there was anything beneath it, she picked up the biscuit box, disinterring the slate, which still faintly bore, in her father’s hand, the number of days Newfoundland had outlived him.

  Poor Eva almost fainted. “I think she still has the slate,” my father said. “But I don’t know if you can read the number any more.”

  When my father and Charlie parted on the beach, they knew that by the time they met again, something dear to both of them would have ceased to be, and that this would happen while they were hundreds of miles apart. But they did not meet again.

  It was not because he was embarrassed to have his family see him cry that Charlie left the house and went down to the beach. He went there because he and my father had had a falling-out about something.

  My father pauses in the story he is telling. There are no lights on in the house, which makes me think my mother might be watching.

  “This falling-out. It was about you not wanting to be a fisherman?” I say.

  My father smiles, shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It was nothing. Just some little thing. I don’t even remember what it was.”

  It is so dark now that if not for the fire, I would not be able to see his face. There is no way he could tell me this without us having the fire to look at while he speaks. “You must remember what it was,” I say.

  “I don’t,” he says. “I really don’t.”

  I know he remembers and I try to think it through. It was to Canada that my father was going, to Canada at this of all times, the country he
esteemed no more highly than Charlie did, but he had no choice, there being no college at that time in Newfoundland. To Canada, which Newfoundland would become part of while he was away. It must have seemed to Charlie like a betrayal. And when his father died while he was in Canada, how must my father have felt? Somehow to blame perhaps. Against all assurances to the contrary—and there must have been many—somehow to blame.

  For my father, as for all the Johnstons, it was not “immediately before the expiration of March 31, 1949,” as set out in the Terms of Union, but with Charlie’s passing that the old Newfoundland ceased to be. His death divided the century and, more effectively than anything else the chronophobic Charlie could have done, kept his children rooted in both time and space, imposed on them an obligation to continue, however pointlessly or tokenly, to resist Confederation. Confederation and the death of their father were forever twinned in their minds.

  I think now that I have the whole story, a complete explanation why my father almost never talks about his father, and why my aunts and uncles never do, and why there are no photographs of Charlie in the house.

  But there is more.

  From Truro to Ferryland is not far, was not far, even then. But he had no money and neither did his family. All of them together could not scrape up the train fare to bring him home to see his father waked and buried. The cost of Charlie’s funeral left them penniless.

  He stayed in his residence room at college, his door locked for three days, while five hundred miles away, across the Gulf, his father was being waked and buried, and he alone of all the Johnstons was not there. At last some of his friends climbed in through his window and dragged him outdoors.

  “Be a good boy,” Charlie Johnston said to my father on the beach at Ferryland. A begrudging blessing. Good boy. Not quite a goodbye. Good boy.

  I try to imagine them on the beach at Ferryland.

  It is little more than a month since the referendum. Every emotion is heightened. The whole of Ferryland, the whole of Newfoundland, is nervously exhausted. Hard on the heels of losing the referendum, Charlie is losing his son. Another casting-off. It is early September. As usual, the seasons have a month’s jump on the calendar. The low scrub on the Downs has begun to turn, the smell of fall has been in the air for weeks. A winter is coming that will be my father’s first away from home, a succession of December days when darkness will fall between four and five o’clock.

  The last thing they share is that prospect from the beach. The only thing they see that a person on the same spot looking seaward five hundred years ago would not have seen is the lighthouse on the Head. Nothing else has been added or subtracted except by nature, incrementally, imperceptibly. “Be a good boy,” Charlie says. And my father, thus admonished, leaves his father standing there.

  It is 1981, thirty-two years since Confederation, thirty-three since Charlie died. My father will not ask me not to leave, or plead with me not to or come as close as Charlie did to begrudging his son what might be a last goodbye. There is no reason to think that we will not meet again. He is only fifty-three, not as old as Charlie, who died years before his time at fifty-six. But I know he will not take the chance. He knows how it would be for me and for him if we parted on bad or ambiguous terms or even awkwardly.

  Each of us has a stick to poke at the cardboard. Embers float up from the barrel, go out, become flankers of grey ash above our heads and drift slowly pondward, carried by a breeze so faint that we cannot feel it. I look up at the ridge, the crest of which marks the start of what we think of as the woods because you cannot hike there and back unless you spend a night outdoors. I have done it many times, gone down into the valley on the other side and slept on the ground.

  I wonder if I have lived in this house long enough, have looked out on this prospect often enough for it to be imprinted on my brain as the view from the house on the Gaze is on his, if years from now, when I speak about Forest Pond, the Shoal Bay Hills, the Petty Harbour Road, I will call them the Pond, the Hills, the Road. I doubt it. For though I have not yet seen much of the world, I know that I am going to, and though I have not yet travelled even as far from Newfoundland as he has, I will have done so and then some by this time tomorrow night.

  The Gaze, the Pool, Hare’s Ears. I will dwell more on his landmarks than I will on mine. This is what I think when I am twenty-three. Perhaps he thought like that when he stood with Charlie on the beach; perhaps he thought the place he was soon to leave had more of a hold on his father than it did on him.

  As I stare into the fire, it reminds me of the forge, which in my lifetime was never lit. I almost say so, then think better of it.

  “We’ll throw your stuff in now,” my father says. The cardboard has burnt. We start throwing in the contents of the box.

  “So you’re off to college tomorrow, Wayne,” my father says. I wondered when he would get round to it.

  “Yeah,” I say with a brisk enthusiasm I hope will discourage him from getting sentimental.

  “I wish I was you,” he said. “I’d love to be your age again.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but this time in a different tone, for I think I know exactly how he feels. I say it with a wistful sympathy, as if I myself have often wished that I was younger. But it is not just younger that he wants to be, of course. He wants to be back there, on the other side of the moment when he turned and left his father on the beach. But also he wants me to understand, now, how great a thing it is to be my age, to revel in the sense of possibility and the knowledge of how much of my life still lies before me. No twenty-three-year-old has ever understood such things, but he wants me to. And he wants to dispel any sadness or apprehension I may have about leaving. He has just conferred on me his blessing. What greater blessing could he give to what I was doing than to wish that he were me? It does not undo or make up for Charlie’s admonition, his last words to his twenty-three-year-old son, “Be a good boy.” But he has overcome, at least long enough to spare me its effects, a sorrow that might have made such tenderness impossible.

  We throw more pages in, ripping pages out of notebooks, tearing them in half. It is like some arch symbolic gesture, a purging of my past.

  I look up and already I can see some stars. I can dimly see the ridge against the sky. I can smell the grass where a sheen of dew has begun to form and, from the stand of alders just outside the fence, the first faint rot of fall.

  A thought, a doubt that will nag at me for years, occurs to me. He was young. Not much older than I am now. There is more to the story, there is, palpably, something more. Did he blurt out something to Charlie on the beach before he left, to Charlie who was so ashamed that he never told another soul? There is more. I am sure of it. Does he want me to say so, ask him what else there is, as if I am hearing his confession? Surely he wouldn’t, having told this much, not tell the rest.

  This cannot be it, I feel like saying. There is something here that no one knows but you. Perhaps he wants me to say that, wants me to coax him into giving this story the ending it deserves, an ending that would make sense to me. “Be a good boy,” I half expect he would say if I asked him to swear that he has told me everything he knows.

  Now it occurs to me what he might be holding back.

  But of course I cannot ask him. Not being sure that I am right, I cannot ask him that. If I do and I am wrong, we will part the way that he and Charlie did. There is even more symmetry here than I imagined. The only way I can find out why they parted on bad terms is by risking parting on bad terms with him. If my suspicions are right, he must know that I can never ask him to confirm them. Unless he offers, I may never know.

  I look at him and remember the night we came back on the train from Port aux Basques. His whispered conversation with his brother the night he fled the party and went outdoors. I remember the change that came over him whenever we came in sight of Ferryland and the day he did not come back down with the others when they went up to the Gaze to see his parents’ graves. I remember all the times I heard him s
peak of that “something” that happened on the beach.

  “I’m sure going to miss this place,” I say.

  He nods. “I already do and I’m still here. Who knows? You might come back. I did.”

  Again I am grateful for the fire, this third presence, to our tending of which talk is incidental. We stay at the barrel until the blaze dies down. I can feel the heat of it receding from my face. Now the sky is banked with stars. Above the Shoal Bay Hills, the moon is rising, nearly full, so close to the horizon that it looks twice its size.

  “There’ll be a ring around the moon tonight,” my father says.

  And he is right. Later, looking out my window, I see the storm-portending ring. If this were winter, a real beauty of a blizzard would be on its way, the kind that in my childhood kept me spellbound at the windows, which afterwards always bore the marks of my ten fingers and my nose.

  But it is fall and rain is coming, a storm that now is in the Gulf and getting stronger. By noon tomorrow it will have sent ahead of it like fair warning a front of cloud and a gale of wind. And on this place that from this window I will never see again the rain will fall.

  HE STANDS ON the beach, looking out across the Pool. He knows his son is watching from the kitchen window. They have put off their goodbye as long as possible. He is waiting for him.

  His son will keep his secret. There are many who would, but only if he asked them to. He will not have to ask his son.

  But he must not try to justify himself or seem to be looking for consolation or forgiveness. All he wants is to rid himself of the loneliness he has felt these past two months. The priest told him once that “in confession you confess, but elsewhere you confide.”

  He is waiting for him to come down to the beach. He will simply tell him and it will be their secret. He wishes he had told him sooner. They might be over it by now. If he was able to imagine what his son would say or do, he would prepare himself. How long will it take? As long as to walk from the window to the door?