Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  His son will soon be far away. He could write to him or wait until he comes back home from college in the spring. But he feels that if he does not tell him now he never will.

  Every day, long before last light, the shadow of the Gaze falls on the Pool. You only notice that the water has changed colour. You never see it change.

  Not even as he hears the front door open and then close does he know what his first word will be. He thinks: in a moment he will know and the world will come between us.

  At the sound of footsteps on the rocks, he drops his hands from his hips and turns around.

  The first word that he speaks is Arthur’s name.

  I LEFT BY boat, as I had vowed I would when I first saw the Gulf when I was ten. The sight of Newfoundland slowly receding reminded me of something. I could not think what until we were several miles offshore. It was not what I had anticipated I would think about as I was leaving. I’d imagined a Stephen Dedalus—like sense of expectation and adventure, standing like Joyce’s hero at the rail, open-armed for new lands and new experience, casting off the nets that for so long had held me back. Instead, it was the “resettlers” I thought about.

  This was how the island must have looked to those Newfoundlanders whom the government resettled from remote islands to population centres in the sixties. This must have been what they had seen when they looked out their windows, this horizon-obscuring chunk of rock on which they had never set foot and vowed they never would.

  It was not what most of them had seen while they made the final crossing to the “mainland,” for they sailed away with their eyes on their islands and their backs to Newfoundland and did not turn around until they disembarked. Most of them had to be coaxed from boats that in some cases had been moored for hours to wharves and fishing stages. I would probably have done the same thing if it was possible to see Newfoundland from the ferry all the way to Nova Scotia.

  A great-uncle of mine who was born in Ferryland at some point visited Woody Island, got married there and never left it until the people of Woody Island were resettled in 1968 to Arnold’s Cove. We went out to Arnold’s Cove to see him and his family land like immigrants on the shore of Newfoundland and to see their house floated across the bay on a raft buoyed up by oil drums.

  We were not the only ones there. It was a summer weekend pastime for people to drive out around the bay and see houses floated in from the offshore islands. There were a couple of dozen people, some with binoculars, staring out to sea as if waiting for some annual event of nature. Woody Island was too far away to differentiate one house from another. There were merely clumps of colours near the shore. I saw a wedge of green detach itself like an iceberg from a glacier, then a great eruption of white water. “Whoa,” a man looking through binoculars said. We would not have been surprised had we been told the house had sunk, but soon we saw the green again.

  While my parents and my aunts and uncles went down to the wharf to welcome my all-but-mythical great-uncle and his never-before-glimpsed relatives, my brothers and I climbed the hill to get a better view of the houses as they came, towed by tugs and motorboats, across the bay. The houses tilted forward slightly in spite of the oil drums. The front of the rafts dipped below the water, and waves lapped at the windowless storm doors, the houses plowing a wide slow wake, pushing rounded swells in front of them, a small fleet of square-hulled ships. I expected to see people inside them, leaning out the windows, expected the front doors to open and people to peer out to see how close to shore they were. But the houses were just shells. You could see right through them, the sunlit empty rooms, bare walls.

  The owners escorted their houses in skiffs piled high with everything they owned, loads of precariously balanced furniture, cardboard boxes of belongings, the skiffs riding so low that their gunwales barely cleared the water, their engines putt-putting just fast enough to keep from stalling.

  I had heard that in mid-crossing some houses, made top-heavy by their chimneys and their roofs, caved in, or, the upper storeys tilting too far forward, broke in half. My great-uncle’s house made it to Arnold’s Cove without mishap and was winched up a slipway to a flatbed truck.

  But one woman, one of his sisters-in-law I think it was, refused to get out of the boat when it moored at the wharf. Wearing a nylon scarf tightly tied beneath her chin, a bulky overcoat, lime green slacks and a pair of rubber kneeboots, she sat staring out across the bay. People on the wharf tried to coax her out of the boat, but, her back to Arnold’s Cove, her eyes on Woody Island, she shook her head. Finally two men climbed down into the boat and she let herself be led to the ladder. When she stepped onto the wharf, she covered her face with her hands, shaking her head when two women put their arms around her, as if she would not be consoled.

  I wondered how long I would last in the place where I was headed if from there I could still see Newfoundland, and knew that I could not go back, not ever. I thought of the stories my father had told me, the moral of which, until now, I had taken to be that outporters were hopelessly set in their ways, hopelessly old-fashioned and opposed to change.

  When he was travelling the south coast on the Belle Bay, he saw houses being moved. Each house was blessed by a priest or a minister before being launched. The priest walked about the empty rooms and sprinkled holy water with a sceptre that he dipped from time to time in a little silver bucket. Fighting water with water. It was hoped that these drops that spattered on the floors and on the walls and on the windows would keep out the sea.

  The houses, and the rafts to which they were bound, went down the slips like boats being launched. A great cheer rose when, after the suspense of the initial plunge and the bobbing up and down, a house floated upright and the swell that might have swamped it subsided. A seaworthy house.

  The closest thing to a crowd that you could get in places that size gathered for each launching. The whole thing seemed to my father foredoomed by the desire of these people to take their houses with them when they could have opted to have a new house built free of charge on a site of their own choosing. They would rather risk sinking it than leave it behind. So how then would they live without what they could not help but leave behind—the view they had had all their lives from its windows? Opening the same door as they had before they moved, looking out the same window, they would never stop expecting to see what they used to see outside.

  The resettlers took with them their flagpoles and their painted beach rocks, their clothesline posts and barrels for burning trash. They took with them, so they could litter their new yards with them, objects that had lain about their old yards for decades, punctured buoys, laddered fishing nets and broken lobster traps.

  Many people moved to places from which they could see their old homes a few miles of water away. This did not relieve their homesickness, of course, but only made it worse. It was difficult even for the men who had often seen their island from a distance, seen it resolve into shapes and lines as they looked back at it while they were heading out to sea, seen it as, from their boats that lay anchored, they handlined for cod. They looked up and there it was, their island. But for many of the women who had never or only rarely been off their island in their lives, the sudden shift in perspective was too profound. They might as well have been marooned astronauts looking back at the moon from planet Earth.

  My father told me that a church while being relocated sprang a leak and sank and still lay at the bottom of the sea, and that its bell could still be heard, a muffled submarine sound that went faintly out across the bay when the tides were running or when the sea was rough.

  He said that houses sinking were cut loose to keep them from dragging under the boats that were towing them. Some, set adrift but only half submerged, floated out to sea where, looming suddenly out of the fog as if they had been wrenched by tidal waves from their foundations, they scared the life out of fishermen, nudging against their boats and then moving on as if they were being navigated from below the waterline by someone looking out the kitchen w
indow.

  There flashed through my mind the image of our bungalow on Petty Harbour Road attached by a tow line to the ferry, my parents at the windows smiling and waving at me. It seemed so absurd I almost laughed out loud.

  Knowing I would lose sight of Newfoundland eventually, I did not stand at the rail. Instead I sat facing away from it for as long as I was able to resist the urge to look. And when finally I did look, it was gone.

  THE CABIN WAS built by someone who had either changed his mind about being a hermit or had gone to be one somewhere else. Now it was being rented by some Newfoundlander who had talked himself into believing it was a sure bet, the first of many cabins he would buy or build on abandoned islands and rent to mainlanders who had run out of places to go to get away. This much I had found out from the fellow who took me out to the island in the boat he used to fish from before the fish ran out. I had told him I was from St. John’s, but I might as well have said Los Angeles, for he seemed to draw no distinction between one place he had never been to and another.

  The cabin looks like something you would see at the entrance to a park for Sunday hikers, made from what might be imitation logs they are so lacquered, so polished. I can tell I will not be roughing it until I go outdoors, which is fine with me. Having been away from Newfoundland for five years, I came back three years ago and now, at the age of thirty, am trying to decide if I should leave again, knowing that if I do it will be for good. No amount of weighing the pros and cons inclines me one way or the other. I have come to realize that in this choice, reason must have no say.

  My hope is that, here, nudged by some solitary impulse, my mind will somehow make itself up, sparing me the task. Everywhere I’ve been there are people I can live among, or stand to live among, as it sometimes seems. I have to know if I can live without the land. Perhaps out here, where there is nothing but the land, I can decide. I have prescribed myself a week of solitude, a week without once dwelling on the question or otherwise considering my destiny or that of anyone I know. I can therefore read as much as I like but I am not allowed to write.

  For electricity, there is a small generator. There is no running water, but there is a room brim-full of light-blue coolers stacked like wine casks at the back. There is no phone, but there is a short-wave radio rigged so that all I have to do in case of trouble is flip a switch and ask for help.

  The place is well stocked with food and wood. There is a new wood stove that has a window at the front so it doubles as a fireplace. In the bedroom there is a real fireplace with bricks so pristine it must never have been used.

  In case the tenant has not come properly prepared, there is winter clothing that would do for climbing mountains, as well as snow goggles and snowshoes that snap on like skis.

  On the inside of the front door are instructions about what you should and should not do when you leave the cabin. Once you open the door on arrival, don’t use the key again until you leave. NEVER LOCK THE DOOR. No matter how hard the snow is near the cabin, never leave without your snowshoes.

  On the adjoining wall, a poster offers a crash course in winter weather. The freezing point of water. A formula for calculating wind chill. Using your thermometer. Using your barometer. DON’T BE FOOLED: LOW PRESSURE MEANS BAD WEATHER. An admonishment to stay indoors, no matter how nice it appears to be outside, if the air pressure drops two readings in a row. It all seems overdone, designed to impress on city dwellers just how wild this wilderness adventure is. Radio forecasts are helpful, but local conditions can vary widely within the forecast zone. A chart shows how long you can safely stay outdoors at certain sub-zero temperatures. Of little use to me because I have no watch. Any watch I wear or even put in my pocket keeps time unreliably and within a week or so stops altogether. I have been told by jewellers that for some unknown reason, a small number of people have this effect on watches.

  I have never spent much time in winter this close to the sea. No one need ever have told me how long a man who went overboard into that would last. I can tell just from looking at it. How can anything warm-blooded have had its origins in that? No blizzard, no iceberg, no howling northwest wind is cold the way that water is. On the crest sides, the waves are rippled by the wind, on the trough sides as smooth and black as slate. Not snow or ice or wind, or any feature of geography present to the inhabitant or traveller the kind of obstacle this water does. Any place between you and which there is land is more real than a place from which you are separated by the sea.

  An island to someone who has never left it is the world. An island to someone who has never seen it does not exist.

  At night I try not to dwell on my isolation, partly out of a fear for my safety that by day I do not feel. Any help summoned by short-wave to this place might be days in coming. I read constantly for companionship, to get back into the world. If this island had never been inhabited, if evidence that, at one time, the place was lived in was not scattered everywhere, I would feel less lonely.

  I do not realize until I see the beaver house that I am halfway across a pond. Straight ahead, just visible above the snow, is a beaver dam and in front of it a triangle of slush ending in a stretch of open water. I turn around and gingerly retrace my steps, knowing that if I were not wearing snowshoes I would already have gone through the ice. I am lucky that the snow is deep. I guess that nothing smaller than a stunted spruce has seen the light of day since last November. It is the snow, more than the ice, that holds me up. The ice, insulated by the snow, is probably only about two inches thick. I am almost at the shore when the snow and ice give way beneath me. I go in up to my waist and then hit bottom, fall for a suspenseful fraction of a second until I stop in mud that, because of the snowshoes, I don’t sink into very far. Feeling foolish, I pull myself out without much difficulty and crawl on my stomach the last few feet to shore. By the time I reach the cabin, my snow pants are as stiff as cardboard and the snowshoes so encrusted with frozen mud that I can barely lift my feet.

  I have just had the sort of mishap on which the sort of person for whom this cabin was designed would dine out for years. A brush with death in the wilderness by which his city-weary spirit was renewed. It was also the sort of mishap that could have been much worse, that could have left me just as dead as that greenhorn from the mainland. I had walked, like some out-of-his-element thrill seeker, across what, when I was twelve, I would have known was a barely frozen mudhole.

  Now the warning on the door seems like a compilation of advice from tenants who learned the hard way what the hazards are. I add to the list, writing on a piece of paper that I tack to the wall: “Be careful where you walk. When the snow is deep, there is no telling where the land leaves off and the ponds begin. Remember that every step you take might be your last. Perils abound and woe to him who, having read my warning, heeds it not. ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.’” Let my successor try to figure that one out.

  For the first two days I avoid the abandoned settlement that is the main attraction for the tourists who come here in the summertime. I tell myself I have no intention of mooning homiletically about in some ghost town. But I find it impossible, knowing that it’s there, not to take a look. The hermit built just out of sight of the settlement, just around the shore from it, as if to have built within sight of it would have been too intrusive, would somehow have spoiled the place.

  Most of the houses that are left are shells of wood. There is one structure that might have been a school. The various parts of it seem not to touch. It seems to be held up by the space that it encloses. Everything has been taken from here, every detachable, man-made, non-wooden thing. Glass, chimney pots, stoves, pails, anchors.

  There is a church from which the stained glass windows have been carefully removed, even the porthole-like window in the steeple on top of which a rusting crucifix still stands. It is like some sort of reduced-scale, model church, six rows of pews on either side, a narrow aisle between them leading to the altar. Between the windows are small wooden shelves sti
ll bearing the rings of the oil lamps that once rested on them. Trails of soot climb the walls above the shelves, and there are faint soot circles on the ceiling. The floor, the pews, the stripped-bare altar are strewn with leaves, twigs, orange needles from the blasty boughs of spruce trees. The side of the church that for the better part of the day is in the shade is damp and grown over with green mould and moss. In the cabin there is no brochure explaining who these people were, when and why they settled here and when they left.

  In front of the church is a small cemetery. I have to dig away the snow from the headstones to read their inscriptions. There are eleven thin, semicircular white marble stones with black inscriptions, all of which bear the same last name, as if no marriages or births took place here, as if some family, after generations of attrition, died out. Some member of the family must have led the service every Sunday. They came here in pursuit of an absolute of self-sufficiency, a family resigned or even dedicated to its own extinction. Some of the men and women might have met and married people from elsewhere and left the island, though it is hard to imagine how these meetings would have taken place. They built on the eastern side of the island, the side that faced away from Newfoundland. From here no other islands can be seen, just the sea whose storms they took the brunt of rather than live on the leeward, land-facing side. It might have been a gesture of renunciation. Or perhaps it was just that here they were closer to the fishing grounds.

  There is a feeling different from what you get in landlocked ghost towns, the sense of a whole world, a whole history having ended. It is like some elaborately, painstakingly constructed object lesson, the kind of place that might have made the author of Ecclesiastes feel that the writing of his book was a foolish act of vanity and a striving after wind.