Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  It is impossible not to feel the ghostly past of the place. At night, in the distance, I see the lights of passing ships. When it is time to take the lantern from the window, time to turn the wick down low and make my way through my unfamiliar house and go to bed, I try to imagine what my light must look like to someone watching from out there. Seeing it fade until nothing is left but a spark so faint they must wonder if it is real—and then know it is, for abruptly it is gone. Nothing now. No prospect but the dark.

  This barometer, like the ones of my childhood, measures pressure in degrees instead of in kilopascals. On my third day, it registers the largest one-tap drop I have ever seen, three full points from thirty-two to twenty-nine. I have never even heard of pressure dropping under twenty-nine except at the sudden onset of tornadoes or hurricanes. My father often told me that the worst wind that ever blew across the island was nothing next to the worst wind that ever blew ten miles from shore, let alone two hundred.

  A storm, a great storm, is coming. I feel as though there is no point in my being here if I stay inside. There is a hill directly behind the cabin, without ever straying from the lee of which you can reach the church. In defiance of the instructions on the door, I put on my snowshoes and go up to the church to wait for the storm to start.

  There used to be full-length shutters on the north-facing windows that when open folded outward and were bolted to the wall. They have left arch-shaped shadows in the clapboard. There were no shutters on the south side of the church, which is so much in the lee of the hill I doubt the ground beneath the windows ever sees the sun.

  At first I stand at the middle of the three windows, the wind hitting me full in the face. The snow does not begin with flurries. It comes in across the water like an accelerated bank of fog and forces me back as it pelts in slant-wise, flecked with ice that stings my face. I have to move farther and farther back to avoid it, standing sideways between the pews, then in the aisle, then in the other row of pews. The storm is only minutes under way when the drifting starts. The snow spouts through the windows like water held back for ages and at last released, three torrents of it gushing in.

  I stand just out of range of the snow. I reach out my hand as though into the mist on the far fringe of a waterfall, then draw my hand back, cold and dripping wet. The snow is deepest on the floor beneath the window. From there it slopes off slowly until, about two-thirds of the way across to the leeward side, it peters out just inches from my feet. It adheres to the walls between the windows, to the pews. Eventually the snow will back me up against the wall and I will have to leave. I wonder if it is possible that the wind will blow so hard that the snow will come in through one window and go out the corresponding one on the other side.

  It is as though the windows are hung with large white drapes that, when the wind is at its height, are almost horizontal to the floor, then flutter downward as the wind subsides.

  I have never heard a sound like the wind makes as it funnels through the windows, a shrieking whistle whose upper pitch seems to have no limit. I can only hear the sifting snow between the gusts, hear it on the floor of the church and on the ground outside, snow on snow, the island’s terrain shape-shifting by the minute.

  The greatest gusts of wind slam the whole wall at once. If not for the open windows that disperse the force, I think the wall and the whole church with it would give way. Ships larger than this island have gone down in lesser storms. Yet I feel certain that having withstood so many storms, the church will hold up through this one. I know that I can make it to the cabin in half an hour as long as I set out before the sun goes down.

  Almost no snow comes in through the windows on the leeward side. If not for them, the church, with each gust of wind, would go completely dark, for the whiteout is so dense that no light comes through.

  They lived here, those people buried in that little cemetery. When a storm like this came up, they could not tell themselves that soon they would be living somewhere else. For them there was no last straw. Alternatives were so unheard of they did not know they had none.

  A seagull glides down from the choir loft, banks slowly, goes out the nearest leeward window, returns a moment later through the middle one, rising, still gliding until he clears the balustrade. Behind it, with a fluttering of wings that I can hear but cannot see, he lands. A show of grace, a show of force. There must be a nest up there, I think, until I remember that no bird would nest this early in the year.

  He repeats the performance, rises up on a fluttering of wings, glides down from the loft, out one window, in the other and goes back to the loft again.

  He thinks that like him, I have taken refuge here and lack the sense to join him in the loft, where it must be warmer and where there is no snow, which he wants me to do, not out of any concern for my welfare but because he knows that sooner or later I will discover the loft. He is telling me, before I try to chase him off, that he is willing to share it.

  I have no intention of spending the night in here, but I accept his invitation. Removing my snowshoes, I test the steps that lead up to the loft to see if they will hold my weight, which they do, though the boards creak loudly. It is ten steps or so to the loft, where there is a single pew with space enough for four or five people, half the congregation if the cemetery is anything to go by. Perhaps when the church was built the family had hopes of being joined by others who never came.

  The seagull roosts on the other side of the loft, hard to the wall, eyeing me with some nervousness at first. I was right. There is no nest. As a nesting place, it is too obvious and too accessible.

  I stand at the balustrade and look out across the church as the triple torrents blast in through the windows. I feel as though I am looking down from the as yet unflooded floor of some sinking ship. It is much warmer up here, not as drafty as I expected it would be, dry and sheltered from the winds that eddy about inside the church. I sit down, my back against the wall, as far from the gull as I can get.

  The weariness that comes over you when you warm up after a long time in the cold makes me nod off. Waking, I think for a panicked moment that I have slept past sunset, but actually it has been only minutes, for the church, when I stand up, looks just the same. Still, I tell myself, I might never have woken up, or might have woken freezing in the middle of the night.

  I go down the stairs with a haste that startles the gull. After I snap on my snowshoes, I climb out one of the lee windows. Looking back, I see the gull soar among the rafters of the old white church, out of the reach of the snow that swirls below him, out of mine.

  Tonight, on hundreds of such islands around the coast of Newfoundland, in restored houses, in cottages and cabins much more primitive than mine, others wait out the storm, which they know may last for days. It is partly for such intervals of enforced idleness and confinement that they have chosen to winter here. Snow blots out the world by day as well as the darkness does by night. And day and night there will be no sound outside but that of the wind that blows from where the melting of the old ice stalled ten thousand years ago.

  Nothing on the radio but shrieks of static that seem to be mimicking the storm. I remember my proscription not to dwell on my destiny or that of anyone I know, not to write, but tonight I cannot help it.

  There are roads you can travel to where they were abandoned fifty years ago, to piers at which boats from smaller islands docked when their owners made the trip to Newfoundland. On each of these islands there is a hermitage where at night a lone light burns. In them live people who will never double back, for whom history has been suspended and nationality is obsolete. Some of them are people who, instead of leaving with the fleets of floating houses in the sixties, stayed behind. Others, from the main island of Newfoundland or even from the continent, went back to these abandoned islands whose populations in the census thereby rose from none to one or two.

  They can see from where they live the life that they declined, or the lights of that life anyway, the lights of towns and especially
on cloudy nights the glow from cities in the sky. They see lines of lights that trace out the shapes of roads they have never used or whose use they have forsworn. Like their fellows on the main island, they are the hard-core holdouts. They keep vigil for a destiny that will never be resumed, commemorate a life they know is lost. I am not one of them. I cannot hold that vigil with them.

  But I am still drawn down those dead-end roads at night to the sea and the piers from which the lantern lights in houses on islands far from shore can still be seen. I told my father once when I was too young to have sense enough to keep the observation to myself that as these islands were to Newfoundland, so Newfoundland was to the world. He smiled and said nothing. He did not want to be fated to irresolution, or a life of protest, did not want to be a man without a country or a patriot of one that never was. But neither could he pledge an allegiance that he did not feel. “The land,” he once told me, “is more important than the country. The land is there before you when you close your eyes at night and still there in the morning when you wake. No one can make off with the land the way they made off with the country in 1949.”

  He told me the story of the Newfoundlanders travelling abroad with passports deemed by our new government to be good until 1954. For years after Confederation, they travelled the world as Newfoundlanders, itinerant citizens of a country that, since they saw it last, had ceased to be. In no sense were these people anything but Newfoundlanders until the first time they set foot on “native” soul, or until their five years were up. There were supposed to be some who neither came back home nor acquired new passports from the Canadian embassies in their countries of residence. Instead, they stayed away in protest, in self-exile from the country that now occupied their own. I loved the idea of these Newfoundlanders in the States, in England, Germany or France blending in among foreigners, still carrying their outdated passports. Citizens of no country, staging their futile, furtive, solitary protests that were at once so grand and so absurd. I wasn’t even sure if there were such people, or if it was possible for anyone to live that way for long without detection. But it was a good story. And for someone who, like me, was born after 1949, the very existence of the country known as Newfoundland was just a story, composed of countless stories I had been told or read in books, of exhibits in museums, of monuments and statues and inscription-bearing plaques.

  The country of no country is a story almost as enduring as the land.

  IN 1992, NOT long after the cod fishery was closed, my parents phoned and told me they were leaving Newfoundland, going to Alberta, where my brothers and their children lived.

  “The Newfoundland I knew is gone,” my father said.

  He said it regretfully, but it also sounded a little like wishful thinking—wishful thinking that it might not be too late to escape the pull of the past. He was hoping that space would do what time had not. I considered telling him so but decided not to. The house was sold. The arrangements were already made and their minds made up.

  Was it possible that three thousand miles from home, in the heart of the continent, morning would not find him brooding at the window, that a day might pass when he did not think of Charlie and the moment of their parting on the beach, that not every day would feel as though the referendum had been newly lost or feel like induction day? It might not be too late for him, for them to not mind that nationality was obsolete, that it no longer mattered where they lived because the Newfoundland they loved, their Newfoundland, did not exist.

  He had been in the college lab in January of 1949 examining soil samples under a microscope, lost in this just-discovered other world, when one of his professors called him out into the hall and handed him a telegram from his brother Gordon that ended with the words “Come home.” Was it possible, three thousand miles from home, that he would think of that less often?

  It must have seemed possible. It must have seemed, in those days before they left, that anything was possible. And it must not often seem so when you are in your sixties. Moving might be worth it, just for that.

  It was only when my parents left it that I really felt that I had left Newfoundland. I had been living away from Newfoundland for most of the past twelve years, in Toronto for the last three.

  It seemed for a while that my past had been erased, that my memory extended back no further than my twenties, as if I had had amnesia since then and knew only where my last twelve years were spent. And even when this feeling passed, my memories of home seemed less legitimate, almost counterfeit, the importance I had invested them with foolishly overblown, as if they could not have been worth much, having happened in a place that everyone I loved had left. Like me, all my brothers and sisters had left. But it had felt as if I had remained true to home, could not be said to have abandoned it, as long as my parents were there.

  Their decision to leave came from out of the blue, as their decisions to move house when I was a child had. I remembered coming home from school one day to find my grandfather’s truck in the yard, piled high with all our furniture. We were moving again, but I had not known it until that moment when I saw the truck. I had not known when I left the house that morning that I would never set foot inside of it again. That was exactly how I felt when they told me on the phone that they were selling the house. I had not known when I last left it that I would never see the inside of it again.

  The thought of them by themselves in a house in a place as unlike Newfoundland as the Prairies filled me with such dread that for nights I could not sleep. I was anxious, for them, I thought. What would happen to them? How could they possibly, at their ages, manage such a move?

  It was a long time before I realized that they might not miss it as much as I would miss their being there.

  During his last days in Newfoundland, he listened to the Fishermen’s Broadcast on the CBC, the one I used to listen to as a child when he was off on a tour of the south coast, the broadcast that, out of habit, the idle fishermen still listened to as gale and freezing-spray warnings were issued for stretches of water where no fishing boats had sailed for years.

  He listened to the “temperature roundup,” which gave the present temperature and weather conditions in places around the island, the places they used to visit in the Belle Bay or landed offshore from in a seaplane and walked to across the ice, places he hadn’t seen in years but each of which he pictured when the announcer said its name, isolated, desolate places he was glad he no longer had to go to, yet somehow missed or thought he did. Perhaps the names just reminded him of time if not quite wasted then inscrutably disappointing, time that should have yielded something more, for him, for Newfoundland, though what that something was he couldn’t say.

  There were many last things that had to be done. They had to bid goodbye to mystified relatives and friends who could not help feeling abandoned and betrayed. There was no time to give everyone more of an explanation than this: they were leaving to be with their children, going to the province where those of their children who had children lived. This was not the real reason and they knew it, but they did not know what the real reason was. A last trip had to be made to Ferryland to see Gordon and Rita, Millie, Kitty. My father had to climb the Gaze and say goodbye to Nan and Charlie.

  On the Downs, the archaeologists who were still looking for the ruins of Baltimore’s mansion had uncovered the ashes of a nearly four-hundred-year-old forge. The first blacksmith’s forge in the New World. The forge that Wynne had written about from Ferryland to Lord Baltimore in England: “The Forge hath been finished this five weeks.”

  A last trip had to be made to old St. John’s to see Eva in her hillside house that overlooked the harbour. Eva tried to talk them out of leaving and, failing, consoled herself by predicting they would soon come back. Something they thought was permanent but that was really only temporary had come over them, she said, though she did not say what that something was.

  Though they were in their sixties, the time had come, as it seemed it did eventually for all Newfoundla
nders, to set out on their journey westward. Alberta was not a place to retire to but a place where people went to start again, to make a new beginning. And that was how they spoke of it.

  After wandering for years from house to house all over the Goulds, my mother, when they were finally able to afford a house of their own, had wound up by necessity in one directly across the road from her father’s. That, literally and figuratively, it seemed to her, was how far she had got, that was the limit of her life’s adventure and her leash, across the road. She had faced south for twenty-five years, then crossed the road to spend the next twenty-five facing north, the view reversed. It was as though she had stood on the same spot all her life and in the middle of her life had merely turned around.

  It was years now since the farm had failed. Her father’s house was being lived in by strangers, the land behind it unworked in years, growing over with wild grass and hay, alders, juniper and spruce. The old forest that her father cleared was growing back after years of waiting on the borders of the field for him to leave. The outbuildings, all looking as if some bored giant had crumpled them slightly in passing, were windowless, doorless, their roofs caved in. The cellar had all but fallen into the hole it had sheltered for decades. Watching the farm they had all worked so hard to preserve pass slowly into ruin was not how she wanted to spend the balance of her life.

  I had left when I was forty years younger than they were now. For the first time, I knew better than they did what they were facing. But it was not something that I could prepare them for. They were setting out like a pair of youngsters who had never been far from home before and were more exhilarated than apprehensive at not knowing what was waiting for them.

  I came back from the mainland supposedly to help them move but really because my own leaving had still not taken and I thought that leaving with them, spending the last night with them in the house, would change that and I would at last feel what I ought to have when I left alone twelve years earlier and again eight years after that.