The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Read online

  Acclaim for Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

  “This fine book [is] an eloquent … tribute to a place more willful than even its toughest inhabitants. The very human story of Smallwood and Fielding and its historical counterpart … gather momentum to achieve a mesmerizing inevitability.”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “A spellbinding, must-read tale.… Johnston’s authentic sense of place, history and romance are woven into a magical tapestry.”

  — Winnipeg Free Press

  “One of the year’s best novels: serious and funny, uncompromisingly original yet accessible.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “With the lyricism of a lost lover, Johnston presents an awe-inspiringly barren and relentless landscape. [His] skill in marrying the political and historical with the personal … is remarkable.”

  — New Statesman (UK)

  “This one is a keeper.… A large and deeply enjoyable book, worth reading more than once, and one that deserves to last.”

  — The Halifax Daily News

  “Rich and complex, this splendid, entertaining novel offers Dickensian pleasures.”

  — Andrea Barrett

  “A truly great, gripping book.”

  — The Calgary Sun

  “Johnston reminds us that politics, for all its squalor, is fit material for passion and suspense — and even so, he’s smart enough to let a love story run off with his exceptional book.”

  — Thomas Mallon

  “Funny, poignant and passionate.”

  — The Winnipeg Sun

  “I read The Colony of Unrequited Dreams with great pleasure.… It is a magic storyteller who can impel you to read on and on, surrendering your will to such an original narrative.”

  — Robert MacNeil

  “What struck me about Johnston’s novel … was an immense poignance attached to both the figure of Smallwood and the society from which he emerged. It was a poignance that never sounded a false note, and that was also effectively integrated with moments of humour and high spirits. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams came alive on every page.”

  — Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star, Choice for Best Book of 1998

  “Grand and operatic.… This brilliantly clever evocation of a slice of Canadian history establishes Johnston as a writer of vast abilities and appeal.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A great read.… Johnston is marvellous.”

  — Time

  “Evokes both the stark vastness of Newfoundland and its stifling political and cultural littleness. It is a dizzying feat of scale.”

  — Times Literary Supplement (UK)

  “Resounds with a timely return to the history and the man that brought Newfoundland into Canada.… The Colony of Unrequited Dreams has the history, the pathos, the prejudice, and the politics.”

  — Atlantic Books Today

  “Immensely satisfying … As absorbing as fiction can be — and a marvellous introduction to the work of one of our continent’s best writers.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A hell of a good read. The setting is entrancing, and the harsh beauty of Newfoundland and its magnetic power on its inhabitants are stamped onto every page.… Reminds me of Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business.”

  — Calgary Herald

  “Intensely powerful passages of amazing sensitivity.… Sweeping historical drama, hilarious satire, mystery — this story is big both in length and scope.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

  “An ambitious and sweeping novel, wonderfully rewarding and expertly written.”

  — The Times (UK)

  “Irresistible … Read it, and be wondrously amazed.”

  — Rudy Wiebe

  “Stunning in scope, underscored by … lyricism and finely woven plot.”

  — The Independent (UK)

  “Comical, compelling … In the figure of Smallwood’s soul mate-nemesis, Shelagh Fielding, Johnston has created a boozy, prickly, lancet-tongued seductress who could hold her own against Dorothy Parker.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by 1310945 Ontario Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, in 1999. First published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 1998. Distributed by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, with the exception of public and historical ones, is entirely coincidental.

  Johnston, Wayne

  The colony of unrequited dreams

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37468-4

  I. Title.

  PS8569.03918C64 1999 C813′.54 C98-932556-3

  PR9199.3.J63C64 1999

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For seven women of St. John’s:

  Claire Wilkshire, Mary Lewis, Lisa Moore,

  Sue Crocker, Mary Dalton, Beth Ryan

  and Ramona Dearing.

  The history of the Colony is only very partially contained in printed books; it lies buried under great rubbish heaps of unpublished records, English, Municipal, Colonial and Foreign, in rare pamphlets, old Blue Books, forgotten manuscripts …

  — D. W. PROWSE, A History of Newfoundland (1895)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I - The Brow

  The Boot

  The Feild

  Judges

  The Book

  Mundy Pond

  Harold Dexter

  The Docks

  Old Lost Land

  II - A Continent of Strangers

  The Newfoundland Hotel

  The Call

  A Modest Proposal

  Hines

  The Backhomer

  III - Field Day

  The Walk

  I Once Was Lost

  Clara

  Fielding

  Sir Richard

  The Dirt Poor and the Filthy Rich

  Fielding’s Father

  The Nones of 1932

  IV - Interregnum

  The British

  Consummation Comes

  The Morning Post

  The Barrelman

  Fort Pepperrell, 1943

  The Most Intimate of Circumstances

  V - Confessions

  Scuttlework

  The Night of the Analogies

  A Man You Never Knew

  As Loved Our Fathers

  VI - Two Hemispheres

  We Let the Old Flag Fall

  Junket

  Revelations

  Something More Important Than Mere Blood

  Acknowledgements

  The Custodian of Paradise

  About the Author

  I

  THE BROW

  They had been friends and fellow students at Oxford, and in quite a natural way, as one pawns off a worthless horse on a friend, so Sir William sold a large portion of his grant at a very high price to Lord Baltimore.

  — D.W. PROWSE, A History of Newfoundland

  The Boot

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 19, 1949

  Dear Smallwood:

  You may not know it yet, but I am back in St. John’s. Six months since Confederation. The past is literally another country now.

  I remember, it was in
New York, I think, you once suggested that I do as Boswell did with Johnson and keep a running tally of your life. Even now, knowing you as well as I do, it seems hard to believe that you meant it, but you did. And you were so offended when I laughed.

  I walk as far as I ever did, though it takes me longer. The past is a place I visit on Sunday afternoons. Things I cannot remember when I have been indoors a week come flooding back.

  I look up at the Brow, which separates the city from the sea, and think of you. What is the name of the river, I asked my father when I was five, that runs between the city and the Brow? The Waterford? he said. No, the big river, I said. By which I meant the harbour.

  I go to the west end, where the coal piers and the car barns used to be. I like to remember what used to be where something else now stands, or what used to be where there is nothing now. The pastime of the old, and I am not yet fifty. Did you know that you can tell from where the mansard roofs begin how far the fire burned in 1892?

  I walk along the waterfront and watch homesick fishermen from the Portuguese white fleet play soccer on the pavement of the apron, their ball bouncing off the steel hulls of ships and landing in the harbour.

  I have been remembering the city, Smallwood. In 1900, there were forty thousand people in St. John’s. If it had grown at the pace that other cities that size have grown at since, there would be half a million people here. Even now, no one thinks of it as a place from which nature has been crowded out.

  But how different it used to be, Smallwood, this city, yours and mine. More yours than mine, you would have said back then. I came from what your father called the quality, you from what my father, more fondly than you might imagine, called the scruff.

  Animals were everywhere. The smell and sound of them was everywhere. Cows, goats, chickens, horses, dogs.

  Goats wandered about at will the way cats in cities do today. If they lingered long enough in one neighbourhood, they were designated “lost” and were “claimed” by someone. But it was a rare goat who would stand for being tethered, so they more or less remained common property. Everyone milked them. For children, to go out milking was not much different than to go out picking berries. It was a common sight, children chasing goats down Water Street with buckets in their hands; children in winter thirstily gulping warm goat’s milk from tin cans.

  I was afraid of the crossing sweepers, boys wielding birch brooms who hung round intersections waiting for people to cross the streets. They walked backwards in front of my father and me, heads down, furiously sweeping the dust or snow, clearing a path for us. My father, once we reached the other side, would give the sweeper a penny, sometimes more, depending on how poor he looked. The same boy would then sweep another pedestrian back across the street on the very track that he had swept for us, redundantly sweeping it again. That it was just a disguised form of begging I didn’t understand. On the same downtown street, we might be swept across like curling stones half a dozen times by the same fierce-faced little boy, who I felt was picking on my father and who, to my indignation, did not sweep a path for anyone who was not well dressed.

  What I miss most are the horses. The sound of the city changed gradually as the horses were replaced by cars and the streets were paved.

  I remember the sound of a lone horse clopping past the house when it was dark outside. The double plumes of steam that issued from the nose of every horse when it was cold. It seems now that they vanished overnight, that one morning I woke up and there were cars instead of horses in the streets.

  In these same streets I saw women twirling parasols and walking arm in arm with men in tall black hats. And children, with their bare legs mud-bespattered, hop-scotched between the potholes. And men gingerly rolled casks of port the size of steamrollers from Newman’s, where it was aged in mine-like cellars, to ships that sailed to Boston and New York, where the expatriate quality drank it with their meals. My father drank one glass of Newman’s port a day.

  The wooden water tanks set out at intervals along the streets, where people wearing hoops from which buckets hung went to get their water. I would watch in wonder as some hoop-wearing woman staggered by bearing half a dozen pails of water.

  The smell of the salt fish. I miss that, too, though I could never stand the taste. The first few hundred feet of land beyond the harbour is no longer spread with cod, nor is cod stacked storeys high in the premises of Harbour Drive as it used to be. Some of the streets were arched over by fish-flakes propped up on mast-like stilts, on top of which salt cod was laid out to dry and beneath which, in the shade that reeked of brine, people took cover from the rain while the traffic passed.

  The harbour. I loved the harbour as only a child to whom it was nothing more than a place to walk could love it. I remember how the harbour looked when it was crammed with bare-masted schooners and steamers with four smokestacks whose mainmasts were so tall they had to be brought in from other countries. There are only steel ships now, and from time to time a tall ship for the tourists and the young, with gleaming sails and polished pine, looking nothing like the tall ships of the past.

  There were so many schooners that when their sails were down, the harbour was a grove of spear-like masts.

  After it rained, the schooners would unfurl their sails to let them dry, a stationary fleet under full sail, the whole harbour a mass of flapping canvas you could hear a mile away. How high those sails were. If they had not been translucent, they would have cast a shadow in the evening halfway across the city.

  Instead, in the evening, in the morning, the sun shone through the sails and cast an amber-coloured light across the harbour and the streets, a light I have not seen in twenty years.

  Water Street was paved from end to end with brain-jarring, axle-cracking cobblestones. It was the only paved street. The rest were mere dirt roads, with potholes so large and so enduring that some were given nicknames. The main streets were occasionally tarred in summer to keep the dust down and, in theory at least, to prevent the creation of further potholes. On dry days, dust lay like bloom on everything. If there was no wind, a yellow cloud of dust formed above the city. You once told me that your father, looking down from the Brow, always noted the appearance of that cloud with glee, as he did the fact that when they tarred the streets of St. John’s, the reek of oil was such that even the quality could not leave their windows open.

  The city smells. Tar and dust, horse manure and turpentine, the hybrid hum of fish and salt and the reek of bilge-water. The smell of coal that was burned in factories and forges and the boiler rooms of ships. The city sounds. The grinding of the wheels of the streetcar as it struggled up the hill to Rawlin’s Cross.

  The parrots squawking in the rigging of the schooners from Jamaica and Barbados that came loaded down with rum and left likewise with salt fish.

  I remember the shrieking hordes of sea gulls that hovered above the tables of the men who cleaned the fish on the side-streets, the “coves” between Water Street and Harbour Drive, the gulls swooping down and plucking at the fish guts while the men still held them in their hands.

  My father, being a surgeon, cleaned his own fish, denying he did so because uncleaned fish cost a little less. I remember once he lugged by the gills with both hands a cod so long its tail dragged and left a trail of slime behind us on the sidewalk. He barely made it to the carriage, and when he laid the cod on the paper he had set out, he measured it at four feet long and said it must have weighed a hundred pounds. “More than you,” he said. I looked at the cod, lying there in the carriage with its little beard-like chin barbel and black spots on its skin as big as eyeballs. “There’s just the two of us,” I said. “We can’t eat all that.” “We’re not eating any of it,” he said. “It’s for the hospital.”

  I used to enjoy the slow descent of evening on the city, watching from my bedroom window the clapboard houses fading as if their light came from within and, after seeping slowly from them one last time, would not return. Every day it looked like that. And every day
there were a thousand other such sights, a tedium of wonder that exhausted me.

  It was like that, Smallwood. Not three hundred years ago but twenty. One generation.

  In this journal I write to people as if I am bidding them goodbye, as if they are asleep in the next room and will read what I have written in the morning when I’m gone.

  It is impossible to fix exactly in time when something happened, and sometimes impossible to remember how life was before it did. This was our city when we were still in school. This is what it looked and smelled and sounded like.

  But how it was before what happened between us, how it felt before we met, we can no more recall than we can how we felt when we were born.

  I AM A NEWFOUNDLANDER. Although up to the age of forty-six I would have been voted by those who knew me to be the man least likely to warrant a biography, one has been written.

  My mother believed my birthdate, Christmas Eve, 1900, predestined me for greatness. One day before Christ’s birthday. One week before the new century. I was the first of thirteen children, the last of whom was also born on Christmas Eve, when I was twenty-five years old. “Thirteen,” my father said, “a luckless number for a luckless brood.”

  No one called my father Charlie. Everyone called him Smallwood, which he hated because, I think, it reminded him that he was a certain someone’s son, not self-created.

  After accomplishing the rare feat of graduating from high school, my father set out for Boston with high hopes, but came back destitute. He had then worked for a time at the family boot-and-shoe factory, “working under the old man’s boot,” he said, referring to my grandfather and the giant black boot with the name Smallwood written on it, which hung suspended from an iron bar that was bored into the cliffs about ten feet above the water at the entrance to the Narrows, so placed by my grandfather to advertise to illiterate fishermen the existence of Smallwood’s Boots, a store and factory on Water Street, where a smaller but otherwise identical boot hung suspended from a pole above the wooden sidewalk.