Baltimore's Mansion Read online

  Baltimore’s Mansion

  National Bestseller

  Winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 1999 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction

  “A love letter not only to [Johnston’s] homeland, but to his father, a staunch anti-Confederate unable to relinquish his vision of what Newfoundland once was and could have been. Thanks to Johnston’s powers of evocation, the reader is able to share a fleeting glimpse of that vision.”

  —Lynn Coady, Chatelaine

  “A humane and winning book, passionate and yet careful in its articulation of the old story of fathers and sons, poetic in its narrative freedom, but very personal as well.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “This is an absorbing, sometimes amusing, often moving read, carried strongly by Mr. Johnston’s fine prose.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “A great companion to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.… The family’s political fury gives zip to Johnston’s decision to write about Smallwood and both books reveal the frightening grandeur of the land.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “Baltimore’s Mansion is an unusual and vibrant book, a fine tribute to the island that has been such a formidable part of the Johnston and other clans, a land whose influence is hard to define but is evident in the way one views the world.”

  —The Edmonton Journal

  “Deftly weaving family stories, political history and Arthurian legend, Johnston reflects on the tragic destiny of ‘the Avalon’, a community that once believed it could be an island—and a nation—unto itself.”

  —Elm Street

  “Easily one of the best memoirs ever published in this country.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “[A] beautifully woven…collection of memories taken intact and replayed so clearly the reader becomes an intimate bystander. Long after the book is put down the images will continue to swirl within easy grasp.”

  —New Brunswick Telegraph Journal

  Also by Wayne Johnston

  The Story of Bobby O’Malley

  The Time of Their Lives

  The Divine Ryans

  Human Amusements

  The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

  For the Johnstons of Ferryland

  For the Callanans—Laus, Cindy, Tim and Joey—of St. John’s

  “The Forge hath been finished this five weekes… wee have prospered to the admiration of all beholders…. All things succeed beyond my expectation.”

  From a letter by Captain Edward Wynne, Governor of the Colony of Ferryland, reporting on the progress of Baltimore’s mansion, to the colony’s patron, Lord Baltimore, who took residence in the spring of 1627.

  Ferryland, July 28, 1622

  I AM FOREBORN of spud runts who fled the famines of Ireland in the 1830s, not a man or woman among them more than five foot two, leaving behind a life of beggarment and setting sail for what since Malory were called the Happy Isles to take up unadvertised positions as servants in the underclass of Newfoundland.

  Having worked off their indenture, they who had been sea-fearing farmers became seafaring fishermen and learned some truck-augmenting trade or craft that they practised during the part of the year or day when they could not fish.

  Their names.

  In reverse order: Johnston. Johnson. Jonson. Jenson… MacKeown. “Mac” in Gaelic meaning “son” and Keown “John.”

  MY FATHER GREW up in a house that was blessed with water from an iceberg. A picture of that iceberg hung on the walls in the front rooms of the many houses I grew up in. It was a blown-up photograph that yellowed gradually with age until we could barely make it out. My grandmother, Nan Johnston, said the proper name for the iceberg was Our Lady of the Fjords, but we called it the Virgin Berg.

  In 1905, on June 24, the feast day of St. John the Baptist and the day in 1497 of John Cabot’s landfall at Cape Bonavista and “discovery” of Newfoundland, an iceberg hundreds of feet high and bearing an undeniable likeness to the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared off St. John’s harbour. As word of the apparition spread, thousands of people flocked to Signal Hill to get a glimpse of it. An ever-growing flotilla of fishing boats escorted it along the southern shore as it passed Petty Harbour, Bay Bulls, Tors Cove, Ferryland, where my father’s grandparents and his father, Charlie, who was twelve, saw it from a rise of land known as the Gaze.

  At first the islands blocked their view and all they could see was the profile of the Virgin. But when it cleared Bois Island, they saw the iceberg whole. It resembled Mary in everything but colour. Mary’s colours were blue and white, but the Virgin Berg was uniformly white, a startling white in the sunlight against the blue-green backdrop of the sea. Mary’s cowl and shawl and robes were all one colour, the same colour as her face and hands, each feature distinguishable by shape alone. Charlie imagined that, under the water, was the marble pedestal, with its network of veins and cracks. Mary rode without one on the water and there did not extend outwards from her base the usual lighter shade of sea-green sunken ice.

  The ice was enfolded like layers of garment that bunched about her feet. Long drapings of ice hung from her arms, which were crossed below her neck, and her head was tilted down as in statues to meet in love and modesty the gaze of supplicants below.

  Charlie’s mother fell to her knees, and then his father fell to his. Though he wanted to run up the hill to get a better look at the Virgin as some friends of his were doing, his parents made him kneel beside them. His mother reached up and, putting her hand on his shoulder, pulled him down. A convoy of full-masted schooners trailed out behind the iceberg like the tail of some massive kite. It was surrounded at the base by smaller vessels, fishing boats, traps, skiffs, punts. His mother said the Hail Mary over and over and blessed herself repeatedly, while his father stared as though witnessing some end-of-the-world-heralding event, some sight foretold by prophets in the last book of the Bible. Charlie was terrified by the look on his father’s face and had to fight back the urge to cry. Everywhere, at staggered heights on the Gaze, people knelt, some side-on to keep their balance, others to avert their eyes, as if to look for too long on such a sight would be a sacrilege.

  A man none of them knew climbed the hill frantically, lugging his camera, which he assembled with shaking hands, trying to balance the tripod, propping up one leg of it with stones. He crouched under his blanket and held above his head a periscope-like box which, with a flash and a puff of foul-smelling yellow smoke, exploded, the mechanism confounded by the Virgin, Charlie thought, until days later when he saw the picture in the Daily News. Even then it seemed to him that the Virgin must have lent the man’s machine the power to re-create in black and white her image on the paper, the same way she had willed the elements to fashion her image out of ice.

  He had seen photographs before but had never watched as one was taken. She was the first object he had seen both in real life and in photographs. For the rest of his life, whenever he saw a photograph, he thought of her and the man he had been so surprised to see emerge unharmed from beneath his blanket.

  How relieved he was when the Virgin Berg and her attending fleet sailed out of sight and his parents and the other grown-ups stood up and blessed themselves. Soon the miracle became mere talk, less and less miraculous the more they tried to describe what they had seen, as if, now that it was out of sight, they doubted that its shape had been quite as perfect as it seemed when it was looming there in front of them.

  They heard later of things they could not see from shore, of the water that ran in rivers from the Virgin, from her head and from her shoulders, and that spouted from wound-like punctures in her body, cascading down upon the boats below, onto the fishermen
and into the barrels and buckets they manoeuvred into place as best they could. Some fishermen stood, eyes closed and mouths wide open, beneath the little waterfalls, gulping and gagging on the ice-cold water, their hats removed, their hair and clothing drenched, hands uplifted.

  The priests and nuns were at the wharf when the ice-laden fishing boats returned, the boats riding low so weighted down were they with water and with ice fragments that had been salvaged from around the berg — leavings, chunks, bergy bits and growlers — that they had snared with gaffs and nets or had hacked off and dragged aboard. The water and ice were loaded into barrels donated by a merchant for the purpose, and the barrels were taken to the sacristy, then down to the basement where they were kept like casks of wine, consecrated by a bishop and afterwards used sparingly as holy water in the sacrament of Extreme Unction and, in rare cases, in baptisms and the blessings of houses.

  My great-grandfather’s house was blessed with water from the iceberg because he was a blacksmith. My father told me this as if it was self-evident why a blacksmith should be so honoured. Droplets of water thawed after ten thousand years, water in its liquid form for the first time in ten millennia, were splashed on the walls, floors and windows, on the chairs, the tables and the beds and on every part of Charlie’s father’s forge, the forge that the priest believed was for sacredness second only to the church.

  Nan told my father when he was nine that she could see the stains where the water had been sprinkled thirty years ago. She pointed to places on the wall and on the floor. “See,” she said, but no matter how closely my father stared at the flowered pattern in the wallpaper or at the linoleum on the kitchen floor, he could not see what she was pointing at.

  There were two versions of the story of the ultimate fate of the Virgin Berg, and my father did not know which was true. In one version, the fishermen stayed with the iceberg until it floated southward, away from the island, out to sea. In the other version, it ran aground on the shoals of Cape St. Mary’s and in some spectacular fashion was destroyed.

  When I went to school, the nuns told us that the Virgin Berg started out from the glaciers of Greenland as an amorphous chunk of ice which the God-wielded elements gradually moulded into a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Berg slowly taking shape as it floated down past Baffin Island and the coast of Labrador until, when the sun rose on June 24, 1905, it appeared fully formed off the headlands of St. John’s, a city named after the Baptist whose feast day this was. That June 24 was also the day of Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland left no question in the minds of Catholics that the iceberg was a sign in confirmation of the fact that God was one of them and a sign to Protestants of God’s disfavour.

  I thought of the Virgin Berg moving slowly southward in the dark of night on the Labrador current, by day too far from shore to be encountered by fishing boats, far from the shipping lanes, an unseen work-in-progress, its nine-times-as-large pedestal submerged, dredging trenches in the ocean floor, plowing through whatever it encountered.

  Even in these daydreams, I could not decide how the Virgin Berg had met its end. I liked to think of it as it continued south, beyond the range of the fishing boats, disappearing slowly from view, that Virgin of ice regally erect. For how long, again unseen, had it persisted in the likeness of the Virgin? Probably not long, once it encountered the warm Gulf Stream.

  Even more vividly I imagined the Virgin foundering on the shoals of Cape St. Mary’s. Where else should an iceberg shaped like Mary meet its end? Great chunks of ice sliding off into the water, cracks appearing in the base until, in one grand explosion, it disintegrated from within, the Virgin’s head falling first, toppling from the shoulders, then a chaos of ice and ocean, God’s handiwork undone in a God-like, apocalyptic way.

  For years, Ferryland existed for me only as the place from which the photograph was taken, a prospect off-camera from which the view of the Virgin Berg grew dimmer day by day. I did not know what it meant that my father was “from” this place. I wondered where he’d be from when there was nothing in the photograph but fog.

  WHEN I WAS six, I believed what my parents and all my aunts and uncles wished were true, that the Avalon Peninsula, “the Avalon” we called it, was itself a country. It is joined to the main island of Newfoundland by an isthmus so narrow that, while standing in the middle of it, you can see the ocean from both sides. My father said we should dig a canal through the isthmus and declare our independence. He felt this way because of something darkly called “the referendum.” I knew nothing more about it than its name. When I asked him, he said it meant, “We used to be a country, but we’re not one any more.”

  The Avalon. The nuns told us that one of the first New World colonists, England’s secretary of state, Lord Baltimore, called the colony he founded in the 1620s “Avalon” because of a legend according to which St. Joseph of Arimathea introduced Christianity to Britain in a place called Avalon in Somersetshire. But they did not tell us how that first Avalon had got its name.

  They did not tell us that in one of the Arthurian legends Avalon was the name of an island somewhere to the west of England where King Arthur sailed to be healed of his wounds. I found this out by reading Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a copy of which was found among the possessions of Aunt Freda, my father’s sister, who grew up in Ferryland, acquired a master of arts in English literature and died of cancer when she was forty-three.

  There were many parallels between my world and the one portrayed in the book, parallels that Freda herself seemed to have noted, for there were little checkmarks in the margins. It so happened that my father’s first name was Arthur and his second Reginald, which I was told meant “King.” I’m sure these coincidences meant more to me than they did to Freda; but Freda — perhaps for personal reasons that I was too young to appreciate — had put a checkmark by what was to become my favourite part of Morte d’Arthur.

  It was the part in which the dying King declares: “… I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound; and if thou hear never more of me, then pray ye for my soul.”

  Then Sir Bedivere puts the wounded Arthur on board a barge “with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur.”

  The two images, the image of the Virgin Berg and that of the barge with its cargo of hooded queens, merged in my mind to form various hybrid images. I pictured an iceberg with not one but several massive statues, the hooded queens surrounding the Virgin who reared up above them. Sometimes there were just the hooded queens, human sized, and they appeared from out of the fog not on a wooden barge but on a pan of ice, as if they had been set adrift against their will. Sometimes on the pan of ice the hooded queen, unaccompanied by her attendants, stood with her arms folded on her breast in mimicry of the queen of heaven in the photograph.

  An arrow pointed from the word “Avilion” to a note my aunt had written in the margin: “Avalon, the Celtic abode of the blessed. An island paradise in the western seas where King Arthur and the other heroes of the Arthurian legends went when they were dying. In one legend, the ‘Isle of Apples’ to which the dying Arthur was taken.”

  I understand now why the nuns traced the derivation of Avalon no further back than St. Joseph of Arimathea, for this Isle of Apples sounds very much like a pagan Garden of Eden. Another note in my aunt’s book read: “Over the years, the legend of Avalon was modified and the location of Avalon was changed. By the thirteenth century, it was believed to be Glastonbury in Somerset, where, according to legend, Joseph of Arimathea, escaping from persecution in his homeland, built the first Christian church in England. So it was that Baltimore, a follower of the legend, chose ‘Avalon’ as the name for his Roman Catholic colony at Ferryland.”

  Poor Baltimore. He thought it was a heavenly haven he was going to when he set sail with his family in the late 1620s, a colony created at his command and now ready to receive him. But I did not think of him then as poor Bal
timore but as Baltimore, “a follower of a legend,” which it seemed to me was a great thing to be, no matter what the legend was, all the more so when it was that of Arthur and Avalon.

  So there were two Avalons, the Avalon where we lived and the Avalon to which, like King Arthur, we would travel when we died.

  Perhaps once a summer, for the first few summers after I started school, we drove as far as the isthmus but never past it. It was almost always foggy there. Owing to the narrowness of that strip of land, the wind was onshore regardless of which way it was blowing, and fog was almost always racing across the isthmus from one direction or the other. It was a place of confluence, turbulence. It was for the same reason always cold there; at the narrowest point of the isthmus, a trench of glacial rubble like the long-dried-up bed of some ancient river ran from sea to sea, a trench strewn with boulders and jagged shards of granite. The rest was bedrock. Over it in some places was laid a mat of root-woven sod on which dwarf spruce and alders somehow grew, their roots like tentacles, enclosing rocks, four and five feet of them exposed between the mat of sod on the boulder and the ground beneath it into which the roots were sunk.

  I could always tell when we were nearing the isthmus, for on sunny days it became foggy, and on foggy days so much more foggy that all the world except the inside of the car was blotted out. Although it was no more than a few miles deep, as soon as we drove into the fog we turned around, as if we could no more go farther than if the road had been washed out. We did not have any agreed-upon point of return, for the depth of that sea-spanning stream of fog varied.

  The Isthmus of Avalon. The isthmus. It was the edge of the known world, and looked it. The word itself evoked the place. Or the place had inspired the word. Like the word, the isthmus seemed to have been fashioned out of mist, a sibilant, lisping mist, an “I” with “mist” on either side.