Baltimore's Mansion Read online

  There is a sudden surge in the wind and he realizes that for some time he has been walking with his eyes closed. He opens them and sees what he takes to be the light of the lighthouse on the Head. It is dulled and faintly flickering as if down there it may already have begun to snow. But it can’t have or the foghorn would be sounding. He puts his hands to his eyes and finds that they are blurred with tears, wind-bidden they must be, for he feels nothing.

  “The lighthouse,” he says, pointing.

  His father grabs his hand. “No,” he says. “I just lit a match — that’s all.”

  He could not have lit a match in all this wind.

  “Don’t give up,” his father says, which frightens him. “It can’t be that much farther now.”

  Something so inimical, so contrary that it must be coming from outside him is inclining him away from what, deep in his soul, he knows is true. He wonders what this something will make him do, about what it will change his mind.

  He is dying. Everything confirms it. He seems to be remembering the present, to be looking back at now from sometime in the future, some remove that fills him with nostalgia for things still close at hand.

  He thinks of the referendum. He should think of more important things, of what he can say to his father to fool him into thinking that if he goes on ahead without him he can bring back help and save them both.

  There is going to be a referendum, but no one knows exactly when. He would like to know what their margin of victory will be. “Think of the referendum not as a threat but as a chance for Newfoundlanders to renew their vows,” the Major said. He will not be there when they renew their vows. He should renew his now, but he doesn’t know the words. He heard the Major say it once. The vow. The pledge. The Major made it up. He has heard his father say it. He should ask him to recite it. What should he say to his father?

  Twenty-one and he has been nowhere in the world but Newfoundland. He should stop thinking of it as an island, as a place set apart from others by the sea. An island, until you leave it, is the world.

  He comes to with his forehead in the snow, his hands on either side. He is not prone but on all fours, his head hung down.

  “Can you get up, Art?” his father says. Arthur. His father chose that name. His mother, just to tease him, calls him Reginald. His second name. Freda told him it was purely by accident that his parents named him after King Arthur. They did not know that Reginald meant “king.”

  “Can you get up, Art?”

  Yes. He is not sure if he says the word out loud.

  “If he won’t get up, I’ll have to carry him,” his father says. “I don’t think I can. I’m not sure what to do.”

  He sounds as though he’s talking to himself or to the horse.

  “She might not bolt. You never know. But she’ll never let me put him on her back.”

  Sometimes on hot days when he was five or six, he went to the cellar and with his hands scraped the sawdust from the blocks of ice that had been there since his father and his uncle cut them in late winter from a pond above the Gaze. He put his face against the ice, his cheeks, his forehead, rubbed them against it until the ache became unbearable. Then he left the cellar and, facing into the wind, let the warm air dry the water from his skin, from his forehead which, for hours afterwards, felt as if someone’s hand were pressed against it.

  His father will not leave him, not even if he dies. He will tell himself his son is only resting and sit beside him in the snow. And so he can only save his father if he saves himself.

  He feels himself rising.

  He must be lifting me, he thinks. But when he opens his eyes his father is still there beside the horse.

  As he reaches up to take her bridle Connie lowers her head.

  I’m all right.

  He thinks he says the words out loud but his father shows no sign.

  Perhaps he is not really on his feet. He wonders if it might be some illusion that means the end is near. This is his last thought before he hears his father shout. How much time passes in between he does not know.

  “The end of the path.”

  It sounds as though his father has gone on ahead.

  “The end of the path.”

  Even when they’re coming back, they call it that. The end of the path. It’s where the path peters out as you go inland from the Gaze.

  But when you’re heading homeward, this is where the path begins.

  MY FATHER WENT to agricultural college in Truro, Nova Scotia, in the fall of 1948. His intention was not to become a farmer but to work at the government-run Experimental Farm near St. John’s as a technologist.

  He did, for a time after graduation, work at the farm. It was the only job he ever liked, the only one he had a more than merely retrospective fondness for.

  The Experimental Farm existed to answer one question: could crops and livestock be farmed in Newfoundland that would rival, in quality and cost, those grown elsewhere?

  My father and the other technologists on the farm were told to “think of things not as useless but as yet unutilized.” They were asked to enumerate the as-yet-unutilized agricultural resources of Newfoundland.

  Much time and money was spent investigating the uses to which our as-yet-unutilized thirty thousand square miles of bogs and barrens could be put. My father studied ways of converting barrens into pasture land, of growing fodder and hay on peat bogs. He helped raise specimens of vegetables that were just as good as any farmed on the mainland and only several dozen times more expensive to produce.

  The mainlander who had been brought in to run the farm believed that the “attitude” of Newfoundlanders had as much to do with the island’s economic problems as, for instance, the short length of the Newfoundland growing season. He asked my father and the others to see as their mandate the completion of this sentence: “Because of its climate and geography, Newfoundland is ideally suited for the production of…”

  For the technologists, finishing that sentence became a way to pass the time while working. Bent over their microscopes, they would each blurt out their contributions.

  Because of its climate and geography, Newfoundland is ideally suited for the production of alcoholics, royal commissions, snow, unsolvable enigmas, self-pity, mosquitoes and black flies, inferiority complexes, delusions of grandeur, savage irony, impotent malice, unwarranted optimism, entirely justified despair, tall tales, pipe dreams, cannon fodder, children who bear an unnatural resemblance to their grandparents, expatriates.

  In spite of the Experimental Farm, Newfoundland’s only agricultural export in the fifties was blueberries, which grew best on once-valuable timberlands that had been accidentally destroyed by forest fires.

  The federal government soon saw that Newfoundland’s agricultural potential did not warrant a workforce the size of the one at the Experimental Farm, and my father and most of the others were let go.

  Or rather, he was transferred, as he put it, “From land to sea.” He wound up having no choice but to apply his lab technology skills to the fishery when, far from starting new ones, Newfoundlanders began to abandon what few farms there were.

  His being hired by the Department of Fisheries was doubly ironic, first because his whole intention in attending agricultural college had been to eschew all connection with the fishery, and second because the job he had no choice but to accept was with the federal fisheries, which had begun operations in Newfoundland after the country’s Confederation with Canada, the Confederation that he, his family and virtually all of Ferryland had bitterly opposed.

  He lived in denial of these contradictions. By my time, he was well used to it. He had become what my mother called a “fishionary,” part missionary, part visionary when it came to fish. Though he still regarded the sea with a mixture of awe, dread and revulsion, he preached the gospel of the fishery, predicted the imminent invention, by scientists and technologists like him, of new and more efficient ways of catching and preserving fish. Where the farm had failed, “the Sta
tion” would succeed.

  The Station’s official name was the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Biological Station. This was a grand name for a three-storey brick building on Water Street East that, though only completed in 1940, looked by the mid 1960s as if it was a hundred years old. The place was simply referred to as the Station. My father talked not about going to work but about going to the Station. “I have to be at the Station in twenty minutes,” he’d say, saying “Station” as if he loved the place and could not wait to get there. Which may even have been true for a while.

  My father became a fish man, a fish-preoccupied, fish-infatuated man, which, even in the island coastal city of St. John’s was an oddball thing to be. The Station was regarded with scornful amusement by the people of St. John’s, who, while they had no idea what went on inside it, were sure it was a variety of high-flown nonsense never heard of in Newfoundland before Confederation. Its long, ponderous name alone was proof of that.

  But then there was the place itself. Its rooms were still lit late at night, and at the windows you could catch from the street as you were going by a glimpse of men in white lab coats and of strange-looking glass receptacles, and convoluted tubes and other apparatus. The Station was seven windows wide, and my father worked in the lab whose two windows were on the far left side of the second storey as you faced the building from Water Street. Before going into the Station, I imagined him in there, inscrutably engaged in the study of fish. It was more interesting to look at from the outside than to visit. The lab itself reeked of the gas that fuelled the Bunsen burners and of the algae-covered Petri dishes in which bacterial cultures and parasites were grown and scrutinized through microscopes. An air of profound boredom hung over the place and over the men who worked there and repeatedly conducted the same tests that gave the same results.

  Still, my father steeped himself in fish lore. Even in the sixties he believed the Station would help keep alive the one industry that Newfoundland could count on, that would still be there when all of Joey’s mills and mines and factories had been shut down. My father said that because of Joey Smallwood, the fishery was underused, swore that a thousand times as many cod as were being caught and sold were dying of old age.

  My father would take me down onto the apron of the waterfront, which he said used to be lined with cargo ships into which blocks of saltfish were loaded like cords of wood. Now fish no longer had to be salted. Now freezer trawlers docked at harbour side. Their great, cavern-like freezers, when opened to the air, emitted blasts of steam, as if their insides were on fire.

  My father taught me about fish — not about how to catch them, but about the fish themselves, how to tell one kind from another, not just when they were still whole but when they were fillets in the supermarket. He taught me how you could tell from looking at fish if it had been frozen or when it was caught. He taught me where in the ocean each type of fish came from and at what depths they could be found, how what they ate affected how they tasted, how to tell from how they tasted what they ate, how to tell how old they were by examining their skeletons — toting up the cartilaginous layers was much like counting tree rings — how cold, how salty was the water they lived in, the various parasites that preyed on each fish, the microorganisms they were composed of, how each fish was best preserved and processed.

  It was some sort of an escape from fishing itself, this knowledge that he shared with me and whose acquisition was not required by his job. Sometimes it seemed that he was contriving a fascination with the ocean that he did not feel, as if he was trying to fool it into thinking that it didn’t really have him, or that it did but that he didn’t mind, that even if he were free to choose he would live the way he did and his lack of choice was therefore irrelevant. But the chain was not severed; it was only longer than it would have been had he remained a fisherman, longer and easier to disguise as something else.

  He tried to teach me the Latin names of fish.

  Latin, Latin, Latin. It seemed that that was all I heard from him for years. The way he pronounced it, they way he playfully spoke it at me always got me laughing. Sometimes, talking to my mother, he parodied the suave, debonair, literally Latin lover, rhyming off in Latin the names of fish. Cod: Gadus morrhua.

  “Gadus morrhua?” my father would say, proffering a forkful of cod at me. I thought he was making most of it up, though in fact he wasn’t. He told me that the Latin name of the tomcod, a small, permanently immature species of cod, was Microgadus tomcod. Who could blame me for doubting that that was made up? Herring: Clupea haerengus haerengus; tuna: Thunnus thynnus — “Two tins of Thunnus thynnus, thank you,” my father said in grocery stores; turbot: Reinhardtius hippoglossides. My favourite was halibut, Hippoglossus hippoglossus. I absolutely refused to believe that this was its name. Mackerel: Scomber scombrus. These, he told me, had no air bladder, what in the cod was called a “sound,” and so had to swim continuously to keep from sinking. There was the northern shrimp, Pandalus borealis, not to be confused with striped shrimp, Pandalus montagni.

  These were in fact their abbreviated names, their genus and species. A fish’s full name, my father told me, consisted of — all in Latin — its genus, species, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom.

  All through my childhood he told me about fish, more about them than I wanted to know. There were the various kinds of flatfish, for instance, the witch flounder and the winter flounder and the turbot.

  The flatfish started out life with its eyes arranged like those of other fish, but in the first months of its life, one of its eyes slowly moved to the other side of its head so that both eyes were on the same side, necessitating that the fish swim with its eyeless blind side against the ocean floor, which it so perfectly resembled it was absolutely invisible until it moved. Otherwise it lay there, its tandem of same-side eyes barely open, keeping watch for prey and predators, a master of camouflage looking up from the ocean floor. My father had a “flatfish face” that he used to do for me and that always sent me into hysterics.

  He told me that the largest codfish ever caught and recorded had weighed 211 1/2 pounds, had a platter-size tongue that had weighed three pounds and had made a meal for six people. It was known among fishery biologists as “Gadus the Great.” Some people at the Station referred to the codfish in general as “Gadus the Great.”

  He told me that cod was so plentiful on the Grand Banks because of the plankton conveyed south by the Labrador Current. Nowhere in the world was there a plankton feeding ground compared with that of the Grand Banks, and it was all due to the Labrador Current. When I first heard of the Labrador Current, I could not help imagining a river that originated in the heart of the Labrador wilderness and by which plankton was borne along to the North Atlantic.

  And then there were the capelin. There was no fish easier to catch than capelin, for they literally rolled up in waves on the beaches.

  “The capelin are in,” my father said excitedly, waking me up one Sunday morning in June after having just got the word from Gordon in Ferryland. They were not in at Bay Bulls or Witless Bay but they were in at Ferryland. The whole family, not bothering with breakfast, piled into the car.

  The winter had been cold, spring had come late, but at last the capelin had come ashore to spawn, and with the spawning capelin came the cod; on the beach below the Gaze a mass mating was taking place, the females leaving their eggs buried in the sand where they were insulated from the icy water; once the eggs hatched, they would be carried out to sea with each retreating tide.

  The capelin, as if in mass surrender to our species, rolled up on the shore in waves, black waves alive with little fish that, once marooned, flopped about in millions on the sand, olive green on top, silver on the bottom. From a distance, from the height of the house above the sea, it appeared that the water of the coastline had turned black.

  By the time we got down to the beach, there were half a dozen stocky, shaggy-maned ponies lined up on the sand at an angle to the water, waiting patiently to
serve their purpose, harnessed to carts that had large-spoked wooden wheels. Fishermen wearing rubber kneeboots and tweed sod caps used long-handled dip nets to scoop the capelin from the water and dump them in the carts.

  It could have been a scene from a hundred years ago, from June of 1869. The beach swarmed not only with capelin but with children, running about up to their knees in the little fish, each wave being about two parts capelin and one part water. We took off our boots and socks and waded into the capelin. I felt the shock of the icy water on my shins. My feet went numb. I reached down and grabbed two fistfuls of fish, writhing, struggling half-foot-long fish. When I held them to the sun a certain way, I saw, among the olive and silver, iridescent pinks and greens and blues. What a strange bounty it was. I looked about. Dead capelin littered the beach, decaying, drying in the sun, trodden into the wet sand by the horses whose hooves left little craters that filled up with water.

  “Mallotus villosus Muller!” my father shouted, chasing my mother down the beach, in one hand a capelin that he said he was going to shove down her dress.

  We followed the horses and their carts with their teeming mounds of fish flesh as they plodded down the beach towards the road to the wharf. As they struggled up over the steep incline between beach and road, hoofs slipping, we and several dozen children of Ferryland helped them, pushed the carts, the wooden wheels, cheered when they crested the hill.

  We filed along the roadside, a procession of ponies pulling carts of capelin, and fifty or sixty children with dogs trotting along beside us, trying to assert their importance by barking at the ponies who ignored them.

  When I looked back I saw my parents.

  My father was sitting on the beach rocks, knees drawn up, arms resting on them, head hung down in a posture of dejection. My mother stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder, looking out to sea between the islands. She bent over and said something. Gently he dismissed her with a wave of his hand, gestured at us as if to remind her we were watching. She seemed to shrug and began walking down the beach towards us.