Baltimore's Mansion Read online

  My father was in some nebulous, electronic otherworld, in the phone, in the wind-whipped telephone wires, in the dust-covered workings of the radio, in the warm transistor tubes, in the worm-like filaments of orange light that dimmed and flickered when the wind was at its height.

  He was wherever the voices on the air came from. He had not gone anywhere in space. He had been transported to this world of strange-sounding high-pitched voices in which storms of static raged like blizzards. He was out there somewhere in air as thick with static as a blizzard was with snow. And he was tenuously, invisibly there on the television weather map of Newfoundland. “That’s where your father is spending the night,” my mother said, pointing to some jagged little inlet or peninsula west of Baie d’Espoir, and often pointing to it the next night and the next, while on the screen Bob Lewis pointed elsewhere.

  If the place where my father was stranded was big enough, Bob Lewis might say what temperature it was there now and with his marker write the number on the corresponding section of the map. It was twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in Ramea. That was all the verification of its existence we would get.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, the phone would ring, and I would hear my mother run to answer it. A crank call. A wrong number. Nothing on the other end but dial tone. She went to bed again in the vain hope of getting back to sleep. I would hear the click of her lighter and, soon after, smell the smoke of a cigarette.

  During the worst winter storms, when she was especially anxious or upset and before it became impossible to go outside, she took us to spend the night at her parents’ house, which my father referred to as “the world’s most mournful dwelling place.”

  My grandparents, though they had electricity, used low-watt bulbs that lit the house about as brightly as oil lanterns used to do. The place was always dim and full of looming shadows that went up the wall and partway across the ceiling. Whenever we came to visit, my grandfather, knowing that we never said it otherwise, insisted that we join them in the kitchen to say the rosary. I couldn’t help feeling that we were praying for my father’s safe return.

  My grandfather had spent at least half of every day from age ten to thirty-five fishing for cod off Petty Harbour, and he playfully teased my mother for being so worried about what, compared with the storms he said he had made his way through in a dory powered by nothing more than his arms and a pair of oars, was “barely a breeze.”

  I imagined him “sou’westered” as he called it, dressed in gleaming oilskin from head to toe, plying his absurdly tiny, inadequate craft up and down the sides of massive, slate-black waves.

  The wind surged against the side of the house, the window panes buckled inward and the whistle in the wood stove rose to a shriek until the gust subsided, at which point my grandfather would look up from the paper he was reading and, wetting his thumb to turn a page, say, “Barely a breeze, Genevieve, barely a breeze, my dear.”

  It worked for a while. My mother would laugh at his teasing, encourage him. Then, when he saw she was past the point that his stories would do her any good, he went to bed while we boys were sent to watch TV with the sound turned down so low we had to sit within a foot of it to hear it.

  My mother sat with her mother in the kitchen, the two of them talking softly, my grandmother reassuring my mother that the storm raging outside was not as bad as it looked — she had seen storms much worse before, and my father was doubtless safe on shore.

  He was never more conspicuously absent than on those nights we spent in the world’s most mournful dwelling place and from the kitchen came the murmur of voices while in the front room of the wind-besieged house my brothers and I huddled by the TV set, trying to hear, above the storm, some program like The Big Valley or Bonanza.

  Some summer evenings while my father was away, my mother piled us into the car and drove us down the road to Maddox Cove. We followed the flume into Petty Harbour, where the roads are so narrow it’s necessary for a car to pull onto the shoulder to let another one go by.

  The Catholic side, where my mother’s parents had lived until they set out for the Goulds in the early 1900s, was on our right. Above the Protestant side on our left was the entrance to a long-abandoned mine, a dark door-shaped hole bored straight into the cliff. As a child, my grandmother had been warned not to cross the bridge to the Protestant side of town lest she be spirited away into the mine that led directly down to hell by “blacks,” as the Catholics called the Protestants.

  Beyond the breakwater, pink buoys marked the site of lobster traps. Fishing nets with large cork floats attached were spread out on the ground to dry. Dories being painted or repaired lay overturned beside the road. There were dozens of dories and skiffs anchored inside the breakwater, all linked by an elaborate network of ropes that kept them from colliding when the wind came up. Here, the water was like that of the pond below our house, so calm it mirrored the pattern of lights on the westside hill. But beyond the seawall, there were lozenge-like ripples on the water, the closest thing to calm the ocean that far from shore could get.

  Maddox Cove is just up the shore from Petty Harbour. It’s sparsely settled, just half a dozen houses on the north side of the cove that are owned by fishermen who moor their boats in Petty Harbour. There are no wharves, no breakwater, just an open, unprotected harbour, a horizon uncluttered by jutting rocks or islands, clear sailing all the way to the Old World.

  We picked among the beach rocks for the remains of various shallow-water sea creatures that had been stranded by the tide. Sea urchins, crabs, tom cods, sculpins, jellyfish, even capelin, the last of which had washed ashore two months ago. We found cables of kelp, still wet, encrusted with little sea snails, and long tentacles of seaweed.

  While we combed the beach for “skimmers,” flat rocks that when thrown properly skipped along the surface of the water, my mother walked off by herself on the wet, wave-rippled sand near the water, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her bandana tied beneath her chin. At a certain distance from us she stopped and looked out to sea.

  I imagined that being at the sea’s edge made her feel closer to my father, made her miss him less, or miss him more but in a way that felt good, as missing him sometimes made me feel.

  Petty Harbour was not home for her the way Ferryland still was for my father, in spite of it being the birthplace of her parents. She had never lived there. By coming here, she was getting away from home, away from things that reminded her of him. Except us. And the sea, of course. There was no getting away from that.

  The sea reminded her of where he was, but the beach, aside from costing nothing to visit and keeping us children endlessly occupied without much need of supervision, was a place where no one bearing bad news could call her on the phone or come by the house.

  Once, as she was coming back down the beach, it was clear from her red-rimmed eyes that she’d been crying.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” I said.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said.

  “Mom?” I said.

  The others were out of earshot.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what happened on the beach?”

  “What beach?” she said. “This beach?” She didn’t sound as if she was hiding something.

  “To Dad,” I said. “On the beach in Ferryland. When he was going off to college. Before he went. I think him and his father were on the beach or something. Did something happen?”

  “My love, I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  I saw that it was true. She didn’t know.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I thought Dad said something happened, but maybe I got it mixed up.”

  I knew she would ask my father if he had put this idea in my head. And I knew that he would tell her no.

  We went back to the others. She sat down on the beach rocks. We sat down with her, four boys suddenly, solemnly well behaved, fearfully watching her, dreading another loss of control, another sign that she was more than just our mother and h
ad secret sorrows of her own.

  There had been other times like this, times when in his absence she disappeared into her room for hours, or walked up the cartroad to the top of her father’s farm. When she reappeared, her eyes were puffy from crying, though we never acknowledged it, never asked her what was wrong. We assumed that at the bottom of it all was this job of his, his long absences from home, the anxiety, the loneliness. We were partly right. But how exactly these things manifested themselves between them they hid from us as best they could.

  We stayed there until past twilight, sitting on the beach rocks with our mother while she smoked, all of us facing seaward as if we were waiting for a boat to come ashore.

  There was still no wind, but it was getting cold. She shivered.

  “Snuggle up, boys,” she said. It had been ages since she had asked us to. We used to “snuggle up” with her on Saturday mornings while my father cooked us breakfast. She took Brian on her lap. I knelt behind her and put my arms around her neck, rested my chin on her shoulder, and Ken and Craig, flanking her, each took one of her arms.

  “Is everybody warm?” she said. We nodded. “Me too,” she said.

  Off to our left, above the hills behind the Brow, we could see in the sky the faint glow of St. John’s, five miles of woods away. By boat, Ferryland was thirty miles south, ten miles closer than by road. Far out on the water, beyond the eastern point of Maddox Cove, came the periodic flash of the lighthouse at Cape Spear.

  Every so often, as if the sea had shrugged it ashore, an almost silent swell broke on the beach.

  “This is nice, hey?” she said. Brian said we should stay there all night. My mother laughed and kissed him on the top of the head. “We’ll go camping when your Dad gets back,” she said. “All of us, all night, okay?” Brian, who never forgot a promise, nodded.

  We stayed a little longer, until my mother declared that it was time to head home. We left, scrambling over beach rocks that we couldn’t see and that slid crazily about beneath our feet so that we had to hold on to each other to keep from falling, my mother shrieking with laughter as the four of us all but dragged her to the road. When we reached the car, I looked up. The sky was full of stars.

  BY THE SEVENTIES, there were no more gatherings at Uncle Harold’s house. With all the children grown up, there was not enough room for everyone. The family no longer made the monthly drive to Ferryland, not even in summer, though now the road was paved. My parents went only once or twice a year, when it was my father’s turn to tend his parents’ graves.

  You could go only so long remaining righteous in defeat, protesting that your having lost did not change the fact that you were right, that it was the so-called winners who had lost, because what they had won was not worth winning. Most anti-confederates found some face-saving way of getting on with it.

  My father, however, still saw himself as a man without a country. He knew it struck many people as ridiculous, but this, far from discouraging him, only seemed to egg him on and give him some sort of perverse satisfaction. It was as though he courted scorn, as though, the world being what it was, the mark of his true worth was that it didn’t take him seriously.

  He did not seek converts to his point of view, always found some way of distinguishing himself from other people who still professed to be anti-confederates. He sniffed with derision when I told him once of a man I had heard of who, every April 1, wore a black armband. No one else’s anti-confederacy was wholly genuine as far as my father was concerned. He dismissed out of hand any supposed anti-confederate who wasn’t old enough to remember what Newfoundland was like before Confederation.

  “Take away his unemployment insurance,” my father said, “and see how quick he’ll change his mind.”

  He still reserved his greatest scorn for the “closet confederates,” who he said were going about staging phony protests, having the hypocritical temerity to have voted for Confederation and now to be going round on April 1, wearing black armbands, badges, pins.

  One night, as we were sitting at the kitchen table after all the rest had gone to bed, I told him that the only way you could know for certain that people were closet confederates was if they admitted to it. And why would anyone do that?

  He told me there was one other way that you could know. When I asked him to explain, he shook his head.

  “Come on, what’s the other way?” I said.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  I asked him if anyone who campaigned for independence had ever confessed to him to voting for Confederation.

  “Never mind,” he said, “never mind,” as if I had had my chance, as if, by missing the hint that he had given me, I had shown myself to be unworthy of some secret.

  “I think if you’re going to talk about closet confederates, you should prove that they exist,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me who they are?”

  “They know who they are,” he said.

  I told him that his was the animating myth of many Newfoundlanders, the myth that the true king was always in exile or in rags while some pretender held the throne.

  “If you say so,” he said, but smiling fondly at me in a way that made me feel even younger and more naive than I was.

  I understood now that the anti-confederates had risked more, infinitely more, than the confederates, who, if they had lost the referendum, would no doubt have gone on to fight another one someday, and another one, ad infinitum, for unlike Newfoundland, the country they were fighting for would always be there. (Or so it must have seemed then.)

  For them there would always have been hope, if nothing else. Not so the anti-confederates, who, if they lost once, would be defeated for all time. Perhaps they, Charlie Johnston, my father, his brothers, my mother’s family, hadn’t understood this until it was too late.

  Symbolic of all of them was Peter Cashin, who had hung on in the legislature after 1949, still arguing against Confederation as if he thought the referendum had been just another election, the results of which, in four years, could be overturned. It had taken years for him to realize that the battle he was fighting was long since lost.

  He eventually settled for a sinecure from Joey Smallwood, who wanted to appease his half of Newfoundland as much as possible. He was made director of Civil Defence, head of the Home Guard, Emergency Measures. Almost a figure of fun.

  The Major.

  “REMEMBER THE CATECHISMS, wayne?” my father would often ask me when we talked about the past. He fondly recalled them as any father would a game that he and his son had fallen out of the habit of playing. Though to him they were more than just a game, the writing and reciting of them. He often wished that he had saved them and regretted that, as he put it, he had somehow lost the “knack” of writing them. When I was a boy, “the catechism” was a routine that we performed for visitors, as we had at the Come Home Year party. In the first catechisms, when I was four or five, my responses consisted mainly of simple sentences with one syllable words, and even then most of their meaning was lost on me, which seemed to be what tickled people most, me answering my father like some prodigy of irony when in fact I understood almost nothing I was saying. He sat on the chesterfield, I stood in front of him, and as solemnly as he asked his questions, I gave the answers he had helped me memorize.

  Q: What, since 1949, have not tasted quite the same?

  A: Blueberries.

  Q: Very good. From what pastime do we derive less pleasure than we did in former days?

  A: Trouting.

  Q: Why is that?

  A: The trout no longer jump into our boats. We have to catch them.

  Q: Excellent. Is there a form of bliss that you will never know?

  A: There are many.

  Q: Foremost among them?

  A: Ignorance of him who, toad-like, croaks and dwells among the undergrowth.

  Q: Name him.

  A: Joey Smallwood.

  Q: Does he leave behind him as he goes a trail of slime?

  A: He does.

 
; Q: Do we fear him?

  A: We do not.

  Q: Scorn him?

  A: Yes. With all our hearts we do.

  Q: Does he, pretender, occupy the throne?

  A: He does.

  Q: Has he who will displace him yet come into the world?

  A: He has.

  Q: In what most favoured region of the country does he dwell?

  A: Avalon.

  Q: Is he known to us?

  A: Perhaps.

  Q: He knows his destiny?

  A: Not yet.

  Q: Who might he be?

  A: He might be anyone. He might be me.

  THE ENEMY WAS “Joey.”

  It seems I always knew that. I knew it before I started school.

  He was a barely personified agency of opposition, the “thwart,” my father called him, the nebulous something that we Johnstons were against. He existed only on movie screens, or in the television set, which was turned off the instant he appeared. About the nature of his threat to us I was never certain. We would have changed the channel, except the only other one we could get was the CBC, and the utter worthlessness of anything Canadian was for us an article of faith.

  So the instant we saw Joey’s face, someone ran to the set and turned it off. “Joey!” the first of us to see him would shout, alerting the one nearest to the set, sounding the alarm. Even when our parents weren’t watching, we children did it. About their aversion to Joey they were so sincere that to avoid him seemed to us the grown-up thing to do.

  To us, he was a bow-tie wearing despot, who by the time I started school had been ruling Newfoundland for fifteen years. He was regarded with a mixture of terror and scornful amusement. He was the only premier Newfoundland had had since Confederation. Confederation had entered the world with Joey; he had led Newfoundlanders to it and tempted them to partake of it as surely as the serpent had led Eve to the apple. And we had thereby fallen from a state of grace that could never be recovered, been banished forever from the paradise of independence.