Baltimore's Mansion Page 22

  “Please,” she says, “Please.” This must have happened because of something she has done. She tells God she is sorry, asks him to forgive her and says that she will make amends if He will let her husband live.

  Few people in Ferryland have phones. Few men spend even the worst winter days at home, so there is no quick way of spreading the news, no telling when some man might come knocking at the door to pay Charlie or to find out why his horse has not been shod, so Nan’s brother, Will, keeps watch at the bottom of the Gaze and Charlie’s brother Mike keeps watch above the forge for men who might stop by for their horses on their way home from the woods.

  Uncle Mike is several times obliged to break the news of his brother’s death to men he hardly knows.

  As word of what has happened at the forge spreads through the town, men come to get their horses and their ponies and lead them by their bridles down the hill. They do not stop to express their condolences to Nan. It is too soon for that. This goes on for hours. From inside the house, they can hear the slow clopping of the horses as one by one they are led away.

  By nightfall, one horse is still tethered to the rail, that of a man so shy that for him to meet any of the Johnstons under these circumstances would be unbearable.

  Will leads the horse along the road above the beach where shore ice clatters as waves he cannot not see break on the rocks. And though it is only seven o’clock, he finds the man’s house unlit, its owner pretending he is out or gone to bed. Will opens the gate, leads the horse into the yard, then walks back to Charlie’s house alone.

  How, Nan wonders, can so much have changed in just one day? The horses, the sight and sound and smell of them, are gone. There is no din from inside the forge, no condensation on the windows, no reflection from within. The fire has gone out for the first time in twenty years. From now until they tear it down there will be a Sunday silence in the forge.

  It does not yet seem to Nan that she has crossed a divide in time. It still seems to her that time has stalled, that there have been a succession of Sundays, and any morning now when she wakes up Monday will have come at last, and Charlie and the horses and every aspect of her life that for the past few months has been on hold will be restored. But from now on, the hill below the forge will be empty in the morning. No one looking out from Charlie’s room will see the horses any more.

  HE LOOKS OUT upon an empty yard as he goes to bed.

  When he wakes up he looks out again and sees waiting patiently for him horses who seem to have gathered of their own accord while he was sleeping. In the hope of beating others to it, of having them shod in time to use them later that same day for hauling wood, the first men led their horses up the hill and tied them to the rail at three o’clock. Charlie and Nan, accustomed to the sound of horses going past outside the window, slept through it.

  It is still dark as, for the last time, he looks out his bedroom window and sees the horses waiting for him on the hill below the forge, standing chest-deep in the morning mist that when he steps outdoors an hour later will be gone.

  How many horses are there? Twenty, thirty, forty? He is too tired to count them. Today, as always, there are too many.

  Somewhere among them is the last horse he will shoe today. Her name is Nancy. After Nancy, instead of going to the rail to get another horse, he will go to the forge, where Nan will find him sometime later.

  Some of these horses were culled from wild herds descended from other herds who first ran free two hundred years ago, horses that were abandoned by or escaped from settlers, or after battles went unclaimed or were impossible to catch, herds that, during winter cold spells, still come down from the Gaze at night and roam the road and lanes in search of food.

  He sees the usual descending series of variously coloured manes and rumps along the rail. Frost snorts from their noses as though a line of infantry is firing at will. He wonders how long it will take to shoe them all.

  Fishing season is over, so he can get an early start, but he doubts that he will have them done by dark. There is no time for breakfast. Nan will bring him something later—toutons, fried bread dough slick with butter. He will go on working, a touton in his mouth as he holds a horse’s hoof between his knees.

  In the porch, the drinking water in the wooden pails has frozen solid. He brings one pail indoors for Nan and takes the other two with him to the forge. If yesterday was anything to go by, he will need at least two buckets, maybe more. He puts them against the brick bed, empties a scuttle of coal on top, then inserts the bellows in the space between the bricks. He works the bellows with his hands and feet.

  Inside the tub of brick, unseen by him though he can smell it, the fire that has not burned out for years starts to make its way towards the surface, until at last the coals on top begin to smoke and finally ignite to an orange crust of embers. Throughout the day, to keep this crust from cooling, to keep the ash from going grey, he will have to work the bellows twice an hour, maybe more.

  The countdown on the old black slate continues. Each day has its number. Today’s is 76. Seventy-six days left until Confederation.

  He cannot imagine writing single digits on that slate ten weeks from now, much less erasing from the slate the number ‘1.’

  He heard the other day that on referendum night, in every independent riding, there were still people lined up waiting when the polling booths were closed. But in the confederate ridings, the voting went like clockwork.

  Every day, there is some new revelation of this sort. He cannot allow himself to think about it. He must think of something else or soon the rum he has hidden on the shelf above the slack tub will be in his hand and his work will go undone.

  He thinks of Art in Nova Scotia, barely old enough to vote. They have had no letters from him. Boys from Ferryland have gone away to school and not been heard from since. He told Art it was worse to say goodbye at sunset than not to say goodbye at all. “That’s just superstition,” his son said, as if he was going away to purge himself of things like superstition. He told him if he waited until morning he would drive him to St. John’s. “And in the morning,” his son said, “there’ll be some other reason not to go.”

  He does the easy horses first. A pony that meekly submits to being shod, a mare so used to this routine she needs no bridle but when he unties her merely walks behind him as he plods up to the forge. He knows these horses better than he knows their owners. These horses who are oblivious to circumstance, neither more nor less content than they were six months ago. He is tired of telling himself he ought to learn from their example.

  And then it starts up in his throat as it has every day about this time since Christmas, a scorching pain that nothing but the water in the bucket can put out. When the pain first started, he drank the water from an iron ladle, dipping it time after time into the bucket. Today, he will drink directly from the bucket, drink it dry, tip it back and let the water that began the day as ice pour down his throat.

  He is grateful to this pain that has made the water taste as sweet as it did when he was just a boy. As he gulps the water from the wooden bucket, it runs down his chin, then down his neck. He feels the water on his throat, inside and out.

  The pain is not gone when he stops drinking. It has been two weeks since it went away completely. The lump of coal lodged in his throat is dowsed but inside it there still burns a core of flame.

  He will go to the priest tomorrow and have him bless his throat with a pair of crossed candles the way the old priest did when he was nine. He remembers the priest making a scissors-like X with the candles held flat in front of him, then pushing the crook of the X against his throat as he knelt at the communion rail, the candles cool against his skin, the smell of the wax, the priest pushing them against his Adam’s apple with increasing force until he was barely able to suppress the urge to cough.

  It is said that there is still water from the Virgin Berg in barrels in the basement of the church. Perhaps the priest might prescribe some if he asked, one healing
ladleful or even teaspoonful a day until the pain is gone. He thinks of the water cooling in those casks for forty years.

  He has drunk the better part of a bucket of water, but he does not feel full. He does not feel anything except that ember in his throat. It seems to him there is no amount of water that he could not drink, no receptacle he could not drain dry and still be thirsty.

  He raises the second bucket of water to his lips. It is just like the other but is suddenly so heavy that he can barely lift it. His hands, his whole arms tremble.

  The bucket, when he falls, strikes the brick edge of the bed, teeters there, then topples over, the water spilling out across the coals from which rises a cloud of steam so thick it fills the forge. He does not hear the hiss as the water, evaporating as it goes, seeps down between the coals.

  He knows that he is lying on the cold floor of the forge, flat on his back. Someone, a man he thinks, comes towards him from the mist, stands over him and looks down at him but does not speak. He thinks this man must be a fetch, the apparition of someone not long dead or soon to die.

  He thinks at first it must be the Major who has died.

  He recalls what Bedivere asked Arthur. “What shall become of me, now ye go from me, and leave me here alone among mine enemies?”

  “Comfort yourself,” King Arthur said, “and do the best you can. But trust no more in me.”

  No. It is not Cashin. Not the Major. Nan? No. One of his sons. It might be Art. The farther from home someone is, the more likely you are to see their fetch. A well-known fact. The man goes back into the mist.

  He sees three women in the mist and now he knows it must be Art, his second son. He remembers someone telling him what “morte d’Arthur” meant, but he called him Arthur anyway, for he loved the story, and King Arthur when he died was very old.

  What can have happened to his son who is only twenty-three? Just a boy.

  “Be a good boy.”

  And then Art turned away, without a word. He cannot remember why. He climbed the beach rocks to the road and got into the car without a wave.

  Someone is kneeling at his side and begging his forgiveness.

  “Please, please—”

  He feels his hammer hand enclosed by someone whose grip is so much stronger than his own that his hand goes limp.

  Not Nan. Not Arthur. Then who? No one. He must have paused to rest and nodded off, and in what his father called a dwall have had a dream. A misunderstanding, nothing more.

  He has never felt such peace. He cries. Tears run down his temples. He would wipe them with his hands if he could move. No one has been taken from him. He will see them all again. Sleeping on the job. What would the Major think? In a moment he will rouse himself and get back to work. But for now he will linger in this slumber.

  When he wakes from the dwall, he is standing at the window of the forge. The mist has begun to lift, but the channel between the islands and Hare’s Ears through which the man aimed the camera at the Virgin Berg when he was twelve is still obscured by fog.

  If the Virgin had arrived on such a day, she would have sailed on past the island unseen by anyone. Or seen only by fishermen so close to her they could not make out her shape. He and his father in their boat might have bumped up against her and not known it.

  He hears from somewhere deep inside the fog a woman’s voice, a woman whispering, and then another’s, and possibly a third and fourth, four women conversing in some urgency as if together they are piloting their craft to shore, listening for the sound of water breaking on obstacles they cannot see, reefs and rocks, jutting fingers of the coast, trying to ply a safe passage to a shore whose distance from them they ought to be able to remember but cannot.

  He has many times made his way into the Pool in just this fashion; he knows what they are going through. He has many times waited on the beach like this for the landing of a boat, knowing it was best that he not call out, for in the fog it would only confuse the unseen navigators.

  He waits, as he so often has, to hear their boat’s bell and to see the light from the lantern held aloft by someone standing in the prow, peering, squinting to distinguish phantom shapes from real ones.

  As the fog begins to lift and he can see more and more water, the voices of the women grow louder and Charlie is certain that he will see them soon.

  He thinks he faintly hears the plash of oars, every few seconds, the long, slow gentle stroke of some reluctant rower whose back is to the shore, who must look over her shoulder to see and take direction from the woman standing in the prow. Their voices, speaking words that he cannot make out, grow louder still and it seems to him he should have seen their boat by now.

  The voices are closer than the fog, which has retreated even further, a woman’s voice and the voices of girls—he cannot tell how many.

  He hears his name spoken playfully, tenderly, by a woman whose lips he would swear are at his ear. The voices pass over him, around him, through him, and the unseen woman and her girls go up the hill towards the Gaze, laughing, happy to be home.

  He turns around.

  He cannot even hear them now.

  Light pours in through the windows of the forge, which faces east, so it must be morning.

  Somehow he has slept all night. No one has thought to look for him in this most obvious of places.

  He goes outside. There are no horses, no hoofprints in the ground. He walks down the Gaze, crosses the road, then goes down to the beach, where at the water’s edge he stands, looking out to sea. He waits.

  He hears the clatter of the rocks on the beach behind him. Someone is coming, someone he knew would meet him here if he waited long enough. But when he looks behind him, there is no one.

  The last blow of the hammer on the anvil still echoes back and forth between Hare’s Ears and the Gaze as Charlie steps into the fog. He can hear Nan calling to him from outside the fog, but from which side he cannot tell, shouting his name over and over as if she is lost. “Charlie. Charlie.” He tells her not to move. He will soon have a fix on where she is.

  Someone not Nan speaks.

  By the time Nan finds his body on the floor of the forge, he is back on the beach and the fog has lifted. Something happened on this patch of beach, but he cannot remember what. As he looks out at the sea, everything is as it was before he crossed the stream, before he crossed over into Avalon.

  The House, the Gaze, the Beach, the Downs, the Pool, Ferryland Head, Hare’s Ears, Bois Island, Gosse Island and the sea.

  All are fixed in a moment that for him will never pass.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my peerless editor and friend at Knopf Canada, Diane Martin; to Louise Dennys, my publisher; to Sharon Klein, my heavenly publicist; and to my agent, Anne McDermid.

  Wayne Johnston’s latest novel (his fifth), The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, has been published internationally to tremendous critical acclaim. The film version of a previous novel, The Divine Ryans, was released in 1999. Baltimore’s Mansion was the recipient of the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2000

  Copyright © 1999 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, in 2000. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 1999. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Johnston, Wayne, 1958

  Baltimore’s mansion : a memoir

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37543-8

  1. Johnston, Wayne, 1958– — Biography. 2. Johnston, Wayne, 1958 — Family. 3. Fathers and sons — Newfoundland. 4. Newfoundland — Social life and customs. 5. Novelists, Canadian (English) —
20th century — Biography. I. Title.

  PS8569.O3918Z53 2000 C813’.54 C00-931353-2

  PR9199.3.J599Z464 2000

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s Web site: www.randomhouse.ca

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