Baltimore's Mansion Read online

  They sit in silence for a while as she clops along. Then his father gives what for him is a speech of record length. “There’ll be no more need for blacksmiths soon,” his father says. “There’s not as many horses as there used to be. Soon there’ll be almost none at all. What shoes they need they’ll make in foundries by the hundreds. They’ll make anchors there, grapnels like I make, but they’ll make them a lot faster than I do. Everything I make they’ll make it there but ten times faster.”

  He tells him that he was apprenticed to his father when he was twelve, “your age,” he says. But there will be, in the Johnston family, no more such apprenticeships, for blacksmithing is a trade that in cities is already obsolete and halfway to becoming so in Ferryland, where horses are being replaced by cars and trucks and where many people are buying their metal implements from foundries that mass-produce them in St. John’s. Blacksmithing is a craft that over several thousand years hardly changed, and over the past fifty has been abandoned.

  He looks around. He thinks his father must be wrong. Even here in the city horses still outnumber cars and trucks. He cannot imagine Ferryland ever having more need for cars than horses, or the men of Ferryland ever preferring shoes made in foundries to shoes made in the forge.

  “You’ll have to find yourself something else to do,” his father says. “You’ll be better off at something else.”

  “What will I do?” he says.

  “You could be a fisherman,” his father says. “There’s not many that can make a go of it without something on the side, but you might be able to.”

  He has been going out in the punt every other morning for two years now with his father and his older brother, Gordon. It will be two more years before he has to go out every morning. They work the nets and traps and leave the handlining to him. It is no easier but less dangerous than what they do. He baits the hooks with squid and capelin, plays out the handline to twenty or thirty fathoms, but he is not yet strong enough to haul in even that much line without their help, especially on a good day, when the hooks are full. When he looks down into the water, he can see the hooked fish at fathom intervals, their white cod bellies bent almost in half, first one way, then the other as they fight for freedom. He is still astonished each time the first cod, in a flapping fury, breaks the surface.

  His father and Gordon laughed so hard they had to stop working once when he wrestled into the boat a codfish half his size. It was so wide and plump he could barely clutch it to his chest. He put his arms around it from behind, clasped his hands across its slimy belly, but it kept sliding back into the water. Time after time he hefted it up, all the while trying to keep out of the way of its thrashing head and sharp fins that beat like wings. It seemed since he had pulled it from the water to have sprouted fins all over. They drenched him in a fine mist of salt spray that stung his eyes. Its mouth, because his arms were entangled in its gills, was wide open. He could see inside but all he noticed was its teeth. He thought for a few seconds that he had hooked the wrong kind of fish, not a cod but some deep-sea sculpin his father should have warned him he might catch by accident. He knew that if he let go of the fish the line they had already pulled in would play out so fast there would be no time to avoid the hooks as they went flying from the boat. At last he heaved the cod’s lower half from the water and fell on his back into the boat, the codfish likewise on top of him. The fish was so cold he could barely stand the touch of it against his skin. How could anything so lively be so cold? He was amazed that something so large made no sound, its silence at odds with the fury of its struggle. “He’s in the boat. You can let go of him now,” his father said. He rolled out from under the fish, which lay there, more subdued now, gills working uselessly, dark eyes unmoving as if up here it could not see. He looked at the water. From the unimaginable bottom of the ocean it had come and now lay stranded in the boat because of him.

  Afterwards his forearms were rubbed raw and flecked with silver scales and his face was nicked all over with tiny cuts.

  He has never once gone on the water without getting sick, but he never gets sick more than once a trip, no matter how rough it gets. These are the terms of the peculiar bargain he has already made with the sea. It is necessary for him to be sick once and only once on each trip before he gets his sea legs. His father and his brother are so used to it they pay not the slightest attention to him as their boat puts out to sea in the early morning darkness and he heaves over the side as though performing some routine act of hygiene.

  Freda tells him in her letters it is not so much his body as his mind that performs this daily ritual, this demonstration of revulsion for the water that, though it might have him for the moment, will not always have him. She does not think he should be a fisherman. She thinks he should find something that will make it unnecessary for him to ever again go on the water. Though he has not told anyone else, he agrees with her, but he has not yet decided what that something is. “The whole world is not like Newfoundland,” she wrote. “There are other places you can go. Not everybody stays.”

  His father stops talking. They move along the old road and despite the wartime blackout light the buckboard lanterns. They see, by their lights or by the clouds of dust they raise, other carts, carriages and vehicles from miles away, and hail every one they meet. They smell the sea on one side and the spruce trees on the other, gauge their progress by the towns they pass through. His father counts them off, announcing each one like a train conductor. Kilbride, the Goulds, Big Pond, Bay Bulls, Witless Bay, Mobile, Burnt Cove, Lamanche, Bauline, Cape Broyle, Calvert — the litany of place names that will bring them back from the city to the place where they were born.

  They climb the hill and cross the flats of Old Bay Bulls until the road again descends to the beach at Witless Bay. All along the Southern Shore, the beaches lie at the mouths of ancient rivers that have worn fissures and valleys and fjord-like indentations in the headlands, and natural breakwaters of beach rocks have been piled up by ten thousand years of waves, piled so high that at sea level he cannot see the water, only a crescent of rocks beyond which he can dimly hear the ocean.

  They cross the dark, empty stretches between one town and the next, the moonlit stretch of barrens strewn with ice-caught ponds above Bay Bulls, the phosphorescent glow along the bays where no one lives, bays with names his father doesn’t bother to announce, the tree-crowded mile of road before the turnoff to Lamanche, where Gail becomes skittish, picking up the scent of a lynx or a weasel in the woods.

  By the time they reach Calvert, it has begun to snow. Both he and his father fall asleep and do not wake up even when Gail turns into the merchant’s driveway and begins to ascend the hill below the store. The shopkeeper looks out the window and sees Gail standing in the light of the porch lantern, for how long he has no idea, waiting for someone to notice. A man and a boy are sound asleep against the buckboard, heads slumped forward onto their chests, snow gathering on their hats and shoulders and on their folded arms.

  He wakes up first and nudges his father awake. “We’re at O’Brien’s,” he says.

  His father looks around, then nods. “Gail’s tired too,” he says. “She took the first turnoff that she recognized. Just as well. We need some things.”

  Wiping the snow from their clothes, they leave Gail untethered and go inside the store, where the fire in the stove in the middle of the floor is barely lit. The sun is not yet up. They are the first customers.

  The fish merchant’s store. He loves coming here. He walks among the shelves, looks at the squares of fresh fudge laid out uncovered on waxed paper, the sugar-sprinkled wedges of mint green and orange ju-jubes, jawbreakers that a boy at school told him change colour by the minute in your mouth, jagged chunks of chocolate in glass jars, bins of jelly beans, striped bars of peppermint and long black twists of licorice, the stacks of oranges and “five-point” apples. He feels his hunger so keenly that he has to grab on to a shelf to keep from falling.

  “Help you with something
over there?” the man behind the counter says. Embarrassed, he shakes his head, looks for something the man will not mind him standing next to.

  “You don’t have to watch him,” his father calls from the back room, where the bulk goods and the fishing gear are stored. He knows they will leave the great emporium with nothing but bulk bags of staples like oats and flour.

  “Oh no. No, of course not,” the man says and looks out the window as if he has just now noticed what an interesting horse and cart they have.

  His father comes out from the back room with a sack of oats and a bag of flour. He joins him at the counter. He dreads what he knows is coming next.

  The clerk opens his credit book and deducts the purchases and reads aloud to his father how much credit they have left. In this store, money never changes hands. For the fish he catches and sells to the merchant, his father is given credit here. This, he knows, is called the “truck” system. He knows that the merchant devalues the credit at will by raising the prices of the goods he sells. He also knows that the man behind the counter is not the merchant, just someone who works for him. They see the man who owns the store once a week at Sunday Mass.

  “We should have more credit left than that,” his father says. At first it seems this is just a token protest. He wonders again how much the anvil set them back and where his father found the money for it. The most money he has ever seen in his father’s hands is a ten-cent piece.

  The man behind the counter shakes his head.

  “That’s what it says here, Mr. Johnston,” the clerk says, pointing at the bottom line below his father’s name. His father nods, pauses as if to speak, exhales heavily, puts both hands on the edge of the counter and looks down as if considering some course of action. Then, abruptly, he sweeps the ledger off the counter with both hands. It lands somewhere out of sight. He hears it slide along the floor until, with a thump, it hits the wall.

  The clerk steps back from the counter. “There’s no need for that,” he says.

  “Dad,” he says and puts his hand on his father’s arm and looks up into his face.

  His father turns sharply away, stoops down and picks up the oats and the flour, carries them out to the cart and jams them in beside the anvil. He climbs up and sits slump-shouldered on the buckboard. The rope reins lie between his feet. Gail shakes her harness bells. His eyes shut as if, upon resuming his former pose, he has gone back to sleep. He grips the upper part of his huge right arm with his left hand, squeezes it as if the muscle has begun to ache.

  He’s still not sure it’s over. He’s not sure until, when he climbs up beside him, his father opens his eyes, looks at him and says, “I wonder will we ever get the country back. When the war is over maybe.”

  “Once we had a country, but because we made a mess of it, the British took it back.” Freda’s words. She said that from 1855 to 1934, Newfoundland was a self-governing colony of Britain. “Just a fancy phrase for country,” his father said. Since 1934 when it had, because of helping Britain win the war, not a penny to its name, the British were “in charge.” “In charge” is how he thinks of it. He is not sure what it means.

  “Things might not be any better if we get it back,” his father says. “They might be worse.”

  “They’ll be better,” he says.

  “Will they? You got it all figured out?”

  He nods solemnly.

  His father laughs.

  He remembers the sound the ledger made as it slid along the floor. He knows that the next time they go the man behind the counter will pretend it never happened.

  “Nan will fry us up some toutons,” his father tells him as Gail returns to the road. Toutons. Pan-fried balls of bread that, as Nan says, fill you up like Christmas dinner. He can’t wait to get back home.

  “You’re not going to school,” his father says. “I’ll tell the teacher that you’re sick.”

  “Can I stay out in the forge?” he says.

  “Sure,” his father says. “You can lead the horses back and forth.”

  Not for another ten years will he see for the second time the city that prompted his father to predict a day when there would be more cars than horses in the streets.

  He will think of it often but they will never speak of it again.

  I WAS BORN in St. John’s, but my parents moved to my mother’s hometown, the Goulds, when I was one.

  My mother’s people, the Everards, were from Petty Harbour, which is now the postcard outport of Newfoundland, primarily because of its close proximity to St. John’s. You can drive to Petty Harbour from St. John’s in fifteen minutes by way of a coastal road that wasn’t there when my mother was growing up.

  The Everards took pride in the fact that from nowhere in the Goulds could you see the town of Petty Harbour or the ocean.

  My mother’s people were not of the water, very much not of the water, though their most recent ancestors were. They were very much of the land, such as it was, sea-scorners, sea-fearers, one rung up the social ladder of the lower classes by dint of their non-association with the sea, with merchants and the truck system and because what they harvested they had themselves created and so they did not have to depend for their livelihood on the whims of such a lowly, bottom-feeding creature as the cod.

  The Everards had moved inland from Petty Harbour in the late nineteenth century, when the fishing grounds became too crowded. The first of them to move still fished part-time, maintaining summer shacks in Petty Harbour or nearby Shoal Bay, at the same time farming in the Goulds.

  My grandfather and some other settlers cleared the wilderness of trees and rocks. My grandfather must have been either a late migrant or an indiscriminate one, for although there was much flatland in the Goulds, he situated his farm on the side of a hill. The angle of the furrows to the vertical was more than forty-five degrees on the steepest meadow, which had to be plowed from the bottom up because a horse going downhill could not keep its feet.

  The labour that went into clearing this land I could not, did not, begin to imagine. It never occurred to me as a child that the farm had not always been there, never occurred to me to wonder why there was a meandering wall of stones along each cartroad, or how what we called “the stump meadow,” a bog in which hundreds of uprooted stumps lay slowly rotting or ossified by age, had come to be.

  The Goulds was much younger than Ferryland. It had no historic sites or plaques, no stone churches from another century, had not grown from a colony founded by some aristocrat from England, had no founding heroes at all that were commemorated in books, no town museum. The Goulds, in New World terms, was anomalously new and anomalously agricultural.

  But although it was not as old as Ferryland, the Goulds felt and looked older, because the remnants of its first generation lay not, as they are in Ferryland, so deeply buried that the place is now a favourite digging site for archaeologists, but above ground, in plain view — the empty shells of long-abandoned barns and cellars that you could see straight through still stood at angles to the ground, as did fences built for some forgotten purpose, their posts supported by the grey-washed stones that, within someone’s living memory, had been uprooted from the ground. There were already by my time farms that looked the way my grandfather’s does now, failed, long-abandoned farms, open fields where hay and fodder that no one bothered with grew wild, fallen fence posts still joined by wire, stands of stunted, wind-bent junipers along the road, grown up since the levelling of spruce and birch. In one place, crisscrossed by paths where we played and took shortcuts to school, a mature forest had arisen on land that must have been among the first to be cleared a hundred years ago. The rocks pried from the earth were piled in heaps that now were all but overgrown by moss.

  We wandered my grandfather’s farm on Sunday afternoons when he was sleeping, played among trucks left for good where they had broken down and been deemed beyond repair, among discarded farm implements, ploughshares without handles, handles without blades, tires complete with rims from some earl
y version of the tractor. There were old hubcaps nailed to trees. Rain-greyed lengths of rope that had been used to tether livestock hung from branches. Upside-down paint cans had been stuck on fence posts for target practice. On the ground lay rusting coils of chains. We were on orders from my grandfather not to move any of these things, as if they had been placed with a purpose. His history in the Goulds was commemorated haphazardly throughout the farm by unculled artifacts.

  The only constant in the Goulds was the contour of the land: the land as it looked in winter, shorn of most of its vegetation, shorn down to bedrock; the hills beyond the farms that bound the town on every side but west, where lay one leg of the bog of Avalon. The hills were so far above the town they were merely dark green shapes, at night bald silhouettes against the sky.

  My grandfather’s farm seemed to me a vast place. To go to the uppermost hayfield, beyond the pound, beyond the grazing field, beyond the crops, beyond the fodder, was a great, rarely embarked upon adventure. But the last time I was there, a few years ago, it took me less than ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. As I looked down at the site of the old house and barn, it seemed impossible that a man and a woman had supported themselves and their seven children on the annual yield of that barely arable few acres and the milk produced by a dozen cows.

  It was into this farming family that my father married, in this farming town he eventually settled, among farmers-in-law who held forever in reserve the trump card of irony that a man of his particular field of specialization — he was an agricultural technologist — ended up working for the fisheries while they were growing crops and raising cows without the benefit of a diploma in anything.