The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Read online

  “Not for me it’s not,” Slogger said. “I say we flog her bare arse.”

  “I say we let her go,” said Prowse.

  “What’s the matter, Prowse?” Slogger said. “Afraid of what Reeves will say?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Prowse said. He grabbed Fielding’s cane away from her so quickly she almost fell forward into the snow. “Quick,” Prowse said, “before someone sees us.”

  With the rest of us following, several of the Townies hustled Fielding into the manual-training centre, where woodworking was taught but which at that time of day was empty. They bent her over a saw-horse. Prowse made to raise up her coat and dress.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re really going to do it, Prowse?” said Slogger. “I mean, I can’t believe you would even flog a girl at all, but you’re going to flog a girl’s bare arse?”

  Prowse looked uncertainly about. From where I stood, I could not see Fielding’s face. Two of the Townies had their hands over her mouth to keep her from making any noise, though she was not struggling. Slogger laughed, doubled over, as did some of the other ’Tories.

  “My God, Prowse,” Slogger said. “You should see — you should see the look on your face.”

  “I was going to do it,” Prowse said. “But if you lot — but only if everybody did it. That way there’d be no tattle-tales. Just her word against ours.” He cocked his head at Fielding. “We could say she made it up. Just like she made up that letter to the Morning Post.”

  The Townies, having followed his orders to drag Fielding inside to be flogged, had no choice but to back him up or else lose face themselves. “I’ll do it if everybody else does it,” Porter said. The others murmured their assent.

  “Come on, boys,” Slogger said, laughing again. The ’Tories followed him from the training centre. Then the Lepers left, leaving only us Townies, and Fielding bent over the saw-horse.

  “Let her go,” Prowse said.

  When the two boys holding her released her, she stood up but did not turn around to face Prowse and me.

  “Go on, Fielding,” Prowse said. “It was just a joke, that’s all. If you tell anyone — Here, take your cane and go.” Fielding said nothing. I could not see her face, but I was certain from the way she stood that her eyes were closed.

  “Give it to me,” I said. Prowse looked at me, shrugged, handed me her cane. He and the Townies filed out, snickering, whispering.

  “Fielding,” I said. “Why — Why did you — ”

  “Please put the cane on the floor and leave,” Fielding said. Her voice quavered. She sniffed as if she might be crying, but she did not bow her head. “Go, Smallwood,” she said. “You’ll have your revenge. Just leave me be.”

  “Why did you — ”

  “I told you, to get you into trouble.”

  “No, I know. I mean why — Why did you confess?”

  “For lack of better sense,” she said. Now I was certain she was crying. “Please go, Smallwood. Don’t say another word, just go.”

  I left. Outside it was almost dark and the snow had started. It was drifting, funnelling up between the buildings. The ’Tories were in the dorm, the lights of which were on. The Townies were nowhere to be seen, gone home most likely. I stood in the lee of the gym, waiting for her to show. I knew this was exactly what she didn’t want, someone watching as she left. She appeared at last, looked around as if to see if the coast was clear. She set off, gloved hand on her hat, long skirts swishing as she scuffed her buttoned boots through the snow. How strange that she had for so long harboured that grudge against me, waited three years for revenge. I remembered the day she followed me to see where I lived. I could well imagine what her house looked like. I vowed never to set eyes on it. Suddenly, she struck out with her cane, in full stride struck and struck again, furiously wielding it machete-like as if she were hacking herself a passage through the storm.

  When the Townies told Reeves that Fielding had confessed, Fielding was called to the office of the headmistress of Spencer and expelled. I was called to Reeves’s office the next day. “I’d expel you, too, Smallwood, if I had any proof,” Reeves said. “I know you had something to do with it.” Apparently sure enough of himself where I was concerned that he knew he could get away with it, Reeves told me that next year, I would be in the Lower Sixth (Commercial), a class for those judged to be unsuited for going on to university. A couple of weeks later, convinced that for me Bishop Feild was a dead end, I dropped out.

  Far from being gleeful, Reeves seemed almost disappointed, at least at first. I think he had been looking forward to watching me plod pointlessly through the Commercial Class. I didn’t offer an explanation and he didn’t ask for one. Despite the fact that I had quit, he gave me what amounted to his expulsion speech. He went to great lengths to establish that the school would in no way be diminished by my absence, that it was not me who was rejecting Bishop Feild, but vice versa.

  “No one is indispensable, Smallwood,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This school will carry on just as well without you. Another boy will take your place. There are plenty waiting.” He hinted that he had been right in his judgment of my character, that this was the immutable, ineluctable forty-five manifesting itself at last, just as he had known it would. He said I had squandered an opportunity that had been handed to me on a silver platter, an opportunity that boys of my background didn’t often get and that I was perhaps too ill-bred to appreciate. Imagine what this would mean to my uncle, Fred Smallwood, who had taken a chance on me and sponsored me as if I were his own son. Finally, as if to say that he regretted having to give me the heave-ho and hoped that this last speech of his would in some small measure mitigate my fate, though he doubted that it would, he threw up his hands.

  “All right then, Smallwood, off you go,” he said briskly, as if no more could be done for me, as if he had discharged all his obligations where I was concerned, performed an unpleasant but necessary task and now it was time to move on to other things. With his hands behind his back, he faced the window and, several times in succession, rose up on his toes, rocked back on his heels, up, back, up, back. I felt like telling him, again, that I had not written that letter. But looking at him there, staring out the window, the back of his neck an outraged pink, his swagger stick beneath his arm, I realized how far short of his ambitions he had fallen, how it galled him that he had wound up where he had, and that he believed himself to have failed with me and, in his own way, was ashamed.

  No fanfare attended my departure. Since the incident in the training centre, I had shunned the Townies, rebuffed the one overture Prowse made.

  “Come on, Smallwood,” Prowse had said. “You don’t have to brood about it.”

  “You were quite willing to see me flogged,” I said. “You thought I might be guilty.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to think?” said Prowse, grinning as if to say we both knew I would have done the same if I were him. “What was I supposed to do?”

  I walked away from him.

  “All right,” Prowse said, “have it your way. Go join the Lepers, they’re the only ones who’ll have you now.”

  All the boys were in class, the windows of the school were closed and frosted over. At about the halfway point of that long walk across the frozen field, I looked at the headmaster’s residence and saw Reeves at the window of one of his rooms. He raised his hand, though whether to wave goodbye or to twirl the end of his moustache I wasn’t sure. When I raised my hand, he turned away. I reached the gate, by which Antle stood wearing an expression that seemed to say he had warned me it would come to this. “Goodbye, Antle,” I said.

  I began my walk to the Brow, my doughboy-type kitbag slung over my shoulder. Crossing the Waterford Bridge, I took off my Bishop Feild cap and threw it in the river, watching as it floated along on the current that would take it to the harbour. From the bridge, I watched the pilot boats, each of whose sails bore a giant letter p, darting about am
ong the schooners and the huge, crane-bearing barges and side-wheel steamers that were piled high with coal and lumber. The schooners, with their sails down, presented a stark forest of masts along the north-side docks, bare masts and rigging and a jumble of hulls as if the whole fleet had been washed up on the apron by a storm.

  I looked up at the Brow and saw our house.

  Reeves had given me a note to give to my father informing him that I had dropped out. My father’s hands trembled as he read the note on getting home from work that night. “Why did he stream you commercial?” he said. “Is it because of that letter?” He had heard about it from Uncle Fred. I nodded. “But you didn’t write it,” my father said. “Did you? I heard it was some — some doctor’s daughter from Bishop Spencer trying to get you into trouble.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Reeves streamed me commercial because he felt like it. He probably would have done it anyway. For me to keep going there would have been a waste of time.”

  My father stared at the note. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “He knows you had nothing to do with that letter. He knows.”

  Later, roaring drunk, he started in. “You’re ruined, boy, you’re ruined,” he said. “We’re both ruined, we’re all ruined, we’re done for now.” And then, as if it was somehow responsible for my dropping out, he got going about Judge Prowse’s History, which he was now calling the Book. “That cursed Book,” he said. “I wish to God I’d never seen that Book.”

  My father, who had never wanted me to go to Bishop Feild and, for the past three years, had been exhorting me to leave, now professed himself “heartbroken” that I had. He was soon pronouncing it to be “the best of schools.”

  “With a diploma from Bishop Feild, a young man could write his own ticket,” he said, shaking his head. “This is it, our last hope dashed.” He went on singing the praises of Bishop Feild late into the night, talking about what a great lot the masters were, how they understood the importance of tradition and refinement. “They are great men,” he said, “learned men,” stressing the word learned as if therein lay the key, as if only by fully appreciating as he did now what it meant to be learned could you understand what great men the masters were. “I know I criticized them in the past, but I am not afraid to admit when I am wrong,” he said. He could see now what the future held for me, I would go to work at Smallwood’s “beneath the old man’s Boot.” “The boot beckons, boy,” he roared that night from the bottom of the stairs. “The black boot beckons, boy.”

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Two:

  THE GOLDEN FLEECE

  In 1610, John Guy starts the first formal settlement at Cupids, and is fooled by the fluke of two successive mild winters into thinking he would like to live there. He is convinced otherwise by the less-anomalous winter of 1613, after which he returns home and for the rest of his life wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, refusing to go back to sleep until his wife assures him he no longer lives in Newfoundland.

  The London and Bristol Company sells John Guy’s colony to William Vaughan. Vaughan, after a long talk with Guy, which he regrets not having had before he made his purchase, does not actually visit his colony, but instead writes a book extolling its virtues called The Golden Fleece and sends in his place a number of Welshmen.

  After not having heard from them for two years, he sends Sir Richard Whitbourne to see how they are doing. Whitbourne reports back to Vaughan that not all of them are dead and there is even talk among those still alive of building shelters of some kind. Inexplicably, the colony is abandoned in 1620.

  Vaughan approaches various people and offers large portions of his colony to those who answer “No” to the question “Have you ever met John Guy?”

  Among them is Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, Secretary of State, who buys a huge tract of Vaughan’s colony and announces his intention to establish a colony at Ferryland, which will be a haven for Roman Catholics who are being persecuted for their religious beliefs in Britain. This sales pitch does not work, however. So harried by persecution are the Roman Catholics that those he approaches with his proposal say they would rather be persecuted than end up like “William’s Welshmen.”

  Calvert goes to Vaughan, demanding to know what they mean by this. On Vaughan’s advice, he focuses his attentions on that group of men whose position in English society and lot in life are such that to move to Newfoundland seems like a good idea.

  As a result, another twelve Welshmen soon accompany a Captain Edward Wynne to Newfoundland, where they establish a colony at Ferryland.

  The Book

  FOR WEEKS, EXCEPT when we were eating, there was nothing on the kitchen table but the Book. My father put it in the middle of the table as if it were the family centre-piece. He pointed at it, referred to it as “he” or “you” as if it were the judge himself. “ ‘Friends as you and I would have been had we gone to school together.’ Oh, yes, I’m sure we would have been great friends. You and me. Bosom buddies. Inseparable. Shoulder to shoulder through life. If only we’d met in school, we’d be spending all of our time together now, hunting caribou in Labrador. The writer and the toter. What a pair we could have been.”

  Sometimes, late at night, he pretended to be the judge addressing Charlie Smallwood. “I have deigned to acknowledge you, to indulge your delusions on the cover of this Book that I wrote and you did not, this Book that you could not have written, this eight-hundred-page masterpiece of mine, an accomplishment so far beyond your scope it reduces your whole life to insignificance.”

  “Stop talking to that book,” my mother would shout from upstairs. “It’s not natural, a man talking to a book.”

  “It talks to me,” my father said. “It mocks me, it affronts me.”

  “You’re losing your mind, Smallwood,” my mother said. “It’s like your dreams. It’s not the book, it’s the booze that’s talking.”

  But as if he had the judge tied to a chair and was giving him a dressing-down in nightly instalments, my father walked in a circle about the kitchen, back and forth, haranguing the book. He had become fixated on things before but never for so long and never on a solid object like the book. It unnerved us all to hear him down there addressing the book as if it were some late-night visitor that none of us had ever seen, denouncing the judge, then himself as if he were the judge.

  He missed two days of work in a row, lying on the daybed in the kitchen until nightfall, lying there while we ate, waiting for us to finish so he could have the table and start in on the book again. “You’re going to be fired, Smallwood,” my mother yelled at him, standing over the daybed. My father muttered insensibly and turned towards the wall. My mother sat at the table and put her face in her hands.

  Long after I heard my father go to bed at the end of his third day home from work, long after I had fallen asleep myself, I awoke to the sound of someone creeping down the stairs. I heard the back door open. I looked out the window. There was my mother, in her nightgown, on the city-facing deck. She held the judge’s book in both hands and stared at its cover. Then, with the book in the palm of one hand, she reared back and, as though she meant to land it on the roof of the judge’s house, hurled it out into the darkness. I could dimly see it unfold in the wind, the pages flapping, and a couple of seconds later I heard it land with a dull thump far down the slope. My mother stood there silently staring after it, her chest heaving against the rail of the deck as if she were panicked to the point of breathlessness.

  There was a low rumbling sound like far-off thunder that, from somewhere down the Brow, grew louder, then receded, though it continued for some time. She stood on her tiptoes, leaning out over the rail of the deck, craning her neck to see. Then, perhaps fearing the noise might have wakened the rest of us, she hurried back inside. Swiftly, almost silently, she went down the corridor and up the stairs, crossed the landing to her room and went back to bed.

  The next morning, a Saturday
, as we all sat at the breakfast table, my mother made an announcement. There had been an avalanche the night before, she said, an especially bad one that had started about a hundred feet below our house and had gone all the way to the bottom. A few fences had been flattened but, “thank God,” she said, no houses had been hit, though the avalanche had cut a swath between two houses and now the cross-Brow road was blocked with snow.

  “Right between the two houses, it went, can you imagine? Your father is going down there soon with the other men to help dig out the road.”

  My father, hungover, did not seem nearly so thrilled by the prospect.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Later, we went down the Brow and joined the men and boys who were going at the mound of snow from either end, working in towards the middle. Looking up at our house, I could see the path the avalanche had taken. The tops of the smaller trees had been snapped off and some larger ones had been uprooted altogether. In places, the hill had been scraped bare of even snow and ice, and the rocky yellow mud showed through. The avalanche, as my mother had said, had ploughed between two houses and left them undamaged, except that their facing sides were scraped, their clapboards splintered.

  We had been at the site for about an hour when one of the men on the other side of the mound from us shouted that he had found something beneath the snow. “I think there’s someone under here,” he said. I stood and stared as everyone else hurried to where the man was standing and began shovelling furiously. “There,” the man said, “there, that’s someone’s arm.” An arm, elbow up, protruded from the snow. A couple of men took hold of it and tugged with all their might, without result. “He’s froze solid, whoever he is,” one of the men said.

  Some of the fathers sent their boys away so they wouldn’t see. The boys backed off reluctantly, staring at the arm. “Go home,” one man roared, and two boys went racing up the hill, to break the news, I had no doubt. My father seemed to have forgotten I was there. They resumed shovelling. I kept watch from the other side of the mound. Eventually, they dug out and turned over the body of an old man, a “Mr. Mercer,” who they said lived on the Brow by himself. His eyes and mouth were wide open, his mouth stuffed with snow.