The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 8

  “Old Mr. Mercer,” my father said later that night. “Lived right at the bottom of the Brow.”

  “But the snow never went that far,” my mother said, “and none of the houses was hit, you said so yourself this morning.”

  “He must have been out walking on the road,” my father said. “Lived by himself. No one knew he was missing. Eighty-three years old he was. Imagine, to live to be eighty-three and then to go like that.”

  “He was stuffed with snow,” I said, forgetting myself and the effect the words would have on my mother, so vividly did I recall how Mr. Mercer looked. “It was like he was force-fed snow right down to here.” I indicated a spot between my stomach and my chest. His gullet stuffed with snow.

  “Don’t talk about it, Joe,” my mother said. She sat down on the sofa looking frightened, stared wonder-struck into the fire. “Don’t talk about it. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, you see. It was an accident, that’s all it was.”

  “An act of God,” my father said.

  “No,” my mother said. “No. It’s not God’s fault. What was Mr. Mercer doing out at that hour?”

  “What hour?” my father said.

  “Late, I mean,” my mother said. “It must have been late. I — I didn’t hear a thing.”

  For a while there was silence. Last night, a man had been buried alive a few hundred feet from where we slept. A Mr. Mercer, whom I had never heard of, a man of eighty-three, his gullet stuffed with snow, his mouth a round white O when they pulled him out.

  I sat rigid on the sofa, unable to help wondering if it was possible that someone would put two and two together, waiting for some word of the book, waiting to hear that they had dug it up from under Mr. Mercer, waiting for a member of the constabulary to turn up on the doorstep, incriminating book in hand. I felt at once terrified and ridiculous. My mother sat in her chair, hunched into herself, hands clasped, and stared at the floor. My mother, the inadvertent agent of Mr. Mercer’s death, the book bringing the avalanche down like a judgment on his, and her, head. It seemed almost funny, but I could not stop shaking.

  After a while, my father got up and began rummaging around the front room and the kitchen, peering behind the sofa, lifting the cushions, searching the counter-top.

  “Where’s my Book?” my father said. “Did anybody see my Book?”

  “How should I know where your book is?” my mother said.

  “I left it there last night,” he said, pointing at the coffee table by his chair.

  “You were drunk last night,” my mother said. “You might have left it anywhere.”

  “I left it on the coffee table,” my father said, “right where I always leave it.”

  My mother got up, grabbed the poker by the fireplace and stabbed at the burning coals, sending sparks flying.

  “There,” she said, “there’s your bloody book, what’s left of it. I burned it last night, just like you burned the boots. I was sick of hearing about it, sick to death of it, so I burned it.”

  “You didn’t,” my father said.

  “I did,” my mother said. “I told you, I warned you; I was sick of hearing you go on about it. Joe goes to the trouble of taking your book to the judge to have it signed — ” She struck at the embers again, sending more sparks flying.

  “All right, all right,” my father said, “don’t burn the house down while you’re at it.” She threw down the poker and ran, crying, up the stairs. I was sure that my father would shout something before she reached the bedroom, but he didn’t.

  “She burned it,” my father said, quietly. “She burned my Book. Now why would she do that?”

  In the spring, when most of the snow was gone, I climbed down the Brow, following the path of the avalanche, surveying up close the damage it had done. I kept my eyes peeled for the book as well and had not edged more than a quarter of the way down the steep, rocky slope when I saw it perched bird-like among the lower branches of a large spruce tree. It lay open, face down, as if some reader had put it down like that to mark their place and had left the book behind. The front and the back cover were streaked to the point of illegibility with water stains, but the pages to which it had lain open for months were still legible, though some of the lines had run. The rest of the pages were saturated and fused together, and I dared not try to leaf through them for fear of tearing them. I gingerly began to close the two halves of the book to see if the spine would hold, and though it did, it was so deeply creased down the middle the book would not stay closed.

  I took it home, smuggled it into the house, and tied it, lengthwise and crosswise, with a piece of ribbon, in the manner I had seen done with old books at Bishop Feild. Then I hid it in the shed out back. I would sneak out every day to check on it, as though I had some fugitive convalescent in the shed. It was two months before the book dried out. I tried to pry apart the pages using a straight razor, starting at the corners, where it was easiest to catch an edge, but they were still fused together.

  I looked at the scrawl the judge had written and the “translation” of it that Prowse had composed, wondering how much time he had deliberated over what to write and how much his words had been based on what, if anything, he knew about my father. “Friends, as we might have been had we gone to school together.”

  “No harm done, I hope,” Prowse had said.

  And I had told him no.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Three:

  CROSSES AND MISERYES

  Wynne sends back to Calvert over the next five years glowing reports of the success of the colony at Ferryland, saying they have “prospered to the admiration of all beholders.”

  In April 1623, heartened by Wynne’s reports, Calvert applies for and is granted a charter to what he calls the province of Avalon, now fondly referred to as “the bog of Avalon.”

  After Wynne’s return to England in 1627, Calvert, by this time so eager to see his colony he can contain himself no longer, sails to Ferryland, accompanied by his family, and spends much of the voyage reading and re-reading Vaughan’s The Golden Fleece.

  Shortly after his arrival, two of his ships are seized by pirates, whose long-established habit of plundering the colony Wynne had thought too insignificant to mention in his letters. After the winter of 1628–29, which his scurvy-ridden colonists assure him is not an especially bad one, but which causes Calvert to observe that “in this part of the world crosses and miseryes is my portion,” he sails back to England.

  Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing The Newlander’s Cure, a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have never been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well.

  Mundy Pond

  FOR YEARS, THE ONLY religious symbol in the house had been a plain wooden cross above the stove. A token wooden cross, just in case. My parents hedging their bets.

  She had never insisted we go to church, so everyone but me was quite surprised when suddenly my mother became a student of religions, “reading up” on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps.

  “What are you up to?” my father said, when she started bringing home catechisms, prayer books, hymn books, missals, Bibles of every denomination. They lay scattered all over the house, publications of the Church of England, the Church of England (Reformed Episcopal), the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic Church. She even read up on what she had formerly dismissed as “crank” religions, such as Christian Science and the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  She did not just read, she went to services as well, often taking me with her because, in spite of her newly awakened curiosity, she seemed to be afraid to go alone. I
believe I saw the inside of at least one church of every denomination in St. John’s. My mother sat or stood, an aloofly critical observer, listening, watching not just the ministers but the congregations. She was like some dispassionately shrewd shopper who would forgo buying altogether if she had to.

  She spoke most favourably of the New World evangelical religions.

  “I am looking for the real thing, Joe,” she said, “the genuine article, and I have yet to find it.”

  One Sunday afternoon, she told me she had a secret that she would tell me if I promised to keep it to myself. I thought I was about to hear about the book and Mr. Mercer. I promised and she told me she had been “convicted of sin” and would soon be “saved.” She told me that she had, that past Tuesday, been converted in the Bethesda Mission of the Pentecostal faith on New Gower Street, the Ark, as it was called, and was to be, the following Sunday, one of forty baptized by immersion in a body of water on the heights of the city known as Mundy Pond.

  “I don’t know what came over me, Joe,” she said. “I went to the mission just to see what all the fuss was about, everybody was talking about the Bethesda Mission and this woman, this Miss Garrigus, but something happened, Joe, something happened.”

  It must have been clear from my expression that I was frightened and did not want to hear what had happened, for she stopped speaking and turned away from me, putting her hands over her face. I wanted to keep my distance from this religious fervour for fear of coming down with it myself, losing myself to it. I was terrified of the idea that something more powerful than my own will might be moving me along, or would if I gave in to it. I could see already that she would never wholly be mine as she had been before and would never think of me as wholly hers.

  The head of the Pentecostal Church in any diocese was called the overseer and had to be a man, but up to now no suitable men had been attracted to the Ark, so Miss Garrigus was unofficially the overseer, with the only sacrament she could not perform being marriage. My mother hung a large portrait photograph of Miss Garrigus above the front-room fireplace. In it, Miss Garrigus wore her hair up, piled high above her head, with a cleft down the middle so that it seemed to form the letter M. She wore a black dress with a perforated-lace collar, from which there hung a cross-shaped lace doily. One hand rested on a cane, the other held open on her lap a large black Bible. She stared out from the photograph disdainfully, unnervingly. She looked as though she could size you up in half a second, as though she had heard every excuse there was for loose living, moral weakness and Godlessness ten times over and could not be fooled. My father, looking at the photograph, called her Alice in Newfoundland.

  Before Baptism Sunday, my mother took me to hear her preach. I wondered if she was hoping that I, too, might be converted.

  Miss Garrigus was an “unrivalled revivalist” — her own assessment — from New England, who that night, in a sermon of which, for fervour and soul-stirring eloquence, my mother said she had never heard the equal, told her congregation that her own conversion had occurred in a dilapidated barn in Maine.

  “Barn born I was,” she said. “I have spent the last twenty years revivalling, travelling the world, preaching, baptizing and saving souls. But recently, at the age of fifty-two, I felt the call to Newfoundland; I felt compelled by the Lord to come to Newfoundland and establish here a mission called the Ark. The shape of Newfoundland began appearing in my dreams, first a vague shape that each night grew more distinct and began to look like some sort of island, though which one I could not tell. Eventually, it was Newfoundland I saw, though I did not know it, I did not know what Newfoundland looked like. I drew the shape I saw in my dreams and showed it to a friend, who told me I had drawn a map of Newfoundland, a map that was accurate in every way.” Miss Garrigus then unscrolled the map she had drawn and showed it to the congregation and told how, upon consulting an atlas, she had her “call to Newfoundland” confirmed beyond all doubt when she saw that the capital of what was soon to be her diocese was called St. John’s, after St. John the Baptist and St. John of the Gospels, who ended the Book of Revelations and indeed the Bible as a whole with the watchword of the Pentecostal Church, “Jesus is coming soon.”

  “Newfoundlanders, you are all New Found,” she said, “foundlings on the doorstep of salvation. You are here in my mission today because you have no church, because no other church would take you in. Or should I say, because you would not be taken in by other churches.

  “There is a woman in this congregation,” she said, “who has been keeping to herself an awful secret, something she thinks no one else knows, though someone does; something she believes she will never be forgiven for, though she will. Hear me, my dear woman; hear me, sister — I will not name you, for you know who you are, and God knows, for God knows everything — God, if only you will ask Him, will forgive you.”

  This “woman” could have been almost anybody, but I could see why my mother had been so affected.

  My mother was baptized in early June, in water from which the last ice had melted but a month before. She arrived back home on Sunday morning in a cart driven by a Pentecostal couple from the Brow. She was wrapped in a blanket, her hair was matted to her head and face and her clothes clung, still dripping water, to her body.

  “I’m saved, Joe,” she said weakly, lips quivering. “I’m saved.”

  “Take care of your mother, boy,” the man said gruffly. “Bless you, Mrs. Smallwood,” the woman said as they drove off. Their ragged old horse clopped slowly down the hill.

  I took my mother into the kitchen, where she sat shivering, arms folded, looking like someone who had been saved, not from damnation, but from drowning and had been hustled home before she caught pneumonia. My sisters urged her to go upstairs with them and change into something dry, but she looked as if she hadn’t heard them. Her eyes seemed focused inward, as though on some vision she had had and was forbidden to reveal.

  I don’t know what happened to my mother that day on the shore of Mundy Pond, but something did, something that altered her forever. I vowed that if God Himself appeared to me, I would assure Him that I would rather save myself than have Him do it.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Four:

  QUODLIBETS

  Robert Hayman, who flees Cupids and helps start up and govern a colony called Bristol’s Hope, from which he soon returns to England, writes a book called Quodlibets, a miscellany of odds and ends, a corrective to the nonsense that Vaughan is churning out, which unfortunately never appears in its original form but is amended, bowdlerized by Vaughan before publication. (Prowse, in his History, mistaking Vaughan’s edition as authoritative, dismisses Quodlibets as “a curious medley.” Prowse was completely taken in by Vaughan, to the point of believing that Vaughan travelled to Newfoundland and began a colony at Trepassey, when in fact he never in his life sailed far enough from England to lose sight of shore.)

  We are in possession of one of the rare copies of the original Quodlibets. In the Vaughan edition, the following poem appears:

  The aire in Newfoundland is wholesome, good,

  The fire as sweet as any made of wood,

  The waters very rich, both salt and fresh,

  The earth more rich, you know it is no lesse.

  Where all are good, fire, water, earth and air,

  What man made of these would not live there?

  Here is the poem as it appears in Hayman’s notebooks:

  The aire in Newfoundland unwholesome is, not goode,

  One cannot goe outside without a hoode.

  The Waters, salt and fresh, they are like ice.

  All who fall in perish in a trice.

  Fire is rare there is so little woode,

  For growing ought the earth it is no goode.

  Against life do all the elements conspire.

  Man made of water, earth, aire and fire,

  Hearken not to William Vaughan, he is a liar.

  Ha
rold Dexter

  THOUGH I LEFT Bishop Feild voluntarily, I would forever feel that I had failed there, and it would be the presiding failure of my life, the first in a list that, for a long time, seemed as if it would never end. When, in the last quarter of the century, I came to oversee the writing of my encyclopedia of Newfoundland, I would see to it that under the entry for Bishop Feild, no mention was made of me. The explanation I would give for this was that I did not deserve mention among those who, after graduating from Bishop Feild, went on to be Rhodes Scholars or otherwise distinguished themselves. The real reason was that I did not want Bishop Feild getting any credit for what I went on to do.

  In 1915, I had what today would amount to a grade nine education. I would one day have a legion of learned men answering to me, deferring to me, terrified of me; Oxford-educated lawyers, Harvard-educated doctors, university professors, civil servants, all afraid to lift a pencil, and with good reason, without first clearing it with me. I would one day, in the House of Assembly, make the Sorbonne-educated leader of the opposition look like a fool. But I never stopped believing, deep down, that these men were my betters, my true superiors; nor, I now realize, did they.

  My father was right. The Boot beckoned, but not just the Boot. Life back home beckoned, back in the old house among my ever-proliferating siblings. Since I had left for Bishop Feild, my mother had had two more children, bringing the total to ten, and another one was on the way. If there was any way I could avoid being one of twelve people in a three-bedroom house, I was going to take it, even if it meant the Boot. That every word that came out of my mother’s mouth these days had to do with her newfound faith didn’t help matters either.