“The Doyle hymn book,” my father used to call it, according to Hubert. The only hymns he knew, Hubert says, and he could play every tune in the book. “The Squid-jiggin Ground” and “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s” were his favourites, and he played them on the mouth organ, not the church organ. He had a whole collection of mouth organs, one in every key. They were among the few things Mother kept after he died. It was an instrument I associated more with the Old West than the New Founde Lande, with the streets of Laredo rather than the coves of Newfoundland, with campfires along the Chisholm Trail rather than on the beaches of the Cape Shore.
Hubert’s favourite way of remembering, or conjuring up, our father (usually when he was drinking) was as a doting parent catching capelin for us with a cast net at Logy Bay—though he hated capelin—and playing tunes on the mouth organ as we sat on beach rocks around a driftwood fire roasting capelin on sticks, the closest we ever got to home and hearth. Perhaps it was his way of belatedly reconciling himself to this man—Our Father, who art probably in Hell, Hubert’s least kindly judgment on him—this man who’d had another family besides us, perhaps two others, perhaps more. My “memories” of him, as I said before, are most likely only stories I was told and pictures I’d seen, and I wasn’t told much of anything till long after he died. If I had what’s now referred to in the psychiatric literature as “repressed memories,” it was probably my mother who had repressed them and not me. I had grown up and gone through school, in fact, knowing as much about the history of my father as I did about the history of the fatherland, which was hardly anything at all—about as much as Anton knew about his father.
Gerald S. Doyle, a manufacturer and distributor of patent medicines, had begun gathering unpatented songs on his travels around Newfoundland early in the century. He was not, however, the Newfoundland pioneer in this conjoint pursuit of peddling and poetry. No less a figure than E. J. Pratt had led the way, as early as 1907, though he was not consciously pursuing poetry at the time, but merely a university career. In 1907 he was still serving as a young Methodist minister on Bell Island, where he concocted his Universal Lung Healer and earned over three hundred dollars as a medicine man, more than his annual salary as a man of God, peddling it in the outports along the northeast coast in the summer, and earning enough money to get him into the University of Toronto in the fall. If he had not gone there, claims his biographer, “he would never have been a poet,” a vocation in which he earned much greater currency.
In 1927, Doyle began publishing his songbook, with ads for his products, and distributing it to Newfoundland households free of charge. After the war, my father abandoned his sedentary office job with Gerald S. Doyle Ltd. and took to the road in his station wagon as one of the company’s travelling salesmen, covering the Southern Shore, the Cape Shore, and St. Mary’s Bay, distributing the patent medicines and the songbook. A second edition had been published in 1940, this time with music. The first edition looked more like a book of poems. A third edition appeared in 1955, the year my father died. Doyle died the following year.
Stranded for two days in his station wagon on a bleak, snowbound stretch of road on the unpopulated west side of St. Mary’s Bay, my father fell asleep with the engine running, trying to keep warm, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The car was loaded down with patent medicines: Dodd’s Kidney Pills, Mecca Ointment, Doyle’s Cod Liver Oil, Sloan’s Liniment, Hobson’s Worm Wafers, Brick’s Tasteless, and Dr. Chase’s Nerve Food, the advertisement for which read, “Why men crack when on the highway to success.” There were a few other salesman’s wares as well, black-market “dry goods” items that he apparently sold on the side: boxes of condoms, for instance, a used sample of which Hubert once found beneath the front seat of the station wagon, along with a pair of women’s underwear. In the glove compartment was a rolled-up handwritten manuscript, a scribbler-scroll bound up with plastic bands. It contained over five hundred Newfoundland proverbs, most of which I had never heard before. Had the old man been secretly planning to do for the proverbial history of Newfoundland what Gerald S. Doyle had done for its musical history?
Hubert liked to imagine him, at the end, consoling himself with music, taking out his mouth organ and playing the elegiac bars of “Cape St. Mary’s.” Take me back to my western boat…If, indeed, there is a song in the Doyle songbook that comes close to sounding like a hymn, “Cape St. Mary’s” is the one. With its arhythmical musical form, funereal tempo, a cappella incantations, and its almost religious feeling, it seems to exist beyond time and place, yet is entirely a song of the earth. Elaine’s father had called it “the national anthem,” but it seems more like the anthem of a country that has never been, or will never be again. Like “Amazing Grace,” or that old Shaker hymn “Bright Morning Star Arising,” it is a song that doesn’t seem to need musical accompaniment. It’s either the essence of music or somehow beyond it, a transcendent reverie or lamentation, a “spiritual” in the deepest sense of the word.
But alas, like the old man, the song may have had a secret, more worldly life—at least according to folklorist Dr. Olaf Skinner.
“Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s,” like “The Squid-jiggin Ground,” is another “composed/traditional” Newfoundland folk song, as Dr. Skinner calls it, by which he means that, unlike most songs identified as “traditional,” its composer is still known to us. But it has already blended in with the traditional repertoire, and most people would probably say it is a traditional folk song. And you’d think it was written by a man who’d spent all his life as a fisherman. But no. Otto Kelland, who composed the song in 1947—it came to him, he said, “right out of the blue”—had not spent his life in that insecure occupation, but in the so-called security profession, first as a policeman for fifteen years and then as head of Her Majesty’s Penitentiary for twenty-five more. I suppose we archivists might be considered by some to be part of the security profession ourselves, though we are always trying to strike a balance between locking things up and granting visiting rights, between preservation and access.
Doubtless, being in prison for such a long time, in whatever capacity, would make you long to be out on the water. Or, indeed, out in any wide open spaces. The lone prairie, for example. Consider this. What would our fathers, Elaine’s and mine, have made of this bit of scholarly jigging? At the mere thought of repeating it, I can hear them roll over in their graves. In his Learneds Conference paper, “Composed/Traditional: Two Songs from the Doyle Songbook,” Dr. Skinner points out that “Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s” bears a striking similarity to “The Hills of Old Wyoming,” a tune composed eleven years earlier, in 1936, and used on the soundtrack of a Hopalong Cassidy movie.
So much for the national anthem—but at least it’s evidence for my mouth organ associations. It was the only instrument I had ever heard played in Westerns. And, I have to confess, when I did eventually hear “Cape St. Mary’s” played on the mouth organ, I had the eerie feeling that it sounded absolutely right.
But let me fish for a few moments. Maybe some tunes sound as if they are beyond time and place, space and time, because they actually are; but if you happen to be on the right frequency sometimes—not tuned in but tuned out—they can, as Otto Kelland said, come to you right out of the blue. And not the blue hills and blue skies of Old Wyoming.
Lost in this meditative cast, I was interrupted by a strange dishevelled-looking man of the cloth inquiring about some real hymns, not the traditional music variety, but the Reverend John “Amazing Grace” Newton’s.
“Do you ’ave the Hauthentic Narrative and the Olney ’yms?” he asked.
Obviously an exasperating mouthful for those who aspired to “proper” aspiration, with the risk of both dropping and adding an h in the same breath, not to mention being fooled by a silent l as well. At this very university, in the mid-sixties, non-standard English-speakers, especially improper aspirators (typically, descendants of West Country English fishe
rmen from around the Bay), were still being fished out and subjected to linguistic filleting in speech classes—English as a second language for native speakers. Non-native English-speakers, however, who couldn’t land the word salmon, for example, without hooking an l as well, or who regularly transposed their l’s and r’s, were regarded simply as charming. What was it about the mis-aspirated h that caused so much exasperation and concern?
Yet, surprisingly, though he dropped and added his h’s, this gentleman pronounced the name of the English village where the hymns had been penned like a native Englishman. Perhaps he had visited Own-ey, or had even tended a flock in those parts; perhaps he had been educated in the Mother Country. My Olney l had been silenced as a graduate student, as a result of my work on crazy William Cowper, he of the silent w. Coo-per had not only lived in Olney, but in John Newton’s house, and had collaborated with him on the Olney Hymns. He wrote about a third of them, in fact.
Our man of the cloth—stained, tattered, wrinkled, and wet cloth, an embarrassingly big wet patch just below his belt—had yellowish, sleep-encrusted eyes and spiky, straw-coloured hair. He could have been a wasted aging front man for an evangelical punk rock band, or a pathetic scarecrow, though if I were a crow, I don’t think I could have summoned up even a sympathetic pretense of fright. Or perhaps the poor soul who stood before me was the crazy William Cowper himself, reincarnated.
I avoided the mock-authoritarian Mr. Stickler routine we sometimes put students through for their own good: Did you check the catalogue? Do you have the call number? Did you fill out your request slip? etc., etc.
“I’ll check the catalogue,” I said helpfully, knowing that we did have both books, but needing call numbers for the slips. I wrote the numbers on there for him.
“You’ll need to fill these in,” I said. “Do you have a library card?”
“No, I’m just writing a sermon,” he said. “We used to ’ave the ’yms ’fore the church burned down.”
The church burned down, I thought, and began to recall something I’d read in the paper a few weeks ago about a church burning down under suspicious circumstances somewhere out in the evangelical heartland: White Bay, Baie Verte, Green Bay, Halls Bay, that area. A burning, literally, evangelical minister had been found outside his burning church, rolling around in the wet grass, trying to douse the flames on his clothes. He claimed that he had gone down to the church in the early evening, an hour before the service, and found an intruder dressed like a mummer setting the fire with newspaper and lighter fluid. The alarmed arsonist had then thrown lighter fluid over him, he said, and set his clothes on fire.
From what I remembered, this suspect was never found, and the minister was later charged with doing the deed himself—setting both the church and himself on fire. But before he was charged and tried, someone had tried to administer justice vigilante style by firing several bullets through the windows and walls of another church down the road where the same minister was preaching.
“Your church had a copy of the Olney Hymns?” I asked him.
“Yes, we did,” he said, “signed by the Reverend Newton ’imself. Lost in the fire…when the church burned down.”
I handed him the form to fill in for a library card, on which he had to put his name, address, and telephone number. On it he wrote “Rev. St. Croix,” and the name and address of an inn in St. John’s.
“Where was the church?” I asked.
“Oh, that was my old congregation,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“Is this a permanent address?” I asked, pointing to the form.
“My sister’s place,” he said. “I’ve been there for a good while. ’ow long can I ’ave the books?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to read them here,” I said. “This is just a research library and archives. Anyway, these are rare books. Even a lending library wouldn’t lend these.”
I left a student assistant at my post, and after retrieving the books from the Vault and finding a pair of reading gloves that looked so dirty they would probably do more harm to the delicate pages than his sweaty bare hands, I led him to a table in the Reading Room and sat down with my file folders at the other end, where I could keep an eye on him. He must have thought it was only going to be him and the hymns, for he eyed me somewhat sulkily as I sat down and looked down the long table at him with the beady-eyed severity of an exam invigilator.
Looking like a grateful, spellbound grandfather who had just received a gift from his only grandchild, the Reverend St. Croix fingered the paper-and-metal identification medallions attached by string to the protective lavender boxes in which the books were enclosed, then gently untied the bows and lifted back the flaps to reveal his gifts: the Authentic Narrative, 3rd edition, 1765; the Olney Hymns, 4th edition, 1787. He began to mutter and mumble to himself as he licked the thumb of the cotton glove and turned the pages of one of the books. Neither of them has Newton’s signature on it, but, if you’ll excuse an inappropriate simile, they are still as rare and valuable as hell.
It may be hard to believe, but the acid-free, rag paper pages of these rare books are as white and supple as the day they were printed. Well, I exaggerate a bit, but compared to the pages of most of the books in here, which were printed in the last one hundred years—there’s no comparison, really. As Colm said at our last meeting, most of these books, printed on high-acid, wood-pulp paper instead of cotton and linen rag, and no longer being sewn together but merely glued, probably won’t even be around one hundred, perhaps even fifty, years from now. In spite of our best efforts to give them a good home, safe from their enemies—humidity, erratic temperatures, dust, and light—these books are just not going to last. They were born with a congenital flaw, so to speak, acid in the bloodstream, from the chemical processing of wood pulp. Many of them are already unstable and have been withdrawn. Their pages are breaking down, turning yellowish brown and brittle. Eventually, they will become so fragile that they will crack and crumble to the touch. As the bookbinder who repairs our books recently remarked to me, bookmaking—as opposed to filmmaking or record-making or printmaking—is the only craft whose developing technology has made things worse instead of better.
Contemplating all this, I must have been digging my elbows rather heavily into the hardwood of the Reading Room table, for my body began to pick up vibrations from the other end, not unlike those that seem to home in on your chest from the thumping bass-heart of some teenager’s stereo in a car coming toward you a mile down the road. Looking down the long table, I saw that the Reverend St. Croix was no longer just quietly muttering and mumbling to himself. Staring reverently at one of the books, his head and hands were shaking and his white lips were trembling fiercely, perhaps even frothing. His whole body, in fact, seemed to be trembling, and I thought that he was either going to have an epileptic fit or start speaking in tongues, perhaps tongues of flame that would set these CO2 tanks firing and suffocate the lot of us. But he looked up suddenly and saw me looking at him, then settled back into what seemed to be a state of normal consciousness.
To maintain my watch, I’d been fighting a strong urge to urinate, and though I knew it would be a mistake to leave him alone with the books, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t wait any longer. The reference librarians are coffee addicts; they have their own twelve-cup coffee maker and a bucket-sized can of Folgers coffee in the storeroom. Before starting work I’d downed a large mug from a pot that had, as one of them had put it, “real authority.” I got up quietly and walked out through the Reading Room door, then rushed past the main desk and down the stairs to the nearest bathroom, which was on the floor below. When I got back, as I had feared, the old bugger was gone—Authentic Narrative and Olney Hymns along with him.
I ran across the foyer and out through the main door. The courtyard was empty. A beautiful sunny springlike morning in January! Across the way was a suspiciously inviting copse of evergreens. I hurried acr
oss the courtyard and entered this small cultivated woods, where the air was warm and sweet-smelling, and, sure enough, there was the Reverend St. Croix seated on a bench with his raincoat open, his head thrown back, and his face looking heavenward, though his eyes were closed. One rare book lay closed beside him on the seat, and the other, open on his lap, looked like some great white mushroom in the glaring light. Except for his eyes, which he opened but didn’t turn toward me, he didn’t move a whisker as I slowly approached and sat down beside him on the bench.
“Those are rare books,” I said, in the gently officious tone I had spent twenty years cultivating. “You can’t take them out of the library. If they get lost or damaged, they can never be replaced…and they shouldn’t be opened in the sun.”
He ignored this and, half-turning toward me, said, just as gently, “Not too many people know that the Reverend Newton caught fish off the coast of Newfoundland and was almost lost in a storm, fish that was salted and stored away, fish that saved ’is life on the last leg of ’is trip, when ’is ship was becalmed and all they ’ad left was fresh water and salt fish. And ’e didn’t have any slaves on that ship—like they say ’e did.”
He closed the book on his lap and laid it on top of the other one on the bench. He closed his eyes, turned his face heavenward once again, and intoned: “‘Amazing grace, ’ow sweet the sound,/ That saved a wretch like me./ I once was lost, but now I’m found,/ Was blind, but now I see.’” He turned to me and said, “That ’ymn was written that night in the storm, when ’e asked the Lord Jesus Christ for mercy.” Then he sprang up from the bench and strode off, but mercifully left the books behind.
I picked them up and laid them on my lap, my anxiety melting away like the snow dripping from the evergreens as I watched the wretched Reverend St. Croix descend the slope toward Elizabeth Avenue, cross the road and disappear into an empty wooded lot on the other side, another lost soul in search of a father, albeit a heavenly one. I tilted my own head back and closed my eyes, inhaled the warm, sweet, pine-scented air of the landscaped grove, and thought I heard the sounds of birds and chirpy human voices among the trees. I almost nodded off with relief, but my head fell forward and jerked me awake.
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