On top of the apple in the bottom of the Christmas stocking, as always, were my father’s chocolate bars, a confectioner’s dozen, all different, from his wholesale supply. I can remember the name, the look, the taste, of every one of them: Cherry Blossom, Crispy Crunch, Mars Bar, Sweet Marie. Perhaps Mother herself was stuffing the chocolate bars in the stockings. By the time I was three or four years old—from what I was able to glean, long ago, from Mother, a most reluctant archival donor, and from Hubert’s fondly bitter recollections—my father had all but abandoned our hearth and home for his other family’s. He was spending longer and longer periods away on his salesman’s expeditions, and sometimes would not even come home for Christmas, though he might have made a point of leaving the chocolate bars behind.
“Probably caught in a storm,” I remember her saying one Christmas Eve, most inauspiciously, as it turned out.
In the housekeeping cabin there were tea bags and packets of the ubiquitous Mother Parker’s coffee on the kitchen counter next to the kettle and the coffee pot, the only sustenance provided for the housekeepers. But there was the physical comfort of a La-Z-Boy chair, along with a Lazy Susan on top of a table beside it, these thoughtful trappings perhaps excusing the hyperbole of “luxurious accommodations” in the tourist brochure. I had no condiments for the Lazy Susan, but I placed my apple on it and, every so often, lazily spun it around. It seemed to relax me, to help me think.
I finished one notebook and started another, wrote late into the night, into the early hours of the morning. When I finally got to bed, it was almost three-thirty, and I immediately began to have bad thoughts. Down, wanton, down! About Anton and Clarice, probably still up and at it; about Anton and his horny girlfriend Marieke, on top for hours, though that sounded more like work than sex; about Anton and the lovely Miranda. Anton still sowing his wild seed at fifty! Down, wanton! I had drunk a lot of Mother Parker’s coffee, and I lay awake for a long time thinking about Miranda.
It may be noticed that on the west coast of Newfoundland, there is neither Scotchman, Irishman, nor rat to be met with…Neither reptile nor serpent of any kind had yet fallen under our notice.
In the morning, Clarice dropped Anton off at the cabin even before I woke up. The slam of a car door and the peel of tires on pavement had awakened me, in fact, and my first thought was that they’d had a spat. All Anton said, however, was that Clarice had, as he put it, “an appointment with her mother,” evoking for me the image of a woman whose fierceness of purpose perhaps outmatched her daughter’s.
We stopped at Broom Point on our way down the coast, where Clarice said she’d seen the piping plover. Though there was a bit of early morning fog, after Port au Choix there was sunshine all the way, plus blue skies, blue seas, and, yes, blue mountains. We picked up some sandwiches at a convenience store in Cow Head, then drove on to St. Paul’s, just past which was the turnoff to Broom Point, and what one of our tourist leaflets called “the flower-filled coastal meadow overlooking the brook.” Thanks to Clarice, Anton now had the rare flora and fauna bug, if I may put it that way, in earnest.
From the Broom Point parking lot, however, we set off on the wrong trail and found ourselves overlooking not a brook but a small sandy beach. It turned out to be exactly what we were looking for. On our way down the hillside path we passed a sign that said Sandy Cove Cemetery and found a small graveyard, enclosed by a peeling white picket fence, in the lee of a cliff. Anton went on down to the beach, but I opened the gate and went inside to take a look. It was a cemetery filled with the graves of children who had died a hundred years ago, when diseases such as diphtheria and cholera had ravaged isolated places such as this, where there was not even a nurse to tend the sick. The small graves were marked with simple white wooden crosses; all the children had died before they were six years old.
I thought of Callimachus, our ancient muse, known by most of our library colleagues as the cataloguer of the great Alexandrian library, though I had known him as a poet, proponent of the short poem and denouncer of epics, before I discovered that he was also a librarian. Unfortunately, the head librarian at the Alexandrian library, Apollonius of Rhodes, was a dedicated writer of epics, and must have watched Callimachus’s cataloguing work with a wary eye. One of Callimachus’s short poems—“epigrams,” he called them—is surely the most moving epitaph ever written, two lines on the death of a child:
His father Philip laid here the twelve-year-old boy
Nikoteles: his dearest hope.
The great Alexandrian library had contained half a million “volumes” of papyrus and vellum scrolls ordered into a catalogue of one hundred and twenty rolls. The Alexandrian customs officers of the time seized all books from ships passing through the port; copies were made for the library and then the books were returned. Cataloguing was then a noble profession. There are Egyptian catalogues, and catalogues of catalogues, dating to 2000 BC. The ancient Sumerians, whose language dates to perhaps 4000 BC, referred to cataloguers as “ordainers of the universe.” The universe ordained by Callimachus burned to the ground in AD 641, about nine hundred years after his death, every book in that immortal library lost. What kind of epitaph would he have written, I wonder, if he had seen his cherished library perish and his life’s work go up in flames?
We ate our lunch on the beach in the sun, sitting back against a large warm rock. Afterward, I nearly drifted off to sleep, lulled by the almost balmy breeze and the rhythmic sound of the sea on the stones. In the midst of my reverie, Anton jumped up and hissed poetically. “List,” he said, and began walking slowly, in tiptoe fashion, along the sloping shore, as if the beach rocks were eggshells. After walking about fifty feet, he froze completely for several minutes, then tiptoed back past me, whispering intently, “Plover! Plover! A piping plover!”
He disappeared up the hillside. I didn’t know where he was going. I listened, as I’d been told, and above the sound of the wind and the waves, I could hear the piping of some peculiar bird. It was unlike any birdsong I’d ever heard, a plaintive sound, soft and melodious, but once I’d heard it, I didn’t have to strain to hear it again. As mournful and clear as a funeral bell, it might have been tolling the sad notes of its own numbered days. I thought of the small white crosses on the bare windswept hill facing the sea, and heard the stilled voices of dead children, like the voices that echo in the still air through the long twilight of a summer night, voices of children heard but not seen, faraway voices that reached you as you sat on the verandah with your solitary companions, your brandy and book, voices that were, for me, the very essence, the promise, the dream, of summer, as well as its underlying sadness.
Anton came running back with his binoculars and camera, but after searching the beach for fifteen minutes or more, he saw no further sign of the piping plover. According to his “Hinterland Who’s Who,” sightings of individual birds had been reported, but nesting adult pairs had never been seen this far up the west coast, though a nesting site had been confirmed on the northeast coast at Cape Freels. I was able to confirm only that I had heard the call of a bird I had never heard before. Anton was convinced, though, that he had seen it, and he catalogued the features as if making his case.
“About the size of a robin,” he said. “A black stripe across the forehead, a black neckband, orange legs, a short orange beak. It was pretending to be hurt, dragging its wing across the sand. They do that to lead enemies away from the nest.”
He sat down on the sand and stared out to sea, looking so dejected he might have begun to drag one of his own limbs across the sand to garner sympathy.
“Plover on toast,” he said, with great resignation, as if this were the worst possible thing he could think of at that moment. “Special of the Day a hundred years ago. Like your turr omelette today. They may be looking for a turr a hundred years from now.”
I felt defensive, and might have launched into an irrational defence of the whole turr-gunning, omelette-stuffi
ng race, but we heard a high-pitched sound high above us and looked up to see a flash of white in the bright blue air.
“There it is,” Anton shouted, pointing his finger at the sky.
The bird was at least a hundred feet above us, and for five minutes or more, with that persistent mournful cry, it put on a display of slow-motion aerial ballet that would put the famed Snowbirds to shame. For the whole time, Anton stood silent and motionless with his head bent back, looking through his miniature binoculars, so intent on extracting every ounce of birdwatching pleasure from this rare sighting that he never once thought of offering them to me.
“Ah, shit!” he exclaimed suddenly, as the plover abandoned our stretch of beach and flew off around a rocky headland to another. “The male’s mating display,” he said, dropping his binoculars to his chest and swivelling his head to get the kinks out of his neck. “Establishing a territory and attracting a mate,” he added, sounding as if he were mimicking his guidebook. “Likely the female I saw on the beach. Or maybe he’s the one I saw on the beach. Hard to tell the two apart, even with binoculars. But male or female, it’s a piping plover for sure.”
It is difficult to give an idea of, or to form an estimate equivalent to, the road-distance gone over.
In the early evening we left the beach and set off down the Straight Shore with the sun in our faces on what looked from the map to be the last stretch of straight road before it turned inland at Rocky Harbour, where we hoped to find a room for the night. All the way down the great neck of Newfoundland, in fact, the road ran straight and true along the rim of the coastal plain, between the mountains where the cinquefoil had perhaps survived the last ice age and the beaches where the plover was now enduring the cold heart of civilization, which was claiming its last remaining habitats, moving over them like an indifferent sheet of ice. Perhaps at this very moment their fragile eggs were hatching in sandy hollows. Surely any creature that flew five thousand miles every year to breed, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, deserved our protection, or, at the very least, to be left in peace. We might no longer be having plovers on toast, but we probably shouldn’t be chasing after them with cameras and binoculars, either. Perhaps the plover could be our national bird, instead of that exotic diving parrot of the tourist brochures, the puffin, which was more fish than bird.
Anton had become as silent and glum as I was. I turned on the radio and was stirred into a state of high alert by a report of (what else) an automobile accident on the local news. In the twilight hours yesterday evening, a car heading north on this very highway, a car carrying two sisters from the airport at Deer Lake to a third sister’s funeral and driven by their brother-in-law, husband of the deceased, had collided head-on with a pickup truck that was trying to overtake a tractor trailer. The driver of the pickup had been blinded by the setting sun, in the opinion of the driver of the tractor trailer. But alcohol was also suspected. The pickup driver had left a lounge a few miles farther back not long before the accident. The lounge owner had reported that. It sounded more like the details of a trial than a news report. But there would be no trial. “It is believed that the occupants of both vehicles died instantly,” said the announcer, dispassionately.
“One for my baby, and one more for the road,” Anton said blithely.
The old Grim Reaper doesn’t get much crueller than this, I thought. A whole family of sisters in one fell swoop. I thought of Hubert and Raymond and me all laid out for identification by our poor old mother, so certain that her time would come before her sons’. But one, three, six, or sixty—no doubt it’s all the same. Surely there’s no balance sheet for pain. His father Philip laid here…
We were rejoiced to get a view of the expansive ocean…I hailed the glance of the sea as home, and as the parent of everything dear.
In Rocky Harbour, we stayed in an old sea captain’s house that had been converted into a B & B, fondly and reverently christened “The Skipper’s.” The double room we’d booked over the phone was, for some reason, “unavailable” when we arrived just ten minutes later, so the owner gave us the triple with bathroom ensuite at the same rate. “I’ve bumped you up to first class” was how he put it. It was a large room on the third floor, perhaps the whole of the third floor, with not only a balcony overlooking the harbour but also access to an even higher aerie, a widow’s walk at the very top of the house, by way of an old ship’s iron stairway leading up from the balcony.
After a mug-up of tea and toast in the parlour and a desultory browse through the Captain’s Library—he seemed to have been fonder of tales of the Wild West and the open range than sea stories—Anton and I climbed up to the widow’s walk and stood on the small platform looking at the last glimmer of sunlight on the western ocean. Perhaps it was no match for a peak in Darien, but I began to feel dizzy staring from such a height, enclosed in a tiny space, with only a low ornamental railing keeping us from toppling into the silent night. Anton stayed up there, however, long after I had come down and climbed into one of the luxurious four-poster beds. As I was tucking my notebook beneath the pillow, through the open window I heard him and his wooden slippers clunking down the iron stairs.
After a late breakfast the next morning, we went up to the widow’s walk again, took two small folding chairs with us this time, and sat taking in the panoramic view of the town, the harbour, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence beyond. Anton had never seen, never even heard of, a widow’s walk—they are, in fact, uncommon in Newfoundland—and this small, confined, vertiginous space, with an unimpaired view of “the old grey Widow-maker,” as Kipling called the sea, in a poem that even Miles admired, had an uncommon attraction for him.
For me, this place where a woman kept a lonely vigil for her seafaring husband felt more like a psychological space than a physical one, and, once again, I couldn’t stay up there very long, not even sitting, before I needed to come down. But not Anton. He stayed up there for over an hour after we were supposed to check out, which was at eleven o’clock. Was he thinking of his forsaken mother? I wondered. How long had she kept her lonely vigil inside her own widow’s walk?
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth fire and the home acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
Or was he remembering his painful childhood: how he himself had stared across the polders and out to sea from the windows of his aunt and uncle’s house, in the lowlands of Holland, watching ships that seemed to be sailing through the fields, sailing to an imagined fatherland? So shut your eyes while Father sings of the wonderful sights that be, and you shall see the beautiful things as you rock in the misty sea. Then off to his lonely, landlocked bed, with neither mother nor father to sing him to sleep.
We did not see even the signs of an alluvial soil.
Evening found us on a farm in Cormack. Anton had decided to have another look.
“William’s place,” he informed me—one of many seemingly offhand revelations that were now to come my way—as we drove slowly down a long, rutted, grass-covered driveway off one of the many gravel roads that criss-crossed the land on both sides of Veterans Drive, the long paved road that ran straight through the town. It was not what you would ordinarily think of as a town: it had no centre that we could find; the farmhouses that remained were widely scattered, as were the few stores; and if it still had such things as a town hall, fire hall, post office, bank, library, and school, we hadn’t seen them. The only public building we saw was a church.
Deep in the woods, many miles from the refreshing waters of the Humber River, the sweltering farm settlement of Cormack had been described as “a 30,000-acre swath of fly-infested wilderness.” I imagined Anton’s father’s and his fellow war veterans’ encounter with farming in Newfoundland to be much like Mark Twain’s encounter with journalism in Tennessee, unforgettably described through the eyes of a naive reporter who had gone to the South for his heal
th and taken a job as associate editor of a small-town newspaper. He quickly concluded, however, after several violent attacks on the newspaper office by irate readers with guns, bricks, and hand-grenades, that “Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger,” and he left.
Doubtless most victims of farming in Newfoundland eventually reach the same conclusion: Newfoundland hospitality is too lavish with the farmer, including the veteran-farmers and farm-wives of Cormack. In addition to the aforementioned infestation of flies—stouts or “bulldogs,” mosquitoes, blackflies, and sandflies—“the constant devouring enemy,” as the town’s namesake, William Cormack, had referred to them, there are low temperatures, not enough sun, too much rain, constant wind, deep snows, early frosts, late frosts, a short growing season, fungi such as potato wart, not found elsewhere in North America, and, last but not least, as Miles once proclaimed, no soil, though there had been rumours of topsoil in this part of the country.
We were sitting on the white rounded husk of an old wringer-washer lying on its side in the grass in front of one of the original, fifty-year-old land-settlement farmhouses, whose peeling clapboard displayed multicoloured flakes of paint: white, red, yellow, green, and blue. Oft painted but never scraped, it seemed, the front of the house looked like some ancient abstract fresco. The windows were boarded over and the front door was padlocked. A tangle of bushes, weeds, grass, and trees—fireweed, alder, lilac, chokecherry—formed another barrier. As it turned out, though, Anton didn’t seem all that interested in getting inside.
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