The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  From a distance the thing looked like a telephone pole with a flag on top. As we got closer, however, the pole looked more like a gibbet or a cross. The flag was the Red Ensign, with the Union Jack in the upper left-hand quadrant and the Badge of Newfoundland in the fly. Below the flag was a long crossbar. Two strands of rope were hanging from the ends of it, and, at the bottom, they were connected to a seat. Opposite this, nailed to the front of the pole, was a handwritten sign.

  If it had been a cross, I thought, the sign would have said, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” or “INRI” in the mysterious Latin inscription, the mocking sign Pontius Pilate had fastened to the cross of Jesus. As a child, I’d always thought (I’d been misinformed about this) that INRI meant “I have suffered.” This was not a cross, however (not in the literal sense, at least), but a swing, a single-post swing, and the sign said, in large, white, cursive letters, NEWFIE SWING.

  Taking nature as our guide, it might be said that this was a cultural icon of another species, a new order, perhaps even a new domain. Newfoundland Renaissance Gothic, or Backwoods Noir, out here in the outharbours, the outponds. Material culture, as my colleagues the Folklore archivists call it. Nothing immaterial about it. A solid-wood device designed for suffering, for crucifixion of a kind, for smashing your stupid Newfie face to pieces if you had muscles in your legs like a black bear or a jackrabbit and could push off hard and high enough. Perhaps there was a place for an I HAVE SUFFERED sign after all.

  “We love the place, O Lord. Forgive us but we do.” These immortal words from the Gospel According to Brendan “Miles” Harnett sprang to mind, his blasphemous reworking of the opening lines of the first Newfoundland hymn, which he’d used as his text one evening for a sermon at the Travers.

  I thought we were no more than ten miles from the main road, but we must have made our way into the terra incognita, into a heart of darkness all our own. In a review I’d read recently in the tls, the writer had used most of his allotted space not to discuss the book at hand (I forget what it was) but to advance the thesis that, one hundred years after Heart of Darkness, the metaphorical journey into said heart, including the one being made by the writer of the book he was writing off, was now just a literary cliché.

  Critick, come hither, and behold! Tread lightly upon this trope.

  Ten years ago, when I was attending a two-week professional development workshop in Ottawa, a few of us took a weekend trip to Montreal. At St. Joseph’s Oratory we beheld a real heart of darkness, discreetly lit up for our viewing pleasure. The actual flesh-and-blood heart of the beloved Brother André, the recently beatified founder of the oratory, was on permanent display in a small glass case set into a wall. Needless to say, it was a strange and awe-inspiring, if sickening, sight.

  But perhaps it was no more strange and sickening than what was now before our eyes. As I stood on the gravel road with a stranger, a foreigner, at my side, and a very dark heart himself, a mixture of impulses and emotions welled up in me, not the least of which was the desire to run. Anton’s face darkened and he furrowed his brow. I felt I was looking at my reflection. An exercise in swing theory was obviously underway. He was bringing all his iconographic skills to bear on this strange object before his eyes, like the featureless monolith in 2001, but nonetheless mysterious for being feature-full. Icebergs, puffins and whales, tulips, windmills and wooden shoes were iconographic child’s play compared to this.

  “What is it?” Anton asked blankly, his odd instinctive emphases sounding perfectly correct.

  I think I knew the answer, but I didn’t speak. Perhaps I couldn’t speak, for it all made me exceedingly gloomy. Dispel and despise, I thought. Dispel and despise. I was feeling overheated, overcome, thinking, if not speaking, in tongues, moved by a spirit not my own.

  “Burn your swings!” I heard myself say. It sounded like some spontaneous Harnettian injunction, one that might replace the proverbial Smallwoodian one. Even to my own ears, however, I sounded like a missionary to foreign parts, a moral anthropologist among the bush-born, a foreigner, an other, in my native land.

  I was glad that, instead of asking another unanswerable question, Anton simply jumped over the ditch, climbed over the fence into the fallow field, and installed himself in the enigmatic device, apparently intent on replacing theory with practice. Will it work in theory? He tested it lightly and carefully at first, then pushed himself off more forcefully, higher and higher, his sneakered feet smacking into the single post, the sound echoing loudly in the stillness of the woods—perhaps the first Newfie swing demonstration ever performed by a European.

  What is it? I thought, as I watched him like a protective father hovering on the edge of a playground. Better to let some unbiased, fresh-faced future archivist or folklorist or archeologist answer that, someone coming upon this cultural artifact—this plaything, this totem and taboo, this icon or sign—a thousand years hence, in the unforgiving archives of the peat bogs. I had to be careful, I had to watch it; we did not have a history, as they say, the country of Newfoundland and me. I who had been nourished, sedated, inoculated at the generous teat of Confederation against the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of our country’s long history, against a reoccurrence of history’s bad dreams; I who had eaten only of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus flower and grown up, innocent and inert, in Canada’s Happy Province; I who had been immersed, if not reborn, in Baie d’Espoir, though Bay Despair still issued from my lips.

  No, we did not have a history, this former country and me—not Terre-Neuve but Terre-Vieille. The fatherland bequeathed to me was only a shadow of the one that Miles had lost. The past itself was terra incognita, and though I’d had my own indigenous patriot guide, an abyss of difficulties had sprung up in my mind, in my imagination, between the point where I stood and the centre of the terra incognita. Like William Cormack, I too had been schooled for pastoral.

  I left Anton with his swing and went on ahead, his childlike, gleeful yip-yips echoing behind me, from the pond below, from the spruce-clad hills above. I walked on down the dusty road, farther into the woods, around the pond, wherever the road was leading. It came to a sudden halt about a half mile ahead, in a roundabout circling an island of alder with a real utility pole in the centre. The overhead wires ended with the road.

  In the afternoon, Anton drove to Cormack, about ten miles down the main road, back the way we had come. I spent the time, three hours or more, making notes about our trip. I filled more than half of one of the hardback notebooks I’d packed. Anton came back looking tired and gloomy, and didn’t say a word about what he’d found. I thought it was better not to ask—I just kept on writing. Slumped in a chair, head hung, he sat out on the deck by himself, sucking on one of the Jockey Clubs that had been left in the fridge. Perhaps his gloomy gaze took in the mocking face of the pond, troubled now by a stiff evening breeze, or the sublimely mocking gravitas of the illusory blue mountains.

  The song of a female and her contentment in this remote and secluded spot exhibited the strange diversity there is in human nature.

  The road up the coast the next day led us through thick fog almost all the way to L’Anse aux Meadows. Anton said it was like a road along the top of the dykes that protected his country from the North Sea. We saw no blue mountains at all, and what we saw of the sea was grey.

  Just past St. Lunaire-Griquet, a few miles from the Norse site, when darkness had thickened the fog to the point where even high beams were useless—were worse than useless, in fact, for the fog seemed to reflect this more intense light right back into our faces—two of the world’s worst and weariest housekeepers found what the owner called a housekeeping cabin, on another pond, a very small one this time, which we were told we could walk around in ten minutes. The fridge and cupboards in this cabin were bare, however, so in the morning, after walking around the pond three times, we drove into St. Lunaire-Griquet to find a restaurant.

  A young w
oman in a black leather jacket, black jeans, and workboots was picketing a restaurant called the Stage Head, half of which, as the name implied, was set on posts, or shores, and built right out over the water. Behind her, flashing feebly in the window in the early morning light, an aquamarine neon sign said, “Seafood.” Though we could no longer land, split, gut, and fillet cod (commercially, that is; there was a so-called food fishery each year), it wasn’t the only fish in the sea. We might have danced the last head-guts-and-sound-bone waltz out there on the real stagehead floor, but tourists could be taught to dance with any walleyed wallflower species. This could be anything, from squidcakes to stewed turbot to curried haddock, whatever made the less-favoured substitutes more palatable.

  The woman’s placard said, “Union Maid,” and as we stood by the car looking at it, she turned it around to reveal the reverse side, which said, “Coaker lived and died for your sins.” Though revisionist historians have recently been undermining Sir William Coaker’s candidacy for sainthood, their sacrilegious ideas had obviously not yet reached this isolated part of the coast.

  The union maid approached us, smiling, with her placard resting on her shoulder. She was what Mother would have called hard-lookin’; not to mean unattractive, but tough-lookin’. For the plain of features, not to be confused with the plain down-and-out, there was poor-lookin’. But this woman was good-lookin’, in her own special way. Anton was smitten, I could tell. She had long black hair that fell halfway down her back. On her head, worn in reverse, was one of those rounded caps, affectionately known as beamers, that are usually worn only by older men. It certainly looked a lot smarter worn backwards, but no doubt this had more to do with who was wearing it. Her lips were full and red, but not painted. It was as if she had just been eating some luscious red berries or fruit. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black; even her face had a black cast. It was a gypsy face, with a dark sultry sensuality that was completely unselfconscious and restrained. Smitten, yes. I think I was, too.

  Union Maid painfully reminded me how diminished my so-called sex life had become. The occasional bad thoughts and flagrant, reprehensible desires; the rare and surprising nocturnal emission, perhaps the body’s last-ditch attempt to avoid a harmful buildup of certain bodily fluids; masturbation, a private act, which these days felt more like a public humiliation with an accompanying chorus of derision, an affirmation of loneliness and an absurd physical act to boot—these were all that separated me from complete abstinence. Bad thoughts were sometimes followed by an outrageous wild desire for complete sexual gratification right then and there, usually with cruelly beautiful strangers in public places: in a long slow lineup at a lone bank teller’s wicket or a supermarket checkout; among the crowded tables at coffee in the university cafeteria; with some shapely graceful spandexed wood sprite flashing past me in a shady grove on the walking trail; with some young summer assistant, some sweet, trusting, busty ingenue, in a dimly lit corner of the Archives. I was, in fact, lavishly entertaining a wild desire right at that moment, a shameless fantasy of union with the union maid.

  But it must have been clear to every woman within reach that I was harmless. My pathetic predatory desires had been disarmed not only by that which made cowards of us all—what Hamlet called “conscience,” though perhaps he meant consciousness, or self-consciousness—but also by something else. No, not fear of arrest and disgrace, or hell fire. In the fields of lust, what remained of my conscience was a tattered scarecrow of a superego. In the sphere of intimacy—sexual intimacy, in particular—I had for a long time been disarmed more by diffidence than conscience, had lapsed into mere longing, though there was nothing mere about the pain connected with it.

  The object of my bad thoughts handed us a leaflet that also said, “Coaker lived and died for your sins.” Two men were watching us through the restaurant window.

  “Hello, welcome, you can eat here,” she said, perhaps reading the look of hesitation, or hunger, on our faces. “It’s the only place in town, really, except for the café and crafts shop on the hill, but you can’t get a full meal there, just soup, tea buns, and sweets. Homemade, though.” She smiled mischievously.

  “What am I doin’ out here, you’d like to know? I work in there. It’s an oven inside. In the kitchen, I mean. I brought in a thermometer and stuck it on the wall. One hundred and ten degrees. They took it down. There’s no ventilation—it’s against the code. No windows, either, to let in some light and fresh air. Just an open door. I complained about it, complained about a few other things too—twelve-hour shifts, eight-day weeks, miserable wages. Even worse than what that woman from Ontario was offering for workin’ in those burger sweatshops on the so-called Golden Horseshoe. A lot of golden horseshit, if you ask me. Not enough proles left in Ontario, I guess. Not enough immigrants to do the dirty work.

  “I got other people complaining, tried to organize them, get them to join the ffawu. They let me go. There’s no work up here. They got complete control. They do what they like, pay what they like. They have to fly fish in here because they closed the plant. I’m told our mha owns this place. It’s packed six months of the year. This is tourism central. You been down to the site?”

  I hadn’t expected her to stop. Her question took me by surprise.

  “You mean, L’Anse aux Meadows?” I said.

  “Yeah, the Norse site.”

  “No, we still haven’t had breakfast,” I said.

  “What’s it like?” Anton asked.

  “It’s great,” she said, nonchalantly. “Very authentic, very low-key, very mystical. But the people who come here are disappointed with it. They drive a thousand miles with a wagonload of kids. They want a circus…Disneyland…Vikings killing one another with hatchets. Now if you want to see a real mystical place, go out to the Cape, Burnt Cape. Where you from, anyway? You’re not from here.”

  “Holland, for me,” Anton said. “My friend Michael is from St. John’s.”

  “Clarice, from Quirpon,” she said, reaching out her hand.

  Anton took it in both of his. “Anton,” he said. “We’ll go to the café.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to interfere.”

  “No, you come with us. Is that okay, Michael, if we go there?”

  “Sure, that’s fine with me.”

  Clarice’s paintings were on the walls of Clarice’s Coffee and Crafts. No relation, she said. There were landscapes and seascapes of Burnt Cape, which looked like a stark and uninviting spot. Only minimally representational, however. Dark, verging on the monochromatic, except for some white and yellow star-points of light. There were large paintings of wildflowers and stunted trees. The lights in the landscapes were cinquefoil, she said, and encaustic was the technique she used. Pigments mixed in boiling beeswax.

  “There’s two or three dozen rare plants out there,” she said, “and more than three hundred altogether, including about a dozen cinquefoil, one not found anywhere else in the world. It survived the last ice age. A Harvard botanist discovered it in 1925. Why they want to grow out there, I don’t know, perhaps for the same reason I want to paint out there. It has the shortest growing season and the lowest temperatures on the Island. And of course there’s no soil. It’s a desert, really, very exposed, very high, with a lot of wind. An Arctic desert. But it’s beautiful, too. About a third of it tuckamore, trees flat as mats. What it is really is one big limestone rock, and there are limestone caves—ovens, they’re called. Not sure why. They might have been used as kilns to make lime for fertilizer and outhouses.”

  “Fernald,” I said. “Was Fernald the Harvard botanist you mentioned?”

  “That’s right. You heard of him? What do you do, anyway?”

  “I’m an archivist,” I said, “and Anton—you’re not going to believe this—has come all the way from Holland to see that cinquefoil you were talking about.”

  “You’re kiddin’ me.”

  “Well, tha
t’s what he told me when he came.”

  Anton was in his element. He spent a long time looking at the paintings while Clarice and I sat and drank our coffee and ate homemade tea buns and partridgeberry jam. Anton’s coffee sat and cooled.

  “Did you go to the new art school?” I asked Clarice.

  “I started a BFA a few years ago. I was in the theatre program for a while, then I switched to art. I left in my second year, it was a waste of time. None of those teachers were real artists.”

  “But teachers don’t have to be artists, do they? You don’t have to be an artist to teach someone how to paint.”

  “No one can teach you how to paint. That’s what I believe. I do all my painting out on the Cape. What does your friend…Anton…What does he do?”

  “He used to be an archivist, too, and an art historian, and a town planner. He drives a truck now, most of the time, when he’s back home.”

  “How long’s he been here?”

  “Since last September.”

  “That’s a long time. What’s he doing here? Not just looking for flowers.”

  “No, he’s looking for other things as well. Birds. The piping plover.”

  “I saw some plovers down the coast last summer. At Broom Point, I think it was.”

  “I love that flower,” Anton said, pointing to a painting on the wall as he sat down to his cold coffee and tea buns. “It looks like an octopus or a giant squid. How big is it, in life?”

  “That’s the Burnt Cape cinquefoil, Potentilla usticapensis Fernaldii,” she said, authoritatively. “The Cape is the only place on earth it grows. I painted it big to show its strength. It’s a dwarf, really, with creamy white flowers. They grow at the end of trailing stems, three or four inches long. Scale of one inch to a foot in the painting.”