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 health 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 displ
ayed 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.
The windows were covered with silver-grey sheets of plywood, but set in the front door were three narrow uncovered vertical panes of glass, in descending order of height from left to right. Their bases pointed like arrows toward the earth, the direction in which the dilapidated house was heading, as were all of us in the end. There were no shingles on the pitched roof, only felt, or tarpaper, and a lot of bare boards were showing through. A sheet of what looked like tarpaulin had been nailed onto the front part of the roof and hung down over the eave just above the door. A curious four-cornered crown sat atop a tall narrow chimney that looked like a piece of square pipe with a brick pattern baked on. High above the house, layers of stratus cloud were stacked like sedimentary rock.
We began walking along a narrow overgrown track toward the cleared land at the back, which was barely visible through the trees. Though the front of the house had been painted many times, and many different colours, the back and sides were unpainted and rotting away. So was the barn, which we passed en route; its wood was a silken lilac grey. Now partially hidden by trees and sunken like a saddle in the middle, both ends pitched at a forty-five-degree angle, the barn’s second-storey open door was like a blank Cyclops eye scanning the sky. Farther along the track, surrounded by brush, were the rusting cabs of two pickups, one red, one green, their doors ajar, as if someone had just made a quick escape.
The track led through dense trees to much higher ground, on which new grass was rising, though it was still not tall enough to hide the traces of beds and furrows—civilian trenches. Over this palimpsest of fallow fields, encircled by a range of low dark hills, a full moon was rising. It was not blue, however, but had a gold-tone, mock-harvest hue. We walked to the highest point of land and sat facing the moon on a mossy, lichen-covered, half-buried rock that must have been too big to be removed when the land was cleared. Anton’s only comments up to this point, all of which had seemed like a distraction, had been about the farm’s flora, many of which, unlike our more cautious east coast specimens, were already in bloom; but before he got around to the subject of the farm’s fauna, and the particular faun that I was most curious about, he surprised me with other, quite startling, news.
“You must know that Miranda is with child,” he said, as if reporting a case of immaculate conception. I wasn’t sure if he meant I’m sure you know or I have to tell you.
For a moment I was only able to nod in reply, though I shouldn’t have been at all surprised; since Christmas he’d spent more time at her house than mine.
He began nodding, too, though he wasn’t looking at me but at the moon.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “When I came here the first time, I asked William for advice. I asked him about a lot of things, but he didn’t have much to say.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
He turned his head and smiled at me, a weak, tired, furtive, tremulous smile, as if it were trespassing upon his face. “Gone to the Blue Mountains,” he said. “No more than a half-dozen farmers are left. The neighbour said he stopped farming long ago, long before they took him away. Ten years ago, maybe, to a nursing home in Norris Point, next to the hospital, where he passed away after a year or two. The farm was killing him, he said. He drank a lot, lost his driver’s licence, then crashed his trucks into the trees. He never married, but there were stories, he said. Perhaps I have half-brothers or sisters, too, just like you. He was living with dozens of starving cats, all inbred and crazy. They climbed the walls of the house and tore the felt off the roof. They were living on birds and mice and shrews. The big toms killed rabbits and chickens, he said. The spca took them all away. He went crazy in the end, couldn’t look after himself, poisoned himself with chokecherry wine…big seeds…with cyanide.”
He started to shake his head, grabbed a piece of moss and pulled it off the rock, stood up suddenly and threw it away, then started to walk back quickly toward the house. It was almost dark and I watched him disappear into the trees.
When I got back to the car, he was reclining in the driver’s seat, his eyes closed, his arms folded rigidly across his chest. The hood of his jacket was tied tightly around his head, and moonlight was falling through the windshield on his moonlike face—a plaster of Paris death-mask face. He looked like some deceased or reposing monk. I got in on the passenger side, reclined my own seat, and sat wide-eyed for a long while, staring at the moon.
I wondered if Anton’s father had seen the blue moon. If he had, it would have been a harvest moon—I guess there would have been a harvest by September 1950—a full moon at the fall equinox, and not orange or gold, but blue. Maybe he too would have seen it as an omen, and a welcome one, perhaps, for a serviceman-turned-farmer, with no war bride at his side, not even a complaining one. I imagined him and his abandoned lover staring at it at the same time, drawn to it by feelings they could not fathom: shifting tides of attachment, regret, and grief, a sea change of disengagement, abandonment, and loss, but on opposite sides of the Sea of Darkness.
We slept in the car overnight, very soundly, to my surprise and relief. I awoke only once, feeling completely stuffed up, needing air. We’d closed all the windows against the mosquitoes. I opened a window, closed my eyes, and didn’t wake again till early morning. I heard the sound of the hatchback door creaking open. Then I watched Anton walk past my door toward the house holding a white Styrofoam cup in front of him, ghostly white in the dim light of dawn, like a priest carrying a votive candle or the sacramental Host. He made his way through the trees, bushes, weeds, and grass and up onto the rotting steps of the house, then removed the tiny cinquefoil from the cup and attached it to a piece of splintered wood in the door. When he glanced back at the car, I closed my eyes, but I watched him disappear around a corner of the house. My bladder was bursting so I got out of the car and walked into the nearest thicket to relieve myself, which I assumed was what Anton was doing as well.
On our way out Veterans Drive, just a few miles from the highway, we encountered a large pickup truck parked right across the yellow line, blocking both lanes. Two workmen with sunglasses, yellow hard hats, and orange vests were standing alongside it, and one of them raised a hand as we approached. He walked up to the driver’s-side window and said with a smile, “We’re having a bit of a blast up ahead, shouldn’t take long.”
After ten minutes, at least a dozen vehicles were waiting in line behind us. The two men were standing with their backs to us, their arms resting on the cab of the truck, the yellow X’s on their backs gleaming in the hazy early morning light. It seemed as if time were standing still. Above their heads, what looked like the same slate-grey stratus clouds that I’d seen last night were stacked in a high uneven pile, like an archive of all the long-lost years. One of the men removed his hat, revealing what the shampoo ads used to call rebellious red hair. Then he took a hairbrush from his jacket pocket and began to brush his hair and beard in the side-view mirror of the cab. I heard a phone ring and saw the other man put it to his ear, then turn and look back, sunglasses glinting, at the long line of drivers waiting for something to happen. He laughed, leaned back leisurely against the truck, and placed one foot against the door. He put the phone back in his breast pocket. Seconds later the air cracked violently and a shower of rock and earth rose like fireworks above the truck. It seemed to freeze there for a curiously long time, obscuring the rocklike wall of cloud, as if it too had exploded and bits of it were suspended, floating, drifting, as clouds are wont to do.
Part Six
June-August 1996
21. PATHOS EVERYWHERE
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
—William Blake
It’s hard to believe that Miles is gone, but he always said that the asthma would take him, as it did his father.
On the Monday after we returned to St. John’s, I had received a phone call from a Sister Perpetua Hennessey at the Presentation Convent, who informed me that Miles had died on the Sunday of the Victoria Day weekend, the day before Anton and I left on our trip, and that his sister, Sister Nano Harnett, was staying at the convent and wished to pass along some items that Miles had left me. A week later, on the first Monday in June, I presented myself, eager as a young novice, at “the Mother House,” as she called it, where I was received by Sister Perpetua herself, the convent’s self-described “amateur archivist.”
Behold, Lowe, I said to myself. Signs and wonders, alarums, in the Land of Archivy! Perpetua, perpetual, respect des fonds, in perpetuity. Je me souviens! Je me souviens!
She led me into the drawing room and introduced me to Sister Nano Harnett. Her namesake, Sister Nano Nagle, had been the founder of the order, the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sister Perpetua explained to me.
“In 1776,” she emphasized. “Not so well known as the American Revolution, but just as important, we like to think.”
Sister Nano Harnett had been a guest at the convent since she came home from Regina for the funeral. She had stayed on to look after the estate. But, alas, said estate did not include the Brendan “Miles” Harnett papers. From Miles, from Sister Nano, nano, nothing, or next to nothing—j’oublie, j’oublie. Just newspapers and books. But the Watchman was whispering in my ear: I speak to those who understand, but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.
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