The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  My father hated every minute he spent beneath the Boot, partly because he had to work under his father, who had predicted he would come back to St. John’s from Boston with “his tail between his legs,” and partly because he believed business to be the least dignified way on earth to make a living. He found a job that at least allowed him the illusion of self-sufficiency, that of lumber surveyor, his daily task being to walk about the decks of ships docked in the harbour and tote up the amount of wood on board. He walked about the cargo holds, tapping on the cords of wood with what he called his toting pole, which was also so-called because he tied his lunch and other sundries to it and in the morning set out for the waterfront with it on his shoulder. It was a stick of bamboo of even width that he often carried with him even when not toting anything, using it as an oversized walking stick, though, because of his mane of hair and bushy beard, it gave him the look of some staff-wielding prophet.

  He spent most of his meagre wages on bottles of cheap West Indian rum, which he bought from foreign sailors on the dock. When drunk, he wandered about the house, cursing and mocking the name of Smallwood. He had been told by someone, or had read somewhere, that the name was from the Anglo-Saxon and meant something like “treeless” or “place where no trees grow.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a bad name for Newfoundland,” he said.

  He could be flamboyantly eloquent when drunk, especially when the subject of his speeches was himself and the flagrant unfairness of his fate. “I should have stayed in Boston,” he said. “What in God’s name was it that made me leave that land of plenty to come back to this God-forsaken city, where my livelihood depends on a man famous for nothing but having hung a giant black boot at the entrance to the Narrows?”

  We often went to the boot-and-shoe store on Water Street. My grandfather, David Smallwood, was a short, bright-eyed man who always wore a tailcoat at the shop and had a beard so long he had to pull it out of the way to see his pocket watch. He had a scraping, servile way with customers that made me feel a little sorry for him. He was, I suppose, born to keep shop. I could not see my father running about, shoehorn in hand, as my grandfather did, fetching boots for people to try on, kneeling down and holding people’s feet while he fitted them for shoes. (My father said the old man’s hands always smelled of other people’s socks. My mother said his wallet smelled of other people’s money.) As a customer walked up and down, trying out a pair of shoes or boots, my grandfather would walk beside him, turning when he turned, stopping when he stopped, in a kind of deferential mimicry, eagerly looking now at the customer’s face, now at his feet.

  The one thing we were never in need of was boots and shoes, for we got them from Smallwood’s for next to nothing. It was easy, in our neighbourhood, to spot the Smallwood children; we were the ones wearing the shabby clothes and the absurdly incongruous new footwear, conspicuously gleaming boots and shoes for which we took no end of teasing, especially as we were all fitted for them at the same time.

  My father did not avail himself of the special family discount, but instead went for years wearing the same boots and shoes, and when he absolutely needed new ones, bought them full price at a rival store called Hammond’s. It is an image that stays with me, his worn tattered shoes, his patched and repatched knee boots, set aside from ours in the hall, in a token gesture of protest. We were always well-heeled, he was always roughshod; it set him apart from us in a way we children found funny, though my mother said it was disgraceful.

  To my father, the Boot was like the hag; he would have boot-ridden dreams that when recounted in the light of day seemed ridiculous, but that often kept him up at night, afraid to go to sleep. He would tell me about them, tell me how he had dreamed about the Narrows boot swaying in the wind on the iron bar like some ominously silent, boot-shaped bell. At other times, it was a boot-shaped headstone.

  When one day my mother told him there was “more booze than boots” in those dreams of his, he laughed and went around repeating it all afternoon as if in tribute to her wit. That night, however, he stayed up late and announced that having run out of “the usual combustibles,” he was about to burn the boots.

  “Go ahead,” my mother said, thinking to call his bluff, “there’s plenty more where they came from.” And so he went ahead and did it, built himself a roaring blaze and kept it going all night long with boots, each time announcing which pair it was he was consigning to the flames. “I’m burning Joe’s knee boots now,” he said. “Now I’m burning Sadie’s shoes, the ones with the brass buckles.”

  “I’m telling Mr. Smallwood,” my mother said, once the smell of burning leather made its way upstairs.

  All that remained of our footwear in the morning was a heap of charred soles in the fireplace. He had even burned our slippers, which we left by the stove so they would be warm when we came down for breakfast in the morning. The only boots he had spared were his own, in which he had left for work by the time my mother got up. Luckily, my mother kept her slippers beneath her bed. Slipper-clad in mid-December, she walked all the way to the store on Water Street. A great bundle of boots and shoes and slippers was delivered to the door that night. My father came home late, penitently close to sober. He took Sadie on his lap and told her he was sorry he had burned her little boots, which got her crying, though she had spent the day quite happily, if house-bound and barefoot, as glad as the rest of us to get a day off from school no matter what the circumstances. He sat all evening on the sofa with a chastened, sheepish air about him, staring into the fire.

  My mother was always predicting his imminent disappearance. She had never known a drinker not to run, sooner or later. He would up and leave us someday, she was certain, she said; it would not be long now, she had seen men like him before, he was showing all the signs.

  “One of these mornings you’ll walk out that door and that will be the last we’ll ever see of Charlie Smallwood.”

  “Maybe I will,” my father said, which got us youngsters bawling.

  “I won’t be pining for you when you’re gone,” my mother said.

  After we went to bed, he would start singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and every other song of departure he could think of.

  “I’m leaving, Minnie May, do you hear me? First thing in the morning.”

  “I hear you,” my mother said. “Tipperary, first thing in the morning.”

  “Twilight and evening bell / and after that the dark / And may there be no sadness of farewell / When I embark.”

  “There won’t be,” she said.

  When he wasn’t drinking, he sat about the house in chastened silence, now and then vowing that he would never drink again. “I’ve had my last drink, boy,” he said to me. “I’ve learned my lesson. You’ll never see Charlie Smallwood take another drink, no sir.” He would concoct grandiose money-making schemes and enthral us with stories of how rich we would be someday because of him. He went out briefly on the steps and looked wistfully at the sky above the city as if he had just returned home after years away, as if he knew his sobriety would not last, for he was too far gone to stop for good. The suspense when he was sober was unbearable, for I knew that he would go back to drinking and the only question was when. Truthfully, the house did not seem right when he was sober, nor did he seem to know what to do with himself, but would wander around as though in imitation of sobriety, as if not entirely sure what it was that sober people did.

  We were forever changing houses, forever being turfed out of the ones we were renting and moving on to even shabbier establishments. All I remember of the houses we lived in is a succession of attics and basements, for these, whether empty or cluttered with objects discarded by strangers, all seemed unique, whereas the houses themselves all seemed the same once the furniture was put in place, our furniture, which went with us from house to house like parts of our essential selves.

  I came home from school one day to find the entire contents of our house on Gower Street piled atop two horse-drawn carts at th
e reins of which were men I had never seen before. My father was at the reins of a third, in which there were hampers of clothing and the smaller bits of furniture. My mother and the younger children had found what room they could among the clutter. It was the first I knew that we were moving, and I thought I had caught them in the act of leaving me behind. It was all my mother could do to convince me that they had not been about to leave without me, but on the contrary, had been waiting for me and would have waited forever if they had to. “You’re my little lad,” she whispered to me so the others wouldn’t hear. “You’re my little lad, you know I wouldn’t leave you.”

  We set out, our little procession of three carts, the horses’ hooves clopping on the pavement. I had no idea where we were going, and we drove for so long I began to wonder if we had a destination or if my father was merely looking for a place to pitch the tent my mother had often predicted we would wind up in someday. They sat side by side, my parents, not speaking, though I could tell she was mortified at the spectacle we made, pretending not to notice the stares of strangers as we rode along, a dispossessed, disfavoured family with all its belongings on display.

  For some reason, the rule was that the longer we spent in transit, the worse our new house and neighbourhood would be. This day’s seemingly unending journey convinced me we had hit rock-bottom and, socially speaking at any rate, I was right. “Where are we going?” I said. They didn’t answer. I played a game with myself. I would pick a house I liked the look of up ahead and tell myself we were going there, and when we passed it by, I would pick another house and concentrate on it, as if I could thereby influence our fate. But we passed so many houses that looked promising that I sat down with my back against the cart and closed my eyes.

  After a while, I felt the cart begin to climb a slight gradient and stood up to find that we were on the bridge crossing the Waterford River, not far above where it flowed into the harbour. We were headed as far from the favoured part of town as it was possible to go, to the south side, the “Brow” of which my mother often spoke as though it lay in outer darkness. It was the least desirable, most scorned of all the city’s neighbourhoods; the home, even those brought up like me had been led to believe, of people one step up from savages, the dregs, the scruff of society, a kind of company town whose single industry was crime. A Pariahville of ironically elevated bottom-dwellers.

  We drove along the base of a cliff so steep and high the cart was almost always in the shade, then began to make our way up the winding road that climbed the cliff. Our house, bigger and better maintained than the one we had left, affordable to us because the reputation of the neighbourhood kept prices down, was at the very top, in a saddle-like depression of the ridge on the height of the Brow so that, from the front, you could see St. John’s and from the back the open Atlantic. From its front windows, the view of the city we had been deemed unworthy to live in was affrontingly spectacular. You could see all the way from Mundy Pond to Signal Hill, and below the Hill, the Narrows and the cliff-face and the Smallwood boot.

  I mention this house over all the others because, perversely, as if to spite the city that had spit them out, my parents wound up buying it. My father called it a double-decker because there was a deck on front and back, which would allow us, he said, to escape whichever of the two prevailing winds was blowing, the onshore east wind, which blew when it was stormy or foggy, and the west wind, which in winter made the sunny days so cold. The east wind would not have been a problem had the house been built in the lee of the Brow, but whoever had chosen the site had preferred the double view to being sheltered from the wind. My mother expressed doubts that a house so situated could withstand the kind of wind we got from time to time, but my father said the fact that the house was twenty years old was proof enough for him that it could.

  We had not been living there a week when there was an onshore storm with winds well above hurricane force. As I lay in bed, I felt the whole house shift in its foundation. I imagined it toppling end over end down the Brow and landing upright in the Harbour, bobbing about among the ships until someone climbed aboard and found us dead. When a gust subsided, the house would slowly right itself, creaking like a ship whose hull was rolling. Once, the house lurched more than usual and there was the sound of cracking boards. My parents came running from their room and got us out of bed (there was a boys’ room and a girls’ room, two in one, three in the other) and into our coats and boots, then told us to go back to sleep on the kitchen floor. It was my father who fell asleep, however, for he had gone to bed drunk, and we who kept vigil, wondering how we would survive outside if we had to leave the house.

  The larger of the two decks, the one that faced the city, was built out over a steep slope and supported by stilts that forever needed shoring up. The other deck faced the ocean. My father, when he was drinking, whatever the time of year, would pace back and forth through the house from deck to deck after I had gone to bed, sometimes forgetting to shut one door so that, when he opened the other, the wind tore unimpeded through the house, through the funnel of the corridor that ran from deck to deck, eerily howling and causing all the closed doors in the house (closed by my mother in case this very thing might happen) to rattle loudly in their frames.

  My father would go out on the front deck at night and alternately extol and curse the city across the harbour, one minute bemoaning our exile from it and the next bidding it good riddance, one minute declaring it too good for us and the next declaring us too good for it. He had found the ideal stage for his soliloquies of rage and lamentation, for the nearest house on either side of ours was two hundred feet away, out of earshot of even Charlie Smallwood’s booming voice. He declaimed from the front deck as though the whole city below and across the way were listening, as though the lights along the Southside Road were footlights and the dark mass of the city the unseen gallery hanging on his every word.

  Down below, St. John’s looked like the night sky, the lights that marked the neighbourhoods like constellations of stars. There was Buckmaster’s Circle, Rawlin’s Cross, the Upper Battery, the Lower Battery, Amherst Heights, Waterford Heights, Barter’s Hill and Carter’s Hill, the Hill of Chips, Monkstown, Cookstown, Rabbittown, all with their distinctive patterns of lights. We had, at one time or another, lived in almost all these neighbourhoods; it was our history down there, spelled out in lights. My father pointed them out to me once in reverse order, counting down to Amherst Heights.

  He would roar in triumph when the lights were put out in some house across the way, as if he had done it himself, as if, in the face of his blustering eloquence, the people who occupied the house had admitted their defeat and gone to bed.

  As she lay in bed one night, my mother provided a subversive commentary like some parody of exhortation, his mocking congregation of one, undercutting him, deflating him, audibly piping up whenever he paused for breath or gave in to sobbing self-pity and loudly blew his nose into his handkerchief.

  “I am a Newfoundlander, but not St. John’s born, no, not St. John’s born,” he said.

  “You’re a bayman and you always will be,” my mother said.

  “We’re not good enough, it seems,” my father said. “We are baymen, a brood of baymen among a sea of townies.”

  “Shut up and go to sleep,” my mother said. “Even baymen have to sleep.”

  “This is what I must endure,” he said. “To be spoken to in this manner by a shameless Huguenot named Minnie May.”

  On the front deck, he ranted and raved against mankind; his enemies; the Smallwoods; his father; his brother, Fred; my mother. But on the other deck, which faced the sea, the object of his wrath was more obscure. God, Fate, the Boot, the Sea, himself. He started out like he might go on for hours, but soon stood staring mutely out to sea, the sea he couldn’t see but knew was there, as if the sheer featurelessness of the darkness he faced had stifled him. Stuck for words, he looked up at the sky as if in search of inspiration, planning to let loose his fury on the moon or on t
he stars, but the sky was almost always dark.

  “They should have called it Old Lost Land, not Newfoundland but Old Lost Land,” he roared, with a flourish of his hand as though to encompass the whole of the island, then held his arms out to the sky like some ham actor beseeching God’s forgiveness.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  PREFACE

  Our friend, Miss Fielding, has asked us to introduce in a few words the important history on which she has for so long been engaged. Although there is really nothing for us to do but conduct her down to the footlights, and then to retire with a bow to the audience, we are honoured by and humbly accede to her request.

  We find happily married in Miss Fielding’s History of Newfoundland two virtues that in other such works are not on so much as speaking terms — we mean brevity and comphrehensiveness. She does in twenty pages what Prowse could not manage in eight hundred. Nor does her argument need bolstering by numbers, photographs, footnotes or illustrations.

  But as Miss Fielding has erected her History not on the ruins of others but on fresh ground, let us follow her example.

  We can think of no more sincere way to recommend her book to the reader than to express our humble hopes, not only that our own exploits will warrant a chapter in some revised edition, but that we may be among those rare few upon whom she confers her imprimatur.

  Lest we, in our acknowledgement, set to bickering the very virtues in her History whose blissful co-existence we find so remarkable, we hereby take our leave and hold out to the reader a volume that we know will at last secure for its author and her country the fame that they deserve.

  The Right Hon. Prime Minister of Newfoundland,