The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  “No,” she said. “I know. But from now until then New York is all you’ll talk about, you’ll keep trying to convince me, and I don’t want to feel pressured.”

  “Well —” I said, trying to laugh again, “if that’s the way you want it. I’ll see you in New York.”

  “You really want me to go?” she said. I nodded. “What are we, Smallwood?” she said. “You and I. What are we?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, though I knew what she meant.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  I was about to tell her I would write her from New York as soon as I got there when she turned around and walked quickly away from me, her cane thudding in the gravel.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Six:

  THE RUEFUL SETTLER

  We here present another selection from the authoritative edition of Quodlibets, called “The Rueful Settler,” in which a settler, now a resident of the renegade colony of Bristol’s Hope, addresses his former master on the subject of the colony at Cuper’s Cove, now known as Cupids:

  John Guy, ’twas you enticed me to this place.

  If ever I set eyes upon your face,

  I shall tell you what I think of Cuper’s Cove,

  Then sit your puny arse upon my stove.

  I’ll tell you why I moved to Bristol’s Hope,

  Then hang you with a sturdy piece of rope,

  And when your little legs have ceased to kick,

  I’ll beat your lifeless body with a stick.

  Never Wales shall I set eyes upon again.

  My sole blessings be this paper and this pen.

  In Newfoundland I live, in Newfoundland will die,

  Unknown, unmourned, because of you, John Guy.

  Old Lost Land

  FIELDING’S JOURNAL, SEPTEMBER 9, 1920

  Dear Smallwood:

  “The man who wrote ‘The Ode to Newfoundland’ lived there,” my father used to tell me, pointing at Government House. The grounds of Government House, where all the governors of Newfoundland since 1824 have lived, back onto Circular Road, so I can see them from my bedroom window. For most of the year, no one sets foot on the grounds but gardeners and in winter no one at all. It always seems a strange sight, that vast, treeless, steppe-like field in the middle of the city, without so much as a dog’s footprints in the snow.

  When I was a child, I was always asking my father, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the wall of his study, he would try to make me understand how big it was, try to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our horse-cab drives around the bay. “We’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny encircled star that stood for St. John’s. “Now, last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map, the paper crackling expansively beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it’s not all like St. John’s. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.” I could not imagine it. All I could imagine were the grounds of Government House going on forever. I have yet to see it.

  The ode was written by Sir Cavendish Boyle, governor of Newfoundland from 1901–1904. When I was a child, I thought his first name was Surcavendish. It conjured up a man who lived alone, a man who was given, like me, to watching the grounds from his bedroom window, some brooding, gloom-savouring soul like myself in whose huge house there was never more than one light burning. I could not imagine him ever having done anything else, could not imagine any existence for him except sitting at that window, looking out, brooding over Newfoundland, endlessly writing the ode.

  At night, with my face pressed to the window, I used to recite to myself my favourite verse. “When spreads thy cloak of shimm’ring white, at winter’s stern command, thro’ shortened day and star-lit night, we love thee, frozen land. We love thee, we love thee, we love thee, frozen land.” It was as if this had been written, not for all Newfoundlanders, but specifically for my father and me, the Fielding family anthem, as if this was our windswept, frozen land.

  Though they are anthem-like, there is something indefinably sad about the words, resigned, regretful, as if Boyle imagined himself looking back from a time when Newfoundland had ceased to be. It is the sort of song you might write about a place as you were leaving it by boat, watching it slowly fade from view, a place you believed you would never see again. He was governor of Newfoundland for only a few years, so he must have written it in the knowledge that he was soon to leave.

  Fall, Smallwood, another fall, and you leave tomorrow. And me? Soon to be at sea again? I feel as though I am at sea. Nova Scotia. New Scotland. New England. New York. New York again. Where the streets are so hemmed in by buildings they never see the sun. The old New World. Where my mother and my stepfather live, which you knew when you invited me along. Perhaps you do not really expect me to accept your invitation. What will you think or do if I turn up? Sometimes I have the feeling that I am appealing to qualities in you that you do not have, that the you I love is just someone I invented. I feel that, though you are younger than me by just one year, we are lifetimes apart. Ill at ease in your own world and in other worlds unwelcome. Mocked at in both. But you will not stop demanding to be let in, or looking for an overlooked, unlocked door. You are willing to risk or forsake everything to get what you want. Including me? How it spited me that it was you, you who embarrassed me in front of all the Townies, and especially in front of Prowse. There is always this awkwardness between us because of what happened at the Feild. Because of what you think happened. That day in the training centre. We never mention it, perhaps for my sake, perhaps for yours. I’m not sure if you’ve forgiven me, if you think my expulsion from Spencer and my getting you a job on the paper makes us even. When the others left, you stayed, and for the first time since we met you said my name. “Fielding.” More tenderly than you have said it since. I should have let you speak instead of asking you to leave. Whatever you had planned to say remains unsaid. I wonder, sometimes, if I should tell you everything. So much to risk. I don’t think I trust anyone that much.

  I WAS TO LEAVE the next day. I walked up Signal Hill, from which you could see the whole city, though it was not St. John’s I looked at but the sea, crashing on the rocks at the base of the red sandstone cliffs. The hill was carpeted with unripe, red-and-yellow partridge berries. They needed almost no soil, grew on sod that was draped like a ragged carpet over rocks. The remains of gun batteries, crumbling fortifications and forgotten barracks lay everywhere. Down below were the charred ruins of a cholera hospital so hard to reach that it was never used except for smallpox patients, who never saw St. John’s, only the grotto of rock around them and the open sea.

  It occurred to me, for the first time, that I might not come back.

  The sea brought out such thoughts in me. My virtual non-existence in comparison with the eternal sea-scheme of things. I never felt so forlorn, so desolate as I did looking out across the trackless, forever-changing surface of the sea, which, though it registered the passage of time, was suggestive of no beginning and no end, as purposeless, as pointless as eternity.

  I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander’s scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea. I was morbidly drawn to read and re-read, as a child, an abridged version of Melville’s Moby Dick, a book that, though I kept going back to it, gave me nightmares. Ishmael’s notion that the sea had some sort of melancholy-dispelling power mystified me. Whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in my soul, the last thing I wanted to look at was the sea. It was not just drowning in it I was afraid of, but the sight of that vast, endless, life-excluding stretch of water. It
reminded me of God, not the God of Miss Garrigus and the Bible, whose threats of eternal damnation I did not believe in, but Melville’s God, inscrutable, featureless, indifferent, as unimaginable as an eternity of time or an infinity of space, in comparison with which I was nothing. The sight of some little fishing boat heading out to sea like some void-bound soul made me, literally, seasick.

  On the other hand, I was an islander. I thought of my father’s stint in Boston, where he had discovered the limits of a leash that up to that point he hadn’t even known he was wearing. I wondered if, like him, I would be so bewildered by the sheer unknowable, unencompassable size of the world that I would have to come back home. How could you say for certain where you were, where home left off and away began, if the earth that you were standing on went on forever, as it must have seemed to him, in all directions? For an islander, there had to be natural limits, gaps, demarcations, not just artificial ones on a map. Between us and them and here and there, there had to be a gulf.

  I walked down the sea side of Signal Hill, following the steep and winding path that led to the Narrows. When I reached the pudding-stone, the wave-worn conglomerate of rock that marked the high water-line, I saw the Boot, the old wooden boot attached to the iron rod bored into the cliff with the name of Smallwood written on it, eerily glowing, swaying slightly back and forth in the wind. The Boot was like some flag, Smallwood the name of some long-reigning monarch or a family that had laid claim to the place two hundred years ago. The republic of Smallwood. “My God, Smallwood,” Reeves had said, “what are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”

  But the Boot would not be the last thing I saw on leaving, for I planned to sail from Port aux Basques after, for the first time in my life, crossing Newfoundland by train. I relished the thought of a journey that would carry me farther and farther inland from the sea. I had no conception of what Newfoundland looked like outside a forty-mile radius of St. John’s.

  As though I had contracted from my father an irrational fear of it, I dreamed about the old man’s Boot the night before I left. I was sailing out through the Narrows, alone on a boat of some kind, and there was the Boot, with my name on both sides of it, Smallwood, glowing in the dark. When I passed it, I turned to look back at it and only as it began to grow dim did I realize that I had cleared the Narrows and was drifting out to sea. I stood in the boat and called for help, but by then I had rounded the point and the Boot, my name and the harbour lights had vanished. It was so dark I could not make out the headlands. There was no wind and I could not even smell the sea. I could not feel the boat beneath me, or hear the slightest sound. I turned around and faced what I believed was seaward, but there was nothing there but darkness. I made to touch my arms to reassure myself of my existence, but it seemed that even my own body had disappeared. I tried to shout again for help, but could make no sound. I woke from this insensate darkness to the darkness of my room and felt my arms and legs and face, and said my name out loud.

  I thought of Fielding, whom I had not heard from since that day when she had acted so strangely on the waterfront. I wondered if she had insisted on not seeing me the past two weeks because she knew she would not be going to New York. It seemed to me it might be her and not my imminent departure that had given rise to the dream.

  As I lay there in the darkness in my boarding-house room, I imagined kissing her and taking off her clothes. I could not picture what she looked like, I knew only that she was naked and I was not. I could not imagine myself unclothed in front of anyone. I felt the buttons of my longjohns. My fantasy was having no physical effect. Up to that point, my sex life had been confined to racy postcards. Some woman, divan-reclined, legs crossed, a feather boa wound about herself. For her, an erection like a chisel and a feverish half-hour of self-administration. For Fielding, nothing.

  I had once, when I was eleven, happened on a man and a woman in the woods above the Brow. They were in a place we called the Spruces, where little light came through and the forest floor was thick with moss. It was a summer Sunday afternoon, overcast but warm, humid. There was hag hair hanging from the trees above the couple, strands and whiskers of it everywhere. The woman was faced full length away from me, unclothed, lying on her side on a blanket. All my mind would recall of her later, and recalled of her now, was her wide bare back, though I watched for so long I saw much more. All I could see of him were his hands, on her, though I could hear his voice and her laughing in a kind of teasing way each time he finished speaking. For a while, a shameful while, unable to resist, I watched, crouching down so they wouldn’t see me, watched and — even more, I think — listened, for I had been told of such things and seen pictures, but I had never heard such sounds. The strange commotion they made; the ever-intensifying sounds from the woman after the man climbed on top of her, so that she sank into the moss, almost out of sight. There was the sense of something secret, something awful, letting loose. It frightened me; it was hard to believe, listening to them, that they knew where this was going, that it wasn’t as new to them as it was to me; hard to believe that they hadn’t just discovered it by accident, setting into motion something that they were powerless to stop and that, for all they knew, would be the end of them, so panicked, so helpless did they sound. I had heard a boy at school say his parents did “it” every night, but I was sure he didn’t mean this.

  I watched until they finished and then left. In memory, I was both drawn to it and repulsed by it, and ashamed of myself on both counts. I wondered what the implications of my ambivalence might be; if there might be something wrong with me.

  I knew that my mother and father must have performed the act itself. My father had once said that if he merely threw his pants on her bed, my mother would get pregnant. But that they had never done that, that it had never been like that between them I was certain.

  I had been awakened once or twice by the furtive and shortlived squeaking of their bedsprings in the middle of the night. And once, while returning from the outhouse, I had heard, above the barely squeaking springs, my mother sucking air through her clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. I had stood outside their door, transfixed. I heard my father shudder to a finish and my mother almost instantly afterwards saying, as if she was terrified he would fall asleep on top of her, “Get off me, Smallwood.” The bed squeaked momentarily as my father obliged her, and soon after there was snoring, not my mother’s, I was sure. I heard her murmur something in a plaintive, almost self-ironic tone, then all was silent.

  That sound my mother made — I had been unable to rid myself of it. I could not look at a woman and not hear it, or imagine my mother in the darkness drawing air in through her teeth. The sound of air passing through my mother’s teeth, and the screams of the woman whose body by the weight of the man’s was pressed into the moss until all I could see was him, him obliterating her so that all that was left of her was sound, screams as if she was giving birth or being murdered.

  I stopped rubbing my longjohns, then considered getting a postcard from my collection in my dresser drawer. The woman in the woods. It could not be that way for me. Somehow I knew it. Some “over me” was always watching, and not for an instant could I forget it. Perhaps it could not be that way for any man, I wasn’t sure, and I had no intention of asking anyone. Nothing I had ever read in books enlightened me. On the one hand I envied her, that woman on the moss, wished I could be capable of such abandonment. But it was, I told myself, a carrot dangled by biology, the animal impulse to chase after which I must not give in to or it would mean my doom. I well understood my father’s horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement. The thought of nights in some fetid breeding bed while the products of other such nights lay listening in the next room or outside the door I found so revolting that I vowed I would never marry. My parents’ marriage was the only marriage I knew from the inside out. To me, their marriage was marriage. To live thus would be to forsake all destinies but the anxiety-ridden drudgery of caring for a
horde of children. A pedestiny. I would never drag myself out of poverty if I got married, let alone achieve more than the limited success considered proper for the best of my kind by men like Reeves.

  Trapped in a marriage, I would be driven mad by the casual assumption of privilege and preferment and innate superiority of “the quality,” if its effect on my father was anything to judge by. But unlike my father, I told myself, I was outraged by the “quality,” not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of others. I saw no contradiction in wanting to achieve greatness through altruism. How else but through altruism could one be both virtuous and great?

  Before I could make up my mind about the postcard, I fell back to sleep.

  Besides what little clothing I had, I didn’t bring much with me except my oilcloth map of Newfoundland, a fishermen’s union pullover with its codfish-emblazoned badge, which I planned to wear while working at the Call, and my father’s History of Newfoundland.

  My parents and brothers and sisters went with me to the railway station to say goodbye, and though they made quite a fuss, especially my mother and the girls (my father and the boys manfully shook hands with me and clapped me on the back), they were upstaged by the entire Jewish community of St. John’s, about whom I had written a laudatory feature in the Telegram two months before and who were surreally on hand to see me off, waving their black hats and weeping as if one of their number was leaving them for good.

  Because of them and because of my oversized nose, many of my fellow passengers took me to be Jewish, a misconception I did nothing to discourage, since it made them less likely to sit with me, not because they had anything against the Jews, but simply because they doubted they could sustain a conversation for long with so exotic an individual. Normally, there is nothing I would rather do than talk, and I knew if I got started I might well talk all the way from St. John’s to Port aux Basques, oblivious to the landscape we were passing through. I would, many times in the future, spend cross-country train trips in just that manner, staying awake twenty-eight hours at a stretch, hardly noticing when one exhausted listener made way for the next, but on this trip I wanted to keep to myself and that, for the most part, is what I did.