The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  He wore a kind of tail-coat that at one time might have been the jacket of a footman or a butler. It hung down almost to his knees and was frayed at the edges, smudged all over with what might have been dust or chalk as if he had begun the day by rolling in the street.

  “How did you know I was a Newfoundlander?” I said.

  “It’s written all over you,” he said. “Literally. You have the name of Smallwood on your shoes.” He smiled and shook his head. “I walk through all the parks in the city from time to time,” he said, “on the lookout for Newfoundlanders. They aren’t usually as easy to spot as you. I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time.”

  I wondered how close to me he must have got to be able to read the name of Smallwood on the soles of my shoes.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Who are you?”

  “First,” he said, “let us settle the question of who you are. You are, judging by your accent, from St. John’s. You have been in New York for three, at the most four, years. You have been shunning your own kind since you arrived, for they remind you of things you came here to forget or at least to get away from for a while. After achieving some small success at home, you came here to prove that you could be successful anywhere. You either believe, or did when you set out, that you will never go back home, or else that you will go back someday in triumph, a made man who will never have to prove himself again.”

  “You could be describing any Newfoundlander in New York,” I said.

  “If you had been spending time with Newfoundlanders in New York, you would not think so. Most Newfoundlanders come here with other Newfoundlanders and, while here, associate with Newfoundlanders. But it could have been myself I was describing, myself some years ago.”

  The whole thing had the self-consciously momentous tone of some biblical encounter, the first meeting of Christ with one of his apostles. It was unnerving.

  “Another reason I know you haven’t been associating with Newfoundlanders is that you don’t know who I am,” he said. “I am Tom Hines, and I am the owner and publisher of a newspaper called the Backhomer. Subscribers in forty different countries. More foreign correspondents than The New York Times.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

  He smiled. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Joe Smallwood,” I said. “And yes, I am related to the man who makes the boots. My grandfather started the store and my cousin runs it now.”

  “What about your father?” he said, looking at me with those enlarged eyes of his. One of them was badly bloodshot.

  “He’s not involved with the store,” I said.

  “And therein lies a tale, I’m sure,” said Hines. “What do you do? Or should I say, what did you come here in the hopes of doing?”

  “I am a newspaper reporter,” I said. “I worked for nearly two years at the Call before it folded.”

  He smiled as if he knew everything about me now that he would ever need to know.

  “The Call,” he said. “Written and read by One Worlders. It’s just as well it went under. I’m told it was published on paper so thin it never made much of a blanket.”

  Angrily throwing off the newspapers I was covered with, I stood up with the intention of replying in kind when a wave of dizziness hit me and sent me backwards onto the bench. When I opened my eyes, Hines was still there, smiling down at me as if my dizziness was his doing.

  “When did you last eat?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  He reached into his blazer and took out a card. “This is the address of a place where you can stay until you are better able to support yourself.” He took a pencil out of the same pocket and began to write something on the back of the card. “And this,” he said, “is the address of the Backhomer. Come see me. I don’t exactly have a job for you, but if you come to work for me, I’ll give you a place to stay and pay you when I can.”

  He extended the card to me and, when I declined to take it, tucked it into the pocket of my jacket. I was too dizzy and too weary to resist.

  “Remember, man,” I thought I heard him saying as he left, “thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou shalt return.”

  I lasted two more nights on my bench in Bryant Park, sleeping in the library throughout the day with a book on my lap that I pretended I was reading.

  The third morning after meeting Hines, I awoke before the sun was up, gingerly eased myself into a sitting position. I saw on the ground a cigarette butt, reached down to pick it up and toppled off the bench, hitting the ground harder, or sooner, than it seemed I should have. I lay on my back. Then, remembering my childhood misconception that lying on your back was a symptom of the onset of TB, I rolled over onto my side and went back to sleep.

  When I awoke again, another man, covered in newspapers, was sleeping on my bench. I somehow managed, using the bench as a support, to get to my feet and considered waking him and telling him the bench was mine, but he looked as though I would be no match for him.

  I wandered through the park, looking for an empty bench, but did not find one. I figured I was a day, two at the most, from complete prostration. I fished in my pocket for the card Hines had given me. The address was in Brooklyn. I set out for it on foot.

  Twelve hours later, I arrived at my destination, just able to stand. All I noticed of the address was the number 1693 and an illuminated red crucifix above the door. I went inside and handed my card to a woman who sat behind a hotel desk. She took the card from me and scrutinized it.

  “We’ll be right with ya, my love,” she said. Then she yelled, “George, there’s one here for the Coop. He’ll be one for the ward if you don’t hurry up.”

  You rode to the Coop on what must at one time have been a service elevator. On the sixth floor, all the walls had been torn down and the space had been partitioned into cage-like rooms with chicken-wire that extended to the ceiling, each room having a wire door that locked from the inside. The point of the cages, since they provided neither privacy nor quiet, was solely to protect the residents and their meagre possessions from each other. You could see from one end of the floor to the other, some men standing, smoking, talking to each other through the chicken-wire, but most, even before lights out, just lying supine and open-eyed on their bunks with their hands behind their heads as though deep in contemplation of better times or the series of events that had brought them to their present state. Most people moved their bunks and belongings to the middle of the cages, equidistant from each “wall” and as far as possible from thieves who with strung-together coat hangers would fish for loot, as my first-night neighbour told me.

  He said that Hines was the landlord, “the Newfoundland-lord, so to speak.” He told me that the Coop was free for two weeks, after which time, if I was able to find a job of some sort, I could, if I wanted, stay on indefinitely. Hines, he said, rented out the “rooms” — there were others like them in New York — at less than the going rate to anyone who could prove himself to be a Newfoundlander.

  “Hines is a Pentecostal minister,” he said. I assumed this explained his eerily accurate appraisal of me. No doubt he knew Miss Garrigus. “Born and bred in St. John’s he was. But now he got this little church, the Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland in Brooklyn, he calls it. I been there. If you go regular, you can earn yourself a few extra days at the Coop.”

  “It looks like some kind of jail,” I said, looking around.

  “Oh, no, you can come and go when you wants,” he said. “Except you have to be back in by nine o’clock at night, and anyone caught with booze is gone for good. And the same with anyone who gets on with any funny business.”

  “He must make money,” I said, “or he couldn’t afford to let people stay at the Coop for free for two weeks.”

  “He makes his money on the paper, I suppose,” he said. “He never made no money off of me. I never been in the Coop for more than two weeks at a time. As soon as my time at the Coop runs out, I’m back on the street again. I can�
�t find no job. You’re not allowed back in the Coop again for three months once they boot ya out.”

  I stood that night with my fingers clutching the lozenges of wire, looking out across the floor at the cots on which the men were sleeping, and saw that one cubicle contained a man, a woman and two children — a boy and a girl — the children small enough to share the bunk, the man and woman sleeping on the floor, with the woman between the man and the bed. There were not often women or children at such places; most flop-houses had a policy against admitting them. The sight of the children doubled up in the bunk reminded me of my brothers and sisters back home, still sleeping three to a bed, I had no doubt. I remembered what a luxury it had been at Bishop Feild to have a whole bed to myself for the first time in my life. I looked at the couple on the floor, the man on his back, the woman on her side and turned away from him, her knees drawn up, her hands beneath her head, her posture faintly recriminatory, as if she blamed him for reducing them to this. I thought of my parents.

  At first my plan was to wait out my two weeks at the Coop and then move on. But I could find no freelance work, none that paid anyway, though I went out looking every day. I thought of the nights I had spent at the Floor. I would not go back to that. It was either take Hines up on his offer or go back home, which I vowed I would never do except by means of my own money.

  So I went to see Hines at the Backhomer, which was like the Call in only one respect, that of having the narrowest of mandates. The Call’s purpose was to promote socialism, the Backhomer’s to promote Newfoundland.

  The Backhomer’s offices, if that is not too grand a term for eight hundred square feet of space, were located above a hardware store on West Fifteenth Street, half a dozen blocks from Hotel Newfoundland. They consisted of two sweltering rooms, one for Hines and one for the rest of us, Hines’s little “office” and the “newsroom.” (Everything at the Backhomer merely aspired to be what it was called, including us “reporters.”)

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Smallwood,” Hines said, stepping out of his office and intercepting me as I headed for the newsroom, having heard me, I presumed, as I was walking down the hall. “Mr. Joseph Smallwood. One-time reporter at the Call and erstwhile resident of Bryant Park. I’d all but given up hoping that you would come to the Backhomer and favour us with your journalistic expertise. I thought you must have returned to your life among the One Worlders.” He looked at me through those eye-enlarging glasses, his left eye now almost completely bloodshot.

  “Every night since our meeting, I have prayed for you in the hope that it would make you more receptive to salvation. If ever you need spiritual guidance or feel the urge to be baptized, come see me at my little church in Brooklyn.”

  “I’ve come about the job you offered me,” I said.

  “Did I offer you a job?”

  “Yes. You just said you’d given up hoping — Look, two weeks ago you said that if I worked for you, you could provide me with a place to stay and pay me when you could.”

  “You say it, so it must be so,” said Hines. “Step into my office.”

  In the office there was a desk and a single chair in which Hines sat, facing me. On the wall behind him was a large wooden carving of the Newfoundland coat of arms: an elk above a crossed shield emblazoned with lions and unicorns and flanked by two Beothuk Indians, with below it the motto Quaerite Prime Regnum Dei (Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God).

  “We’ll have to work out the terms of your employment,” Hines said.

  “If you’ll let me stay in the Coop and let me have two meals a day, I’ll come to work for you,” I said. “I can’t say for how long.”

  “As for how long,” Hines said, “we know not the day, nor the hour.”

  Three days later, I began working for him. He ran an item in the paper announcing that the grandson of David Smallwood, the very David Smallwood who, to advertise his store, had erected one of Newfoundland’s more familiar landmarks, the Narrows Boot, was now working at the Backhomer.

  The rest of the staff of the Backhomer consisted of a man named Duggan and his wife, Maxine. What the terms of their employment were I never did find out.

  Most of what little news-gathering went on was done from the newsroom by phone. Only rarely did anyone besides the freelance photographer have to venture out to cover something. Once a month, more to alleviate my homesickness than in hope of finding stories, I went to Green Point in Brooklyn to meet the Red Cross boat from St. John’s. There I met Newfoundlanders from whom I got the latest news and newspapers from home. But like Duggan and Maxine, I spent most of every day in the newsroom, smoking, morosely, disconsolately smoking. We shared huge, bowl-like glass ashtrays that went unemptied for days, filling up with butts and ashes so that after a while, instead of stubbing out our cigarettes, we simply stuck them in the pile pincushion fashion. By late afternoon, there was a pall of smoke about head height in the little newsroom.

  We were always homesick; we could not help it, since all we ever wrote or read about at work was Newfoundland. We had never had this much to do with Newfoundland when we lived there. We were even more homesick than our readers and that, judging by the letters to the editor, was saying something. We were at once homesick and sick of home, sick to death of hearing about it, writing about it, sick of keeping tabs on and interviewing other homesick Newfoundlanders.

  “Newfoundland this, Newfoundland that, Newfoundland morning, noon and night; it’s enough to drive you mad,” Duggan said. “I swear to God, if I hear the word Newfoundland one more time, I’ll blow my brains out.”

  Hines pointed what might have been the finger of fate at him and said, “Remember, man, thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou shalt return.” Duggan, when Hines’s back was turned, revolved his index finger at his temple to indicate that Hines was crazy.

  The Backhomer was largely about Newfoundlanders abroad and was read by Newfoundlanders at home and abroad. Hines every so often published the abroad subscription list so readers could see how Newfoundlanders were distributed throughout the world, putting asterisks and exclamation points after the names of the farthest-flung subscribers. “Millie Dinn, Ankara, Turkey.**!!!! Calvin Hodder, Hong Kong.**!!!”

  Hines, in his sermon/column, forever likened Newfoundlanders to the Jews, pointing out parallels between them. There was a “diaspora” of Newfoundlanders, he said, scattered like the Jews throughout the world. He saw himself as their minister, preaching to his flock from his columns, most of which began with epigraphs from the Book of Exodus. So often did Hines liken Newfoundlanders to the Jews, we likened him to Moses, asking each other in the morning if Moses had come down from the mountain yet, meaning had he shown up yet for work.

  One of my main tasks was to edit the two pages in the Backhomer devoted to “Lost Newfoundlanders,” Newfoundlanders missing in action, so to speak. Any Newfoundlander trying to track down a long-lost relative could write the Backhomer and have their letters and a photograph of their “lost” loved one printed in this section. “Anyone knowing the whereabouts” was how most of them began. Often, the most recent photographs were taken fifty years ago, daguerrotypes in which the men — it was usually men who were missing — all looked alike.

  There was a woman looking for her brother, whom she had not heard from since 1898. Along with a letter written by her daughter was a portrait photograph of one Joe Marsh sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, looking done up for some special occasion, wearing a suit, arms folded, head thrown slightly back, his expression that of someone who had no intention of living out his life in Hickman’s Harbour. I imagined him now at forty-six coming across this picture of himself at twenty-one. I chose as the caption a sentence from the letter written by his sister: “WHERE ARE YOU, JOE? Last reported sighting twenty-five years ago. In 1898, left Hickman’s Harbour with Captain Ed Vardy on a boat bound for St. John’s. Went from there to Montreal. Dropped out of sight ten years later. Not seen since. What happened to him torments me to this day.”


  “Where are you, Joe?” There was something morbidly attractive about the idea of dropping out of sight and coming across thirty years from now, in a paper like the Backhomer, a picture of me as I was when I was twenty-four, accompanied by a letter from Fielding or my mother begging anyone who knew my whereabouts to get in touch. For a clean getaway, I would have to do little more than change my name.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Eleven:

  OSBORNE AND BEAUCLERK

  In 1729, the West Country merchants convince King George II that because of the state of lawlessness among its permanent residents, Newfoundland needs a governor. They suggest the appointment to the post of the present commodore of the Newfoundland fishery, Lord Vere Beauclerk.

  In response to requests from resident Newfoundlanders for the appointment of a civilian governor, the king compromises and chooses Lord Vere Beauclerk, acknowledging that while he is not a civilian, any Newfoundlander who wishes to think of him as one is free to do so. (Thus begins a tradition, which will last almost one hundred years, of filling the civilian post of governor with non-civilians.)

  When it is found that if Beauclerk accepts the position, he will be constitutionally required to resign his seat in the British Parliament — which, out of loyalty to the king, he is loath to do — Beauclerk declines the appointment. Once again the king steps in and saves the day, announcing that navy commander Henry Osborne will be the governor, but that Beauclerk will go with him and tell him what to do.