The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  I said goodbye to Duggan and Maxine and asked them to tell Hines that I was not coming back and that I would no longer be staying at the Coop.

  I spent only three more days in New York, three days and two nights sitting and sleeping on park benches, contemplating my next move. I decided to go back to Newfoundland, though I had no idea how I would go about it.

  Socialism. Better to find a cause that, though perhaps less just, had some hope of succeeding, the nearest thing to socialism that people would accept, than to revel all your life in the righteousness of your defeat.

  Fielding. Thoughts of her, now that I had made up my mind to go back home, were nagging at me constantly.

  In my five years in New York, I had come to know quite well the captain of the Red Cross boat that each month docked in Brooklyn at Green Point. After our third or fourth meeting, long before I was conscious of missing Newfoundland, Captain Prowdy had pronounced mine the worst case of homesickess he had ever seen.

  On the third day after my visit to the Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland, I went to Green Point, keeping an eye out for Hines, who I knew sometimes turned out to bless the boat. I hung round, after the other Newfoundlanders who had come to meet the boat had left, to talk to Captain Prowdy. It was a cool, windy day, despite the time of year. The thought of another winter spent in the flophouses of New York had become unbearable. I held my coat together at my throat, my other hand clamped on my sod cap to keep it from blowing away.

  “You look like you’re about done in, Joe,” Captain Prowdy said. His kind, sympathetic tone made me go weak in the knees. I described to him my situation and, before I could ask, he offered me a ride back to Newfoundland in the Red Cross boat. It would take a while, he said. We would go via Boston, Halifax and North Sydney to Port aux Basques. In all, the trip would take three days, and this was no passenger ship, so he hoped I had something like a bed waiting for me back in Newfoundland, for I would need it.

  I felt so relieved, I fainted.

  III

  Field Day

  And we believe a greater pack of knaves does not exist than that which composes the House of Assembly for the Colony. Take them for all in all, from the Speaker downwards, we do not suppose that a greater set of low-life and lawless scoundrels as Public men can be found under the canopy of heaven.

  — from “The Newfoundland Royal Gazette,” 1834, as quoted in D. W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Twelve:

  HERODOTUS

  The evolution of the Newfoundland justice system culminates in 1792 with the establishment of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. John Reeves (deemed by Prowse “a most admirable selection” — judge not the judge, judge, lest ye be judged) becomes its first chief justice. Unfortunately, his objectivity is called into question in 1793, when he publishes the first history of the oldest colony and in it sets forth the thesis that England has for three hundred years been exploiting Newfoundland.

  While we could hardly expect Chief Justice Reeves to write a history as authoritative as this one, since he did not have access to the enormous volume of documents, the perusal of which has been our happy task this twenty years, or to the succession of other Newfoundland histories from whose blunders we have learned so much; and while we do not wish to cast aspersions on the man whom some have called Newfoundland’s Herodotus, our History would fall short of being definitive in one respect did we not point out that John Reeves was a peevish crank who wrote an entire history of Newfoundland just to get back at some West Country merchants who, he said, “are so miserly that, were I to allow it, they would be constantly contesting in my court some Newfoundlander’s right to breathe their air.”

  What do we find upon reading Reeve’s successors, Anspach, Harvey, Pedley, Prowse, et al., but that they repeat in their histories this heinous lie of his as though it were the gospel truth. While we trust that our history refutes his thesis to the satisfaction of educated people everywhere, the fact that we cannot undo the harm he has done has on many occasions kept us from a good night’s sleep and given rise in our nature to an irritability that many have named as the reason they will never speak to us again.

  Such are the travails of the historian who, because his predecessors are dead, must content himself with lying awake at night concocting fantasies in which he so humiliates them in debate that they pledge to burn all existing copies of their books. To such lengths are we driven by reading Reeves, as well as to tapping our foot on the floor, which we must refrain from doing, for there have been complaints and we cannot afford to be evicted from yet another boarding-house, there being so few left that we can afford, having had to forgo an income these past twenty years to make possible the writing of this book. That our history will sell in such volume as to compensate ten times over for the income lost while writing it seems little comfort now.

  The Walk

  ITRIED TO CONVINCE MYSELF that I was ready to return, that only by leaving had I learned to live here. But I wondered if I, too, had reached the limits of a leash I had not until now even known I was wearing and was, like my father, coming home not because I wanted to, but because I was being pulled back, yanked back by the past. For a panicked while, I wondered if I had made a fatal, irreversible mistake in departing from New York the way I had. I could not go back there now, no matter what.

  Something strange happened when we drew near to Port aux Basques. There had been a storm the night before, and though the sky was breaking, the easterly wind had not gone round. The clouds were still racing westward and the rock-face on the headlands was wet with rain.

  It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions, but strange and real as towns seem when you pass through them on your way to somewhere else, towns that you have never seen before but that seem remindful of some not-quite-remembered other life. A kind of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn’t. It was the old lost land that I was seeing, as if, like fog, the new found one had lifted. How long I stood there staring at it, I’m not sure, seconds or minutes. When I came out of whatever “it” was, the new found land was back and tears were streaming down my face. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but there was no one else on deck.

  I had never seen the place that way when I lived there, not even when I was very young, and I somehow knew that I never would again, not if I went away for fifty years and came back for one last look before I died.

  I lingered for a while at a boarding-house in Corner Brook, got a job freelancing for the local paper and helped start up a union at the paper mill, still feeling the pull of the mainland, knowing I was back for good but for some reason unable to undertake the last leg of my journey home, the train ride that would take me to St. John’s. Each night I resolved that the next day I would leave, and each morning I found some excuse to put off my departure. I did not know what I was looking for until it found me.

  The sectionmen who maintained the cross-island railway had just got word of a coming pay cut and wanted to form a union in the hopes of having the cut rescinded. When they heard of my work with the union at the paper mill, they approached me and I agreed to help them.

  I spent the next three days trying to figure out how I was going to organize seven hundred men who lived in section shacks strung out along the railway at one-mile intervals from St. John’s to Port aux Basques and all the branch lines in between. A meeting was impossible, as was getting their signatures on union cards by writing to them, since most of them could not read or write.

  The only way I could think to do it was to walk the entire length of the railway, branch lines included, gathering signatures as I went. At first, it seemed out of the question. I doubted that I was physically up to walking more than twenty miles a day
for three months. Some anti-unionists at the boarding-house had nicknamed me Skab, a shortened version of Skin-and-Bones (and, of course, the last thing any union organizer would want to be nicknamed), and what would be left of me after I walked seven hundred miles I tried not to imagine.

  But the idea grew on me — the idea of a grand, momentous homecoming that would hint that my five years abroad had been full of just such adventures, walking in service of a noble cause from one side of the island to the other. I pictured the last few hundred feet of rails thronged by cheering crowds who, for weeks, had been tracking my progress in the papers and had come out to witness my long-heralded arrival at Riverhead station in St. John’s. My family and friends would be there, all except my doom-prognosticating, now-chastened father, whose absence would confirm that I had proved him wrong; that, having shown that unlike him I could make it on the mainland, I had come back home, my demons of self-doubt laid to rest for good, not because I had to, but because I wanted to, wanted selflessly to put my talents, which elsewhere could have made me rich and famous, to use in helping Newfoundland.

  I took the train back to Port aux Basques and there began my walk, signing up sectionmen along the way, collecting from each of them fifty cents in membership fees. I set out in mid-August and had to make it to St. John’s by November 1, when the pay cut was to take effect.

  I fancied I was walking the lone street in a company town called Sectionville, along which houses were laid out at one-mile intervals. The residents of Sectionville travelled their single, endless street using hand-pumped trolley cars by which I was frequently almost run over, so silently did they glide along the tracks and so oblivious was I, in my near-exhaustion, to what little sound they made.

  It became an almost surreal sight after a while: married couples, pairs of men, pairs of boys and girls, sitting on their trolley cars, facing each other, see-sawing, pumping the handle up and down. I tried travelling by trolley-car myself but found that even with a partner, it was more tiring than walking. A few well-muscled sectionmen who could operate a trolley by themselves assured me I could be their passenger, but I declined, knowing what a puny, foolish-looking figure I would make sitting there looking at them while they did all the work. I told them that at any rate, it was better that I walked, for the longer my odyssey took, the more hardship and privation I endured, the more likely to sign up the sectionmen would be and the more embarrassed the railway would be.

  I carried my suitcase on a stick slung over my shoulder. It bumped on my back with every stride until, about a week into the walk, one of the sectionmen fashioned me a shoulder harness like cigarette girls wore and I walked with my suitcase flat in front of me, and with a book laid open on it, which allowed me to read while I was walking.

  My suitcase held seven weighty books, six of them readable, one of them not — my father’s copy of the judge’s History. I had purchased another History in New York, and this was the book I read most often.

  I plodded wearily along, after a while no longer noticing the spectacular scenery, often near-delirious from hunger and exhaustion, reading, reading, retracing centuries of history until it seemed to me the judge’s whole book was written in the cryptic scrawl of his inscription to my father. I probably read the judge’s History twenty times. It began to seem that this, and not the walk, was the epic task that I had set myself, to read the history of my country non-stop, over and over until I had committed it, word for word, to memory, as Hines had done with the Bible, the one book that remained unopened in my suitcase.

  I had bought a Bible in Corner Brook because I hoped my supposed religiosity would impress the sectionmen who fed me and let me spend the night in their shacks. It did, but, more important, it impressed their wives. When their wives went to my suitcase to get any clothes that needed washing, there was the Bible. That Bible, not one page of which I read along the way, kept many a sectionman who was otherwise inclined to do so from dismissing me as a Godless socialist and convinced them to sign up with the union. I told them and their wives that when I thought I could not take another step, I took out the Bible and was inspired by reading it to carry on.

  “I could not have come this far without it,” I shamelessly said, at the same time recalling the many times I had been tempted to lighten my load by throwing it away.

  I had often enough heard my mother quote passages from the Bible to be able to do so myself without ever having read them. I was often asked to say the grace over dinner as if I were some itinerant preacher who was only secondarily a union organizer.

  How strange it was, that meandering town of Sectionville, the narrow stream of civilization that wound its way through the wilderness from one side of the island to the other, marked off in miles, each mile-post with its corresponding shack occupied by families driven to eccentricity by isolation.

  They really were no more than shacks, clapboard shacks raised from the ground on posts, since it was either too rocky or too boggy to sink a proper foundation. Their flat roofs were waterproofed with black felt and gleaming tar, their one adornment a metal chimney pot, the cap of which could be closed or opened by pulling on a piece of rope beside the stove. No other kind of roof but a flat one would have stayed on for long, what with the wind. When a storm was coming, the sectionmen battened down their shacks like boats at sea, pulled to the solid shutters on the windows and the aptly named storm-doors, then lit the lamps, it being otherwise pitch dark inside even at midday. Many of the shacks were shored up on the sides by a palisade of saplings sunk obliquely into the ground, so the bottom halves of the shacks looked like the shells of teepees. If not for these “longers,” the shacks would have been blown off their posts the way boxcars often were from the tracks.

  The method of gauging when it was safe to send a train was not a very scientific one. The sectionmen measured the force of a gale by how difficult it was to open their front doors against it. I saw this “test” performed more than once, a man bracing his shoulder against his half-open storm-door while wearing a calm, almost diagnostic expression. There was no scale of wind velocity per se. It was merely deemed to be either safe or unsafe to send a train.

  Each shack had a little porch attached that led directly to the kitchen/sitting room, the centrepiece of which was the pot-bellied stove in which wood and coal brought in by the train were burned and on the floor around which, on paper spread out to catch it, lay a pool of soot. The section people made do with teapots with their spouts cracked off, cups without handles, cups made from tin cans and a loop of wire, chipped plates and saucers with spider webs of fault lines, chairs cobbled together from whatever could be scavenged, tables made of doors laid across two sawhorses, doorknobs still attached. For beds, there were makeshift bunks and hammocks fashioned from old fishing nets and sails, and armchairs and sofas made from crates and burlap sacks.

  Between house and outhouse, washing lines were strung and on them, almost always horizontal in the gale, flapped underwear made from flour sacks, threadbare coveralls and shirts and bed-sheets so stitched and restitched they looked like ragged flags.

  Some shacks were surrounded by a flock of squawking chickens that were kept for eggs until winter. There might be a horse, a single cow, a beagle for retrieving birds and rabbits.

  Each night, I displaced children from their beds, and sometimes even couples, who would not hear of me sleeping on the floor. Word spread up the line that I was coming, as did word of my emaciation, so that it became the mission of the wives to shore me up with food. They seemed as eager to see if I was as wasted away as rumour had it as anything else, sizing me up as if to say my state of bedragglement was scandalous, as if my every ailment could be attributed to the neglect and ineptitude of all the wives to whose ministrations I had so far been subjected. “There’s not enough of you to bait a hook with, sir,” one woman told me outside of Springdale Junction. “We’re having trout, sir,” she said, as if she couldn’t imagine why her counterparts hadn’t thought of trout, as if this were
a novel dish available nowhere in Newfoundland but at her house. She hinted that if I had been as well fed by all the others as I would be by her, I wouldn’t be the size I was.

  “You’ve got to keep your strength up, sir,” she said when I protested that delicious as the dinner was, I could not eat another bite. Another bite of trout, I meant, for trout it had been almost every night since Port aux Basques. At her urging, I ate more and more.

  That night I lay awake, stuffed to the point of insomnia with trout. In the morning, her husband took me under the armpits and, lifting me up, authoritatively declared that I weighed ninety-seven pounds, ten pounds less than his twelve-year-old boy. I was sent off, after a trout-and-eggs breakfast, with a trout and dolebread sandwich lunch that hungry though I was by noon, I could not bear to eat, and threw away in favour of blueberries that I picked along the tracks. I felt guilty doing so, knowing how dearly come by the bread had been. It would not have mattered to them who I was; if I was walking the railroad to help them or just to pass the time, they would have treated me with the same unstinting kindness.

  By the time I reached central Newfoundland, I was having a great deal of trouble with my feet, which were blistered and swollen, and it was now to healing my feet and mending my shoes that the wives devoted themselves. From the minute I entered a shack to the time I went to bed, I sat with my feet immersed in a washtub filled with some bizarre concoction, the occupants of one shack swearing by blueberry wine and partridge-berry jam as a cure for blisters, the occupants of the next night’s by something else.