The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  My feet were buttered, smeared with turpentine and rubbed with diesel oil. I slept with my feet wrapped in poultices of every description, wrapped in bark: spruce bark, juniper bark, birchbark, pine bark.

  One woman tied soapbar-like blocks of fat-back to the soles of my feet. Forgetting I was wearing them, I got up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse and lost my footing, landing with a crash on my backside to the delight of the two boys, who, because of me, were sleeping on the floor.

  “Oh, my God, Mr. Smallwood is crippled,” the wife said, as if there lay before her a life of notoriety as the woman in whose house Mr. Smallwood had been crippled. “I’m all right,” I said, “I’m all right,” removing the fat-back from my feet as the two boys howled with laughter.

  As I walked along the tracks, I thought of my cousin Walter’s boot-and-shoe shop, the rows and rows of gleaming boots and shoes. I thought about phoning Walter and asking him to send me several pairs, but as the only way of getting them to me would have been by train, I decided not to.

  Near Gander, I was heartened when a sectionman showed me a copy of the Daily News, in which there was a small item about what I was doing and why. There was nothing in the Telegram, which did not surprise me. I had left Newfoundland five years before as a Telegram reporter and a non-paying guest of the Reid Railway, who wanted only that I sing the praises of train travel in return for my fare, and here I was now, walking the same tracks to organize a strike against the railway.

  “So they know I’m coming,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “They know you’re coming. It’s a great thing you’re doing, sir.”

  Once a day, from then on, when I was passed by an eastward-bound or westward-bound passenger train, passengers who had heard of my cross-island walk waved to me, shouting encouragement or cheering ironically as if they thought I must be mad.

  Walking the branch lines was the hardest part, having to detour from my eastward march to go down the length of some peninsula, and at the end, having to turn around and retrace my steps. It was all I could do to force myself to turn due east onto the Bonavista branch line, which began so tantalizingly close to what would be the last leg of my journey.

  The country here looked as if it had been put through a strainer, sifted until all the soil was gone and there was nothing left but boulders, which were then strewn haphazardly in what had been a single, massive, shallow lake, creating ponds and intervening steppes of stone that at intervals were thinly coated with bog and here and there garnished with clumps of juniper and stunted spruce.

  So undifferentiated was the landscape that if not for the section shacks, I would have lost all sense of movement. As it was, I had to make a conscious effort not to wander from the tracks, not to stay the course where the track turned and walk off aimlessly across the barrens straight into some pond.

  And there was always the wind, a gale in my face making a sail of my shirt and pants, or a gale at my back against which I had to dig in my heels to keep from falling forward. I thought scornfully of the moors and heaths I had read about in books. They were nothing next to this. Any wind in which you could stand upright and not be lifted off your feet was nothing next to this.

  The eastern side of the island was four hundred miles from the mainland and the wind blew here as it did anywhere in the North Atlantic four hundred miles from shore. The wind blew northwesterly across the island as if its effect on it were incidental to some larger, grander mission of destruction; as if it were on its way to a place where people were not so easily impressed; or as if it were blowing just to please itself, a land-oblivious, sea-generated wind that made it hard to believe sometimes that the whole island was not adrift.

  At the Southern Bay stop, I came closest to the sea. Outside the moderately choppy inlet, the wind blew unimpeded and massive black waves went by at right angles to the shore, a perpetual storm of seaspray blowing from their crests. The water a hundred feet from shore looked as deep and rough as it would have had the island not been there at all. It was strange and spellbinding, that tandem of wind and water. Where the water stopped, the wind went overland until it met up again with water on the other side, each one, it seemed, driven on by the other. Everything was headed one way — clouds, wind, water, the waves so high the horizon was near and jagged, bobbing as if I was jumping up and down. I was sure the motion of the waves must extend right to the bottom, the whole ocean running like a river infinitely wide.

  It was impossible not to personify the wind. The only pathetic fallacy involved was thinking you had any business being where you were. There was a section shack called Blow Me Down House, which made me realize just how wind-obsessed its occupants must be, trying to convince themselves that they were wryly resigned to the worst the wind could do, that it was just some benign rival of theirs that would appreciate their joke.

  This wind was not part of a storm that, however powerful, would come and go. Storm winds blew from the east or from either side of east. It was an abiding, prevailing, self-sustaining wind; a side-effect of nothing. The purpose, the end of this wind, was simply to blow and go on blowing.

  I looked up at the sky sometimes to watch the large low clouds that always accompanied the wind. They moved so fast it was hard not to do likewise, hard to plod reasonably along while overhead there was a stampede of cloud, hard not to wonder what the implications might be for me of all that volatility.

  I was, I realized, inching ever closer to some sort of breakdown. I began to feel that hallucinations were imminent; I developed a kind of hallucination phobia, which I presumed was a prelude to the real thing. I was suddenly seized by the conviction that around the next bend, I would see my grandfather walking down the track towards me, my grandfather with his long, flowing, pocket-watch-obscuring beard come to meet me, to escort me somewhere I was certain I did not want to go.

  I felt the urge to turn around and run, then told myself that whichever way I turned, I could not see behind me. I hurried along, looking over my shoulder, peering up the track, stumbling. I was certain that Hines was about to appear, Hines in his strange outfit, his three-quarter-length black coat, his red, brass-buttoned vest. I wondered for the first time if, in his former life, he had been a train conductor. Hines coming down the track towards me with his Bible, in chastisement, held aloft. “Remember, man,” I thought I heard a voice say, “thou art a Newfoundlander and unto Newfoundland thou hast returned.” I ran, not on the track, but beside it on the crushed stone, my feet going out from under me. I heard myself sobbing, then laughing, or so I thought, for it was not me laughing but a child.

  I saw her standing right in front of me, a little girl in a ragged burlap dress with her tattered shoes untied. She stopped laughing when she saw the expression on my face and stared sullenly at me. A forerunner of Hines perhaps. I heard another voice, distinctly unlike that of Hines, behind me.

  “Where are you going in such a rush, sir? You look like you is runnin’ from an ’ive of bees.”

  I turned around and there was a middle-aged man, not Hines, wearing only coveralls, his arms and shoulders bare, staring uncertainly at me and at times at the little girl as if he was still not sure if I posed a threat.

  “I’m Joe Smallwood,” I said.

  I was back in the world, theirs, mine, suddenly aware of how I must look to them.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Thirteen:

  THE IRISH ARE COMING

  By the early 1800s, there are a sufficient number of English merchants permanently settled on the island to support an unskilled labour force.

  Thus begins the Irish immigration to Newfoundland.

  The Irish pour in by the thousands. Five times as many as are needed are recruited, which creates a healthy atmosphere of competition among the workers and discourages the Irish from demanding higher wages than the honest English can afford to pay.

  I Once Was Lost

  EARLY OCTOBER,
MID-AFTERNOON. Hours before, when the wind had changed to the northeast, I had felt it, but I had assumed it was too early in the season for snow and had kept walking. Now, only a few minutes since the storm had broken, the barrens were whited out.

  Because the branch lines were used less than the main line, they needed less maintainance, so there were fewer section shacks and they were farther apart, three or four miles apart in some cases. The last shack I had passed was two miles back, so I guessed that I was about midway between two shacks. The chimney of the last shack had been smoking, but no one had answered the door when I knocked and I had gone on, deciding to stop there again on the way back. This meant that the closest sectionman who knew roughly where I was on the track was five miles back, where I had spent the night, and he probably thought that the man in the shack where I had got no answer would be out looking for me.

  There was little I could do but hope for someone to find me, for I knew that if I kept walking, I would wander from the tracks, which were already drifting in with snow. On the other hand, I knew that if I did not keep moving, I would freeze to death. I scrambled down the railway bed and walked as far as I dared back and forth, feeling for the slope with one hand, then turning and feeling for it with the other. I wondered if I should try to feel my way in this manner back to the shack, but such was my state that I was not sure which way I had been facing when the storm had broken or what side of the tracks I was on.

  I shouted for help, but I could barely hear my own voice. I was not dressed for winter (I was barely dressed for fall), no gloves or hat or overcoat, my suitcase still hung around my neck. I was dressed about as well for a blizzard as the men of the Newfoundland had been dressed. And without the reserves of strength that even the weakest of them had had. I cursed myself for not having had the sense to turn back when the wind had changed.

  It was late in the sixty-first day of my walk, and even before the storm had set in, I had been near delirious with malnutrition and fatigue. There were almost no trees on the Bonavista branch, nothing but bog and barrens on either side, nowhere to shelter, the railway bed being of no use since the wind was blowing straight down the tracks. Soon, with my back to the wind, I could not see anything but white, and I could hardly breathe, for it seemed that all the air had been displaced by snow.

  I thought of Mr. Mercer out walking on the Brow that night when the avalanche came down. I pictured my mother throwing from the deck the book that even now was in my suitcase, peering out over the rail until she heard the rumble from below. I took off the suitcase, clutched it against my chest, lay on my back against the railway bed, at an angle to the ground and closed my eyes.

  To keep myself from getting drowsy, I sang, “When Joey comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah. When Joey comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.… We’ll all feel gay when Joey comes marching home.”

  They would find me, perished here, I thought. Around the remains of that pathetic wretch, the lone and level snows stretched far away. Lost in an October blizzard while walking across Newfoundland after five years in New York, which, as predicted by his father, left him destitute. Found frozen to death on the Bonavista branch line, clutching to his chest a suitcase containing two hundred dollars’ worth of coins, membership fees for a union, which in the attempt to organize he perished, the punctuating failure of his life; also containing seven books, including a Bible and two histories of Newfoundland, one readable, one not, in revised editions of which he would not be mentioned, and several articles of ragged clothing. As predicted by the headmaster of Bishop Feild, from which he failed to graduate, he had, by the time of his death at the age of twenty-five, accomplished nothing. An autopsy revealed that his character at death was forty-five. Actual cause of death, chronic character deficiency.

  I sang, without ironic intent, “The Ode to Newfoundland,” even the winter stanza, which had always been my favourite: “When spreads thy cloak of shimm’ring white, at winter’s stern command, through shortened day and star-lit night, we love thee frozen land. We love thee, we love thee, we love thee frozen land.”

  There was a thump beside my head, and when I opened my eyes I saw a large black boot, a boot with my name on it, Smallwood spelled out in stitching on the side. My father had been right about the Boot, the old man’s boot. Now my head was bracketed by boots, a boot on either side. The Narrows Boots. The name Smallwood like some luminous siren, confusing navigators, luring them towards the rocks. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Or exit. Death in his big black boots had come to claim me.

  I grabbed one of the boots with both hands and heard what sounded like someone waking from a nightmare, and I wondered if it might be me who had roared with terror. I felt myself lifted by my collar and the seat of my pants, then laid across something on my stomach like some bit of game someone had bagged, my arms and head hanging down over one side, my legs over the other. Then something, it must have been my suitcase, was placed on my back, lashed onto me with ropes, as I was lashed to whatever I was lying on.

  It was not until I felt the sensation of movement that I realized I was on a trolley that was travelling against the wind, straight into it, in fact. Once, when there was a slight lull in the wind, I caught a glimpse of the driver, going slowly up and down, straining to do what, under ideal conditions, would have been hard work for two. The hood of his canvas coat was up; he was wearing snow goggles and across his mouth a scarf, so that little more than his nose was showing. Then the wind picked up again and he disappeared from view.

  I could not hear the cranking of the trolley or the rumble of the wheels along the track, or see anything to confirm that we were moving, though I could still vaguely feel that we were. Then even that sensation vanished and I thought I had just awoken from a dream of being rescued. But then I saw him, there, not there, there, not there, like some snow mirage that meant the end was near.

  At some point on our journey down the tracks, I was lulled to sleep by a warm, peaceful drowsiness that I knew I should resist but couldn’t. I dreamed, though it seemed more vivid and more tactile than a dream, that I was wading out to sea, a sea unlike the one I knew, a calm, warm, hospitable, inviting sea.

  I awoke momentarily to find myself slumped in a washtub filled, or being filled, with hot water. Through the steam rising from the water, I could make out a figure standing over me, in his hand some kind of pot, which he emptied into the tub.

  “Awake?” he said. “I heard you were coming. Don’t worry, I’m not a cannibal. And if I was, I’d be eating light tonight. Pay no attention to those carrots and potatoes bobbing around in there with you. Let’s see, I wonder if it might be easier just to put this washtub on the stove. Smallwood stew, Smallwood stew, tonight we’re having Smallwood stew. Smallwood stew for lads and lasses; Smallwood stew, it suits all classes; Smallwood stew, it is so grand, it is the best in Newfoundland.”

  “He is not dead whose good name lives,” I think I said. “Quite right” was the answer.

  When next I awoke, I was in a bed and someone was tucking me in. At first, I thought it was my grandfather.

  “Poppy,” I said and tried to put my arms around his neck, but then he took on the look of one of the vultures from the Floor and I weakly tried to fend him off, striking at him with my hands, which he grabbed and held still as if they were a child’s.

  “Sleep,” he said. It was a command, but his tone was such that I could obey him or not, pull through or not; it was all the same to him.

  I fell in and out of sleep, fought it, lest while I slept the men from the Floor would have their way with me. Once, I thought I heard ice pellets hitting the other side of the wall beside my bed. Not since I had lived in the saddle of the Brow had I heard such wind. I was sure the shack would be ripped from its foundation and sent tumbling like a cardboard box across the barrens.

  I awoke after what felt like a long time, lucid now, much better but famished. From my bed, through the open door of the room, I could see someone sitting at a table ne
ar a cast-iron stove, reading a newspaper.

  After staring at the person for a long time, I wondered if my lucidity was just a dream. This was about the last place on earth I would have expected to encounter her. She was greatly changed, her large-boned frame no longer rounded, but bare, angular. She looked about twenty years older than she should have, was improbably dressed in a red-and-black checkered shirt, dungarees and work boots, but there was no mistaking who it was.

  “Fielding,” I said.

  She looked up, stared at me as if she was unconvinced that I was not still feverish, then thinly smiled. Yes, it was Fielding. But there was in that ever-changing face of hers the shade of something new.

  “Smallwood,” she said, in the faintly ironic way one might greet the return to consciousness of some stranger you have written off for dead and whose death would not have bothered you a bit.

  “What are you doing out here?” I said.

  “Hermiting,” she said. “Reduced to hermiting because you broke my heart.”

  I momentarily forgot about New York. I thought that she was talking about Bishop Feild. I felt guilty and must have looked it, for she burst out laughing, eyeing me as if it was a measure of my ego that I could believe something I had done had affected her for life. Then I remembered the last night we had seen each other.

  “What happened to you?” I said. “What are you doing out here?”

  She told me her story over dinner that night, while I was wolfing down a plate of fried potatoes.

  “The summer I went back home, I found out I had TB. My father diagnosed it, though for a while he couldn’t believe his own diagnosis. People like us weren’t supposed to get it; it was supposed to be the malnourished, unhygienic, filth-ridden poor. People like you. His sister, my aunt Dot, has never forgiven me for disgracing the family by coming down with an unrespectable disease. Nor him for diagnosing it, for that matter. Or perhaps it’s for not dying that they can’t forgive me, for coming out of the sanatorium and reappearing at gatherings where I was supposed to pretend people didn’t know what I’d been sick with. My aunt Dot still swears that my father was wrong and that I caught TB after going to the San, caught it from the other patients. My father has been a model of light-heartedness ever since she raised the possibility.