“Tuberculosis is not nearly as class-conscious as my relatives. It doesn’t arbitrarily exclude the rich. It’s really very democratic. It didn’t hold my having my own room at the San against me, like the other patients did. A better-dressed tubercular they’d never seen. ‘A doctor’s daughter in the San,’ they said. ‘It just goes to show.’ TB didn’t worry about being ostracized for consorting with the likes of me. It tried to kill me just as hard as it tried to kill the others.
“At any rate, within a year I looked like you. Well, maybe not that bad, more like an X-ray. But I’m better now. I’m still in quarantine, mind you. That’s why I live out here all by myself. To keep from infecting people.”
I fell for that one, too, there flashing across my mind an image of the inside of the place I had heard so much about but never seen. The San. Rows of beds. Wheelchairs. Crutches. It’s a wonder I did not ask her if, before her father’s diagnosis, she had found herself lying on her back a lot.
Fielding laughed at my distress and assured me that she was not contagious. The only lasting effect of her illness, she said, was that as the result of surgery, her left leg was and always would be perceptibly thinner and shorter than her right, causing her to walk with a limp and necessitating that she wear on her left foot a thick-soled orthopedic boot.
I looked at her. It was hard to believe she was only twenty-six years old. There were deep shadows beneath her eyes. She, too, was little more than skin and bone, and the frame on which the skin was stretched was not as large as I once fancied it must be. I could not reconcile this body with the one I associated with her name.
The man’s clothes she wore must have belonged to someone the size of the old Fielding, for they hung as loosely on her as mine did on me, though she still seemed she would be twice my size if only she would stand erect. She had acquired, in addition to her limp, a slight stoop that began from the waist. There was something, not only in the way she spoke and gestured and moved about the shack, but also in her very posture, as if she were mocking the disease that had tried so earnestly to kill her, embellishing its effects.
She was drinking more than ever before, making up, she said, for the two years she had spent in the San, where drinking was strictly prohibited and where consequently she had consumed only half as much per day as she was used to. She drank from the same silver flask. I never saw her refill it, nor did I see any bottles, empty or otherwise, about. Her silver-knobbed cane stood in a corner by the door. She saw me looking at it.
“I take it with me when I go walking on the barrens,” she said. I tried without success to picture that.
“So what do you do here?” I said.
“I work for the railway,” she said. “I started out just living here. I heard there was this abandoned section shack, and I asked if I could rent it. It’s not the sort of place the doctors, my father included, wanted me to go, but I thought if I lived in a place like this I could get some writing done. I’m writing a history of Newfoundland.
“Anyway, the spring before last, I was hired with some other women to tar the railway ties. It grew from there. I had more free time than the other women, not having a family to look after. The men, most of whom are very sweet and treat me like a widow who’s been forced by her husband’s death to eke out some sort of living on her own, asked the railway to hire me to do what they consider to be nuisance work. I tar the ties, not just along my section, but for miles on either side of it. I’m also a spotter; I patrol the tracks, looking for blockages, and clear them if I can. I shore up the railway bed with gravel now and then.
“The men — I’m a half-foot taller than some of them — they do the major work, the things they pretend to think I’m not strong enough to do, or wouldn’t know how to do properly. They won’t let me help them lift the rails when they need replacing. They know I’m a townie and a doctor’s daughter. They call me Miss Fielding.”
I wondered how she was regarded by the wives of the section-men, the daughter of a St. John’s doctor out here on the Bonavista branch line, alone. It was hard to picture her, as she was presently constituted, fending for herself, chopping the wood I had seen stacked up behind the shack, pumping the trolley, tarring the ties, shoring up the railway bed.
“What are you doing out here, Fielding?” I said. “What are you playing at, being poor or being a man?”
“I have no desire to be the latter,” she said. “And as for the former, I don’t have to play at it. I accept no money from my father. And I’m not paid very much, even by railway standards. Far less than the men.”
“You’ve changed,” I said and heard in my voice a tenderness I had wanted to suppress. She shook her head, as if she did not want, would not permit me, to talk about New York.
“As you can see,” she said, “I am not at all embittered by the events of the past few years; on the contrary, the experience has so renewed my faith in humankind that I have forsworn the use of irony until the day I die.”
“Whatever brought you here,” I said, “you’ve been here far too long.”
“I think my chances of a relapse here are actually less than they would be in St. John’s, where I couldn’t afford to live very well. I made up for catching TB when I told my relatives I was going to be a writer. They were overjoyed, for as you know, no family that can’t count among its progeny at least one unpublished writer is taken seriously in St. John’s. And then when they found out I was supporting my writing by working on the railway as a sort of sectionman, well, you can imagine how thrilled my father was, his daughter pursuing not just one but two of the most preferred professions. I’m all my aunts and uncles and cousins talk about these days.”
I had never in my life heard such a steady stream of irony. I don’t think she spoke more than half a dozen straightforward sentences during the three days I spent convalescing in her shack.
She told me that it was her bed I had been sleeping in and that I could go on doing so until I left, while she would sleep on the cot in the room she called her study, not because she wanted me to have the better bed, but because she did not want me in her study, her sanctum sanctorum, as she called it, “the San” for short; a sign bearing that name was nailed to the door, as if to ward people off.
I did not catch so much as a glimpse of the inside of her tiny study, for she kept the door closed and padlocked while I was on my feet and did not go in there to work until after I had gone to bed. What I had thought in my delirium was the sound of ice pellets was the tapping of her typewriter.
FIELDING’S JOURNAL, OCTOBER 21, 1925
Dear Smallwood:
How smug you’d be if you knew that I’ve been writing in my journal to you ever since. Not every night, but many. More nights than not.
Now, with you in the next room, it feels as though I’m talking to you through a knothole in the wall. Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus sleeps while Thisbe speaks words that Pyramus will never hear.
I have known for weeks that you were coming. I heard it first from the woman in the mile house next to mine. “There’s a man named Smallwood walking clear across the tracks,” she said. “Branches and all. To unionize the sectionmen.” You couldn’t just walk the main line. No. You had to walk the branches, too. I’ve been getting unasked-for updates on your progress ever since. “He’s twenty miles outside Deer Lake. Not a lick of meat left on his bones.” What do you mean left? I felt like saying. “Nor a lick of leather on his boots.” Phonse at Six Mile House has been charting your progress on the map on his kitchen wall. Smallwood is coming.
My homecoming was momentous, too. The island appeared, then vanished, then appeared again as stars do when you look at them too long. I thought it was an optical illusion. I didn’t know that my eyes were opening and closing. I must already have been sick when I left New York. The woman beside me at the rail sent her husband down below to get some water. “You’re burning up, my dear,” she said, holding the back of her hand against my cheek. How cool it felt. I told her I was fine. The
sea gale was blowing full in my face. All around me passengers were wearing scarves and hoods. How could I be burning up? But neither she nor her husband left my side until we docked in St. John’s, where they led me down the gangplank, at the bottom of which my father was waiting.
He was so startled by how much I had changed that the first thing he did, before he even said hello, was take my pulse. People gave us a wide berth while he was doing it. I didn’t even know I had changed until I saw it in his face. It had been months since I had seen anyone who knew how I used to look. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” I said. “I should never have let you leave,” he said.
He took me straight from the boat to his consulting room. And from there straight to the San. I hadn’t seen St. John’s in two years. Nor would I see it again for another two.
The first few months were not so bad. At Christmas, I lined up with the others and read a message to my father that was broadcast on the radio. He was a chest doctor, but he did not work at the San — it’s a wonder anybody did — and not even for him could they relax the rules of quarantine. We wrote each other letters. Mine I dictated to a nurse so that no paper I had touched would leave the place. My stenographer, my father called her. She always wrote postscripts to my letters, asking him to admonish me for bad behaviour. “Where she gets her licker no one knows.”
But after Christmas it got worse. In July, they told him that if he wanted to see me one last time, he should do it soon. But he did not come. He said later he thought that if he came to see me, I would know that I was dying and might not fight as hard to live. Was this really why he stayed away? He could see I had my doubts. I still do. But he might have been telling the truth. Maybe if he had come to visit me I would have died.
I saw you, Smallwood, from my study window when you knocked before the storm. I was sure the snow would hold off long enough for you to make it to the next mile house. And even after it started, I sat here hoping it would turn to rain. I was told by men who are not often wrong about the weather that it would. What if I had waited too long and been unable to find you? Another secret I would have to keep. It reminded me of the nights I sat up writing while you were stranded in the ice on the S.S. Newfoundland. The very absurdity of you surviving that storm just to perish in one on dry land made me sure the snow would change to rain. On the other hand, a one-man catastrophe might be more your style.
You must have thought of the Newfoundland yourself. No one’s shoulder to place your hand upon. Nor anyone to place his hand on your shoulder. If I hadn’t found you, I’d have gone to the next mile house and asked for help. Assuming I could have found it.
I found mine because of something Phonse told me when I first came here. There would be days and nights, he said, when the fog or snow would be so bad that I would miss my signal lantern. I hadn’t thought it was possible and took his advice only when he insisted. I fastened a ship’s bell above the door and on the nail that held it hung a coil of rope. When I set out to find you, I tied the rope to the rail on the far side of the track.
Coming back, it seemed I had gone twice as far as I should have and still not tripped the bell. I wondered if I had tripped it and not heard it. I thought about going back, then decided that as I was pumping into the wind with half a passenger aboard, I would give it ten more minutes. A few minutes later I heard it. A muffled clanging above the roar of the wind. A beckoning bell. I groped around until the rope I could not see was in my hands.
I put you in the tub — yes, I saw, of course I saw, just how apt your name is. (Just kidding. But you see, I could have punned more cruelly on your name at Bishop Feild than to call you Splits.)
And then, for the first time in my life, and I dare say for the last, I watched you sleep. You without your glasses. (Another first for me. You were still wearing your glasses when I found you, though the lenses were coated with ice and snow. I put them in my pocket, and later, afraid they might shatter if I put them on the stove, left them to thaw out on the table where they lie now in a pool of water.) How strange you looked. As if you were missing your most distinctive facial feature, lying there minus something as uniquely Smallwood as your nose. Your head above the blankets was like a skull with nothing left but skin.
I tried to tuck you in, but you fought me off, I presumed because you knew that it was me. Finally you slept, though you breathed too rapidly at first. You reminded me of me when I was at the San. Then something in your face relaxed or was erased, and your mouth fell slightly open. I thought you might be dying. But you had just fallen deeply asleep. Vulnerably, unguardedly asleep. You as you would look if for one moment you could forget that the world was watching.
I’m glad you’re still alive.
After that first day and night, when she did not think it was safe to leave me unattended, Fielding went back to work. Once, on the morning of the second day, I looked out the window and saw her, goggled and scarved like some early aviator, pumping her trolley along the tracks, going up and down, her arms out in front of her, as if she were doing knee-bends. She seemed quite adept at it, and far stronger than her appearance had led me to believe.
When she passed the shack and disappeared around a bend, I put on my coat and went outside. Though it was warmer, there was still snow on the ground and I had to wade through it up to my knees to reach the back of the shack, where I hoped there would be a window through which I could see her study. There was one, but it was boarded up. So that my tracks would not lead too obviously to the study window, I walked about in the snow on all sides of the shack and the outhouse and, satisfied that she would not guess my reason for venturing out, headed back inside, noticing, as I did, another little sign above the door that read Twelve Mile House.
I slept most of the day, read a little from each of my books except the Bible, unable to concentrate on one for long.
“I see you gave yourself the grand tour,” Fielding said when, late in the afternoon, she came back to the shack. “Too bad about those shutters on the window.”
I felt myself redden. I could think of nothing to say until my eyes fell on the book I had left on the kitchen table.
“Have you read Prowse?” I said, feigning innocence, picking up the book and extending it to her. “But I suppose you must have, if you’re writing a history of Newfoundland.” How it must have irked her to hear me say that name, though she did not show it.
“I’ve read him,” she said, smiling as if to acknowledge a lame attempt at wit. She did not take the book.
She went about preparing a supper of salt fish and potato cakes, which we ate in silence. I told her that like so many of the people I had met in New York, she was just playing at being poor and being an artist, and like them she was sustained by the knowledge that she could go back to her life of affluence any time she liked. I felt like telling her this shack of hers was a palace compared with the Coop or the Floor or the marble bench in Bryant Park that for three weeks had been my bed. But looking at her while she ate, I felt that nothing I could say would faze her, that as far as she was concerned, her two years in the San had changed her in some way I could never understand.
“That letter to the Morning Post,” I said, “was a masterpiece.”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” she said, smiling. “Anyway, those scores were settled long ago, Smallwood. You shouldn’t dwell so much on the past.”
On the third night, when we were again sitting at the table after dinner, I told her that I was feeling up to continuing my walk and would be leaving in the morning. I went to my suitcase, took out a union-membership card and slid it across the table to her.
“There you go,” I said. “Just sign that, give me fifty cents and you’re a member of the union.” She pushed the card back to me and drank from her flask, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Every sectionman from here to Port aux Basques has joined,” I said.
“That’s their business,” she said.
“The others won’t mind that you’re a woman,” I said, “or
that you do less work.”
Fielding sniffed derisively.
“Why won’t you join?” I said.
“That’s my business.”
“You know the issues — ”
“I know what you think the issues are. Two and a half cents an hour — ”
“That’s a lot of money to some people.”
“It’s a lot of money to me.”
“Then why won’t you join?”
“I never join anything if I can help it.”
“Did someone from the railway — ”
She laughed.
“I know what this is about,” I said, “and you said I shouldn’t dwell so much on the past.”
“It’s not about the past,” she said.
“Then what is it? There’ll be a union with or without you. You’ll get your raise whether you sign up or not. Unless there’s a closed shop. In which case, you might lose your job.”
“I’ll get by,” she said. “I’m on the lighthouse-keeper waiting-list and the waiting-lists of various other hermit professions. You aren’t planning to swim the coast to unionize lighthouse-keepers next, are you?”
“I mean it, Fielding. You could lose your job.”
She slammed down the flask, stood up and looked at me.
“The day of the snowstorm,” she said, suddenly out of breath, “before the snow started, you knocked on that door.” She pointed at it as if to corroborate what she was saying. “I looked out, and when I saw that it was you, I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to join the union, but because I knew the storm was coming and I was hoping you would perish in it. I sat in here for two hours after the storm set in before I changed my mind, before I went out to see if I could find you.”
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Page 22