The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

She smiled. “Compared with the old days, I’m a prohibitionist,” she said.

  “You think Confederation is just another hare-brained scheme of mine, don’t you?” I said. “Like the piggery. Like the Book of Newfoundland.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I had a somewhat longer list in mind.”

  “We’ll win this time,” I said.

  “Smallwood,” Fielding said, “much as I look forward to these once-every-five-years visits of yours — ”

  “Aren’t you going to take a side in this thing, Fielding?” I said. “Don’t you care which way it goes?” I was going through the motions, waiting for my chance. “What did Cashin have to say?” I said.

  “Oh, you know the major,” Fielding said. “ ‘Aren’t you going to take a side in this thing, Fielding? Don’t you care which way it goes?’ That sort of thing. I helped him drink the bottle of Scotch he brought with him, but more than that, I said, I cannot do.”

  “What did Cashin say about me?” I said.

  “He said that you were worse than Judas Iscariot, who at least had the decency to hang himself. But that’s as close as he came to insulting you, I swear.”

  “I have nothing against the major,” I said. “He’s fighting for what he thinks is right. He’s not afraid to take a stand — ”

  “Don’t go getting all homiletic on me, now,” said Fielding.

  “It’s hard for a certain class of Newfoundlander to get ahead in Newfoundland, Fielding. Under the Commission of Government or responsible government, it always will be. Under Confederation, we can make a new start. We can make them pay for what they’ve done to us.”

  “Who’s we? Who’s us? Who’s them?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Fielding. Look around you. You live in a hovel. You drink yourself unconscious every night. You write yet another column every day. And you think I repeat myself. Where do you think all this is leading? Journalism is a poorly paid, losing game. You’re not the daughter of a doctor any more, don’t kid yourself.”

  “I know whose daughter I am,” she said.

  “I wonder if you know the man who was in my mother’s house this afternoon? I think he knows you.”

  “What in God’s name are you talking about, Smallwood?” Fielding said, a touch too loudly to sound convincing.

  “He calls himself Tom Hines now,” I said. “I don’t know what he used to call himself. I worked for him in New York at a paper called the Backhomer, which he still publishes. I didn’t know then that he had changed his name. Apparently, he left Newfoundland, it would have been while you were in the San, I think, went to Boston and, over the next five years, nearly drank himself to death. Then, or so he said, he had a stroke, and because of it some sort of vision or conversion. He was baptized in the Pentecostal Church and left Boston for New York, where he became a minister. The paper was his ministry and his readers were his congregation. His flock, he called them. The Backhomer. You must have heard of it.”

  “I know it,” Fielding said. “I glance at it from time to time, looking for ideas. There’s always a picture of this Hines fellow in it standing in front of this tiny church in Brooklyn — ”

  “The Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland in Brooklyn,” I said. “As you know, the Pentecostals and the Catholics are against us. Hines is here just for the referendum, a few weeks to help defeat Confederation, then he’s going back. I think he could be quite — influential — if he isn’t stopped.”

  “But what does all this have to do with me?” Fielding said.

  “I think you know who Hines used to be.” I said. I took out from inside my jacket a keepsake copy of the Backhomer from the twenties. I opened it to the page that bore Hines’s picture and handed it to Fielding. She stared at it.

  “By the time that picture was taken,” I said, “it would have been ten years since you’d seen him. Ten hard years. I dare say he had changed a lot, even aside from the stroke that paralysed one side of his face. Do you recognize him?”

  “It’s … it’s not a very good picture,” Fielding said, keeping her eyes averted from mine. “It’s so old.”

  “It’s the picture in which he looks most like he did when you saw him last,” I said. “You know him, don’t you?”

  Fielding nodded. “He never had a beard back then. Never wore glasses. He never dressed like that. His face … his face is not — ”

  “He told me you didn’t write that letter or send it to the Morning Post.”

  Fielding stared at me, then hung her head. “I don’t know how you wormed it out of him,” she said. “But you’ve got all you need to stop him now. What do you need me for?”

  I sighed. For this at least I did not have her to blame. I was not cursed with loving for life a woman who had once hated me enough for that. And I did still love her, for all that I had sworn otherwise when I saw Prowse jauntily emerge from her boarding-house that night. I had thought of her many times since then and had come to the realization that it was not the sum of her words and deeds but some essential Fielding I was drawn to, who for me could never change and from loving whom I would never be reprieved.

  I tried to look poker-faced, but when she glanced up she saw that I had tricked her. She smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Well, you must know something,” she said. “What is it?”

  “When you were in the Harbour Light, you gave me the letter that Reeves gave you, remember? The Morning Post letter.”

  I took out of my pocket an envelope and gingerly removed the letter, which was itself like an envelope now, for most of the words had fallen from the paper. I poured them out on the table, where, curled up and yellowed, they looked like pared fingernails.

  “These words,” I said, “that were pasted on this paper came from the judge’s book. The History. I recognized one or two of the words and then I looked through my copy of the book and found the others. I’ve written out the text of the letter.” I handed her a folded piece of paper. She took it from me and read it, hands trembling, though I wondered if they always did by now. She shook her head.

  “Ancient history,” she said.

  “Why did you give me the letter?”

  “I don’t know. To see if you’d notice what book the words were from. As a kind of joke. I didn’t know you had crossed paths with … Hines. I don’t know. I couldn’t stand to keep it. I couldn’t stand to see it destroyed. I knew that you would guard it with your life. And you were involved. Your life was affected by that letter, too —”

  “Not like yours was —”

  Fielding shrugged.

  “What was his real name?” I said.

  “You can find out if you want to,” she said.

  “What happened at Bishop Feild?” I said. “Don’t you think you’ve kept this secret long enough?”

  As if she had been asked to do so a thousand times and was at last relenting, she got up and went to the closet at the foot of her bed, opened the door, reached up and took a box down from the shelf. She put it on the table, rummaged around for a while, then extracted a yellowed edition of the History. It was so tantalizingly close I almost grabbed it from her hands. I changed my mind again. She was guilty. But Hines had been involved. How satisfying it would be to see at last those little windows in the pages, ellipses where the words had been.

  She sat there, staring at the book’s outer cover.

  “There should be a word missing from the title page,” I said. She ignored me, went on staring at the book.

  “For God’s sake, Fielding,” I said, “just open the damn book to the title page.”

  Fielding stood up and hurled the book across the room, barely missing the window, all but falling down in the process. She collapsed into her chair and sat back, breathing heavily, her eyes closed. She reached out for her glass, felt for it, picked it up before I could help her and took a long swallow of Scotch, still breathing hard as she swallowed.

  “You look at the God-damned book,” she said, pointing, eyes still closed, to where it lay, open but
face down, beneath the window. “You’re the one who’s so obsessed with the past, not me. There it is, the literal past, Smallwood; the history of Newfoundland. Go take a peek.”

  If she thought to shame me out of it by recommending it to me in this fashion, she had figured wrong. I crossed the room, picked up the book and opened it to the title page … from which were missing the words and letters I had expected would be missing.

  I closed the book and placed it on the table in front of Fielding. She did not pick it up or even look at it, or at me. She slumped in her chair, cradled her glass with both hands against her stomach.

  “Turn the front cover,” Fielding said, “and read aloud what you see.”

  I picked up the book again and turned the front cover. In ink that had run slightly, some lines had been carefully, painstakingly written. I read them aloud. “ ‘To Edward, on the day of your graduation from medical school. University of Edinburgh, May 9, 1901. Your loving parents, May and Richard Fielding.’ Your father’s book.”

  “Keep reading,” Fielding said. Below the first inscription, there were several lines of illegible scrawl. And below those: “ ‘For Edward Fielding. My grandson tells me he and your daughter are good friends. Friends as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.’ ”

  I felt myself reddening with resentment, embarrassment. I fought not to let it show.

  “Actually, that’s not really from the judge,” Fielding said. “It’s from his son, Prowse’s father. Prowse took me to see the judge one day to have him sign my father’s copy of his book. He scrawled something we couldn’t make out, so Prowse took the book to his father and he wrote that inscription, a decipherment of the judge’s, he said, but I’m not so sure. The old man seemed pretty far gone to me. Prowse’s father even wrote a note of explanation to my father about how the judge had palsy or something and only his family could make out what he wrote.”

  I suffered all the more keenly because I had to hide what I was feeling. So Prowse had done exactly the same thing with Fielding. Except he had not owned up to Fielding that the “translation” was his. I had long since known what Prowse was like, but I felt more betrayed by him now than I ever had. How many copies of the judge’s History were floating around with inscriptions forged by Prowse to the fathers of his friends?

  “I believe your father has one just like it,” Fielding said.

  I looked at her. She was not smiling. She was staring reflectively at her glass of Scotch. Prowse had told her. He would have taken her to see the judge before he took me and might therefore have convinced her that the inscription to her father was genuine, while the one to mine was just a joke. How many jokes had she and Prowse shared about me over the years?

  “So where does Hines come into it?”

  “Hines wrote the letter,” Fielding said.

  “How long have you known?” I said.

  “I knew it all along,” said Fielding.

  “Why did he write it?” I said.

  “The old Hines did things like that,” she said, “just to keep himself amused. Drunks need more than booze to keep themselves amused, which you know as well as I do.”

  “Then why did you confess to writing the letter?” I said.

  “I confessed because … because I panicked. Because Hines said he was going to tell Reeves that Prowse did it.”

  “Prowse?” I said. She nodded.

  “The past Hines put behind him,” Fielding said. “The past he’s always writing about. Prowse and I were part of that. We used to get Hines to buy booze for us. There was a whole other life outside the gates of Bishop Feild and Bishop Spencer, Smallwood. Hines told us, Prowse and me, about the letter. He had borrowed the book from me — I should have known he was up to something. We thought it was funny at first, a great trick. Until he told us who he planned to blame it on.”

  Fielding reached for her glass, but her hand was shaking so badly she could not pick it up.

  “It would just have been Prowse’s word against Hines,” I said. “Reeves would have believed Prowse, not some drunk —”

  “Hines knew about us,” Fielding said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Exactly what you think I mean,” said Fielding.

  I felt myself turn crimson with hatred for Prowse. My face was burning. “Us? You and Prowse? While you were still in school?”

  She said nothing.

  “But so what if Hines knew about Prowse and you. He had no proof, it would still have been his word —”

  “He was a photographer for the Morning Post,” she said. “We let him take a picture of us once. Not doing anything. Just lying there. We thought that was pretty funny, too.”

  I could not look her in the eye.

  “How did you know Hines wouldn’t just go ahead and blackmail Prowse into confessing, too?”

  “I took a chance,” she said. “I figured at the worst I would save Prowse from having to take the blame all by himself.”

  “You were that determined to stick by him?”

  “And at the best — Well, there was no point getting both of us in trouble.”

  “He should have confessed, too,” I said.

  “I know that now,” Fielding said. “But Prowse is Prowse.”

  “I’ve sometimes thought you confessed for my sake —”

  She said nothing, looked away.

  “And all the while, when you and Prowse were supposedly on the outs, all the while Prowse was treating you like dirt at Bishop Feild —”

  “As I said, Prowse is Prowse. It ended at some point. I can’t remember exactly when.”

  “Well, I think I’ve got enough now to silence Hines,” I said.

  “And what if he won’t be silenced? What if you threaten him him with going public with what you know and he says go ahead? I know men like Hines. They like nothing better than informing on the men they used to be, no matter what the crime.”

  “If he says go ahead,” I said angrily, “then I go ahead.”

  “And then what happens to Prowse?” she said. “Have you thought of that? That picture of us may still exist, for all you know.” I wanted to ask her why it should matter in the least to either of us what became of Prowse. But I was afraid of the answer. And I knew that if I got going about him, it would all come out. The night I watched him from outside her boarding-house. The light in her room. On, off. On, off. Our afternoon together.

  “It won’t come to that,” I said. “Hines will back down.”

  “You’re willing to take that chance? Would you be willing if your livelihood, your reputation was on the line?”

  “I have nothing in my past —” I was going to say “to be ashamed of” and I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew it. “I have nothing in my past that they can use against me that they haven’t already used. They’ve said I flunked out of Bishop Feild; they’ve said a thousand times that my father is a drunkard. And don’t forget, Prowse is a prominent confederate. Having him discredited could hurt our cause. If I thought there was any real chance of that —”

  “Smallwood,” Fielding said, “I’ve never asked you for anything before and I’ll never ask for anything again. Please, don’t confront Hines with this.”

  “I have to,” I said. “Maybe even if I thought there was a risk, I’d do it. Confederation is too important. But there is no risk.”

  Her hand steady now, she sighed, raised the glass to her mouth and drank its contents. She turned away from me. “Then at least promise me you won’t tell Prowse you know about all this.”

  “I’ll promise you that. I have no reason to tell him anyway.” I paused, my eyes full of spite-hot tears. “You’ve loved him all along,” I said. “You’ve never stopped, never —”

  She picked up the bottle of Scotch and hurled it with all her might against the wall. It smashed into tiny shards that went flying past my head and the Scotch sprayed out across the wallpaper in a map-like stain. The force of the throw carried Fieldi
ng to the floor, onto her hands and knees. I bent to help her up.

  “GET OUT,” she screamed. “GET OUT.”

  A column she must have written before my visit ran the next day, but the day after that the first panel on the third page of the Telegram was filled with something else.

  It was soon going round that Fielding had “disappeared” without a word to anyone as to where she was going. I checked with her landlord, who told me that he did not know where she was but that he expected her back, for she was still paying the rent on her room, which contained all of her belongings. All that occurred to me at the time was that it seemed I now had one less worry, namely, that at some point Fielding would come out in favour of independence by making Confederation the sole target of her columns.

  I went early the next morning to the boarding-house where, my mother had told me, Hines was staying. I was informed he had already checked out. It occurred to me he might be hiding from me, and perhaps he was, until the next ship sailed for the mainland. For it turned out that I was right, not Fielding, though I am sure Fielding attributed Hines’s sudden departure from Newfoundland to my confronting him with what I knew.

  Hines never spoke a word in Newfoundland against Confederation, nor was there any partisan mention of the subject in subsequent issues of the Backhomer. He had known, that afternoon in my mother’s house, that I had blundered onto his secret. There were things, it seemed, that not even Hines could afford to have attributed to his former self, things for which he did not think his congregation would forgive him.

  Fielding’s Condensed

  History of Newfoundland

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  THE ODE NOT TAKEN

  Boyle develops a love/hate relationship with Newfoundland and, never able to resolve this ambivalence, writes two odes, which we here alternate, verse by verse.

  When sun rays crown thy pine-clad hills,

  And summer spreads her hands,

  When silvern voices tune thy rills,

  We love thee, smiling land.

  (When men do drown for lack of gills,

  And, dead, wash up on land,

  Their wives their silvern tears do spill,