Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  “I wouldn’t want to have your head this time tomorrow,” the conductor said, shaking his own head but grinning. I had seen two bottles of Royal Reserve rye whisky in my father’s suitcase.

  We stowed our luggage in our berth, then went where everyone else was going, to the observation car. Most of the people who had got on board did not have berths. They were travelling coach, probably unable to afford a berth but in any case with no need for one on this occasion, for they had no intention of even spending time by themselves, let alone sleeping.

  The purser was cheered when he broke out two bottles of Champagne. On every run from now until the last one in the spring, my father said, there would be Champagne. A token of mollification. I foresaw a long twenty-four hours for children and other non-drinkers. There were not many children. There would be little for me to do but watch the grown-ups.

  The step dancer eventually got on the train. Now that he had stopped dancing, people took notice of him and called him by name, Walter.

  “Not much room to scuff in here, Walter,” one man said.

  “He don’t need much room,” a woman said. Walter said nothing, just smiled, as if in humble acknowledgment of fame. Nor did it seem that anyone expected him to speak.

  The accordionists came up the steps to the observation car. They were so alike that they must have been brothers. They began to play, making a sound like a hundred car horns blowing in raucous celebration of a wedding. No one else seemed to mind. No one paid much attention to die scenery or the blue sky and white clouds visible through the glass roof. A singalong was soon under way, of Newfoundland songs, though there was not a railway song among them or one in which the word “train” was even mentioned.

  I kept my eye on Walter. He sat near the circular staircase that led up to the observation car, beside the accordionists. He did not move a muscle. There was nothing to indicate that he was keeping time with the music or even remotely aware of his surroundings. Then he stood up and, as if in a trance, began to dance as he had on the platform, as if driven to do so by some force he was helpless to resist, though he was so stiff that all of him except his feet did seem to be resisting. He looked nonplussed but composed, as if, though it was a longstanding mystery to him why his feet behaved the way they did, he knew he had no choice but to wait for them to stop. He went up and down between the aisle while everyone clapped along.

  Soon others were dancing, as many as the limited space would permit. Glasses were abandoned, temporarily or not, all over the place. I poured the contents of a couple into an almost-empty Coke bottle and proceeded to get drunk for the first time in my life. My father saw what I was up to but said nothing. His main concern was not that I was drinking but that my mother not find out.

  Having downed most of the contents of my Coke bottle at the rate that I normally consumed Coke, I felt as though I might be sick. I kept perfectly still, concentrating on not being sick, convinced that unless everyone around me kept perfectly still and concentrated on my not becoming sick, I was doomed.

  Luckily for me, sleep came first. I passed out in a chair by the window. When I woke up hours later, the party, accordion driven, was still going strong. People looked out the windows, but only to see where we were, to revel in how much of the journey still remained. Time was being measured solely in terms of space. The party would last for 638 miles, and so far we had travelled only 160.

  A mummers’ troupe was on the train, though we in the observation car did not realize this until we heard a voice from the bottom of the stairs say “Mummers allowed in?” and another “Any Christmas here?”

  “Mummers!” someone shouted.

  From below the observation car, there was an explosion of sound from which we had not even begun to recover when there came climbing up the stairs like some invasion force a troupe of mummers, all wearing costumes that disguised not only their identities but their genders, the lead one holding above his/her head with both hands a suitcase-size radio that was cranked up to what must have been full volume and playing some sort of frenzied raucous jig.

  The other mummers, perhaps ten or twelve of them, fell in behind him/her single file, half-jogging, half-shaking, each using to deafening effect some sort of noisemaker — one was playing on his/her hip a set of spoons, another had what looked something like but wasn’t quite a tambourine, another had on his/her arm a shield-like drum and was beating it with both ends of what appeared to be a pepper grinder; another was not so much playing as blowing into a mouth organ in a way that sounded like the random honking of a flock of geese; another was rattling on the end of a stick or whip what was supposed to be, and for all I know may well have been, a bladder full of peas.

  The noise of their instruments combined with that blasting from the radio to make such a din that people from the rest of the train came up to see what was going on.

  “Oh look, it’s the mummers,” one of the women said and ran back down the stairs, presumably to spread the news.

  Though I doubted there was anyone on the train who would have recognized them, the mummers spoke ingressively — that is, while breathing in — as mummers visiting the houses of people they knew did in order to disguise their voices. Their every word was a hoarse croaking gasping inhalation.

  I had never seen mummers before. There hadn’t been much mummering done in or around St. John’s for a long time. It had been outlawed there since the 1860s, as it had been on the entire Avalon Peninsula, largely because one Isaac Mercer had been set upon and murdered by a troupe of mummers on December 28, 1860, in Bay Roberts, a town not far from St. John’s.

  Because mummers went from house to house bumming booze or wandered with bottles in hand through the streets, becoming progressively more drunk and less inhibited, their jaunts sometimes ended in fistfights. And mummering was in some places a time-honoured way of getting revenge for past grievances by using the disguise to beat the living daylights out of enemies. Religious rivals went at each other, Catholics preying on Protestants and vice versa.

  There had been plenty of mummering in Ferryland when my father was growing up, despite the law that had been passed against it and despite the parish priest’s condemnation. The priest, every Christmas, denounced mummering as blasphemous, pornographic and obscene. Mummers were depraved, he said. While dancing with mummers, people would “feel them up” to determine what sex they were. In which case, he said, you not only had men groping women and vice versa, but men groping men and women groping women. And this was a tradition people thought was worth reviving? “Have nothing to do with mummering,” he said.

  The members of this troupe wore homemade masks, veils of lace or net curtains, or pillowcases or stockings pulled tightly over their faces, tied at the throat with twine. Some had wigs and false beards, and what little that showed of their faces was painted black.

  There was a mummer with a middle leg so long that it dragged the ground, an opaque stocking stuffed with socks that he/she kept stepping on and tripping.

  There was a “Horse-chops” too, who was “riding” a hobby-horse made of a stick with the figure of a horse’s head on top, a head that had moveable jaws with nails for teeth that he/she snapped at people’s noses, ingressively laughing when they pulled back, half-terrified, half-amused.

  They sang ingressively an old song that the accordion brothers knew. It was, I found out later, called, “The Terra Novean Exile’s Song”: “How oft some of us here tonight/Have seen the mummers out/As thro’ the fields by pale moon light/They came with merry shout/In costumes quaint with mask or paint.”

  Eventually, the lead mummer held out a hand to a woman who without the least hesitation accepted, and the two of them, arms linked, began what was obviously not the first such dance for either of them. The other mummers followed suit.

  I was approached by a mummer wearing a red dress with black polka dots over green slacks tucked into knee-high rubber boots; for a mask it wore a pillow slip, with eyeholes but no mouth, tied at the neck with gree
n twine, a pair of woollen mitts, a large blue floppy hat with a fringe of flowers. There was so much padding underneath the dress I couldn’t have come within a hundred pounds of guessing the person’s weight, and over the dress was an enormous stuffed bra and an equally enormous rosette-embroidered pair of panties. “Give us a dance?” I shook my head, which ached. I felt queasy. I was hung over, though I didn’t know it.

  I knew it was supposed to be all in fun, but there was something about mummering itself I didn’t like, something I would not have liked had I been living in a time when mummering was commonplace. Partly it was the mummers themselves; there was something of the bully about them. It was an uneasy feeling, to be forced to take part in something so one-sided, to be at such a disadvantage — the mummers were anonymous, uninhibited, aggressive, because you couldn’t see their faces, while there you were for all to see.

  The mummer wearing the middle leg that hung down almost to the floor danced over to my father, that leg lewdly swinging, and held out an arm to him. Smiling and trying not to look the least bit disconcerted, he shook his head. It soon became clear, however, that refusal was unacceptable. The mummer grabbed his middle leg with both hands and, raising it, made as if to knight my father with it, laying it first on one shoulder, then the other.

  “I wants a dance,” he/she said ingressively. “What’s the matter? Townies don’t dance?”

  “I’m no townie,” my father said. “What’s your name?”

  “It’s not time yet for guessin’ names,” the mummer said.

  “It’s time to dance,” and this time with the middle leg bopped my father on the head.

  “I’m not in the mood for dancing,” my father said. “You lot aren’t planning to keep this up all the way to the other side of the country, are you?”

  The mummer put his face to within inches of my father’s and, speaking ingressively, said, “It’s not a country, it’s a province. It never was a country. If you know your history.”

  My father made a lunge for him, but several other mummers intervened and hustled away the one who by his words had revealed himself to be the fact-facing bus-boomer.

  “Downstairs,” one of them said ingressively. “We’re going downstairs now. Time to visit somewhere else. Somewhere we’ll be more welcome.” The mummers, accompanied by the makeshift band and many of the occupants of the observation car, departed as abruptly as they had arrived, though for a long time afterwards we could still hear them down below.

  My father sat brooding again, looking out the window for a while. It had been comical, his lunging for the middle-leg-wearing fact-facing bus-boomer, though it did not seem so now. Those passengers still in the car darted a glance at him from time to time.

  He got up and told me to stay put until he got back — he was going to take a short nap in our berth. I thought he might be going off in search of the fact-facing bus-boomer, but he went the other way. We never saw the bus-boomer, mummered up or otherwise, again.

  My father came back about an hour later and rejoined me in the seat. “Were you going to beat him up?” I said.

  My father laughed. His mood was much improved and I could tell why just from looking at him.

  “No,” he said, “I wasn’t going to beat him up.” But he laughed as if he was picturing the fact-facing, bus-booming mummer thrashed, his costume in a state of extreme dishevelment.

  When night came, he fell silent again, staring out into the darkness. We had something to eat in the dining car, then went back to our berth.

  I climbed into bed. He turned off the light and sat by the window, facing me, a glass in one hand that he rested on his leg. “You go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll wake you when the sun comes up and we’ll have breakfast in the dining car. Don’t tell your mother what happened, all right?”

  I nodded. “Where will we be when the sun comes up?” I said.

  He took his schedule from his pocket and squinted at it in the darkness. “Whitbourne Junction,” he said.

  “Tell me a ghost story,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You’ll have bad dreams.”

  “No I won’t,” I said.

  He told me about the Great Eastern. The first underwater transatlantic telegraph cable had been brought ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, on July 27, 1866. For the purpose of laying the cable between Valenica, Ireland and Heart’s Content, a telegraph company owner named Cyrus Field had purchased what in the 1860s was the largest ship in the world, a debt-inducing white elephant called the Great Eastern, which had been designed and built by the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

  The Great Eastern was seven hundred feet long, drew fifty feet of water and had the capacity to carry four thousand passengers. It was built at Millwood, London, to transport immigrants to Australia and British troops to India. There hung on the wall of our living room a sketch of the Great Eastern that, in dim light, looked like a city skyline, all masts and sails and a calliope of smokestacks, a massive paddlewheel at the stern.

  The Great Eastern was dogged by misfortune from the very start. The first attempt to launch it failed and resulted in great damage to the ship. Once launched, it brought grief to everyone involved with it.

  Its bad luck was said to have been caused by a jinx placed on it during its construction when a rumour spread that two men were trapped somewhere between the hulls. Isambard Kingdom Brunel refused to tear apart his ship merely on the basis of a rumour, and so the hulls were sealed.

  The rumours of faint tappings heard from within persisted throughout the life of the ship. These rumours scared off passengers afraid of hearing ghosts or afraid of being on board when God got round to exacting his revenge, or afraid of the bad luck that was said to hang for life on anyone who had anything to do with Brunel’s floating masterpiece. Mystics predicted its every voyage would be its last. The sinking of the Great Eastern was foreseen a thousand times but never happened.

  A failure as a passenger ship, its one great success was the laying of the transatlantic cable. It carried the three thousand miles of cable in its hold, played it out foot by foot until the last of it was sunk in a protective trench on the floor of the harbour at Heart’s Content.

  In 1887 the Great Eastern was sold for scrap. It took two years to dismantle it; in 1889 the skeletons not of two men, but of a man and a boy, a father and his twelve-year-old son, were found sealed between the hulls.

  “Is that true?” I said.

  “No,” my father said. “No. It’s just a story.” But I knew from how he spoke that it was true.

  He told me to imagine the Great Eastern as it hove to in sight of Newfoundland, still bound to Ireland by that cable that played out from the stern like some fishing line, as if it had trolled the Atlantic without success for some creature of the deep.

  “They could have reeled the Great Eastern in from Ireland,” my father said. “Or once the cable was ashore, we could have reeled in Ireland from Newfoundland.”

  Newfoundland and Ireland physically linked, tethered, bound together by a cable that, to this day, lies buried on the ocean floor. Was this not something marvellous? he said. But I would not be put off.

  For how long had the man and his son remained alive? I asked. My father said they had survived for years by eating rats that like them had been trapped between the hulls and by licking condensation from the walls. I knew he was hoping that by making this joke, he would fool me into thinking the whole thing had been made up. I kept asking questions.

  Why was their entrapment, their entombment, just a rumour and not a fact? Why was their disappearance not evidence enough of where they were?

  “It’s just a story,” my father said.

  What would they have talked about once they gave up hope of being rescued? Were they found side by side or far apart? Had they been able to hear sounds from outside? Probably, since people outside had been able to hear them tapping on the hull. Muffled sounds. A world away. Did they die while the ship was still being built, b
efore it was even launched, or after it was launched?

  “That’s enough questions, Wayne,” my father said. “You asked me for a story, so I made one up.”

  I put the questions to myself instead. What must it have been like in there, between the hulls? There would have been no light, or almost none. Dark, silent, with only each other to talk to and only each other to hear. It seemed at once terrifying and absurd, the two of them trapped between the hulls of that great ship while work on the exterior continued or while the Great Eastern was under sail.

  The Great Eastern and its hull-haunting ghosts, the bones of a man and his son still clothed, their boots still on their bony feet. A father and his son. What a strange companionship their last days must have been. Companionship. Ship companions.

  I lay awake for a long time, watching my father as he looked out the window and filled and refilled his glass with rye and ginger ale. The train rumbled along, swaying on the narrow gauge. We were passing through the core. Through the window, even though our car was dark, I could see only what the locomotive light eight cars ahead revealed, a short stretch of tracks, the reflection of the light as we crossed a stretch of open water. In the observation car it had been chilly, but underneath the blankets it was warm.

  I fell asleep and sometime later was wakened by his voice. I was about to admit to him that I had been asleep when I realized he was not talking to me.

  He spoke, inaudibly, paused as if to let someone reply, then spoke again. His voice was low. Some of what he said I could not make out. He drank, his head tipped back, eyes closed as though he was engrossed in this attempt to drain his glass. He poured another drink.

  “Dad?” I said.

  Startled, he froze in the act of raising his glass to his mouth. He lowered his arm.

  “Thought you were asleep,” he said.

  “Who were you talking to?” I said.