Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  He won elections by landslides, despite an almost unbroken record of spectacular failures, treasury-draining economic development schemes, the hope of whose improbable success he clung to long after it was certain even to his closest friends that they were doomed.

  No matter what the implications might be for us as Newfoundlanders, we delighted in the failures of Joey’s debt-defying schemes. He was like a tightrope walker who never managed a single successful walk but kept raising the rope higher and higher, in the end trying to perform from the greatest height while wrapped from head to toe in bandages and with every limb encumbered by a cast.

  During the first fifteen years of Joey’s reign, Newfoundland went from the solvency of a $45 million surplus to a several-billion-dollar debt. It was an epic debt, ludicrously huge in proportion to our population of less than half a million.

  It was vindication of sorts. Confederation might be here to stay, though no one ever said so in so many words, but it had all backfired on Joey in a manner that was no less gratifying for bringing with it the complete ruination of Newfoundland.

  During the last of Joey’s days in office, the Johnstons refused to risk heartbreak by even considering the possibility that they would finally be rid of him.

  “He’ll worm his way out of this one yet, you just watch,” my uncle Harold said. “This one” was the deadlocked election of October 1971. Strange things happened in Newfoundland politics during the next six months. Politicians who were offered cabinet posts to do so switched parties, crossing the House of Assembly from both sides, the balance of power teetering back and forth. Joey’s government at one point had fewer members than the opposition, but he somehow managed to forestall a vote of non-confidence and stayed in power.

  “It’s the referendum all over again,” Aunt Eva declared. “The whole thing is fixed.”

  But Joey announced his resignation on January 13, 1972, at four o’clock in the afternoon, as it was getting dark. I was fourteen and just home from high school in St. John’s. His speech, which he delivered from his office, was carried live on TV and radio. Life in Newfoundland came to a standstill. In many homes throughout the province that night, people wept and swore bitterly at the ungratefulness of those Newfoundlanders who had voted against him. As in the referendum of 1948, about half of them had. A quarter of a century later, the country was once again split down the middle.

  There was neither weeping nor swearing in our house. Harold and Marg and Eva and Jim came by in the evening.

  “It’s a happy night in heaven,” Eva said.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” my father said.

  They all said it was a shame that Nan Johnston and Mr. Charlie and Freda could not have lived to see this day.

  For a while they were silent. It sounded as if a coup were under way outside, so many shotguns were being fired off in celebration, in mocking mimicry of what the confederates had done on referendum night twenty-four years earlier. Joey had not only given us the satisfaction of defeating him but had bowed out about as ungracefully as it was possible to do, prolonging his reign long past the point where everyone but him knew he was finished. Eva, sipping on a drink, swore the suspense had been such that she had foresworn TV, radio and newspapers for weeks. “My God,” she said, putting her hand on her chest, “I thought that man would never go.”

  They decided to call the Ferryland Johnstons, Gordon and Kitty and Millie. As each of them took a turn on the phone, their voices changed instantly, as if they had placed a call to the past, as if they were looking out the kitchen window of the old house at the lighthouse on the Head, looking out across the Downs, which at night were always a shade darker than the water.

  Ferryland, Gordon told them, was going wild. Fireworks. Bands of merrymakers going by on the road below the house, motorcades of cars honking. Guns going off. Though it was a clear night, the foghorn in the lighthouse had been sounding since four o’clock. Gordon doubted that anyone in Ferryland would get to sleep that night. It was as if Confederation had been undone.

  But they spoke not with rancour or with vehemence or even, after a while, with vindictive glee, but wistfully. Something had ended, something more than just Joey’s reign as premier. It was hard to say just what, but something had. And harder still to imagine what would take its place.

  However things might have been in Ferryland, the celebration in the Goulds did not go on all night or even until midnight. In our house, by ten o’clock, the Johnstons were subdued, reflective.

  “We’re still stuck with Confederation, but at least we’ve seen the last of Joey Smallwood,” Eva said. The others murmured their assent.

  They must have thought that with Joey gone, they could at last, if not reconcile themselves to Confederation, then forget about it, not be daily reminded by his face and his voice and his name in the paper of their father’s Old Lost Land.

  It had not occurred to them that they might miss this last link with the battle, that they had in part defined themselves by their opposition to Joey, that to rail against him was a way of sustaining the illusion that Confederation might still somehow be undone.

  They had all been in their twenties when the fight for Newfoundland was lost, young men and women. Defeat came as an intervention. They had lost not something they had merely hoped would last but something they had had no reason to think they would ever lose.

  Now, in their early fifties, they were no less bewildered than they had been back then. They had followed the river of what should have been, knowing it led nowhere.

  WHEN MY FATHER had put in enough years on the south-coast run to quit if he wanted to, he did. He worked now in a federal Fisheries laboratory that had been part of the U.S. Army base in the Second World War at Pleasantville, St. John’s, a place of converted barracks and dormitories and squat three-storey wooden buildings constructed by the Americans for a war that, for all they knew, would last for decades.

  That science could not save or even much improve the fisheries he had by this time known for years. He performed on a rote basis quality-control tests on samples of fish collected around the island by younger men who told him he had no idea what their lives were like. He became so adept at it that he could think of other things or even think of nothing while he worked. It seemed to him sometimes that he was the opposite of everything he wished to be. All he wanted was to spend his days outdoors, away from microscopes, Bunsen burners, beakers, test tubes.

  My father and his brothers, almost every morning from the age of ten, fished for hours with their father before they started school, as much part-time fishermen as he was. When they came back into the Pool and landed their catch, they walked down the road to the schoolhouse past Most Holy Trinity Church on the landward side of the road, and their father went up the hill to the forge behind his house and began his other job. They had all been working for five hours by the time the school bell rang at nine o’clock.

  He had not been at sea for seven years, had not been fishing for thirty, but my father shaped his day like the fisherman he once was, rising every morning he was able to at four o’clock, the time his father used to wake him and his brothers in the years they spent together on the water. At no time of the year was the sun up at four in the morning. Every day began in darkness. It was important to him that it did. It was important to him that he not begin his day getting ready for work, that work he disliked not be his reason for rising when he did. He had at least that much control, was to that degree at least not fatefully bound by his ill-chosen profession.

  Then, too, there were the dreams he had. For some reason, he had his worst dreams when he slept past four o’clock. He told me that he dreamed of his father. Sometimes that he and his father and brothers were about to wreck on Ferryland Head, which they had many times come close to doing. He dreamed of the time he and his father lost the sled when they were cutting ice, when he walked for hours not knowing that his spleen was ruptured. My father, lost in the dark wood of his dreams, called out to his father
while my mother lay beside him, trying as gently as possible to coax him into wakefulness, whispering his name. “Art, Art, wake up.” He always woke with a start, the bed shaking as if he had just dropped into it from some great height.

  I was eighteen, attending college in St. John’s. Every morning when I got up I found him standing at the kitchen window, the day for him already hours old. He loved to have the house to himself when it was dark outside. Wearing slacks but barefoot and shirtless, he would lean on the kitchen counter, side-on, just to the right of the sink into which he tipped the ashes of his cigarettes as he looked out the window, waiting for the first lightening of the sky above the Shoal Bay Hills, watching the hills themselves come into view, a rolling horizon a shade darker than the sky above it. He stood there looking out the window for hours.

  At seven o’clock, he started his day again and ours for the first time by turning on the radio, which was always tuned to the CBC. (Joey was gone, the CBC no longer off limits.) He listened to the marine forecast as if it still mattered to him how high the waves would be that day and what the chances were of freezing spray and when the tides would ebb and flow. He noted it all in his journal/log, was often still writing in it when we came out for breakfast. He kept a meteorological diary, and to his weather observations appended notes in ship’s-log form throughout the day. “February 9, 1976. Snow flurries and drifting snow. Had to dig the car out. Snow with southeast winds expected by mid-afternoon, changing to rain overnight. Wayne home from school with flu. Because of storm, Mom taking day off too…”

  He took an early retirement at the age of fifty-five. “The fish will soon be gone,” he said, as if by way of explaining his retirement. He and his co-workers had been telling their superiors for years what the fishermen had been telling them. The fish would soon be gone. And perhaps their superiors had been telling their superiors. No one knew for certain. Nothing was done. And then one day — and it seemed to happen that suddenly — the fish were gone.

  WHILE OUR LAST house, the only one we ever owned, was being built, we lived for six months across the road from it in my grandfather’s house, the whole family sleeping in the room that my grandparents used to sleep in but that my grandfather abandoned for another, smaller one after my grandmother died. For six months, the seven of us, my parents, four teenage boys and my seven-year-old sister, slept and, for the most part, lived in that one room, the door of which was always closed. The rest of the house, except the kitchen and the bathroom, was practically off limits to us, even the living room, for we had to go to our bedroom when my grandfather retired to his at eight o’clock. The precious interval between dinner and bedtime we spent in a manner we were not accustomed to — saying the rosary, on our knees in the kitchen, leaning, beads in hand, on chairs or on the daybed.

  It was deemed to be such an imposition on my grandfather, of whom everyone was terrified, to have the seven of us in his house, that my mother warned us not to make a peep once he went to his room. My parents slept in what must have been the bed my mother was conceived in, it looked so old, and the five of us children slept on the floor, between the foot of the bed and the wall, on our sides, for there was not enough room to sleep on our backs or on our stomachs. We undressed for bed in shifts, my parents first while we waited outside in the hall. Once they were under the covers they called my sister in, and when she was in her sleeping bag and facing the wall, we boys went in.

  It seemed the house across the road would never be built. Our bedroom window faced it, and we spent a lot of time watching its progress from there. An old house on the site had to be torn down to make way for ours. It was one of the oldest houses in the Goulds, a white saltbox with a dark green trim. After it was levelled by a bulldozer, people were permitted to scavenge for firewood, and there was not much of it left to be hauled away when they were finished.

  We moved into my grandfather’s house in mid-October. The shell of our house, a small bungalow, was built very quickly, raising our hopes that the whole thing might be finished before spring. But work inside proceeded very slowly. Once the shell was up to protect them from the coming snow and hide them from the eyes of their employers across the road, the carpenters took their time. The winter was a bad one. One morning we woke up to see a snowdrift arced across what soon would be our front yard, cresting at about fifteen feet right where the driveway would be.

  As soon as there was a floor solid enough to hold us, we went over there to walk around, not minding the dark. We were so glad to be on our own again, even if it was only for as long as we could stand the cold. I thought the place would always have the new-house smells of unfinished wood, gyproc, sawdust and cement. By the light of the flashlights we carried, we could see each other’s breath. Though there were only joists to mark the rooms, we staked out our territory, the four of us boys sitting in what would be our room, staring enviously through the wooden uprights at my sister in her room; beyond hers was my parents’ room, another set of uprights away, my father sitting on a sawhorse, smoking a cigarette, my mother with arms folded, staring out the window at her father’s house across the road. It seemed to us the pinnacle of privacy.

  The plasterboard went up, the pink insulation and the ceiling tiles, the doors. In April, carpet was put down throughout the house. The furnace and appliances were installed, as was the wiring. The last thing to be constructed, or assembled rather, was the fireplace. The variously coloured stones for it had been delivered months too early and had lain outside all winter, buried under mounds of snow, protected only by a canvas tarp and a plastic sheet. My father had fretted all winter about the stones, certain he would find them split into pieces by the frost in the spring. But when the stonemason removed the coverings, the stones were all intact, protected from the cold by the snow, he said, as if this had been his plan all along. The whole family watched him build the fireplace, artfully trowelling the massive granite stones into place with cement. When the large grey granite mantelpiece was put in place, the house was finished.

  We had lived in some indescribably dilapidated houses, at best in old houses maintained to minimum standards. We spent a winter in one house that had no refrigerator. We put our perishables outside on the steps, losing everything except the milk to neighbourhood dogs. One Friday my father, determined not to be deprived for the umpteenth time of bacon and eggs for his Saturday morning breakfast, stayed up all night, keeping guard in the porch over his pound of bacon on the veranda. Each time the pack of dogs advanced on the house, my father chased them off with a shovel that he wielded like a battle-axe. This was 1965. In another house we all awoke one morning to find it being painted by strangers who had been hired by the landlord who had neglected to tell us not only that the painters were coming but that the place was up for sale and we had a week to find somewhere else to live. We lived in a house without running water, kept our drinking water in a bucket on the porch, where in the winter the first few inches froze and we had to break the ice with an axe before we filled our glasses. The water was delicious but so cold it gave us headaches. We lived in a house beside a tavern, and between the two there was not so much as a fence or a patch of grass. The patrons brawled almost nightly in the gravel parking lot while we watched from our upstairs bedroom windows. In the backyard of one house, sewage ran raw from a ruptured septic tank, bubbling up from the ground like oil. In another house, my father chopped clean off with a hatchet the head of a rat, having waited hours for him to emerge from the basement drainage pipe.

  But in this house, this tiny house, everything was new. My memories of our first days in it are not spoiled by the fact that within a year it became almost mythically dysfunctional. Impossibly, blessedly, everything worked for a while.

  AUGUST 1981

  There is no way of saying goodbye to my father that will not remind him of the day on the beach in Ferryland when he and Charlie said goodbye. Not for a long time has he let slip a word about what happened on the beach, nor have I said anything about it. Whatever it is abo
ut Ferryland that has haunted him for years is caught up with that day and that goodbye. I know that much. But I am resigned to never knowing more.

  Every goodbye since then has recalled that one for my father, and ours especially, because of all his children I am the one who most reminds him of his young self and so of his childhood. It is hard to say just why this is, but we both know it. I can see in my father’s eyes that he is dreading our goodbye as much as I am. We must avoid being alone with each other so that he can simply be one of several who see me off at the airport with a handshake and best wishes. We have tacitly agreed to be vigilant and not be the last two at the dinner table or the first two up for breakfast. But the effect of all this is to keep the thought of encountering the other so constantly in mind that it seems bound to happen.

  The day before I am supposed to leave, I go to the newsroom at the St. John’s paper where I work to clear my desk of four years’ worth of papers, letters, drafts of essays and short stories. I fancy there might be something worth preserving, so I pile it all into a box and put it in the car. Driving home, the box on the front seat beside me, I pick through it with one hand, and by the time I reach the Goulds I have decided that there is nothing worth keeping after all. I park in the driveway, remove the box and head for the trash barrel in the backyard. And when I turn the corner of the house, when I am close enough to the barrel that to turn away and make for the back door would be too transparent an attempt to avoid him, I see my father just as unmistakably headed for the barrel with an armload of flattened cardboard boxes and other things I cleared out of my room the day before.

  I know, before he begins to speak, that he is going to tell me. Everything favours it. If he does not tell me now he never will. I am leaving. He knows I plan to be a writer. He knows, or hopes, that someday I will write about him. He cannot get the story straight in his mind and believes that when I tell it he will understand it better.