Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  I flew home so I could be there to meet them when their plane touched down. When you turn the corner into the short corridor that leads to the terminal at the airport in St. John’s, you find yourself face to face with a throng of people gawking eagerly as if they have gathered to welcome home a local hero fresh from some triumph on the mainland.

  I have never felt more left out, more self-consciously alone than when I’ve arrived at that airport with no one there to meet me. I was anxious that my father not feel that way, that there be among that crowd as he turned the corner as many familiar faces as possible.

  He came down the tunnel holding my mother’s arm, while a flight attendant whose help he swore he did not need walked gingerly beside him. Many other relatives and friends were there, but the sight of me unsettled him. He looked as if he wondered if some stroke-induced forgetfulness had made him lose track of where I lived.

  “You’re home again,” I said.

  “Home again,” he said, smiling sheepishly as if he had been caught in some bit of foolishness. “You’re home again, too.”

  “I just wanted to see the look on your face,” I said. “I’m just here for a few days.” We hugged. He seemed to have grown even shorter. I could have rested my chin on his head.

  He looked around the small terminal, shaking his head in wonder, disbelief, dismay. Time, this time, had had no effect except on him. The past, neither by his leaving nor his coming back, had been undone.

  But he had survived, he had seen through to its conclusion some inscrutable necessity.

  HIS COUNTRY AND his father gone, my father came back home in May of 1949, crossing Newfoundland by train from west to east, soon to visit his father’s grave for the first time, and soon to see his family, his brothers, his sisters and his mother for the first time since before his father’s death.

  He rode coach, as he always did, unable to afford a berth, though on this occasion it didn’t matter, for there was no chance that he would have slept. There were only a few differences. A sign at the dock in Port aux Basques read “WELCOME TO NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR, TENTH PROVINCE OF CANADA.”

  The train itself no longer bore on its boxcars THE NEWFOUNDLAND RAILWAY, but instead Canadian National Railway or CNR. The stewards, the bursers, the waiters, die conductor, the engineer and fireman all wore the uniform of the new management. The table cloths and napkins and towels and face cloths were monogrammed CNR.

  My father travelled with friends who, like him, were returning home from college. Anti-confederates all, they were getting their first glimpse of the new Newfoundland and gleefully observed that “aside from a few letters,” it still looked the same, as if the Confederates had predicted that if they won every inch of it would be transformed.

  Reaching Riverhead Station in St. John’s, my father was met by an uncle with whom he drove the forty miles of unpaved road along the Southern Shore to Ferryland. It reminded him of the time he and Charlie brought back the anvil from the foundry in St. John’s. His uncle stopped the car on the road below the house and helped my father get his suitcase from the trunk. Then he drove off.

  It must have seemed impossible to my father that so much could have happened in a year, that to go back in time but one year would have been to go back before they lost the referendum, before he went fishing for the last time, before he left home, before his father died, before Newfoundland the country ceased to be, back to when there was still a fire in the forge and when, after dark in the fall, behind the windows fogged up from the heat, he saw the fire surge and fade, surge and fade as his father worked the bellows, back to when it had been twenty years since his grandfather died and the forge had gone unlit so long that the chimney bed was cold. How could all that have happened in one year? How could so much have ended and so much else begun?

  There were still hoofprints on the path that led up to the forge, along which people led their horses by the bridle to have them shod, prints left there since last fall and persisting because the ground had not yet thawed.

  He was shocked, looking up the hill towards the house, to see how lifeless the forge looked. It had never looked its age before, but now it did, the age that the fire within, the ring of the anvil, the smoke and sparks from the chimney and the light at the windows had belied. It looked not only old, but as if it had been in disuse for years.

  The only things unchanged were the rusted scrap heap of iron out back, his father’s rough stock of iron, for which he and his children had foraged the Shore on weekends, the ancient mound of yellow ash and the flame-shaped streaks of soot on the rust red chimney bricks. The forge, like a piece of cooled, once-molten metal, had achieved its final form.

  It seemed to my father, looking about, that all of Ferryland had achieved its final form, been heated, hammered, doused in the tub, tempered in brine and hardened into fact that would endure like rock. He noticed the silence, what had previously been the silence only of night and early morning and of Sunday afternoons. It was mid-week, mid-afternoon and there came from the forge a discordant silence. All of Newfoundland had been resettled in his absence, its destiny as profoundly changed as if it had been floated on a raft across the Gulf.

  After seeing his mother and the rest of his family, he walked alone down the road to the Church of the Most Holy Trinity. He stopped to look at an early iceberg that had made its way into the harbour and run aground and turned the whole Pool cloudy green and left a scum of slush on the surface so that now, after high tide, there was a strand of ice along the shore. The base of the iceberg stretched like a pedestal beneath the water, which was a deep blue-green at the sunken edges. Above the water it was faintly like a house except for one spire of ice that was still attached to the rest, though the intervening part was well submerged. Unless it was dynamited, there would be no capelin in June, and even larger fish like the cod would keep their distance, so that to catch them fishermen would have to travel twice as far as usual. But such considerations were behind him now. He had not come back to Ferryland to live.

  He climbed the hill behind the church to the cemetery on the Gaze. Following his mother’s directions, he found his father’s grave, read the headstone, stood beside it. He turned and faced the water, looked down at the beach where he had last seen his father alive.

  “Be a good boy.”

  It had rained the night before, and though the wind had gone round and was now blowing from the west, storm clouds were still racing overhead. A west wind in Ferryland was offshore, so there was no fog.

  My father could see the whole length of the Downs and, at the end, Ferryland Head and the lighthouse, whose keeper must have had a busy, sleepless night.

  The beacon of the lighthouse, as if the keeper was testing it, flashed once. And though it was the middle of the day, my father could see its brief illumination of the water and the land, a single revolution of super-illuminating light, like the opposite of an eclipse. Then it was ordinary day again.

  He remembered the echo of the hammer on the anvil. He looked down at the Head and the islands, Bois and Gosse, the points of land that caused the echo, that sent up between them and the Gaze the ceaseless din, the sound of the hammer on the anvil as it travelled back and forth across the water. Before the echoes from one blow had faded, another one was struck. There must have been a final blow that ricocheted from hill to hill, the echoes subsiding like those of a rifle shot.

  On referendum night, Charlie could not have been more devastated if his side had just been declared the losers in a winner-take-all war, if it had just surrendered to a regime to exist honourably under which would be impossible and there was therefore nothing left for him to do but shoot himself.

  When the last returns from Labrador came in, confirming the anti-confederate defeat, Nan sat beside him and tried to console him at the kitchen table. His upper body was sprawled across it as he cried with his face between his arms, his forehead on the tablecloth.

  Just before midnight he went out and fired up the forge. He did n
ot work or even burn anything in the furnace, just kept the fire roaring all night long, piling on the coal, cranking the bellows to sustain that conflagration of protest, impotence and grief. He drank rum and fed the fire, stared into it, stabbed it with a poker, tears and drops of sweat streaking his soot-stained face as he ignored Nan’s pleas to come back to the house.

  But the next day, word went round in Ferryland that the Major, Peter Cashin, had vowed that despite the outcome of the vote, he would stop Confederation. All of Ferryland had been ready to march to St. John’s as soon as Cashin said the word. But no word from Cashin came.

  Once it became clear that not even the Major could salvage the cause, many anti-confederates in Ferryland got obliteratingly drunk and stayed that way for days. Charlie went on a binge that lasted for weeks. Never a man to be mistaken for a stoic, Charlie alternated between rage and grief, sitting slumped at his kitchen table while work went undone, fish went uncaught, crops untended, and customers looking to have their horses shod were turned away. Charlie was incredulous that anyone could think that with the referendum lost, there was any point in putting shoes on horses.

  Finally Charlie did get down to work. But he pounded away on the anvil more vigorously than usual in the months after the referendum, spoiling more shoes and nails than he had since he apprenticed with his father. The din from the forge was such that Nan wondered if he was doing anything but striking the anvil.

  It had been a longer-than-usual cessation of hammering that sent Nan out to the forge, where she found that her husband had as suddenly and inexplicably given out as his legendary anvil had, one second solid, the next shattered as if he had reached some predetermined limit measured out by hammer strokes.

  Charlie lay on the floor of the forge, all his tools scattered about him. She was able to tell how long he had been lying by how low the fire had burned down. In the part of the forge reserved for just-finished pieces there was nothing; nor were there any works-in-progress on the floor or in the vat.

  My father turned around again and faced the forge and, for an instant, was convinced that since that final blow, no time had passed, that if he looked in through the window he would see his father and it would still not be too late to say goodbye.

  WHERE THE FORGE was, there is nothing now. The site is overgrown with scrub. There are horseshoes lying everywhere, in the grass, above ground and below. You have only to dig with your heel to unearth a shoe or a nail or a rusting railway spike. Sod has grown over Charlie’s pile of rough stock, which must have sunk some into the ground, for the mound that my father remembers looking up at is just a few feet high.

  They believe they have found the site of Baltimore’s great but short-lived mansion on the Downs, a mansion that was razed by pirates, Protestants, weather and decay. They are still trying to puzzle out its shape and dimensions.

  The Downs have been marked out on a grid with string, and students and professors from the college in St. John’s are sifting through the excavation square by square. In each hole, a person crouches, brushing dust from shards of china, piecing together cups and plates, unearthing cutlery that they hope can be restored.

  They have yet to find the salt works mentioned in the letter sent to Lord Baltimore from Ferryland by Edward Wynne in 1622. They are sorting out the floor plan, speculating about which room lay where. There is talk that the whole house will be reconstructed exactly as it was, that one day the people of Ferryland will look out their windows and see what people looking out theirs saw four hundred years ago.

  There would have been a day when the Welshmen who preceded him and spent years preparing a place for him saw Lord Baltimore’s ships from the top of the Gaze, proof that the Old World had persisted in their absence, that all that lay between them and home was a finite stretch of water. Here was Baltimore, making real again things they had stopped believing in, Baltimore who would never see, as they had, Ferryland before the first ship landed, the place before it had a name, who would never, as they had, draw near to an empty shore feeling as if they had gone back to the brink of time, as if time would begin the moment they set foot upon the beach. They had not arrived at the end of a mission of discovery and exploration as Cabot had in 1497, when he made landfall at Cape Bonavista. They had come to stay for good, as absurd and as terrifying as that must have seemed to them as, in the last few minutes of their journey, they regarded Newfoundland. They had neither his illusions nor the prospect of a quick return to England to sustain them.

  Baltimore would never know the loneliness and solitude they felt in those first days. But here at last was “his Lordship” on whose behalf they had been toiling for years but whose existence they did not really believe in, so impossible was it to imagine an aristocrat resident in such a place, however fine his house might be. He would stick out among the colonists the way his unoccupied mansion did among their tilts and huts.

  In his ship was as much of home as he had been able to cram into it. His mansion house was ready for him. It was there, incongruously there for him to see as he hove to in sight of Ferryland.

  I have often wondered what he thought when he first set eyes on it, if it matched his expectations, if it was everything his governors had promised it would be. Baltimore, his wife and children looking at their new home as they drew near to it. He was fifty-two years old, beyond the life expectancy of even an aristocrat in the early 1600s. In old age, he was starting over in a place he had never set eyes on, a place where habitation by the white man was still an experiment.

  In his portrait, which could pass for Shakespeare’s, he looks very much like a man of his time. His neck and his shoulders are enclosed in ruffled layers of white lace, the rest of his body in a long black cloak; he has a moustache, a Van Dyke beard and long hair brushed back behind his ears.

  There is in his expression the faintly amused disdain for his portraitist and for all those who will look upon his work that is often seen in portraits from that time. He does not look like someone destined to forsake two thousand years of civilization to start his life again in Newfoundland.

  Once he moved in, all that was required to complete the illusion that he was still in England was for him to draw the curtains on his windows. The mansion house had been located not with any mind to shelter from the elements or fend off attack by pirates but to show it off to best advantage to Baltimore on his arrival, to the colonists and to anyone from elsewhere who might be sailing by.

  When winter came—the worst one since the colony had been established—he soon realized what a fool he’d been. Though he gave them shelter in his house, ten of his forty subjects died from scurvy or starvation.

  A northeast wind, when it gusted, funnelled down the chimneys, put out the meagre fires and swept in icy drafts throughout the great house, which became an infirmary. The time he spent there would come back to him in nightmares for what little remained of his life. Snow drifted down the chimneys, at first melting, then gathering like ashes in the grates until Baltimore was forced to admit that fires were unfeasible and ordered that the flues be closed and the doors and windows boarded up. Until they ran out of oil for their lanterns, it was barely possible to breathe in the mansion house there was so much smoke. After the oil ran out, the house was dark day and night except for the light from the candles that were rationed out. It was not long before the house was like the steerage hold of a ship, all aboard her trying to ride out the winter the way they had the crossing from the Old World to the New. Seasickness was the one affliction they were spared. But there was no pilot to tell them how much progress they were making, how much longer they would be confined or what he thought their chances were. Those few who, in the fever of starvation and disease, ventured out reported snow so deep and ice so thick they were sure they would never melt no matter how long summer, if it ever came, might be.

  Everyone in the mansion house was given extreme unction by the priests who had made the crossing with Lord Baltimore. Messages were written informing those who might o
ne day find their remains that they were Catholics and desired to be buried as such. It seemed when the candles were put out that there was nothing in the world but the droning of the wind.

  In the spring he took with him back to England all those who survived the winter. He deserted the mansion house, left all its contents and furnishings behind. This is what they are digging up, what lies beneath the town of Ferryland, beneath the site of Charlie’s house and what remains of Charlie’s forge.

  They sailed out of the Pool and, if they looked back, saw the first ghost town of the New World, the mansion house barely finished but deserted on the Downs, forts and wharves and huts made from trees around whose fresh stumps wood chips still lay scattered.

  I have often imagined Baltimore and his family standing on the deck of their ship, watching with relief the land recede. Theirs was the first casting-off, the first abandonment, the first admission of defeat. They were the first to pack up and leave everything behind. They blazed a trail of retreat that many after them would follow.

  They probably believed that not only Ferryland but all of Newfoundland was uninhabitable and they were taking what for all time would be the last look at the place that anyone would take.

  Within a year he made plans to begin a colony on what he had been assured were the more moderate shores of the continent, southeast of Newfoundland, a place called Maryland. The land of Mary after Charles I’s queen, to him Mary the Virgin whose likeness in ice would three hundred years later pass within a mile of where he lived. Before he could set sail for his new colony, he died.

  BY THE TIME Nan comes back with her two daughters who kneel on the floor beside him, the coals in the forge have reignited and the steam is gone.

  Nan clutches his hammer hand in both of hers. The part of her hand between her index finger and her thumb is joined to that part of his hand. She squeezes so tightly she does not realize that the pulse she feels is hers.