The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (10 page)

Vaughan approaches various people and offers large portions of his colony to those who answer “No” to the question “Have you ever met John Guy?”

Among them is Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, Secretary of State, who buys a huge tract of Vaughan’s colony and announces his intention to establish a colony at Ferryland, which will be a haven for Roman Catholics who are being persecuted for their religious beliefs in Britain. This sales pitch does not work, however. So harried by persecution are the Roman Catholics that those he approaches with his proposal say they would rather be persecuted than end up like “William’s Welshmen.”

Calvert goes to Vaughan, demanding to know what they mean by this. On Vaughan’s advice, he focuses his attentions on that group of men whose position in English society and lot in life are such that to move to Newfoundland seems like a good idea.

As a result, another twelve Welshmen soon accompany a Captain Edward Wynne to Newfoundland, where they establish a colony at Ferryland.

The Book

F
OR WEEKS, EXCEPT
when we were eating, there was nothing on the kitchen table but the Book. My father put it in the middle of the table as if it were the family centre-piece. He pointed at it, referred to it as “he” or “you” as if it were the judge himself. “ ‘Friends as you and I would have been had we gone to school together.’ Oh, yes, I’m sure we would have been great friends. You and me. Bosom buddies. Inseparable. Shoulder to shoulder through life. If only we’d met in school, we’d be spending all of our time together now, hunting caribou in Labrador. The writer and the toter. What a pair we could have been.”

Sometimes, late at night, he pretended to be the judge addressing Charlie Smallwood. “I have deigned to acknowledge you, to indulge your delusions on the cover of this Book that I wrote and you did not, this Book that you could not have written, this eight-hundred-page masterpiece of mine, an accomplishment so far beyond your scope it reduces your whole life to insignificance.”

“Stop talking to that book,” my mother would shout from upstairs. “It’s not natural, a man talking to a book.”

“It talks to me,” my father said. “It mocks me, it affronts me.”

“You’re losing your mind, Smallwood,” my mother said. “It’s like your dreams. It’s not the book, it’s the booze that’s talking.”

But as if he had the judge tied to a chair and was giving him a dressing-down in nightly instalments, my father walked in a circle about the kitchen, back and forth, haranguing the book. He had become fixated on things before but never for so long and never on a solid object like the book. It unnerved us all to hear him down there addressing the book as if it were some late-night visitor that none of us had ever seen, denouncing the judge, then himself as if
he
were the judge.

He missed two days of work in a row, lying on the daybed in the kitchen until nightfall, lying there while we ate, waiting for us to finish so he could have the table and start in on the book again. “You’re going to be fired, Smallwood,” my mother yelled at him, standing over the daybed. My father muttered insensibly and turned towards the wall. My mother sat at the table and put her face in her hands.

Long after I heard my father go to bed at the end of his third day home from work, long after I had fallen asleep myself, I awoke to the sound of someone creeping down the stairs. I heard the back door open. I looked out the window. There was my mother, in her nightgown, on the city-facing deck. She held the judge’s book in both hands and stared at its cover. Then, with the book in the palm of one hand, she reared back and, as though she meant to land it on the roof of the judge’s house, hurled it out into the darkness. I could dimly see it unfold in the wind, the pages flapping, and a couple of seconds later I heard it land with a dull thump far down the slope. My mother stood there silently staring after it, her chest heaving against the rail of the deck as if she were panicked to the point of breathlessness.

There was a low rumbling sound like far-off thunder that, from somewhere down the Brow, grew louder, then receded, though it continued for some time. She stood on her tiptoes, leaning out over the rail of the deck, craning her neck to see. Then,
perhaps fearing the noise might have wakened the rest of us, she hurried back inside. Swiftly, almost silently, she went down the corridor and up the stairs, crossed the landing to her room and went back to bed.

The next morning, a Saturday, as we all sat at the breakfast table, my mother made an announcement. There had been an avalanche the night before, she said, an especially bad one that had started about a hundred feet below our house and had gone all the way to the bottom. A few fences had been flattened but, “thank God,” she said, no houses had been hit, though the avalanche had cut a swath between two houses and now the cross-Brow road was blocked with snow.

“Right between the two houses, it went, can you imagine? Your father is going down there soon with the other men to help dig out the road.”

My father, hungover, did not seem nearly so thrilled by the prospect.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

Later, we went down the Brow and joined the men and boys who were going at the mound of snow from either end, working in towards the middle. Looking up at our house, I could see the path the avalanche had taken. The tops of the smaller trees had been snapped off and some larger ones had been uprooted altogether. In places, the hill had been scraped bare of even snow and ice, and the rocky yellow mud showed through. The avalanche, as my mother had said, had ploughed between two houses and left them undamaged, except that their facing sides were scraped, their clapboards splintered.

We had been at the site for about an hour when one of the men on the other side of the mound from us shouted that he had found something beneath the snow. “I think there’s someone under here,” he said. I stood and stared as everyone else hurried to where the man was standing and began shovelling furiously. “There,” the man said, “there, that’s someone’s arm.” An arm,
elbow up, protruded from the snow. A couple of men took hold of it and tugged with all their might, without result. “He’s froze solid, whoever he is,” one of the men said.

Some of the fathers sent their boys away so they wouldn’t see. The boys backed off reluctantly, staring at the arm. “Go home,” one man roared, and two boys went racing up the hill, to break the news, I had no doubt. My father seemed to have forgotten I was there. They resumed shovelling. I kept watch from the other side of the mound. Eventually, they dug out and turned over the body of an old man, a “Mr. Mercer,” who they said lived on the Brow by himself. His eyes and mouth were wide open, his mouth stuffed with snow.

“Old Mr. Mercer,” my father said later that night. “Lived right at the bottom of the Brow.”

“But the snow never went that far,” my mother said, “and none of the houses was hit, you said so yourself this morning.”

“He must have been out walking on the road,” my father said. “Lived by himself. No one knew he was missing. Eighty-three years old he was. Imagine, to live to be eighty-three and then to go like that.”

“He was stuffed with snow,” I said, forgetting myself and the effect the words would have on my mother, so vividly did I recall how Mr. Mercer looked. “It was like he was force-fed snow right down to here.” I indicated a spot between my stomach and my chest. His gullet stuffed with snow.

“Don’t talk about it, Joe,” my mother said. She sat down on the sofa looking frightened, stared wonder-struck into the fire. “Don’t talk about it. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, you see. It was an accident, that’s all it was.”

“An act of God,” my father said.

“No,” my mother said. “No. It’s not God’s fault. What was Mr. Mercer doing out at that hour?”

“What hour?” my father said.

“Late, I mean,” my mother said. “It must have been late. I — I didn’t hear a thing.”

For a while there was silence. Last night, a man had been buried alive a few hundred feet from where we slept. A Mr. Mercer, whom I had never heard of, a man of eighty-three, his gullet stuffed with snow, his mouth a round white
O
when they pulled him out.

I sat rigid on the sofa, unable to help wondering if it was possible that someone would put two and two together, waiting for some word of the book, waiting to hear that they had dug it up from under Mr. Mercer, waiting for a member of the constabulary to turn up on the doorstep, incriminating book in hand. I felt at once terrified and ridiculous. My mother sat in her chair, hunched into herself, hands clasped, and stared at the floor. My mother, the inadvertent agent of Mr. Mercer’s death, the book bringing the avalanche down like a judgment on his, and her, head. It seemed almost funny, but I could not stop shaking.

After a while, my father got up and began rummaging around the front room and the kitchen, peering behind the sofa, lifting the cushions, searching the counter-top.

“Where’s my Book?” my father said. “Did anybody see my Book?”

“How should I know where your book is?” my mother said.

“I left it there last night,” he said, pointing at the coffee table by his chair.

“You were drunk last night,” my mother said. “You might have left it anywhere.”

“I left it on the coffee table,” my father said, “right where I always leave it.”

My mother got up, grabbed the poker by the fireplace and stabbed at the burning coals, sending sparks flying.

“There,” she said, “there’s your bloody book, what’s left of it. I burned it last night, just like you burned the boots. I was sick of hearing about it, sick to death of it, so I burned it.”

“You didn’t,” my father said.

“I did,” my mother said. “I told you, I warned you; I was sick of hearing you go on about it. Joe goes to the trouble of taking your book to the judge to have it signed — ” She struck at the embers again, sending more sparks flying.

“All right, all right,” my father said, “don’t burn the house down while you’re at it.” She threw down the poker and ran, crying, up the stairs. I was sure that my father would shout something before she reached the bedroom, but he didn’t.

“She burned it,” my father said, quietly. “She burned my Book. Now why would she do that?”

In the spring, when most of the snow was gone, I climbed down the Brow, following the path of the avalanche, surveying up close the damage it had done. I kept my eyes peeled for the book as well and had not edged more than a quarter of the way down the steep, rocky slope when I saw it perched bird-like among the lower branches of a large spruce tree. It lay open, face down, as if some reader had put it down like that to mark their place and had left the book behind. The front and the back cover were streaked to the point of illegibility with water stains, but the pages to which it had lain open for months were still legible, though some of the lines had run. The rest of the pages were saturated and fused together, and I dared not try to leaf through them for fear of tearing them. I gingerly began to close the two halves of the book to see if the spine would hold, and though it did, it was so deeply creased down the middle the book would not stay closed.

I took it home, smuggled it into the house, and tied it, lengthwise and crosswise, with a piece of ribbon, in the manner I had seen done with old books at Bishop Feild. Then I hid it in the shed out back. I would sneak out every day to check on it, as though I had some fugitive convalescent in the shed. It was two months before the book dried out. I tried to pry apart the pages using a
straight razor, starting at the corners, where it was easiest to catch an edge, but they were still fused together.

I looked at the scrawl the judge had written and the “translation” of it that Prowse had composed, wondering how much time he had deliberated over what to write and how much his words had been based on what, if anything, he knew about my father. “Friends, as we might have been had we gone to school together.”

“No harm done, I hope,” Prowse had said.

And I had told him no.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Three:

CROSSES AND MISERYES

Wynne sends back to Calvert over the next five years glowing reports of the success of the colony at Ferryland, saying they have “prospered to the admiration of all beholders.”

In April 1623, heartened by Wynne’s reports, Calvert applies for and is granted a charter to what he calls the province of Avalon, now fondly referred to as “the bog of Avalon.”

After Wynne’s return to England in 1627, Calvert, by this time so eager to see his colony he can contain himself no longer, sails to Ferryland, accompanied by his family, and spends much of the voyage reading and re-reading Vaughan’s
The Golden Fleece
.

Shortly after his arrival, two of his ships are seized by pirates, whose long-established habit of plundering the colony Wynne had thought too insignificant to mention in his letters. After the winter of 1628–29, which his scurvy-ridden colonists assure him is not an especially bad one, but which causes Calvert to observe that “in this part of the world crosses and miseryes is my portion,” he sails back to England.