The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (17 page)

“I am here,” I said, to the men two and three times my age who gathered round me while I stood atop an empty crate, “to tell you how to start a union and to explain to you the principles of socialism. I am here to tell you why your children never have enough to eat; why the men you work for pay you next to nothing; why some of you are risking your lives to keep rich men like the owners of the S.S.
Newfoundland
in smoking-jackets.…” I had never seen a smoking-jacket in my life, but the heroes of Horatio Alger’s novels, which I read avidly, were always getting their first big break from men who wore them and afterwards aspired to wear one themselves, so I figured I was on safe ground. (I took to heart a curiously amended version of the Algeresque myth; I wanted to rise not from rags to riches, but from obscurity to world renown, and had chosen socialism as my best means of accomplishing this, thereby establishing as my mortal enemies the very characters who had inspired me to self-betterment in the first place.)

I always told the men that they were working to keep the rich in something; if Alger did not provide me with some item of frivolous affluence, then Fielding did. If it was not smoking-jackets, it was silver spittoons, gold cigarette cases, snifters of brandy, snuffboxes, satin slippers, Persian rugs. I got a roar of indignation from a crowd of stevedores by referring to some man’s “heirloom-laden house,” having no more idea than my listeners apparently had of what an heirloom was.

I once, at Fielding’s urging, denounced men whose “lives were spent in the acquisition of gewgaws and gimcracks.” This did not elicit any sort of response. “It was a good speech,” Fielding told me afterwards. “The rich of St. John’s will not be so quick to gather gewgaws and gimcracks in the future.”

One day, a man who was standing at the rail of a ship shouted down to Fielding as she made her way along the waterfront, drumming up an audience for me. “What are you doing down here, now, my dear?” He was a burly, balding redhead whose stomach stuck out between the rails as if his shirt and pants concealed a boulder. “Prohibitionist, are ya?” he said.

“Imbibitionist,” said Fielding.

He raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?” he said.

“I have come to release you from the shackles of ignorance,” said Fielding, “of which you seem to be burdened with more than your share.”

“Oh, I’ve got more than my share all right,” he said, rubbing his crotch to a chorus of guffaws from the other men along the rail. Fielding looked quickly away so they would not see her smile, which I was shocked to see her do. I ran along the dock towards her.

“That’s quite a cane,” I heard the man saying. “Big knob on it like that. Ya like big knobs, now, do ya?”

“Your wife must miss you terribly while you’re away,” Fielding shouted. “Still, I’m sure some kind soul helps her fill the void you leave behind.” The men laughed.

“That’s enough of that,” I said, shaking my fist at the redhead. He threw back his head and laughed.

“Fielding,” I said, “you shouldn’t carry on with them like that. Perhaps you shouldn’t be down here on the waterfront at all.”

“Is
that
your fella?” the redhead said. “That explains the cane — ”

“I’ll explain something to you,” I shouted. Fielding put her hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the ship.

“Thank God you showed up when you did, Smallwood,” she said. “I think that man was on the verge of turning coarse. I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Very funny,” I said and, as if in retaliation, turned and shook my fist at the redhead. “Come down here and you’ll get your explanation.”

“No offence,” she said, turning me about with one hand, “but I think he’s had more experience with giving explanations than you have. Let’s just get out of here and let him think he scared us off.”

I was twenty when I told Fielding I was going to New York. I had got nowhere promoting socialism and, after reading John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
and finding out that he had once worked for the
Call, the
New World socialist newspaper that was located in New York, I received what Fielding described as “my call to the
Call
.”

“It would mean a great deal to me if you came along,” I said. It was the closest to declaring affection for her I had ever come.

“New York?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “New York.”

“I’m not sure — I’m not sure that I’m ready for New York,” said Fielding.

“Do you mean because your mother lives there?” I said. Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.

“Then there’s only one way to find out if you’re ready for it,” I said. She looked more troubled by my invitation than it seemed to me she should have been, even if she meant to decline it.

“Are you worried about leaving your father alone?” I said.

“My father has been alone all his life,” said Fielding.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid to quit your job,” I said. “It’s not like we’re making any money. That’s why there’ll always be newspaper jobs. No one else wants them.”

Fielding nodded distractedly. “You’re going for certain?” she said. “You didn’t tell me you were thinking about it.” I shrugged. So that was it, I thought, flattered. She was sad that I was leaving. I felt a pleasant hurt of fondness for her in my throat. It surprised me. That fleeting look of tenderness was in her eyes, that wistfulness I had seen the day we met at Bishop Feild. It was as if, for an instant, she had stepped outside her life and was seeing everyone in
it from a perspective that in a few moments, she would be unable to recall. I wondered how, in those few moments, she regarded me. And I wondered if this feeling that I had for her, this curious affection, might be love.

She blinked rapidly, and for an awkward few moments I thought she was going to cry. Now she looked panicked, as she had at the Feild when I alluded to her estranged parents and when Slogger Anderson taunted Prowse into proving he was not afraid to flog her.

“When are you leaving?” she said at last. I told her in two weeks; I had given notice at the
Telegram
that day.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t — you see, I couldn’t make it by then,” she said. “Maybe sometime after that, I’m not sure. I’d have to be sure before I — ”

“Is there something you need help with here?” I said. “I could stay — ”

“No, no,” Fielding said, “there’s nothing. Really. I’d have to be sure in my mind, that’s all, you see. In my mind. I’d have to think about it for a while.”

“All right, then,” I said. “But I bet you’ll decide in time to go with me.”

She extended her hand to me, awkwardly, formally. I was gratified to see that there were tears in her eyes.

“I don’t expect I’ll see you before you go.”

I forced a laugh. “I’m not going for another two weeks,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I know. But from now until then New York is all you’ll talk about, you’ll keep trying to convince me, and I don’t want to feel pressured.”

“Well —” I said, trying to laugh again, “if that’s the way you want it. I’ll see you in New York.”

“You really want me to go?” she said. I nodded. “What are we, Smallwood?” she said. “You and I. What are we?”

“What do you mean?” I said, though I knew what she meant.

“Never mind,” she said.

I was about to tell her I would write her from New York as soon as I got there when she turned around and walked quickly away from me, her cane thudding in the gravel.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Six:

THE RUEFUL SETTLER

We here present another selection from the authoritative edition of
Quodlibets
, called “The Rueful Settler,” in which a settler, now a resident of the renegade colony of Bristol’s Hope, addresses his former master on the subject of the colony at Cuper’s Cove, now known as Cupids:

John Guy, ’twas you enticed me to this place.

If ever I set eyes upon your face,

I shall tell you what I think of Cuper’s Cove,

Then sit your puny arse upon my stove.

I’ll tell you why I moved to Bristol’s Hope,

Then hang you with a sturdy piece of rope,

And when your little legs have ceased to kick,

I’ll beat your lifeless body with a stick.

Never Wales shall I set eyes upon again.

My sole blessings be this paper and this pen.

In Newfoundland I live, in Newfoundland will die,

Unknown, unmourned, because of you, John Guy.

Old Lost Land

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, S
EPTEMBER
9, 1920

Dear Smallwood:

“The man who wrote ‘The Ode to Newfoundland’ lived there,” my father used to tell me, pointing at Government House. The grounds of Government House, where all the governors of Newfoundland since 1824 have lived, back onto Circular Road, so I can see them from my bedroom window. For most of the year, no one sets foot on the grounds but gardeners and in winter no one at all. It always seems a strange sight, that vast, treeless, steppe-like field in the middle of the city, without so much as a dog’s footprints in the snow
.

When I was a child, I was always asking my father, “How big is Newfoundland?” Using the map on the wall of his study, he would try to make me understand how big it was, try to give me some sense of how much more of it there was than I had seen so far in our horse-cab drives around the bay. “We’re here,” my father said, pointing at the tiny encircled star that stood for St. John’s. “Now, last Sunday, when we went out for our drive, we
went this far.” He moved his finger in a circle about an inch across. Then he moved his hand slowly over the rest of the map, the paper crackling expansively beneath his fingers. “Newfoundland is this much bigger than that,” he said, making the motion with his hand again. “All this is Newfoundland, but it’s not all like St. John’s. Almost all of it is empty. No one lives there. No one’s ever seen most of it.” I could not imagine it. All I could imagine were the grounds of Government House going on forever. I have yet to see it
.

The ode was written by Sir Cavendish Boyle, governor of Newfoundland from 1901–1904. When I was a child, I thought his first name was Surcavendish. It conjured up a man who lived alone, a man who was given, like me, to watching the grounds from his bedroom window, some brooding, gloom-savouring soul like myself in whose huge house there was never more than one light burning. I could not imagine him ever having done anything else, could not imagine any existence for him except sitting at that window, looking out, brooding over Newfoundland, endlessly writing the ode
.

At night, with my face pressed to the window, I used to recite to myself my favourite verse. “When spreads thy cloak of shimm’ring white, at winter’s stern command, thro’ shortened day and star-lit night, we love thee, frozen land. We love thee, we love thee, we love thee, frozen land.” It was as if this had been written, not for all Newfoundlanders, but specifically for my father and me, the Fielding family anthem, as if this was
our
windswept, frozen land
.

Though they are anthem-like, there is something indefinably sad about the words, resigned, regretful, as if Boyle imagined himself looking back from a time when Newfoundland had ceased to be. It is the sort of song you might write about a place as you were leaving it by boat, watching it slowly fade from view, a place you believed you would never see again. He was governor of Newfoundland for only a few years, so he must have written it in the knowledge that he was soon to leave
.

Fall, Smallwood, another fall, and you leave tomorrow. And me? Soon to be at sea again? I feel as though I
am
at sea. Nova Scotia. New Scotland. New England. New York. New York again. Where the streets are so hemmed in by buildings they never see the sun. The old New World. Where my mother and my stepfather live, which you knew when you invited me along. Perhaps you do not really expect me to accept your invitation. What will you think or do if I turn up? Sometimes I have the feeling that I am appealing to qualities in you that you do not have, that the you I love is just someone I invented. I feel that, though you are younger than me by just one year, we are lifetimes apart. Ill at ease in your own world and in other worlds unwelcome. Mocked at in both. But you will not stop demanding to be let in, or looking for an overlooked, unlocked door. You are willing to risk or forsake everything to get what you want. Including me? How it spited me that it was you
, you
who embarrassed me in front of all the Townies, and especially in front of Prowse. There is always this awkwardness between us because of what happened at the Feild. Because of what you think happened. That day in the training centre. We never mention it, perhaps for my sake, perhaps for yours. I’m not sure if you’ve forgiven me, if you think my expulsion from Spencer and my getting you a job on the paper makes us even. When the others left, you stayed, and for the first time since we met you said my name. “Fielding.” More tenderly than you have said it since. I should have let you speak instead of asking you to leave. Whatever you had planned to say remains unsaid. I wonder, sometimes, if I should tell you everything. So much to risk. I don’t think I trust
anyone
that much
.