The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (2 page)

I was afraid of the crossing sweepers, boys wielding birch brooms who hung round intersections waiting for people to cross the streets. They walked backwards in front of my father
and me, heads down, furiously sweeping the dust or snow, clearing a path for us. My father, once we reached the other side, would give the sweeper a penny, sometimes more, depending on how poor he looked. The same boy would then sweep another pedestrian
back
across the street on the very track that he had swept for us, redundantly sweeping it again. That it was just a disguised form of begging I didn’t understand. On the same downtown street, we might be swept across like curling stones half a dozen times by the same fierce-faced little boy, who I felt was picking on my father and who, to my indignation, did not sweep a path for anyone who was not well dressed
.

What I miss most are the horses. The sound of the city changed gradually as the horses were replaced by cars and the streets were paved
.

I remember the sound of a lone horse clopping past the house when it was dark outside. The double plumes of steam that issued from the nose of every horse when it was cold. It seems now that they vanished overnight, that one morning I woke up and there were cars instead of horses in the streets
.

In these same streets I saw women twirling parasols and walking arm in arm with men in tall black hats. And children, with their bare legs mud-bespattered, hop-scotched between the potholes. And men gingerly rolled casks of port the size of steamrollers from Newman’s, where it was aged in mine-like cellars, to ships that sailed to Boston and New York, where the expatriate quality drank it with their meals. My father drank one glass of Newman’s port a day
.

The wooden water tanks set out at intervals along the streets, where people wearing hoops from which buckets hung went to get their water. I would watch in wonder as some hoop-wearing woman staggered by bearing half a dozen pails of water
.

The smell of the salt fish. I miss that, too, though I could never stand the taste. The first few hundred feet of land beyond
the harbour is no longer spread with cod, nor is cod stacked storeys high in the premises of Harbour Drive as it used to be. Some of the streets were arched over by fish-flakes propped up on mast-like stilts, on top of which salt cod was laid out to dry and beneath which, in the shade that reeked of brine, people took cover from the rain while the traffic passed
.

The harbour. I loved the harbour as only a child to whom it was nothing more than a place to walk could love it. I remember how the harbour looked when it was crammed with bare-masted schooners and steamers with four smokestacks whose mainmasts were so tall they had to be brought in from other countries. There are only steel ships now, and from time to time a tall ship for the tourists and the young, with gleaming sails and polished pine, looking nothing like the tall ships of the past
.

There were so many schooners that when their sails were down, the harbour was a grove of spear-like masts
.

After it rained, the schooners would unfurl their sails to let them dry, a stationary fleet under full sail, the whole harbour a mass of flapping canvas you could hear a mile away. How high those sails were. If they had not been translucent, they would have cast a shadow in the evening halfway across the city
.

Instead, in the evening, in the morning, the sun shone through the sails and cast an amber-coloured light across the harbour and the streets, a light I have not seen in twenty years
.

Water Street was paved from end to end with brain-jarring, axle-cracking cobblestones. It was the only paved street. The rest were mere dirt roads, with potholes so large and so enduring that some were given nicknames. The main streets were occasionally tarred in summer to keep the dust down and, in theory at least, to prevent the creation of further potholes. On dry days, dust lay like bloom on everything. If there was no wind, a yellow cloud of dust formed above the city. You once told me that your father, looking down from the Brow, always noted the appearance of that cloud with glee, as he did the fact that when they tarred the
streets of St. John’s, the reek of oil was such that even the quality could not leave their windows open
.

The city smells. Tar and dust, horse manure and turpentine, the hybrid hum of fish and salt and the reek of bilge-water. The smell of coal that was burned in factories and forges and the boiler rooms of ships. The city sounds. The grinding of the wheels of the streetcar as it struggled up the hill to Rawlin’s Cross
.

The parrots squawking in the rigging of the schooners from Jamaica and Barbados that came loaded down with rum and left likewise with salt fish
.

I remember the shrieking hordes of sea gulls that hovered above the tables of the men who cleaned the fish on the side-streets, the “coves” between Water Street and Harbour Drive, the gulls swooping down and plucking at the fish guts while the men still held them in their hands
.

My father, being a surgeon, cleaned his own fish, denying he did so because uncleaned fish cost a little less. I remember once he lugged by the gills with both hands a cod so long its tail dragged and left a trail of slime behind us on the sidewalk. He barely made it to the carriage, and when he laid the cod on the paper he had set out, he measured it at four feet long and said it must have weighed a hundred pounds. “More than you,” he said. I looked at the cod, lying there in the carriage with its little beard-like chin barbel and black spots on its skin as big as eyeballs. “There’s just the two of us,” I said. “We can’t eat all that.” “We’re not eating any of it,” he said. “It’s for the hospital
.”

I used to enjoy the slow descent of evening on the city, watching from my bedroom window the clapboard houses fading as if their light came from within and, after seeping slowly from them one last time, would not return. Every day it looked like that. And every day there were a thousand other such sights, a tedium of wonder that exhausted me
.

It was like that, Smallwood. Not three hundred years ago but twenty. One generation
.

In this journal I write to people as if I am bidding them goodbye, as if they are asleep in the next room and will read what I have written in the morning when I’m gone
.

It is impossible to fix exactly in time when something happened, and sometimes impossible to remember how life was before it did. This was our city when we were still in school. This is what it looked and smelled and sounded like
.

But how it was before what happened between us, how it
felt
before we met, we can no more recall than we can how we felt when we were born
.

I
AM A
N
EWFOUNDLANDER
. Although up to the age of forty-six I would have been voted by those who knew me to be the man least likely to warrant a biography, one has been written.

My mother believed my birthdate, Christmas Eve, 1900, predestined me for greatness. One day before Christ’s birthday. One week before the new century. I was the first of thirteen children, the last of whom was also born on Christmas Eve, when I was twenty-five years old. “Thirteen,” my father said, “a luckless number for a luckless brood.”

No one called my father Charlie. Everyone called him Smallwood, which he hated because, I think, it reminded him that he was a certain someone’s son, not self-created.

After accomplishing the rare feat of graduating from high school, my father set out for Boston with high hopes, but came back destitute. He had then worked for a time at the family boot-and-shoe factory, “working under the old man’s boot,” he said, referring to my grandfather and the giant black boot with the name Smallwood written on it, which hung suspended from an iron bar that was bored into the cliffs about ten feet above the water at the entrance to the Narrows, so placed by my grandfather
to advertise to illiterate fishermen the existence of Smallwood’s Boots, a store and factory on Water Street, where a smaller but otherwise identical boot hung suspended from a pole above the wooden sidewalk.

My father hated every minute he spent beneath the Boot, partly because he had to work under his father, who had predicted he would come back to St. John’s from Boston with “his tail between his legs,” and partly because he believed business to be the least dignified way on earth to make a living. He found a job that at least allowed him the illusion of self-sufficiency, that of lumber surveyor, his daily task being to walk about the decks of ships docked in the harbour and tote up the amount of wood on board. He walked about the cargo holds, tapping on the cords of wood with what he called his toting pole, which was also so-called because he tied his lunch and other sundries to it and in the morning set out for the waterfront with it on his shoulder. It was a stick of bamboo of even width that he often carried with him even when not toting anything, using it as an oversized walking stick, though, because of his mane of hair and bushy beard, it gave him the look of some staff-wielding prophet.

He spent most of his meagre wages on bottles of cheap West Indian rum, which he bought from foreign sailors on the dock. When drunk, he wandered about the house, cursing and mocking the name of Smallwood. He had been told by someone, or had read somewhere, that the name was from the Anglo-Saxon and meant something like “treeless” or “place where no trees grow.”

“It wouldn’t have been a bad name for Newfoundland,” he said.

He could be flamboyantly eloquent when drunk, especially when the subject of his speeches was himself and the flagrant unfairness of his fate. “I should have stayed in Boston,” he said. “What in God’s name was it that made me leave that land of plenty to come back to this God-forsaken city, where my livelihood depends on a man famous for nothing but having hung a giant black boot at the entrance to the Narrows?”

We often went to the boot-and-shoe store on Water Street. My grandfather, David Smallwood, was a short, bright-eyed man who always wore a tailcoat at the shop and had a beard so long he had to pull it out of the way to see his pocket watch. He had a scraping, servile way with customers that made me feel a little sorry for him. He was, I suppose, born to keep shop. I could not see my father running about, shoehorn in hand, as my grandfather did, fetching boots for people to try on, kneeling down and holding people’s feet while he fitted them for shoes. (My father said the old man’s hands always smelled of other people’s socks. My mother said his wallet smelled of other people’s money.) As a customer walked up and down, trying out a pair of shoes or boots, my grandfather would walk beside him, turning when he turned, stopping when he stopped, in a kind of deferential mimicry, eagerly looking now at the customer’s face, now at his feet.

The one thing we were never in need of was boots and shoes, for we got them from Smallwood’s for next to nothing. It was easy, in our neighbourhood, to spot the Smallwood children; we were the ones wearing the shabby clothes and the absurdly incongruous new footwear, conspicuously gleaming boots and shoes for which we took no end of teasing, especially as we were all fitted for them at the same time.

My father did not avail himself of the special family discount, but instead went for years wearing the same boots and shoes, and when he absolutely needed new ones, bought them full price at a rival store called Hammond’s. It is an image that stays with me, his worn tattered shoes, his patched and repatched knee boots, set aside from ours in the hall, in a token gesture of protest. We were always well-heeled, he was always roughshod; it set him apart from us in a way we children found funny, though my mother said it was disgraceful.

To my father, the Boot was like the hag; he would have boot-ridden dreams that when recounted in the light of day seemed ridiculous, but that often kept him up at night, afraid to go to
sleep. He would tell me about them, tell me how he had dreamed about the Narrows boot swaying in the wind on the iron bar like some ominously silent, boot-shaped bell. At other times, it was a boot-shaped headstone.

When one day my mother told him there was “more booze than boots” in those dreams of his, he laughed and went around repeating it all afternoon as if in tribute to her wit. That night, however, he stayed up late and announced that having run out of “the usual combustibles,” he was about to burn the boots.

“Go ahead,” my mother said, thinking to call his bluff, “there’s plenty more where they came from.” And so he went ahead and did it, built himself a roaring blaze and kept it going all night long with boots, each time announcing which pair it was he was consigning to the flames. “I’m burning Joe’s knee boots now,” he said. “Now I’m burning Sadie’s shoes, the ones with the brass buckles.”