The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (38 page)

“If not, then Feildians lie,” my father said, shaking his head. “She says she wrote the letter, yet she accuses you of lying. ‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ ”

“What evil does she think you’ve done?” my mother said to me. “If you ask me, she’s the evil one, talking in riddles and circles just like the devil does.”

“Were there really eight of you?” my father said.

“No,” I said. “More like forty.”

“Five times eight,” my father said. “I’ve never liked the number eight. Eight men to kill one man. All you boys and just one girl. That’s the kind of thing that stays with you all your life.” I wondered if he meant Fielding’s life or mine.

Throughout the campaign, I received telegrams from Sir Richard from all over the island. YOU ARE MY MAN IN HUMBER STOP REMEMBER THAT STOP AM COUNTING ON YOU STOP SRS.

It was obvious that Sir Richard was going to take Humber with a massive majority, but he could not stop fretting about what his margin of victory would be. DREAMT LAST NIGHT BARRETT SHUT OUT STOP NOT A SINGLE VOTE STOP SRS.

I travelled, as I had throughout the winter, to every household in the district. Sir Richard took a swing through Humber near the
end of the campaign, spent two days there, but by that time he was so exhausted that his speeches were almost incoherent. In one town hall, he five times reminded the audience that he was the man who had brought to Humber district the country’s second pulp-and-paper mill. I sat on the platform behind him, leading the applause, and when I saw that the audience was growing bored, scuffed my shoe on the floor, our signal that he had talked long enough and should start summing up. He nodded his head, mumbled some closing words, then staggered off the stage. Anything more than a public lapse into unconsciousness would have seemed to them a triumph, so completely had I convinced them of his virtue.

Sir Richard was swept back into power, taking 83 per cent of the vote in Humber district, and across the island twenty-eight of thirty-six seats. I was in Humber and he was in St. John’s when the votes were counted.

“We are back in power, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, when I called him by telephone. “For four years, they have been dancing on my grave, the bastards, and now my turn has come to dance on theirs. In return for everything you’ve done for me, I’m making you a justice of the peace. What do you think of that? Not bad for someone who never finished high school, eh?”

I was so disappointed I could barely speak, and when I did manage a few words, I was on the verge of tears.

“I was hoping for something … political,” I said. “Hoping to work with your … administration, with … you.”

“A successful politician has many debts to pay,” Sir Richard said. “My list of people whose generosity I feel I should — reciprocate — is long, Smallwood, very long.”

Justices of the peace travelled in pairs throughout the island, accompanied by a bailiff/bodyguard, trying cases too insignificant for the higher courts to bother with. I had seen them conducting their proceedings on fishing wharves, using wooden crates for benches and weighting down their papers with beach rocks so they would not blow away. I could see myself in itinerant exile from St.
John’s, could see before me years spent wandering the outports of Newfoundland, prosecuting people driven, out of poverty and boredom, to petty crime, sending to jail and fining and making lifelong enemies of people whose vote I might be looking for someday. It would be like a life spent at the wretched courthouse, only worse, less grand, without the pomp and circumstance of courtrooms; like becoming a modern-day fishing admiral.

I knew Squires wanted me out of the way to spare himself the embarrassment of having to acknowledge my existence from time to time. I knew it, but told myself I did not resent him for it, for it was what I would have done in his situation. A politician had to do what was expedient. I somehow had to show him that I was not what he was fully justified in presuming me to be. As well, I assumed that all ambitious young men went through some such phase of exploitation by the politicians they helped to get elected.

I wrote to him, telling him, with thanks, that I was declining his offer and returning to “my first love,” writing for newspapers. He wrote back, tersely wished me well and, for a long while, that was that. It was not until I learned that Prowse had been hired on as Sir Richard’s executive assistant that I vowed I would never speak to either one of them again.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Eighteen:

SIX CLEAR-SIGHTED PROTESTANTS

In spite of Cochrane’s painstakingly-arrived-at objections, a local legislature is established on June 7, 1832.

In the first election, ten of the fifteen seats are won by Protestant Conservatives, five by Catholic Liberals. Governor Sir Henry Prescott notes the obvious inequity and suggests measures to decrease the number of Catholics.

He proposes, among other things, that only those occupying property valued at ten pounds or more per year be allowed to vote. But his suggestions are rejected by the Colonial Office, with the disastrous result that after the next election, Catholics outnumber Protestants nine to six.

Luckily for Newfoundlanders, and owing to the foresight of Governor Prescott, there is a non-elected, governor-appointed Senate-like council consisting of six clear-sighted Protestant opponents of self-rule, with absolute powers of veto. By sending back all bills sent to it by the House, this council brings the business of government to a standstill.

What a debt is owed to these six men who stood alone against the enemies of Newfoundland, and whose only support consisted of the governor, the Colonial Office, the Privy Council, the British Parliament and the king of England. If not for them, the 1830s would have seen the Poor Relief Bill passed in spite of the opposition to it of the poor themselves, on whose behalf the merchants marched in protest through the streets.

Fielding’s Father

I
WENT TO WORK
for a paper in Corner Brook (sending money on to my family in St. John’s), and as each day went by, my bitterness abated and common sense got the better of me. As I had concluded before, Liberalism was my only way of advancement in politics, so I had to swallow my pride and try to stay in Sir Richard’s good graces. I began keeping track of his administration in St. John’s and even wrote him letters of advice from time to time, which he did not acknowledge.

But in 1930, he wrote me from St. John’s and asked me to come see him right away. I took the train across the island and went to his house, where Cantwell gave me a small amount of money and instructed me to hole up in the Brownsdale Hotel on New Gower Street until further notice.

I knew that Sir Richard was soon to call a by-election in the district of Lewisporte, and I was hoping that, guilty over not having rewarded me properly before, he was going to offer me the Liberal nomination. I languished at the Brownsdale for three weeks, thinking Sir Richard had forgotten me, until finally he phoned. Before he could speak, I did. I told him this by-election was especially important
to me because the Lewisporte seat had formerly been held by George Grimes, my first mentor, who had just passed away.

“It would be a great honour for me to run in Lewisporte, Sir Richard,” I said. “I can win there for you; I’d like the Liberal nomination.”

“I’m sorry, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, “but I’ve already promised it to someone else.”

“Who?” I all but shouted into the phone, certain the someone else must be Prowse.

“Lady Squires. My wife will be the first woman elected to the House of Assembly,” Sir Richard said, as if he were announcing yet one more thing he would be remembered for, as if he considered it to be more of an achievement for him than for her.

“Then what do you want me to do?” I managed to choke out. He said he wanted me to start up a Liberal propaganda sheet, to be called the
Watchdog
, whose sole purpose would be to counter the Tory propaganda sheet, which was called the
Watchman
. My job would essentially be to dig up dirt on members of the Opposition and other of Sir Richard’s enemies.

The
Watchman
and the
Watchdog
. To make it easier to distinguish between them in conversation, the papers were referred to simply as the
Dog
and the
Man
. “We got the worst of that abbreviation,” Sir Richard said, as though it were my fault. Sir Richard got some revenge by “obtaining” the
Man’s
mailing list and having me send the
Dog
free of charge to lifetime Tories, not in the hope of converting them, but in the hope word would get round among their fellow Tories that they were subscribing to the
Dog
. We managed to stir up quite a lot of trouble before our ruse became common knowledge.

There appeared in a Tory paper a cartoon depicting me as a bespectacled, emaciated mongrel sitting in rapt attention to a phonograph from which were issuing the words “Sic him, Smallwood, sic him.” The caption read “His master’s voice.” To me, to be depicted, however unflatteringly, as a sidekick of Sir Richard’s
was a breakthrough. I cut out the cartoon and pasted it on the wall above my desk.

Every so often, Prowse would come by the
Dog’s
offices, which were located in a freezing, ill-partitioned warehouse on Water Street, with some press release that Sir Richard wanted translated into propaganda. There was no doubt that even at age thirty, Prowse looked prime ministerial, and that Sir Richard was the mentor to him I wanted him to be to me.

One day, after he threw a hand-scribbled note from Sir Richard on my desk, Prowse lingered, as he did not usually do, and I knew that at long last he wanted to talk, I presumed about our falling out at the Feild, to talk about it and smooth it over, since our paths had crossed yet again and would likely go on crossing.

“So,” he said, “I hear that you were in New York when Fielding was there.”

I reddened, wondering if he could possibly know what had happened between Fielding and me there.

“She was there when I was there would be a better way of putting it,” I said. “She didn’t last long. It’s a big city. Not like St. John’s or Halifax.”

“But you came back?” Prowse said, disingenuously interrogative, mock-earnest.

“After five years,” I said. “Who told you Fielding was there, anyway?”

“She did,” Prowse said.

Dear Prowse, September 12, 1918
. Years after the caning. Years after Prowse had carried me about in triumph for mocking Fielding’s father on the pitch at Bishop Feild. When had she stopped loving him? Had she stopped? Had she ever loved him? Or me? She said she felt more for me than she ever had for him. It seemed to me now that that could mean almost anything. Even after the letter Prowse and I had co-written and the other boys had signed, she might be writing to him. Or more. Those stories she had told me about being propositioned by married men, men with
children. Had she intended me to assume that it was Prowse she meant? It might have been her way of saying that she was available to me, a married man with children. Or her way of making me think she was.

Forget Fielding, I told myself. You never so much as held hands with her. Your courtship lasted about three minutes, from her declaration of affection, if that is what it was, to your blundering proposal. I felt as foolish as I had that night when I saw in her eyes what I should have seen all along. Still, here was Prowse. The thought of him having her almost made me sick.

“You’re still on speaking terms? You still see each other?” I deadpanned. “In spite of everything, I mean.”

“Oh, I bump into her on the street from time to time,” said Prowse. “It’s a small city. Not like New York.”

“She never mentions you,” I said. He smiled.

“You worked at the
Call
,” Prowse said. It was not a question. I nodded. “I can’t imagine Fielding working there — ”

“She didn’t,” I said.

“Oh, I know,” Prowse said. “Fielding a socialist, can you imagine?”

“She
was
one,” I said, aware too late of how ridiculous it sounded, as if we were fighting over Fielding, whom we both claimed to despise.

“Not really,” Prowse said. “She may have pretended to be one. Just for a lark. More grist for the mill, you know. One more thing to write about. Fielding would never have taken seriously anything as ridiculous as socialism.”

The gauntlet had been thrown down. A challenge of one-upmanship, which I declined. I thought of Grimes, the Sunday afternoons when the three of us had gone canvassing from door to door. Fielding and I, the two of us not yet twenty, trying to start up unions on the waterfront. Fielding’s decision to follow me to New York. Fielding inexplicably crying the day I told her I was leaving Newfoundland. Inexplicable then. I savoured the memory
now. A woman crying at the thought of losing me. I had plenty of ammunition if I cared to use it. Still, there was nothing to be gained from provoking Prowse. I would let him imagine whatever he liked. It even occurred to me he might be trying to get me to admit to something he could someday use to buy my silence.