Baltimore's Mansion (18 page)

A
UGUST
1981

There is no way of saying goodbye to my father that will not remind him of the day on the beach in Ferryland when he and Charlie said goodbye. Not for a long time has he let slip a word about what happened on the beach, nor have I said anything about it. Whatever it is about Ferryland that has haunted him for years is caught up with that day and that goodbye. I know that much. But I am resigned to never knowing more.

Every goodbye since then has recalled that one for my father, and ours especially, because of all his children I am the one who most reminds him of his young self and so of his childhood. It is hard to say just why this is, but we both know it. I can see in my father's eyes that he is dreading our goodbye as much as I am. We must avoid being alone with each other so that he can simply be one of several who see me off at the airport with a handshake and best wishes. We have tacitly agreed to be vigilant and not be the last two at the dinner table or the first two up for breakfast. But the effect of all this is to keep
the thought of encountering the other so constantly in mind that it seems bound to happen.

The day before I am supposed to leave, I go to the newsroom at the St. John's paper where I work to clear my desk of four years' worth of papers, letters, drafts of essays and short stories. I fancy there might be something worth preserving, so I pile it all into a box and put it in the car. Driving home, the box on the front seat beside me, I pick through it with one hand, and by the time I reach the Goulds I have decided that there is nothing worth keeping after all. I park in the driveway, remove the box and head for the trash barrel in the backyard. And when I turn the corner of the house, when I am close enough to the barrel that to turn away and make for the back door would be too transparent an attempt to avoid him, I see my father just as unmistakably headed for the barrel with an armload of flattened cardboard boxes and other things I cleared out of my room the day before.

I know, before he begins to speak, that he is going to tell me. Everything favours it. If he does not tell me now he never will. I am leaving. He knows I plan to be a writer. He knows, or hopes, that someday I will write about him. He cannot get the story straight in his mind and believes that when I tell it he will understand it better.

I do not know it yet, but there is a symmetry here that it would be pointless for us to resist. The time of the year is the same, early September, which in Newfoundland means early fall. Even the time of day is the same, almost twilight. The sun is low in the west, barely above the grove of spruce on the hill beside our house; on our backyard, on the meadows between it and the pond, on the pond and on the Shoal Bay Hills falls the
same sad yellow light, the last light of a September day when the air is clear and, after sunset, quickly cools.

Years later I will wonder if my father saw me from the house making for the trash barrel and hurried out so we would meet, if there had been no tacit agreement between us to avoid each other and it was only me avoiding him and he thought I had done so long enough.

“Hello, Wayne,” my father says.

“Hi, Dad.” There is nothing I can do but meet him at the barrel.

“I thought I'd burn this tonight while there's no wind,” he says. “There'll be a gale tomorrow night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” my father says, as if he is sick to death of gales, though I know he will track the storm on his instruments and record the data in his book. “Southeast wind and rain. It's on its way.”

And by the time it gets here, it occurs to me, I will be gone. A storm I will not be here to see will come in from Petty Harbour and above the Shoal Bay Hills. About this time tomorrow night, hours after the wind comes up, the first drops of rain will patter on the kitchen window and on the window of the room I have slept in almost every night for the past ten years. But there is no wind now, none. The pond is so calm it reflects the trees around it and the sky. And when the sun dips below the trees, the pond is like black glass. On its surface are reflected the lights of houses near the water and the street lamps on the poles around the pond.

“Let me get mine started first,” he says. The thick cardboard will take longer to light and burn than what I have in
the box. My father stuffs the barrel with cardboard, takes a sheet of paper from the box, lights it with a match, then drops it in. The cardboard catches. At first there is a lot of smoke, but then the blaze gets going, flares up above the rim of the barrel. Both of us stare into the fire. Soon we will look up and be surprised at how dark it has become, how long we have been standing there.

“I have something to tell you,” my father says. He tells me this story.

He went away to college on an early September evening in 1948. A couple of hours before sunset, he left for St. John's, planning to stay there overnight and, in the morning, catch the train for Port aux Basques. It would be his first crossing of the island and his first crossing of the Gulf, his first time off the island. He was twenty-three years old. The age that I am now.

He said all but one of his goodbyes in the house. His father, on some pretext, had gone down to the beach. My father, leaving his suitcases by the car of a family friend who was waiting to drive him to St. John's, walked down to the beach where Charlie was standing, looking out across the water.

Charlie did not want my father to leave. He was crying when my father reached him on the beach. They hugged but said nothing. My father made his way back up the beach, sliding in his best shoes on the rocks. His father, who had continued to face the water, turned when he stopped hearing the clatter of rocks behind him, when my father reached the grassy slope that led up to the road.

“Be a good boy!” his father shouted. My twenty-three-year-old father turned and looked at Charlie standing there a
few feet from the water, not quite turned to face him, one arm lifted and dropped quickly in a gesture of resigned farewell.

Then Charlie fully faced the sea again, put his hands on his hips, looked out across the Pool, between Bois Island and Ferryland Head, at the open water. He stood there in that reflective, stock-taking pose, facing the direction exactly opposite the one his son would soon be taking.

So he left in defiance of his father. But surely something more must have happened on that beach. I look at my father as he stares into the fire. Before I can ask him to, he tells me more.

He went away to college in September of 1948, crossing an island that was still a country but whose days as such were numbered. While he was away, Newfoundland the country ceased to be. At college in Truro, Nova Scotia, on April 1, 1949, induction day, the day Newfoundland joined Confederation, my father was set upon by a group of his mainland friends who hoisted him on their shoulders and, ignoring his protests that he would always be a Newfoundlander and the fact that tears were streaming down his face, carried him around the campus shouting, “Three cheers for the new Canadian!”

He pauses again. There is no way I will let him tell me this much and not tell me the rest. “I skipped a bit,” he says.

Something else happened while he was away at college, a few months before Confederation.

His father died. I never knew this until now, had never taken notice of the date of Charlie's death when looking at his headstone on the Gaze.

Charlie died about halfway through the nine-month interval between the second referendum and induction day. Despite losing the referendum, he had died a Newfoundlander, in
January of 1949. The two referenda in the summer of 1948, the two nights six weeks apart that he spent crouched beside the radio, arms around his stomach, rocking slowly back and forth as if silently trying to coax the anti-confederates to victory as the results were coming in, the excruciating closeness of the votes, the campaign between the inconclusive referendum and the next, then the months of waiting after their defeat for induction day — all this had proved too much for him.

He had fretted himself to death as the countdown to Confederation proceeded, each day changing on a schoolroom slate that he hung on the wall in the kitchen the number of days left in the life of Newfoundland. Charlie died on January 14, 1949, the day after erasing the number 77 and hours after writing the number 76 on the slate.

Throughout the three days of his wake and funeral, the slate, like a stopped clock, read 76. Afterwards, Nan could neither stand the sight of it, reminder, register that it was of the day he died, nor bring herself to erase the number, so she took the slate down and put it out of sight and out of mind on a table in the attic. She took the top of a tin biscuit box and with the box turned upside down enclosed the number-bearing slate and left it there. That she did this was not discovered until some years later, when Nan herself died and Eva, plundering the house for keepsakes, found the slate where her mother had left it; not knowing there was anything beneath it, she picked up the biscuit box, disinterring the slate, which still faintly bore, in her father's hand, the number of days Newfoundland had outlived him.

Poor Eva almost fainted. “I think she still has the slate,” my father said. “But I don't know if you can read the number any more.”

When my father and Charlie parted on the beach, they knew that by the time they met again, something dear to both of them would have ceased to be, and that this would happen while they were hundreds of miles apart. But they did not meet again.

It was not because he was embarrassed to have his family see him cry that Charlie left the house and went down to the beach. He went there because he and my father had had a falling-out about something.

My father pauses in the story he is telling. There are no lights on in the house, which makes me think my mother might be watching.

“This falling-out. It was about you not wanting to be a fisherman?” I say.

My father smiles, shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It was nothing. Just some little thing. I don't even remember what it was.”

It is so dark now that if not for the fire, I would not be able to see his face. There is no way he could tell me this without us having the fire to look at while he speaks. “You must remember what it was,” I say.

“I don't,” he says. “I really don't.”

I know he remembers and I try to think it through. It was to Canada that my father was going, to Canada at this of all times, the country he esteemed no more highly than Charlie did, but he had no choice, there being no college at that time in Newfoundland. To Canada, which Newfoundland would become part of while he was away. It must have seemed to Charlie like a betrayal. And when his father died while he was in Canada, how must my father have felt? Somehow to blame
perhaps. Against all assurances to the contrary—and there must have been many—somehow to blame.

For my father, as for all the Johnstons, it was not “immediately before the expiration of March 31, 1949,” as set out in the Terms of Union, but with Charlie's passing that the old Newfoundland ceased to be. His death divided the century and, more effectively than anything else the chronophobic Charlie could have done, kept his children rooted in both time and space, imposed on them an obligation to continue, however pointlessly or tokenly, to resist Confederation. Confederation and the death of their father were forever twinned in their minds.

I think now that I have the whole story, a complete explanation why my father almost never talks about his father, and why my aunts and uncles never do, and why there are no photographs of Charlie in the house.

But there is more.

From Truro to Ferryland is not far, was not far, even then. But he had no money and neither did his family. All of them together could not scrape up the train fare to bring him home to see his father waked and buried. The cost of Charlie's funeral left them penniless.

He stayed in his residence room at college, his door locked for three days, while five hundred miles away, across the Gulf, his father was being waked and buried, and he alone of all the Johnstons was not there. At last some of his friends climbed in through his window and dragged him outdoors.

“Be a good boy,” Charlie Johnston said to my father on the beach at Ferryland. A begrudging blessing. Good boy. Not quite a goodbye. Good boy.

I try to imagine them on the beach at Ferryland.

It is little more than a month since the referendum. Every emotion is heightened. The whole of Ferryland, the whole of Newfoundland, is nervously exhausted. Hard on the heels of losing the referendum, Charlie is losing his son. Another casting-off. It is early September. As usual, the seasons have a month's jump on the calendar. The low scrub on the Downs has begun to turn, the smell of fall has been in the air for weeks. A winter is coming that will be my father's first away from home, a succession of December days when darkness will fall between four and five o'clock.

The last thing they share is that prospect from the beach. The only thing they see that a person on the same spot looking seaward five hundred years ago would not have seen is the lighthouse on the Head. Nothing else has been added or subtracted except by nature, incrementally, imperceptibly. “Be a good boy,” Charlie says. And my father, thus admonished, leaves his father standing there.

It is 1981, thirty-two years since Confederation, thirty-three since Charlie died. My father will not ask me not to leave, or plead with me not to or come as close as Charlie did to begrudging his son what might be a last goodbye. There is no reason to think that we will not meet again. He is only fifty-three, not as old as Charlie, who died years before his time at fifty-six. But I know he will not take the chance. He knows how it would be for me and for him if we parted on bad or ambiguous terms or even awkwardly.

Each of us has a stick to poke at the cardboard. Embers float up from the barrel, go out, become flankers of grey ash above our heads and drift slowly pondward, carried by a breeze
so faint that we cannot feel it. I look up at the ridge, the crest of which marks the start of what we think of as the woods because you cannot hike there and back unless you spend a night outdoors. I have done it many times, gone down into the valley on the other side and slept on the ground.