Baltimore's Mansion (21 page)

He repeats the performance, rises up on a fluttering of wings, glides down from the loft, out one window, in the other and goes back to the loft again.

He thinks that like him, I have taken refuge here and lack the sense to join him in the loft, where it must be warmer and where there is no snow, which he wants me to do, not out of any concern for my welfare but because he knows that sooner or later I will discover the loft. He is telling me, before I try to chase him off, that he is willing to share it.

I have no intention of spending the night in here, but I accept his invitation. Removing my snowshoes, I test the steps that lead up to the loft to see if they will hold my weight, which they do, though the boards creak loudly. It is ten steps or so to the loft, where there is a single pew with space enough for four or five people, half the congregation if the cemetery is anything to go by. Perhaps when the church was built the family had hopes of being joined by others who never came.

The seagull roosts on the other side of the loft, hard to the wall, eyeing me with some nervousness at first. I was right. There is no nest. As a nesting place, it is too obvious and too accessible.

I stand at the balustrade and look out across the church as the triple torrents blast in through the windows. I feel as though I am looking down from the as yet unflooded floor of some sinking ship. It
is
much warmer up here, not as drafty as I expected it would be, dry and sheltered from the winds that eddy about inside the church. I sit down, my back against the wall, as far from the gull as I can get.

The weariness that comes over you when you warm up after a long time in the cold makes me nod off. Waking, I think
for a panicked moment that I have slept past sunset, but actually it has been only minutes, for the church, when I stand up, looks just the same. Still, I tell myself, I might never have woken up, or might have woken freezing in the middle of the night.

I go down the stairs with a haste that startles the gull. After I snap on my snowshoes, I climb out one of the lee windows. Looking back, I see the gull soar among the rafters of the old white church, out of the reach of the snow that swirls below him, out of mine.

Tonight, on hundreds of such islands around the coast of Newfoundland, in restored houses, in cottages and cabins much more primitive than mine, others wait out the storm, which they know may last for days. It is partly for such intervals of enforced idleness and confinement that they have chosen to winter here. Snow blots out the world by day as well as the darkness does by night. And day and night there will be no sound outside but that of the wind that blows from where the melting of the old ice stalled ten thousand years ago.

Nothing on the radio but shrieks of static that seem to be mimicking the storm. I remember my proscription not to dwell on my destiny or that of anyone I know, not to write, but tonight I cannot help it.

There are roads you can travel to where they were abandoned fifty years ago, to piers at which boats from smaller islands docked when their owners made the trip to Newfoundland. On each of these islands there is a hermitage where at night a lone light burns. In them live people who will never double
back, for whom history has been suspended and nationality is obsolete. Some of them are people who, instead of leaving with the fleets of floating houses in the sixties, stayed behind. Others, from the main island of Newfoundland or even from the continent, went back to these abandoned islands whose populations in the census thereby rose from none to one or two.

They can see from where they live the life that they declined, or the lights of that life anyway, the lights of towns and especially on cloudy nights the glow from cities in the sky. They see lines of lights that trace out the shapes of roads they have never used or whose use they have forsworn. Like their fellows on the main island, they are the hard-core holdouts. They keep vigil for a destiny that will never be resumed, commemorate a life they know is lost. I am not one of them. I cannot hold that vigil with them.

But I am still drawn down those dead-end roads at night to the sea and the piers from which the lantern lights in houses on islands far from shore can still be seen. I told my father once when I was too young to have sense enough to keep the observation to myself that as these islands were to Newfoundland, so Newfoundland was to the world. He smiled and said nothing. He did not want to be fated to irresolution, or a life of protest, did not want to be a man without a country or a patriot of one that never was. But neither could he pledge an allegiance that he did not feel. “The land,” he once told me, “is more important than the country. The land is there before you when you close your eyes at night and still there in the morning when you wake. No one can make off with the land the way they made off with the country in 1949.”

He told me the story of the Newfoundlanders travelling abroad with passports deemed by our new government to be good until 1954. For years after Confederation, they travelled the world as Newfoundlanders, itinerant citizens of a country that, since they saw it last, had ceased to be. In no sense were these people anything but Newfoundlanders until the first time they set foot on “native” soul, or until their five years were up. There were supposed to be some who neither came back home nor acquired new passports from the Canadian embassies in their countries of residence. Instead, they stayed away in protest, in self-exile from the country that now occupied their own. I loved the idea of these Newfoundlanders in the States, in England, Germany or France blending in among foreigners, still carrying their outdated passports. Citizens of no country, staging their futile, furtive, solitary protests that were at once so grand and so absurd. I wasn't even sure if there were such people, or if it was possible for anyone to live that way for long without detection. But it was a good story. And for someone who, like me, was born after 1949, the very existence of the country known as Newfoundland was just a story, composed of countless stories I had been told or read in books, of exhibits in museums, of monuments and statues and inscription-bearing plaques.

The country of no country is a story almost as enduring as the land.

I
N
1992,
NOT
long after the cod fishery was closed, my parents phoned and told me they were leaving Newfoundland, going to Alberta, where my brothers and their children lived.

“The Newfoundland I knew is gone,” my father said.

He said it regretfully, but it also sounded a little like wishful thinking—wishful thinking that it might not be too late to escape the pull of the past. He was hoping that space would do what time had not. I considered telling him so but decided not to. The house was sold. The arrangements were already made and their minds made up.

Was it possible that three thousand miles from home, in the heart of the continent, morning would not find him brooding at the window, that a day might pass when he did not think of Charlie and the moment of their parting on the beach, that not every day would feel as though the referendum had been newly lost or feel like induction day? It might not be too late for him, for them to not mind that nationality was obsolete, that it no longer mattered where they lived because the Newfoundland they loved,
their
Newfoundland, did not exist.

He had been in the college lab in January of 1949 examining soil samples under a microscope, lost in this just-discovered other world, when one of his professors called him out into the hall and handed him a telegram from his brother Gordon that ended with the words “Come home.” Was it possible, three thousand miles from home, that he would think of that less often?

It must have
seemed
possible. It must have seemed, in those days before they left, that anything was possible. And it must not often seem so when you are in your sixties. Moving might be worth it, just for that.

It was only when my parents left it that I really felt that I had left Newfoundland. I had been living away from Newfoundland for most of the past twelve years, in Toronto for the last three.

It seemed for a while that my past had been erased, that my memory extended back no further than my twenties, as if I had had amnesia since then and knew only where my last twelve years were spent. And even when this feeling passed, my memories of home seemed less legitimate, almost counterfeit, the importance I had invested them with foolishly overblown, as if they could not have been worth much, having happened in a place that everyone I loved had left. Like me, all my brothers and sisters had left. But it had felt as if I had remained true to home, could not be said to have abandoned it, as long as my parents were there.

Their decision to leave came from out of the blue, as their decisions to move house when I was a child had. I remembered coming home from school one day to find my grandfather's truck in the yard, piled high with all our furniture. We were
moving again, but I had not known it until that moment when I saw the truck. I had not known when I left the house that morning that I would never set foot inside of it again. That was exactly how I felt when they told me on the phone that they were selling the house. I had not known when I last left it that I would never see the inside of it again.

The thought of them by themselves in a house in a place as unlike Newfoundland as the Prairies filled me with such dread that for nights I could not sleep. I was anxious, for them, I thought. What would happen to them? How could they possibly, at their ages, manage such a move?

It was a long time before I realized that they might not miss it as much as I would miss their being there.

During his last days in Newfoundland, he listened to the
Fishermen's Broadcast
on the CBC, the one I used to listen to as a child when he was off on a tour of the south coast, the broadcast that, out of habit, the idle fishermen still listened to as gale and freezing-spray warnings were issued for stretches of water where no fishing boats had sailed for years.

He listened to the “temperature roundup,” which gave the present temperature and weather conditions in places around the island, the places they used to visit in the
Belle Bay
or landed offshore from in a seaplane and walked to across the ice, places he hadn't seen in years but each of which he pictured when the announcer said its name, isolated, desolate places he was glad he no longer had to go to, yet somehow missed or
thought he did. Perhaps the names just reminded him of time if not quite wasted then inscrutably disappointing, time that should have yielded something more, for him, for Newfoundland, though what that something was he couldn't say.

There were many last things that had to be done. They had to bid goodbye to mystified relatives and friends who could not help feeling abandoned and betrayed. There was no time to give everyone more of an explanation than this: they were leaving to be with their children, going to the province where those of their children who had children lived. This was not the real reason and they knew it, but they did not know what the real reason was. A last trip had to be made to Ferryland to see Gordon and Rita, Millie, Kitty. My father had to climb the Gaze and say goodbye to Nan and Charlie.

On the Downs, the archaeologists who were still looking for the ruins of Baltimore's mansion had uncovered the ashes of a nearly four-hundred-year-old forge. The first blacksmith's forge in the New World. The forge that Wynne had written about from Ferryland to Lord Baltimore in England: “The Forge hath been finished this five weeks.”

A last trip had to be made to old St. John's to see Eva in her hillside house that overlooked the harbour. Eva tried to talk them out of leaving and, failing, consoled herself by predicting they would soon come back. Something they thought was permanent but that was really only temporary had come over them, she said, though she did not say what that something was.

Though they were in their sixties, the time had come, as it seemed it did eventually for all Newfoundlanders, to set out on their journey westward. Alberta was not a place to retire to
but a place where people went to start again, to make a new beginning. And that was how they spoke of it.

After wandering for years from house to house all over the Goulds, my mother, when they were finally able to afford a house of their own, had wound up by necessity in one directly across the road from her father's. That, literally and figuratively, it seemed to her, was how far she had got, that was the limit of her life's adventure and her leash, across the road. She had faced south for twenty-five years, then crossed the road to spend the next twenty-five facing north, the view reversed. It was as though she had stood on the same spot all her life and in the middle of her life had merely turned around.

It was years now since the farm had failed. Her father's house was being lived in by strangers, the land behind it unworked in years, growing over with wild grass and hay, alders, juniper and spruce. The old forest that her father cleared was growing back after years of waiting on the borders of the field for him to leave. The outbuildings, all looking as if some bored giant had crumpled them slightly in passing, were windowless, doorless, their roofs caved in. The cellar had all but fallen into the hole it had sheltered for decades. Watching the farm they had all worked so hard to preserve pass slowly into ruin was not how she wanted to spend the balance of her life.

I had left when I was forty years younger than they were now. For the first time, I knew better than they did what they were facing. But it was not something that I could prepare them for. They were setting out like a pair of youngsters who had never been far from home before and were more
exhilarated than apprehensive at not knowing what was waiting for them.

I came back from the mainland supposedly to help them move but really because my own leaving had still not taken and I thought that leaving with them, spending the last night with them in the house, would change that and I would at last feel what I ought to have when I left alone twelve years earlier and again eight years after that.

On the night before they left, my parents, my younger sister, Stephanie, and I slept on the floor of the living room in sleeping bags borrowed from Harold and Marg, who would retrieve them after we were gone. My parents insisted that no one go to the airport to see us off.

Their luggage was packed and piled up in the porch. Everything had either been sold or sent west. There were not even curtains on the windows. The car they had rented for the last couple of days and would leave at the airport was in the driveway. Their flight was very early in the morning, just after sunrise. My father, for the first time in forty years, had a purpose for getting up at four and for the first time in forty years would not be getting up alone.

The four of us sat on the living room floor with our backs against the wall, our lower halves in sleeping bags. My parents smoked cigarettes. My father and my sister talked. Their voices echoed in the empty house, which smelled as it had when it was new. The lights of cars passing on Petty Harbour Road lit
up the room every few minutes, moved at first slowly and then swiftly across the ceiling before vanishing abruptly.

My mother and my sister fell asleep. I could hear them breathing evenly, my mother still sitting with her back against the wall, my sister slumped beside her.

My father, perhaps thinking I was asleep, got up and went out to the kitchen, I heard him light a cigarette.

There is a question I want to ask him, the same question I almost asked him the night before I went away when we stood at the barrel, staring into the fire, a question that still seems unthinkable to ask. Back then I thought I could bear to live in permanent suspense, but for some time now have been feeling I cannot.

I remember how, on his last ride on the train, my father shouted at the fact-facing bus-boomer. How can I even think what I am thinking? That I am even able to consider it, I tell myself, have been telling myself for years, is a measure of how things must have been back then. An epidemic of suspicion, treachery, guilt, paranoia. Why do I so much want to know if I am right?

I get up, tiptoe across the room and down the hall. I stand in the doorway of the kitchen. My father is leaning sideways on the counter in his customary manner, looking out the window. The kitchen is empty of all furniture and knickknacks, and the sight of him there savouring in solitude his last night in his house almost makes me change my mind.

I could leave the question unasked and instead tell him some things that I doubt anyone but he could understand. That
I have chosen the one profession that makes it impossible for me to live here. That I can only write about this place when I regard it from a distance. That my writing feeds off a homesickness that I need and that I hope is benign and will never go away, though I know there has to be a limit. And that someday it will break my heart.

I could tell him that I know as well as he does how it feels to crave what you can never have.

That I know his grievous wound was self-inflicted and that leaving will not heal it.

That he will come back to this place that he sometimes thinks he hates, while I who never think of it with anything but love must stay away.

That years ago, when I first left the island, as the ferry pulled away from Port aux Basques, I looked back with near contempt on this place that I believed could not contain me. I was too young to understand that the mainland, the main land, that I believed that I was headed for, did not exist. It existed neither for the people I was soon to meet nor for the people I had left behind, neither for him nor for his father, nor for the castaways and exiles who first wintered on the shores of Newfoundland.

That I am still too young to understand all this, but I know it's true.

Just past him, outside the window, are the steps on which I used to stand and face into the wind when I knew a storm was coming. The east wind that blew in from the Shoal Bay Hills and still smelled of the unseen North Atlantic.

The storms moved from west to east, their clouds, winds, rain or snow from east to west. A simple but maddening paradox. Like a person walking towards the rear of an airplane.
Everything the storms contained moved two opposing ways at once.