Baltimore's Mansion (4 page)

His father says he will have to go to St. John's to get a new anvil.

“First thing tomorrow,” Nan says, but his father shakes his head. The men will come as usual with their horses, and to him it is unthinkable to turn them all away. He does not say it, but they know he cannot stand the thought of the forge
without an anvil, does not want it so one second longer than it has to be.

“You're not going down the Shore in the darkness by yourself,” Nan says.

“Gordon can take the punt out with Uncle Will in the morning,” his father says. “Art can come with me to keep me company.” He tells Gordon not to let the fire in the forge go out.

“How old was that anvil?” he asks his father.

“I don't know,” he says. “It used to be my father's. It's the only one I've ever had.”

“Fifty years?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

They will have to travel the whole length of the Southern Shore, the forty miles of it from Ferryland to St. John's and back again, by horse and cart. His father figures they will make it back to Ferryland by noon.

It is still dark when they crest the Old Shore Road, and for the first time in his life, he sees the city of St. John's. All he can really see are lights, twin lines of lights that trace out the shapes of streets, clusters that mark neighbourhoods as large as any settlement along the Shore. The bobbing lantern lights of ships keep time with their reflections in the harbour. It makes him think of the stars as they look from his father's boat when the wind is up but the sky is clear. How could anyone bound for shore find among so many lights one to guide him safely home?

As they head down Kilbride hill, he smells the city. He is familiar with the smells of smoke and unbarked wood and salt fish, but mixed in with them are smells his father tells
him come from breweries and tanneries and places where rope is made from hemp and rolled out on spools the size of wagon wheels.

When the sun comes up, so much smoke hangs in the air above St. John's that he thinks there must have been a forest fire. It hangs like a pall of morning fog between the hills that flank the harbour.

They follow the Waterford River into town. His father has not been to St. John's often enough to be able to hide how much he is intimidated by it. Their brown mare, Gail, who has made the trip just twice before, tosses her head and veers to one side each time she meets a car.

Only two cars that he knows of have ever passed through Ferryland, but here they share the street with cabriolets and buggies and men high in the saddle on shiny, sleek black horses and children riding bareback ponies.

He gapes in disbelief at the size of St. John's. His father told him it held forty thousand people, but the number is nothing next to what he sees — the cobblestone stretch of Water Street, the country's one paved road, and on it swarms of people not dressed for work as he understands the word, going in and out of what he imagines must be stores, though they look nothing like the store back home. The sheer number and size of the tall ships in the harbour strikes him dumb. He gawks at the steamers with their towering smokestacks, the barges piled high with wood and coal, the houses joined together in rows like trains without even token breaks between the cars.

Their mode of dress makes every other man look like a merchant or a minister of some kind. They wear bowler hats, long coats and vests and gleaming boots but pick their way
through puddles as if their feet are bare. Women, for no reason he can think of since the sky is clear, walk about beneath umbrellas. The only umbrellas he has seen before are the ones the nuns use on rainy days, going back and forth between the convent and the church. Water Street is busier than the road below the Gaze after Sunday Mass, and it gets busier as the day goes on. How is it that with so many rushing to and from he never sees the same person twice?

He waits for his father outside the gates of the foundries, stares at the streams of men who come and go, waits for his father to appear, holding Gail by the bridle because he knows that as soon as she sees him she will kick up her forelegs and might break her harness. It is in part his nervousness that makes her restless. Every so often he feeds her the stalk of a carrot or turnip. To thank him she butts him with her head.

They go from foundry to foundry in search of an anvil.

He doesn't know what his father is looking for in an anvil, though his father assures him that no two anvils are alike. He watches from a distance as his father, who has brought a hammer, strikes several dozen anvils experimentally, almost diagnostically, searching for one that will make the hammer rebound to his satisfaction and return the force of the blow into his body in a way that feels indefinably right.

Each time he tests an anvil, a man stands beside him, watching. Once, when his father is done, he and the man confer, the man looking at his father, his father at the anvil until at last he shakes his head and walks away.

“What was wrong with that one?” he asks.

“I'll come back for it unless I find a better one,” his father says.

Finally his father emerges from a foundry to announce that he has chosen his anvil. Three men wheel it on a trolley to the gate while his father walks beside it.

He thought he would get to see up close what a new anvil looked like, but this one is far from new. It looks much older than his father's. The saddle has begun to rust. It must be years since it was last struck with a hammer. His father scours out the swage fitting and the clamp holes with a file until water poured in one end comes out the other.

“There. There's nothing wrong with that,” his father says. “I'll burn off that rust when we get home.”

After several men help him load it onto the cart, they set out for Ferryland, the canvas-covered anvil like a catafalque, Gail plodding with what looks like funereal restraint, though they know she is going as fast as she can. He is hungry and wonders if he should ask his father if they can stop somewhere to get a loaf of bread. For the first time he wonders how much the anvil set them back.

The short winter day is over, and it is getting dark again when they leave the city limits and reach the Old Shore Road. The number of cars and trucks and carriages and buggies on the gravel road grows fewer the farther up the Shore they go. At a certain point, once they have passed through Kilbride, the Goulds, the road to Petty Harbour, his father drops the reins and lets Gail go at her own pace; she knows the way and needs no guidance unless the roads are bad.

They sit in silence for a while as she clops along. Then his father gives what for him is a speech of record length. “There'll be no more need for blacksmiths soon,” his father says. “There's not as many horses as there used to be. Soon there'll be almost
none at all. What shoes they need they'll make in foundries by the hundreds. They'll make anchors there, grapnels like I make, but they'll make them a lot faster than I do. Everything I make they'll make it there but ten times faster.”

He tells him that he was apprenticed to
his
father when he was twelve, “your age,” he says. But there will be, in the Johnston family, no more such apprenticeships, for blacksmithing is a trade that in cities is already obsolete and halfway to becoming so in Ferryland, where horses are being replaced by cars and trucks and where many people are buying their metal implements from foundries that mass-produce them in St. John's. Blacksmithing is a craft that over several thousand years hardly changed, and over the past fifty has been abandoned.

He looks around. He thinks his father must be wrong. Even here in the city horses still outnumber cars and trucks. He cannot imagine Ferryland ever having more need for cars than horses, or the men of Ferryland ever preferring shoes made in foundries to shoes made in the forge.

“You'll have to find yourself something else to do,” his father says. “You'll be better off at something else.”

“What will I do?” he says.

“You could be a fisherman,” his father says. “There's not many that can make a go of it without something on the side, but you might be able to.”

He has been going out in the punt every other morning for two years now with his father and his older brother, Gordon. It will be two more years before he has to go out every morning. They work the nets and traps and leave the handlining to him. It is no easier but less dangerous than what they do. He baits the hooks with squid and capelin, plays out
the handline to twenty or thirty fathoms, but he is not yet strong enough to haul in even that much line without their help, especially on a good day, when the hooks are full. When he looks down into the water, he can see the hooked fish at fathom intervals, their white cod bellies bent almost in half, first one way, then the other as they fight for freedom. He is still astonished each time the first cod, in a flapping fury, breaks the surface.

His father and Gordon laughed so hard they had to stop working once when he wrestled into the boat a codfish half his size. It was so wide and plump he could barely clutch it to his chest. He put his arms around it from behind, clasped his hands across its slimy belly, but it kept sliding back into the water. Time after time he hefted it up, all the while trying to keep out of the way of its thrashing head and sharp fins that beat like wings. It seemed since he had pulled it from the water to have sprouted fins all over. They drenched him in a fine mist of salt spray that stung his eyes. Its mouth, because his arms were entangled in its gills, was wide open. He could see inside but all he noticed was its teeth. He thought for a few seconds that he had hooked the wrong kind of fish, not a cod but some deep-sea sculpin his father should have warned him he might catch by accident. He knew that if he let go of the fish the line they had already pulled in would play out so fast there would be no time to avoid the hooks as they went flying from the boat. At last he heaved the cod's lower half from the water and fell on his back into the boat, the codfish likewise on top of him. The fish was so cold he could barely stand the touch of it against his skin. How could anything so lively be so cold? He was amazed that something so large made no sound, its silence at odds with the
fury of its struggle. “He's in the boat. You can let go of him now,” his father said. He rolled out from under the fish, which lay there, more subdued now, gills working uselessly, dark eyes unmoving as if up here it could not see. He looked at the water. From the unimaginable bottom of the ocean it had come and now lay stranded in the boat because of him.

Afterwards his forearms were rubbed raw and flecked with silver scales and his face was nicked all over with tiny cuts.

He has never once gone on the water without getting sick, but he never gets sick more than once a trip, no matter how rough it gets. These are the terms of the peculiar bargain he has already made with the sea. It is necessary for him to be sick once and only once on each trip before he gets his sea legs. His father and his brother are so used to it they pay not the slightest attention to him as their boat puts out to sea in the early morning darkness and he heaves over the side as though performing some routine act of hygiene.

Freda tells him in her letters it is not so much his body as his mind that performs this daily ritual, this demonstration of revulsion for the water that, though it might have him for the moment, will not always have him. She does not think he should be a fisherman. She thinks he should find something that will make it unnecessary for him to ever again go on the water. Though he has not told anyone else, he agrees with her, but he has not yet decided what that something is. “The whole world is not like Newfoundland,” she wrote. “There are other places you can go. Not everybody stays.”

His father stops talking. They move along the old road and despite the wartime blackout light the buckboard lanterns.
They see, by their lights or by the clouds of dust they raise, other carts, carriages and vehicles from miles away, and hail every one they meet. They smell the sea on one side and the spruce trees on the other, gauge their progress by the towns they pass through. His father counts them off, announcing each one like a train conductor. Kilbride, the Goulds, Big Pond, Bay Bulls, Witless Bay, Mobile, Burnt Cove, Lamanche, Bauline, Cape Broyle, Calvert — the litany of place names that will bring them back from the city to the place where they were born.

They climb the hill and cross the flats of Old Bay Bulls until the road again descends to the beach at Witless Bay. All along the Southern Shore, the beaches lie at the mouths of ancient rivers that have worn fissures and valleys and fjord-like indentations in the headlands, and natural breakwaters of beach rocks have been piled up by ten thousand years of waves, piled so high that at sea level he cannot see the water, only a crescent of rocks beyond which he can dimly hear the ocean.

They cross the dark, empty stretches between one town and the next, the moonlit stretch of barrens strewn with ice-caught ponds above Bay Bulls, the phosphorescent glow along the bays where no one lives, bays with names his father doesn't bother to announce, the tree-crowded mile of road before the turnoff to Lamanche, where Gail becomes skittish, picking up the scent of a lynx or a weasel in the woods.

By the time they reach Calvert, it has begun to snow. Both he and his father fall asleep and do not wake up even when Gail turns into the merchant's driveway and begins to ascend the hill below the store. The shopkeeper looks out the window and sees
Gail standing in the light of the porch lantern, for how long he has no idea, waiting for someone to notice. A man and a boy are sound asleep against the buckboard, heads slumped forward onto their chests, snow gathering on their hats and shoulders and on their folded arms.

He wakes up first and nudges his father awake. “We're at O'Brien's,” he says.

His father looks around, then nods. “Gail's tired too,” he says. “She took the first turnoff that she recognized. Just as well. We need some things.”