Baltimore's Mansion (5 page)

Wiping the snow from their clothes, they leave Gail untethered and go inside the store, where the fire in the stove in the middle of the floor is barely lit. The sun is not yet up. They are the first customers.

The fish merchant's store. He loves coming here. He walks among the shelves, looks at the squares of fresh fudge laid out uncovered on waxed paper, the sugar-sprinkled wedges of mint green and orange ju-jubes, jawbreakers that a boy at school told him change colour by the minute in your mouth, jagged chunks of chocolate in glass jars, bins of jelly beans, striped bars of peppermint and long black twists of licorice, the stacks of oranges and “five-point” apples. He feels his hunger so keenly that he has to grab on to a shelf to keep from falling.

“Help you with something over there?” the man behind the counter says. Embarrassed, he shakes his head, looks for something the man will not mind him standing next to.

“You don't have to watch him,” his father calls from the back room, where the bulk goods and the fishing gear are stored. He knows they will leave the great emporium with nothing but bulk bags of staples like oats and flour.

“Oh no. No, of course not,” the man says and looks out the window as if he has just now noticed what an interesting horse and cart they have.

His father comes out from the back room with a sack of oats and a bag of flour. He joins him at the counter. He dreads what he knows is coming next.

The clerk opens his credit book and deducts the purchases and reads aloud to his father how much credit they have left. In this store, money never changes hands. For the fish he catches and sells to the merchant, his father is given credit here. This, he knows, is called the “truck” system. He knows that the merchant devalues the credit at will by raising the prices of the goods he sells. He also knows that the man behind the counter is not the merchant, just someone who works for him. They see the man who owns the store once a week at Sunday Mass.

“We should have more credit left than that,” his father says. At first it seems this is just a token protest. He wonders again how much the anvil set them back and where his father found the money for it. The most money he has ever seen in his father's hands is a ten-cent piece.

The man behind the counter shakes his head.

“That's what it says here, Mr. Johnston,” the clerk says, pointing at the bottom line below his father's name. His father nods, pauses as if to speak, exhales heavily, puts both hands on the edge of the counter and looks down as if considering some course of action. Then, abruptly, he sweeps the ledger off the counter with both hands. It lands somewhere out of sight. He hears it slide along the floor until, with a thump, it hits the wall.

The clerk steps back from the counter. “There's no need for that,” he says.

“Dad,” he says and puts his hand on his father's arm and looks up into his face.

His father turns sharply away, stoops down and picks up the oats and the flour, carries them out to the cart and jams them in beside the anvil. He climbs up and sits slump-shouldered on the buckboard. The rope reins lie between his feet. Gail shakes her harness bells. His eyes shut as if, upon resuming his former pose, he has gone back to sleep. He grips the upper part of his huge right arm with his left hand, squeezes it as if the muscle has begun to ache.

He's still not sure it's over. He's not sure until, when he climbs up beside him, his father opens his eyes, looks at him and says, “I wonder will we ever get the country back. When the war is over maybe.”

“Once we had a country, but because we made a mess of it, the British took it back.” Freda's words. She said that from 1855 to 1934, Newfoundland was a self-governing colony of Britain. “Just a fancy phrase for country,” his father said. Since 1934 when it had, because of helping Britain win the war, not a penny to its name, the British were “in charge.” “In charge” is how he thinks of it. He is not sure what it means.

“Things might not be any better if we get it back,” his father says. “They might be worse.”

“They'll be better,” he says.

“Will they? You got it all figured out?”

He nods solemnly.

His father laughs.

He remembers the sound the ledger made as it slid along the floor. He knows that the next time they go the man behind the counter will pretend it never happened.

“Nan will fry us up some toutons,” his father tells him as Gail returns to the road. Toutons. Pan-fried balls of bread that, as Nan says, fill you up like Christmas dinner. He can't wait to get back home.

“You're not going to school,” his father says. “I'll tell the teacher that you're sick.”

“Can I stay out in the forge?” he says.

“Sure,” his father says. “You can lead the horses back and forth.”

Not for another ten years will he see for the second time the city that prompted his father to predict a day when there would be more cars than horses in the streets.

He will think of it often but they will never speak of it again.

I
WAS BORN
in St. John's, but my parents moved to my mother's hometown, the Goulds, when I was one.

My mother's people, the Everards, were from Petty Harbour, which is now the postcard outport of Newfoundland, primarily because of its close proximity to St. John's. You can drive to Petty Harbour from St. John's in fifteen minutes by way of a coastal road that wasn't there when my mother was growing up.

The Everards took pride in the fact that from nowhere in the Goulds could you see the town of Petty Harbour or the ocean.

My mother's people were not of the water, very much not of the water, though their most recent ancestors were. They were very much of the land, such as it was, sea-scorners, sea-fearers, one rung up the social ladder of the lower classes by dint of their non-association with the sea, with merchants and the truck system and because what they harvested they had themselves created and so they did not have to depend for their livelihood on the whims of such a lowly, bottom-feeding creature as the cod.

The Everards had moved inland from Petty Harbour in the late nineteenth century, when the fishing grounds became too crowded. The first of them to move still fished part-time, maintaining summer shacks in Petty Harbour or nearby Shoal Bay, at the same time farming in the Goulds.

My grandfather and some other settlers cleared the wilderness of trees and rocks. My grandfather must have been either a late migrant or an indiscriminate one, for although there was much flatland in the Goulds, he situated his farm on the side of a hill. The angle of the furrows to the vertical was more than forty-five degrees on the steepest meadow, which had to be plowed from the bottom up because a horse going downhill could not keep its feet.

The labour that went into clearing this land I could not, did not, begin to imagine. It never occurred to me as a child that the farm had not always been there, never occurred to me to wonder why there was a meandering wall of stones along each cartroad, or how what we called “the stump meadow,” a bog in which hundreds of uprooted stumps lay slowly rotting or ossified by age, had come to be.

The Goulds was much younger than Ferryland. It had no historic sites or plaques, no stone churches from another century, had not grown from a colony founded by some aristocrat from England, had no founding heroes at all that were commemorated in books, no town museum. The Goulds, in New World terms, was anomalously new and anomalously agricultural.

But although it was not as old as Ferryland, the Goulds felt and looked older, because the remnants of its first generation lay not, as they are in Ferryland, so deeply buried that the
place is now a favourite digging site for archaeologists, but above ground, in plain view — the empty shells of long-abandoned barns and cellars that you could see straight through still stood at angles to the ground, as did fences built for some forgotten purpose, their posts supported by the grey-washed stones that, within someone's living memory, had been uprooted from the ground. There were already by my time farms that looked the way my grandfather's does now, failed, long-abandoned farms, open fields where hay and fodder that no one bothered with grew wild, fallen fence posts still joined by wire, stands of stunted, wind-bent junipers along the road, grown up since the levelling of spruce and birch. In one place, crisscrossed by paths where we played and took shortcuts to school, a mature forest had arisen on land that must have been among the first to be cleared a hundred years ago. The rocks pried from the earth were piled in heaps that now were all but overgrown by moss.

We wandered my grandfather's farm on Sunday afternoons when he was sleeping, played among trucks left for good where they had broken down and been deemed beyond repair, among discarded farm implements, ploughshares without handles, handles without blades, tires complete with rims from some early version of the tractor. There were old hubcaps nailed to trees. Rain-greyed lengths of rope that had been used to tether livestock hung from branches. Upside-down paint cans had been stuck on fence posts for target practice. On the ground lay rusting coils of chains. We were on orders from my grandfather not to move any of these things, as if they had been placed with a purpose. His history in the Goulds was commemorated haphazardly throughout the farm by unculled artifacts.

The only constant in the Goulds was the contour of the land: the land as it looked in winter, shorn of most of its vegetation, shorn down to bedrock; the hills beyond the farms that bound the town on every side but west, where lay one leg of the bog of Avalon. The hills were so far above the town they were merely dark green shapes, at night bald silhouettes against the sky.

My grandfather's farm seemed to me a vast place. To go to the uppermost hayfield, beyond the pound, beyond the grazing field, beyond the crops, beyond the fodder, was a great, rarely embarked upon adventure. But the last time I was there, a few years ago, it took me less than ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. As I looked down at the site of the old house and barn, it seemed impossible that a man and a woman had supported themselves and their seven children on the annual yield of that barely arable few acres and the milk produced by a dozen cows.

It was into this farming family that my father married, in this farming town he eventually settled, among farmers-in-law who held forever in reserve the trump card of irony that a man of his particular field of specialization — he was an agricultural technologist — ended up working for the fisheries while they were growing crops and raising cows without the benefit of a diploma in anything.

B
Y
1963,
IT
was estimated that expatriate Newfoundlanders and their descendants numbered two million, or four times the population of the province. “A country's worth” of Newfoundlanders lived abroad, my father said.

During the war, thousands of Newfoundland women married and went back to the States with American servicemen. All but one of my mother's five aunts scattered to the Boston States.

My grandfather received news of his sister May's death after not having seen or heard from her for fifty years, though there had been no falling-out between them. He was sixty years old at the time. It was summer. My mother and I went to see him after my grandmother called, but I was six, so my mother told me nothing. My grandmother was in the kitchen when we got there. I wandered off down the hallway. The door of my grandparents' bedroom was open, and my grandfather was sitting on his bed, hands resting on the edge of the mattress, shoulders slumped. I was shocked to see him indoors on a weekday afternoon. Sunshine poured into the room, illuminating dust motes and a patch of ancient rug.

“Hello, Wayne,” he said.

“How come you're in here?” I said.

“Just thinking about May,” he replied. I thought he meant the month of May. I was about to ask for an explanation when my mother found me and brought me back to the kitchen.

It was an unprecedented lapse for any grown-up that I knew, but especially for one as notoriously “hard” as he was, to admit what he had to a child. He had been ten when May left home. She had been a girl of seventeen, which must have been how he remembered her. He had got the news less than an hour before, had been called in from the fields by my grandmother when she came back from the post office with a letter addressed to him from Boston. She must have known its contents. It was just a question of which of his sisters had died.

Half an hour after I saw him sitting on the bed, he came out through the kitchen, went to the fridge, filled a bottle with ice-cold water from a jug, stoppered the bottle and went back to work.

None of my great-aunts ever came back home. It was as if they had gone to a place from which Newfoundland seemed so other-worldly they had stopped believing it was real. Home, when they left it, had ceased to exist.

For my part, I did not believe in
them,
these great-aunts whom I had never seen and who had supposedly lived longer in the Goulds than I had lived so far. It seemed to me they must have been only shadowy presences who had faded so slowly away that their final departure had been barely noticed.

Realizing that Newfoundland's greatest tourism potential lay in enticing expatriates back home to the island, Premier Joey Smallwood designated 1966 as Come Home Year. It was a kind of amnesty, as if, on behalf of their relatives who could not bring themselves to do it, the government had declared to prodigal sons and daughters who had gone to the mainland to find work that all was forgiven, there were no hard feelings.

A campaign to induce homesickness in expatriates was launched. The time was right for it. A new kind of music that had been invented by homesick Newfoundlanders was forever playing on the radio. My father called it “the green-arsed baymen blues.” It spoke, he said, to the homesick, city-sick, pal-pining, mother-missing, sweetheart-yearning, mainland-stranded baymen.

Come Home Year licence plates were issued. Ads were run in newspapers in Toronto, Boston, New York and even London, England, where a lot of Newfoundlanders lived who had not been home since the end of the Second World War.

It was because the first paved cross-province highway was completed in 1966 that that year was designated Come Home Year. It was the showcase accomplishment of provincial-federal co-operation, for one thing, and for another allowed people who could not afford to fly their families home to make the trip by car and ferry.

In the summer of 1966, Newfoundlanders from all over the world came home for the province-wide reunion. It seemed there was at least one long-lost this or that in everybody's house, the place crawling with nostalgia-ridden, reminiscence-mad expatriates with mainland accents introducing their mainland-born children to their grandparents for the first time.
Everywhere people were making up with one another and pledging never to have a falling-out again and that from now on they would keep in touch. There was a kind of surprise reunion craze that summer, and along with it a kind of reunion paranoia, everyone, even those who were themselves planning something, suspecting that something was being planned for them. The slightest deviation from the norm aroused suspicion. It got so that anyone who had relatives who had moved to the mainland was afraid to open a door for fear of finding them behind it. I remember a boy in our neighbourhood telling us there was an epidemic of heart attacks brought on by reunions, that Newfoundlanders all over were dropping dead from sheer surprise.

These Newfoundlanders had been told by relatives or had read in ads placed in mainland newspapers that they were coming home to a new Newfoundland, the post-Confederation Newfoundland so different from the one they had left that they would hardly recognize it. They were told that once they saw that Newfoundland no longer lagged behind the rest of the world, they would want to stay for good.

Some Newfoundlanders did come back for good during the summer of Come Home Year, among them my uncle Dennis, my mother's brother, who had left for Toronto just after we joined Confederation in 1949 and had not been home since.

There was a welcome home party for Dennis at my uncle Harold's. (Harold was my father's younger brother; his wife, Marg, was my mother's sister.) He met a horde of nieces and nephews he had never seen before and introduced to us his Ontario-born wife and daughter. Dennis, after seventeen years of working on a loading dock in Toronto, came back to join
his father and his brother Gerald on the family farm. He was forever describing to us children the wonders of Toronto but ignored us when we brazenly asked him why, if Toronto was so wonderful, he had come back home.

All the Johnstons and the Everards and their spouses and children were at the Come Home Year Party. My father's sister, Eva, and her husband, Jim, were there. They were famous among the family for walking out whenever “O Canada” was played. Eva lived in St. John's, so I myself had never witnessed one of these walkouts, but each time she and Jim staged one I heard about it.

The grown-ups gathered in the front room while we children were relegated to the kitchen. I stood in the doorway between the two rooms and watched them, sensing a momentousness that had to do with more than just Come Home Year. This was the largest gathering of my relatives that I had ever seen. I was eight and knew from past experience that when more than four or five of them gathered in one place, it was inevitable that they would get going about Confederation.

Almost anything could get my father going about it at almost any time. He would start off complaining about having the flu or about how awful the weather was and somehow wind up on the subject, though it was eighteen years since our side had been defeated in the referendum, since Newfoundlanders had renounced independence by a heartbreakingly small margin.

He held forth at the party in ruefully aggrieved, reverential tones about Peter Cashin, whom he said was one of the greatest public speakers who ever lived, a man who, when it
came to making speeches, “put Joey Smallwood to shame.” There hung on our wall, facing you in the porch as you entered, a black-and-white portrait of Cashin, the closest thing to a leader the factious anti-confederates had had.

My grandfather Charlie had been a friend and supporter of Major Cashin's, one of many lieutenants who worked with him in the referendum. Charlie had witnessed the confrontation that had brought the young Cashin local fame, a fight with a nun named Sister Joseph, who was so large she could not pass through doors except sideways. No one who had not seen them square off at the start would have known whom she was fighting with, so quickly did they wind up on the ground and so rarely and fleetingly did Cashin appear from among the manifold layers of her habit. It looked as if she had thrown a fit and with all the strength that God could spare her for the purpose was trying to subdue some devil with whom she was invisibly possessed. You could have made, from what she wore, a hundred pairs of pants for the Major, Charlie said, as if by that to estimate how badly he was overmatched. It ended suddenly, audibly, with a thud and Sister Joseph splayed supine, on her face a look of stern bewilderment, Cashin somewhere beneath her. When she got up, the young Cashin did not. Her breastplate of celluloid was in two places broken and her wooden cross hung down her back. Her nose was bleeding, her chin and cheekbones bruised, while Cashin, nun-pummelled, unconscious, was unmarked.

My father described how, just before making a speech, Cashin would roll up his shirtsleeves and smash his fist on the table or desk in front of him. This was easy to believe from his portrait, which appeared to have been taken by a photographer
the breaking of whose neck Cashin had postponed just long enough to let him take his picture. The stocky, fierce-looking Major, a hero of the First World War, stared from the photograph as if daring you to say the word “Confederation.”

Harold's wife, Marg, described how in her haste to get home and hear Cashin speaking on the radio, she'd tripped and broken her leg. That was the kind of loyalty, the kind of fervour the Major inspired.

My father quoted, in denunciation of Smallwood, the observation made by Parnell in his famous speech at Cork, Ireland, in 1885: “No man has the right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country, thus far shalt thou go and no further.”

They all saw Cashin as a Parnell-like figure, after whose defeat by some conspiracy that, though “common knowledge,” was impossible to prove, everything went bad.

“Who was Parnell?” I asked.

“A great leader for Irish independence,” my father said. “Hounded to his death by priests because he had a fling with a married woman named Kitty O'Shea.”

“What's a fling?”

“A sinfully delicious piece of pastry,” Uncle Harold said.

“We ruled ourselves for eighty years,” my father said. “From 1855 to 1934. And then that bloody British Commission of Government was set up. To save us, they said. To save Newfoundland from going bankrupt.”

And then he got on to Joey Smallwood, who was leader of the confederates at the National Convention from 1946 to 1948. The National Convention was an assembly elected to decide what forms of government should be offered to the people of
Newfoundland in a referendum. The Convention voted not to include Confederation with Canada on the ballot, but Whitehall ruled that it should be included anyway.

“Everybody knows the referendum was rigged,” my father said. England, supposed to be neutral on the issue, had been in cahoots with Canada, and Canada had been in cahoots with Joey; all of them, in some way that my father deemed to be past my understanding, had rigged the referendum.

I watched my father and noted how the grown-ups watched him, hanging on his every word as Cashin's followers must have hung on his in the 1940s. He seemed to me no less a leader than his namesake, King Arthur, or Parnell or Cashin, all the more impressive for being, as each of them had been, the patron of a lost, just cause.

“Even with it rigged, they barely won,” he said scornfully, as if the nearness of the vote somehow proved that it was rigged. “I can tell you this much — if Newfoundland had stayed a country and Peter Cashin had become prime minister —”

“He would have done away with fog and drizzle,” Uncle Dennis said. I thought this was pretty funny, but the silence that followed this remark was so censorious Dennis didn't speak another word for hours. He had gone away to Canada — as the Canadian mainland was still referred to by members of my family, though we had been Canadians for twenty years — and it had taken him seventeen years to see the error of his ways. Not many remarks of this kind would have been tolerated from anyone, but especially not from him.

As I regarded them, it seemed possible, even inevitable, that Confederation would somehow be undone. How could anything stand when so many grown-ups were against it? They
were still able to summon up some scorn, some indignation, still able to suspend their disbelief in the reversibility of Confederation and act as if they would no longer put up with having had their country taken from them.

“One thing is certain,” my father said, “and that is this: all who voted for Newfoundland did so out of love for Newfoundland. Are we agreed on that point?” They all gave their vigorous assent, nodding their heads, Uncle Dennis, trying to make amends for his gaffe of a moment ago, Uncle Harold and Uncle Jim flanking my father, their eyes averted from his as if to indicate how intently they were listening. They wound up in a close circle around him, holding their glasses, smoking, Harold and Jim rising up ever so slightly on their toes from time to time in a way that was somehow linked to the rhythm of my father's voice, as though they were urging him on, as though he was rolling now. Whenever my father made some point, Aunt Marg looked at my mother as if to say, There now, there it is — at last someone has said it. My father began speaking as though someone present was opposing him, though no one was.