Into the Blizzard (30 page)

So I gave up on George Tuff, even though I knew his father had been a magistrate at Old Perlican and had married twice. Then it struck me: marriage. That’s the way to find a person. Had George Tuff been married? He had
fought at Gallipoli and Beaumont-Hamel and Cambrai and survived everything the war could throw at him and returned and—yes—he married a woman thirty years younger than himself. Arral Tuff was from Stephenville Crossing—the other side of Newfoundland. George Tuff had cleared out of the east coast of Newfoundland and lived his days on the coast where I grew up. He wasn’t the only soldier who did so: Bertram Butler, the hero of many campaigns, did the same, working for years with the Bowater pulp and paper company.

In 1988, Arral Tuff wrote a letter asking for a widow’s compensation for her husband’s veteran status. She wrote this letter from 26 Churchill Crescent in Corner Brook. I was sitting in my car outside that door, looking into the front window where that letter was written. Arral Tuff had been a senior citizen living in an old folks’ home that I passed every day as I walked to school as a kid. To think of the woman who’d married a man who’d survived the entire First World War—and I had probably walked very close to her several times without knowing it. She was one of those women counting out coins from her clutch purse at the Co-op grocery store, the store I loved because it had the city’s only escalator. I now knew, from her correspondence, that Arral Tuff hadn’t received a widow’s compensation.

A friend of mine went to a recent Remembrance Day ceremony at the war memorial in St John’s. I went there, she said, for you. There was icy rain, driven at a slant. Very cold, she said. Water was running in the streets. An old lady was up to her ankles in lace-up leather shoes. There was a young girl, either a soldier or a cadet, standing with a rifle by the statues, on one end. The girl wasn’t moving, her eyes downcast, bun at the back, incredibly beautiful and young and rain dripping steadily off her chin. She was trembling from the cold, but otherwise completely still. They had to cut the ceremony a bit short—too many elderly people in the freezing rain. The cannons really boomed. They seemed to tear up the sky and my friend thought she could smell the smoke. She missed the “Ode to Newfoundland.”

Later in the evening, she was in a restaurant across from the memorial and there were three photographers, in the dark, after the rain, taking pictures of all the wreaths. A reporter on the radio said that it was a lazy wind: soon as cut through you than go around you. One woman: The weather was nothing compared to what was going on overseas back then.

The smell of cannon smoke. The Victoria Cross is made from the bronze of a Russian cannon captured by the British during the Crimean War—at least that’s what they thought
until they analyzed the metal and have decided now the iron is from a Chinese-made cannon captured by the Russians. So the Victoria Cross is an early example of a Chinese export.

The Crimean War was the first major war covered by journalists. It was suggested that a medal should be struck that honoured the bravery of the individual soldier. Up until then the only medals handed out for courage were to officers. The Victoria Cross is awarded “for most conspicuous bravery or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.” There was some opinion against the award: a medal for bravery might encourage individual behaviour that could weaken the strength of a fighting force.

There had been a customs house here at King’s Beach where the war memorial was built. It had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1892. After the war the cliff face was blasted away to make room for the memorial. Governor Allardyce lit the fuse. Two ex-servicemen were given the contract to lay the first concrete. One of the men, Ernest Churchill, had been
on the regiment’s hockey team and then been gassed at Passchendaele. The memorial was paid for, through Thomas Nangle, with five pounds for every missing Newfoundland soldier and merchant marine, and Royal Navy reserve seaman.

During the fundraising for the caribou memorials in France and Belgium, Nangle had grown exasperated: If one
hundred pounds is all that can be spared per monument, I recommend that we erect nothing at all, he said. Let us forget we ever had a Regiment.

The word “monument” means to remind, to advise and to warn. And they are often the last things to survive a civilization.

I had one last place to visit. One last tour of duty. I drove across the island again, this time in December, trying to beat a snowstorm. Past Botwood, where I learned that Rachel Ricketts—Tommy Ricketts’s sister—had remarried after her first husband died. She married Edward Purchase of Fogo in the school chapel and they lived in Botwood. Edward had a brother Arthur, who was a Blue Puttee. Arthur Purchase, after his year was up, did not sign on for the duration of the war. Very few soldiers did this. He returned home, and Rachel Ricketts married this man’s brother. Rachel was two years older than her brother Tommy. Tommy Ricketts, the youngest of three children, just like me.

The weather turned poor as I drove to Seal Cove. A snowplough was churning a tall wave of snow and salt and sand and the wave hit the car with a whump as the plough
passed by at full speed. I promised myself to turn around before two in the afternoon, to allow enough time to retreat before the final big freeze of the year and a snowstorm which would mean abandoning my car with only all-season tires until April, much like soldiers abandoned equipment when they were forced to withdraw quickly.

The hills here were steep and the road followed these hills up and down. On the final down you’re in Seal Cove. A beautiful, quiet place with a public wharf and men who still fish out of here. I used the post office and sent my family a postcard. I let them know I was okay and near the end of my journey. That I might be back before they got this note. While I licked my stamp I recalled the earliest report I could find for a John Ricketts—the father of George and Rachel and Tommy. Herman Pearce was in his post office in 1903 when he noted in his diary that John Ricketts of Seal Cove was
on his way to visit his brother. It was a dirty cloudy day in December, Pearce wrote, then the wind blew from the northwest and it became fine and clear.

The same weather was happening again. I asked the post office clerk if she knew how one could get to Middle Arm. There are no roads to Middle Arm and the closest community is this one. Seal Cove is where the fishermen of Middle Arm dealt with their product and accepted supplies and received word from the outside world.

The clerk confused my query about Middle Arm with another Middle Arm in the adjoining bay, Notre Dame Bay.

I mean the one where Tommy Ricketts was born, I said.

She understood then. It was just around the corner, she said. But Middle Arm is a place no one goes to anymore. Then she brightened. Alonso Osbourne might help you, she said. And she pointed out Alonso’s yellow bungalow.

Bungalow, I thought, is an Indian word, as is Bangalore. Puttee, too: a puttee is a bandage. Alonso was the name of the father of Hank Williams.

I knocked on the door to the yellow bungalow and Alonso Osbourne’s daughter went to fetch him. Come in, she said. A small man in his seventies, Alonso Osbourne was born in Middle Arm in 1936. He weighed a pound and a half and his parents decided to let him live with the midwife here in Seal Cove. The midwife was his grandmother.
She put me in a shoebox, he said, with cotton and placed me behind the water warmer of the woodstove. That was my incubator, he said.

He knew Tommy Ricketts. Tommy would have ended up in Seal Cove if he hadn’t won the Victoria Cross. A school was built out of concrete in his honour but it was abandoned in the 1940s and torn down ten years later. An ordinary Tommy Ricketts would have fished out of Seal Cove.

I thought: It’s a pretty spot here, the houses ringing the bay.

Alonso Osbourne drove me around to a man who might take me to Middle Arm in his boat. But the man wasn’t home. He may be out turre hunting, Alonso said. You can walk there, but be careful on the ice in the tickle.

I said I wasn’t about to walk on strange ice. I did that once when I lived in Trepassey, and the neighbours were waiting for the day when they’d have to come fish me out.

There is a woods road, Alonso said. Look for Nobles, on your way to Western Arm.

So I drove out to Western Arm. And on the way I stopped at a river that flows from Flatwater Pond into Middle Arm. I felt an urge to walk down to it because it was a river that Tommy Ricketts would have crossed as a boy. It was as wide, I judged, as the Ancre. Ricketts liked to fish at Virginia River in St John’s. He was a fly fisherman, like me, and he returned to Middle Arm in the summers to fish with his friend Tom Gavin. How to fool smart ducks.

I drove on and came upon a sign for Nobles Woods Road and turned off onto it and drove along a raised frozen white ground. I passed a pair of those tall galvanized cylinders that woods trucks drive through to align their loads, then crossed a Bailey bridge, which is a type of pre-fab truss bridge used by the British in World War Two. I crept up the snowy hills and was worried about getting stuck in there. I checked the odometer because I didn’t like the state of the road or the weather. The road rose alongside the hill
until it crested and I saw the ice over Middle Arm. I got out of the car and walked across the snow with the stumps of blackened trees sticking out of the snow. The entire hill and valley had been burned over, and snow was falling on it. I couldn’t tell if the place had been logged or burned or both.

I knelt down and formed a snowball with my bare hands, thinking: my son would build a snow fort with this type of snow. When you create a shelter like that you pile the snow and leave it overnight. The snow goes through a binding process called sintering. A lovely word, sinter. Many things go through such a transformation. Art, you hope, does.

The snow fell onto my eyelashes and I hugged myself to stay warm. I was thinking that if I had to, I could build a snow fort here. Who would be the last person to spend a night in Middle Arm? But I’d need a shovel. You heap snow and pat it down and then you take a shovel and slide it into the bottom and carve a hole. You scoop out as much snow as you can and then you enter the hole with an axe. You chop out more snow from the ceiling of the fort. All of this excess snow you throw on top of your fort and you repeat this process until you feel like it could go on in an infinite spiral of progression. One can let one’s mind go with this ever-expanding roof built from the snow carved from within—and it is easy to see how many projects are like this, how scenes are carved one upon the other, building
layers upon the primary source. Here I am, I have confirmed that the hometown of Tommy Ricketts no longer exists as a habitable space. The regiment he served in is now a reserve battalion for militia. Bishop Feild College where he studied is a primary school for youngsters my son’s age. The house where he met his young wife Edna is demolished. The pharmacy where he died is torn down. The only thing left of Tommy Ricketts is a field in Ledegem. A field much like this one before me.

The wharves and houses where the community had existed have been erased from the landscape. Out there someplace in the bottom of the bay is Sop’s Island, where the other Tommy Ricketts came from, the one that was killed the day this Tommy Ricketts won the Victoria Cross. Buried at Ledegem. Sometimes people get tangled up.

The sense that anything had ever happened here, that a child could be born, that anything could evolve from this place and animate itself and create a difference in another part of the world—all that seemed unlikely. This land had reverted back to land dominated by the industry of animals and insects.

I turned and looked back at my car. It was the only modern thing in view. I remembered hunting with a friend in the winter and we were in the woods for three solid days and he collapsed in the snow one day—we had been whispering all morning, and he said, in a normal shocking
voice, that not only had we not seen a caribou, we hadn’t seen another living thing. And it struck us that the entire animate world could have been destroyed and we would not have known it, out there in the field waiting for movement, for purpose.

The only evidence of civilization in Middle Arm was this recent forest fire buried under a cloak of snow. The bereft fields here were startling: the burnt hill and valley covered in snow, just the charred stumps climbing out of the white frozen ground. These were the shattered black trunks of trees harvested by Nobles, probably. I was trying to think what this vista reminded me of, and then I remembered the photos in the archives of battlefields on the Western Front, the destroyed land. That experience of the earth had marched right into the backyard of Tommy Ricketts, had turned this homeland into a black-and-white photograph. I was alone in this photograph like some lonely stag, at a site of birth and death, while the wind freshened and some serious snow began to whip into my face.