The Big Why (7 page)

When I left, when Jenny Starling saw that I was certainly to return to Kathleen, she relaxed. She began to smoke. She loosened up. She became herself because she had lost everything. In that becoming of her self I was glad to have chosen Kathleen. I wanted a clean woman. There was a fixed ideal in my head, and I recognized the hypocrisy of my own moral waning. But also there was a keen realization that I had not known Jenny. She had kept her self from me because she felt that if I’d known who she was, I would never have been with her for a minute. There was something strong in my character that made people act a role they hoped I’d admire. A strong character does not mean a champion of moral high ground. It is alluring but damaging. And here she was, drinking heavily, smoking, her stomach relaxed and big. Surprisingly, she became beautiful.

The train home to New York from Boston. Speed damaged the trees and small towns. Then dusk destroyed the world. I told Kathleen everything, except the fact that on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday morning I had not permitted this woman who had sent the letter to unbutton my sleeves and clench the back of my hair and lift me. That I did not lift her and turn my hips to search. This denial of sex seemed paltry, and I could not use it as a confirmation of my love for Kathleen. It seemed like a position, and if I had done that, it was only to use it as collateral against the guilt of previous misdeeds. I would admit to the child, I would accept him. But all Kathleen said to me was, You shaved.

What.

Youve shaved.

She made me throw out all of my underwear.

I remember the waste of that. She closed her ears to my plea for mercy. At my attempt to be good but the boat out of Boston was delayed. I said I’d had no idea that Jenny would come down to see me off. She hauled out my postcards from the scouting trip. Omissions, Kathleen said, are horrible. They are the worst forms of lying. For they harbour the scent of truth. About the boat’s delay and Jenny’s send-off she said, A coincidence is never that impressive to someone else.

Kathleen did not know what to do. We had a child, Rocky, and she was pregnant too. Kathleen hated the thought of another woman pregnant when she was pregnant. How can a man make two women pregnant at once? And claim to love? Does he think he is a god? She did not know what to do. At times it was only her goodness that prevented her from hating me.

I was frantic. I wanted her. I wanted everything about her. What I wanted was the form of life I was living. I wanted to be married.

She had to be away from me, she said. Would I book a train, upstate. Her parents in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was dragging her parents into this. But what did I expect. How long do you need, I said.

I dont know.

She was gone a week. I wrote and called her. Rocky had a fine time. He loves his grandparents. They have a farm. He was pulling up fresh new carrots clotted with soil.

We will give her, Kathleen said, the proceeds of the house.

She did not say her name.

Yes.

And our savings.

Okay.

I dont want you to have anything to do with her.

Agreed.

And youre emotionally stupid.

I admitted to this.

So that ended our first attempt at Newfoundland.

Was I relieved? I had salvaged things. I’d realized that my own ambition, let’s call it Rockwell Land, was tied up not with a place but more with the idea of who I was. The primary things had been salvaged. The family. My son, Rocky, my pregnant wife. New York. I could live in New York. I did some drafting for Ewing and Chappell. I pushed my T-square away from the plans for a confident bank and exhaled. I worked for three solid years. We had two more children, girls. Jenny had her son, George. I was lucky. My friends were married. The frame of marriage. I needed the structure of it. I was a crazy man who needed parameters. A wife. I liked my wife.

Three years passed like this and my wife grew closer to me. But there was something in the new form of her closeness — she kept a veneer. I had hurt her and this was the result. It was not anything we spoke of, but it shone on her skin. Kathleen was self-conscious around me. A little formal. And then I remembered how she’d been when that letter arrived from Boston. She had laid the envelope on the floor while I did push-ups, as if she’d known of the affair all along. As if nothing I did surprised her and she was above it. She knew better than me. She had a good spirit, whereas I had the devil in me. She judged me but loved me for the devil. It was the one thing she was superior about, and I was a coward to mention it. I was glad she was the way she was. I did not want a confrontation. It meant rubble. A confrontation meant everything that we were would crumble. So I took it. I accepted it like a punch to the ribs to protect the face. Faces. I hated the way my wife’s face remained steady, and I knew she had an ugly face when it fell into emotion (we all do) and she would not let me see her face ugly. It wasnt the affair or the baby but the way we dealt with it that made me think we could not be together forever.

I thought of all this after walking with Rupert down to the Bartlett tunnel. He was offloading a floater. The tunnel is about eighty feet long, through solid rock. At the far end is Molly’s Island, and around it the green-and-white thrusting of the tide onto rocks, spraying up forty feet. We took a pony with us. The waves pushed in and rose, making the pony nervous. The men off the floater shook hands with us. Flour, roofing tar, new barrels, and pipe for a water pump. So, Rupert said, rumour has it you were in Newfoundland once before.

He had heard something. I tried coming, I said, to New-foundland, yes. Four years ago. Soon after meeting your brother.

We loaded the cart and pointed the pony back at the tunnel.

You had plans, he said, for an art school.

I wanted to bring artists and students here.

You met Morris.

Morris. Yes, Morris, the prime minister. He loved the idea. How’d you know that.

Oh, I know Morris.

So it was Morris who’d told him. We were walking back through the tunnel, and the underground aspect of Rupert’s questions made me feel like I was being interrogated.

I guess youve found out about me then, I said.

A thing or two.

I decided to be open with Rupert. He was being nice to me, so why not confess. Morris told me that there are good ideas and bad ideas, and that this one, to make a university in Newfoundland, was good.

Yes, Rupert said. That man’s mouth never goes slack.

A promise, I said to Rupert, can shape you even when the promise is broken.

You went to Burin.

The prime minister suggested it. I liked the name. It’s the name of an engraving tool.

Rupert: The bays are good there. Ice-free in winter. There are good storerooms on the water in Burin. Unlike here.

Yes, what is it with this tunnel.

We dont use it much now. But we needed it back when the fishery was good. Say fifty years ago. All this harbour was blocked with boats and wharves. Our claim was this here rock, and we got tired of lugging our gear around it.

He smacked the rock with his hand. You were ambitious.

To Rupert it must have been as if some external circumstance too chagrining had upset my distinct vision. And he would have been right. It was because I did not want to men-tion Jenny Starling in Boston. I did not, even now, want to mention it to you. I helped coax Rupert’s pony with his heavy load up to Hawthorne Cottage. We unloaded her.

Even though I do not believe in God. Even though this. When I was alone in that house. When I was waiting for Tom Dobie to join me. While I waited for the coffee pot to heat. Even though I believed in experiences and objects and was a man who believed that a good, godless life can be lived on earth, even so I prayed to God. I knelt and prayed. I prayed to the fireplace, which was praying north. I asked God to make me strong and make me love the things that were good. I wanted to love Kathleen. I wanted her to be enough and to be a vessel through which all the things of the world could be funnelled. I believed in children and friends. The fact that we do not live on, I did not let this depress me.

I met up with Rupert Bartlett down at Chafe’s. I was buying supplies: nails, oakum, food. Bud Chafe told me that people did not usually buy on a day-to-day basis. They bought provisions, stores. They bought barrels and sacks and tubs. They sold the same way. They sold nothing for eleven months and then on one afternoon in the fall they hammered out a price for their fish. When the fish ran good, Rupert said, the price fell. When the fish were poor, the price was a little better. Bud Chafe smiled. Just a little bit better.

Rupert said his brother was back in St John’s on board the
Morrissey
.

I said, I thought he was captaining a collier. I thought he was in Holyrood.

Yes, but the
Morrissey
was put in dry dock to have her keel caulked. So Bob is there and soon he’ll be captaining a collier.

You mean he hasnt left yet.

The news was wrong. He’ll be here in a jiffy.

Bartlett would offload coal — I had ordered seven tons of the coal. When I made my order Bud Chafe’s pencil stopped.

Seven tons. Let’s see. Youve come in here and tried to buy four small potatoes, one onion, and seven tons of coal.

I said, I’m sick of being cold. My family is coming and by God I want to stoke that house like a furnace room. Seven tons, I figure, will do me a year.

I can sell a gallon of spuds. A gallon’s as small as I go.

By the time Bartlett rounded Conception Bay the ice had come in. We saw the collier, black with soot, at the ice edge. I watched through binoculars. Men coated in coal dust, pointing out a direction for Bartlett to steam through. He was trying to make it to the Bartlett wharf and tunnel. You heard the stokers encouraging the engine, the steam pressure build, black plumes belching from the sole stack, and you knew he was ramming her through the ice. I passed the glasses to Tom Dobie.

Tom: He won’t do it.

Men from Brigus were hired to help the crew punch through two hundred yards of ice. I got an afternoon at it. They used saws and pikes and poles to lever out the ice pans. They gripped ropes and tracked the collier through the cut channel. They were halfway into port when Bartlett got impatient. He waved them off. I had not seen him in action before. The men drop-ped their ropes and jogged away from the front of the collier. Bartlett guided the collier back to the mouth of the harbour and gave her full throttle. His momentum split the ice and carried him in a few boatlengths. A seam of black opened up ahead of him around Molly’s Island. He was fine and skilful until he got about a hundred yards from the tunnel entrance. He could have set her there and towed the coal ashore on sleds and ponies. But he ground the collier deep into the pack and wiggled her furious arse. A pan of ice nosed up and pushed a neat, silent hole through the neck of the bow. The collier sat there on top of the ice, quiet now, with a wide wound plunged through the side of her. Then she slipped down to sea level. Bob Bartlett and three crew stepped over the side and walked ashore, as if that was that. The crew all slunking backwards, watching the collier lean to port and sink, heavy with coal. Bartlett refused to look, just walked straight to the Bartlett tunnel and got a hand up onto the wharf apron.

I watched the deck creak through the ice, the water curl over the bow and lick at the masts. I had ordered seven tons of that coal. Now on the bottom of the harbour.

I was out of wood and getting cold. I was still sleeping in a tent in the upstairs bedroom, the room above the stove. A green canvas, heavy. Just to keep the heat in.

Wet sleet was on the kitchen window. Night. It looked like a fringe of silver tinsel. This was a time when I thought I was a good artist. Before I knew for sure that I was mediocre. Or is it middlebrow. What is the difference. It is true that I wrote letters to cubists, telling them they were wrong. Art should make you interested in life, not in art. Art is a by-product of living. I was against many things, and I believed the way to be against them was to rant and argue and never be conciliatory. I loathed diplomacy.

I slept in the tent in a room on the second floor. Bad to worse, I thought.

I went over to the Bartletts’ to see Bob. Rupert showed me in. The Newfoundland men were short, like me. Except when sitting down. When they sat down they appeared taller.

Bob Bartlett was talking to Bud Chafe. Bud’s son Charlie was still missing in the Arctic. Bob was saying he was all right, he would be fine, Bud. He just needed to get a ship back to Wrangel Island. If the men kept their heads Charlie would be all right. Bud said, Is it money. I have money.

Bartlett came over to me. He had his mother on his arm.

My best girl, she is.

And we shook hands. His big tough hand.

So what made you come finally. Besides me. New York to Brigus is twelve hundred miles.

I’ve wanted, I said, more than anything to live on the ocean.