The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (27 page)

“How would Reeves know anything about it?”

“He knows everything now.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Passed on,” said Hines, in a faintly ironic tone, as if to say that Reeves’s passing was just another example of God having the last laugh. “Two years ago in England. We did an item on him in the paper. A lot of boys, men now, who had gone to Bishop Feild under him wrote to say how sorry they were to hear that he was dead.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“I have my reasons.”

“How did you find out all those things about me?”

“God makes me privy to knowledge that he withholds from others.” I knew there would be no point pursuing the matter further.

“I’m beginning to think it’s quite possible that you’re insane,” I said.

“God had us meet so I could tell you these things,” Hines said.

Exasperated, I got up and left his office. My head was in such a spin that I sat motionless at my desk until Maxine asked me what was wrong. I told her and Duggan about my visit to Hines’s church and his sermon, leaving out the part about the book.

“I wouldn’t pay much attention to anything Hines says,” Maxine said. “That stroke he had screwed up more than just his eyesight.”

I looked up the issue of the
Backhomer
in which Reeves’s obituary appeared. It was the standard stuff: a photograph of him, a laudatory account of his life, especially that part of it he had spent in Newfoundland. I looked up the next couple of issues in which letters from Feildians lamenting his death were printed. I was startled to see a letter from Prowse and letters from several other of the Townies who had always been offering to get up petitions protesting Reeves’s treatment of me and some of the other boys.

“I have often,” wrote Prowse, “since leaving Bishop Feild, had occasion to feel grateful for the lessons that I learned there from Headmaster Reeves, who, though strict, was one of the most scrupulously fair-minded men it has been my privilege to know.” The letter was signed David Prowse, Q.C. A lawyer now. And Porter a doctor. I wondered if Prowse had intended those of us who had known Reeves to read the letter ironically. Even so. I thought bitterly of Prowse. His treatment of Fielding. I read the other letters. There were some from the ’Tories, including one from “Slogger” Anderson, now a member of the House of Assembly. Fondly recalling days that never were. This was how men of the sort they aspired to be were supposed to remember and pay tribute to their teachers.

There was one thing I was certain I could not do and that was go on working for Hines. I was afraid of being pulled further into
that weird world of his in which there was no telling what was and was not true. And I had no doubt, despite his theatrics with the watch and his assertion that God would not extend his invitation twice, that he would go on trying to convert me. I decided to leave the
Backhomer
and vowed I would never set eyes on him again if I could help it. I decided that the next time I saw my mother, I would say nothing about my visit to the Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland in Brooklyn unless she brought it up, which I doubted, for it would horrify her to think of, let alone talk about, me running from the church with Hines’s sentence of damnation ringing in my ears. And she might not hear about it at all. Miss Garrigus, knowing how it would affect her, might not tell her. Or Hines, not wanting to come off looking like a failure, might not tell either one of them.

I said goodbye to Duggan and Maxine and asked them to tell Hines that I was not coming back and that I would no longer be staying at the Coop.

I spent only three more days in New York, three days and two nights sitting and sleeping on park benches, contemplating my next move. I decided to go back to Newfoundland, though I had no idea how I would go about it.

Socialism. Better to find a cause that, though perhaps less just, had some hope of succeeding, the nearest thing to socialism that people would accept, than to revel all your life in the righteousness of your defeat.

Fielding. Thoughts of her, now that I had made up my mind to go back home, were nagging at me constantly.

In my five years in New York, I had come to know quite well the captain of the Red Cross boat that each month docked in Brooklyn at Green Point. After our third or fourth meeting, long before I was conscious of missing Newfoundland, Captain Prowdy had pronounced mine the worst case of homesickess he had ever seen.

On the third day after my visit to the Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland, I went to Green Point, keeping an eye out for Hines,
who I knew sometimes turned out to bless the boat. I hung round, after the other Newfoundlanders who had come to meet the boat had left, to talk to Captain Prowdy. It was a cool, windy day, despite the time of year. The thought of another winter spent in the flophouses of New York had become unbearable. I held my coat together at my throat, my other hand clamped on my sod cap to keep it from blowing away.

“You look like you’re about done in, Joe,” Captain Prowdy said. His kind, sympathetic tone made me go weak in the knees. I described to him my situation and, before I could ask, he offered me a ride back to Newfoundland in the Red Cross boat. It would take a while, he said. We would go via Boston, Halifax and North Sydney to Port aux Basques. In all, the trip would take three days, and this was no passenger ship, so he hoped I had something like a bed waiting for me back in Newfoundland, for I would need it.

I felt so relieved, I fainted.

III
 
Field Day

And we believe a greater pack of knaves does not exist than that which composes the House of Assembly for the Colony. Take them for all in all, from the Speaker downwards, we do not suppose that a greater set of low-life and lawless scoundrels as Public men can be found under the canopy of heaven.

— from “The Newfoundland Royal Gazette,” 1834, as quoted in D. W. Prowse,
A History of Newfoundland

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twelve:

HERODOTUS

The evolution of the Newfoundland justice system culminates in 1792 with the establishment of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. John Reeves (deemed by Prowse “a most admirable selection” — judge not the judge, judge, lest ye be judged) becomes its first chief justice. Unfortunately, his objectivity is called into question in 1793, when he publishes the first history of the oldest colony and in it sets forth the thesis that England has for three hundred years been exploiting Newfoundland.

While we could hardly expect Chief Justice Reeves to write a history as authoritative as this one, since he did not have access to the enormous volume of documents, the perusal of which has been our happy task this twenty years, or to the succession of other Newfoundland histories from whose blunders we have learned so much; and while we do not wish to cast aspersions on the man whom some have called Newfoundland’s Herodotus, our
History
would fall short of being definitive in one respect did we not point out that John Reeves was a peevish crank who wrote an entire history of
Newfoundland just to get back at some West Country merchants who, he said, “are so miserly that, were I to allow it, they would be constantly contesting in my court some Newfoundlander’s right to breathe their air.”

What do we find upon reading Reeve’s successors, Anspach, Harvey, Pedley, Prowse, et al., but that they repeat in their histories this heinous lie of his as though it were the gospel truth. While we trust that our history refutes his thesis to the satisfaction of educated people everywhere, the fact that we cannot undo the harm he has done has on many occasions kept us from a good night’s sleep and given rise in our nature to an irritability that many have named as the reason they will never speak to us again.

Such are the travails of the historian who, because his predecessors are dead, must content himself with lying awake at night concocting fantasies in which he so humiliates them in debate that they pledge to burn all existing copies of their books. To such lengths are we driven by reading Reeves, as well as to tapping our foot on the floor, which we must refrain from doing, for there have been complaints and we cannot afford to be evicted from yet another boarding-house, there being so few left that we can afford, having had to forgo an income these past twenty years to make possible the writing of this book. That our history will sell in such volume as to compensate ten times over for the income lost while writing it seems little comfort now.

The Walk

I
TRIED TO CONVINCE MYSELF
that I was ready to return, that only by leaving had I learned to live here. But I wondered if I, too, had reached the limits of a leash I had not until now even known I was wearing and was, like my father, coming home not because I wanted to, but because I was being pulled back, yanked back by the past. For a panicked while, I wondered if I had made a fatal, irreversible mistake in departing from New York the way I had. I could not go back there now, no matter what.

Something strange happened when we drew near to Port aux Basques. There had been a storm the night before, and though the sky was breaking, the easterly wind had not gone round. The clouds were still racing westward and the rock-face on the headlands was wet with rain.

It was as if I saw, for a fleeting second, the place as it had been while I was away, and as it would be after I was gone, separate from me, not coloured by my past or my perceptions, but strange and real as towns seem when you pass through them on your way to somewhere else, towns that you have never seen before but that seem remindful of some not-quite-remembered other life. A kind
of hurt surged up in my throat, a sorrow that seemed to have no object and no cause, which I tried to swallow down but couldn’t. It was the old lost land that I was seeing, as if, like fog, the new found one had lifted. How long I stood there staring at it, I’m not sure, seconds or minutes. When I came out of whatever “it” was, the new found land was back and tears were streaming down my face. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but there was no one else on deck.

I had never seen the place that way when I lived there, not even when I was very young, and I somehow knew that I never would again, not if I went away for fifty years and came back for one last look before I died.

I lingered for a while at a boarding-house in Corner Brook, got a job freelancing for the local paper and helped start up a union at the paper mill, still feeling the pull of the mainland, knowing I was back for good but for some reason unable to undertake the last leg of my journey home, the train ride that would take me to St. John’s. Each night I resolved that the next day I would leave, and each morning I found some excuse to put off my departure. I did not know what I was looking for until it found me.

The sectionmen who maintained the cross-island railway had just got word of a coming pay cut and wanted to form a union in the hopes of having the cut rescinded. When they heard of my work with the union at the paper mill, they approached me and I agreed to help them.

I spent the next three days trying to figure out how I was going to organize seven hundred men who lived in section shacks strung out along the railway at one-mile intervals from St. John’s to Port aux Basques and all the branch lines in between. A meeting was impossible, as was getting their signatures on union cards by writing to them, since most of them could not read or write.

The only way I could think to do it was to walk the entire length of the railway, branch lines included, gathering signatures as I went. At first, it seemed out of the question. I doubted that I was
physically up to walking more than twenty miles a day for three months. Some anti-unionists at the boarding-house had nicknamed me Skab, a shortened version of Skin-and-Bones (and, of course, the last thing any union organizer would want to be nicknamed), and what would be left of me after I walked seven hundred miles I tried not to imagine.