The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (30 page)

“What happened to you?” I said. “What are you doing out here?”

She told me her story over dinner that night, while I was wolfing down a plate of fried potatoes.

“The summer I went back home, I found out I had TB. My father diagnosed it, though for a while he couldn’t believe his own diagnosis. People like us weren’t supposed to get it; it was supposed to be the malnourished, unhygienic, filth-ridden poor. People like you. His sister, my aunt Dot, has never forgiven me for disgracing the family by coming down with an unrespectable disease. Nor him for diagnosing it, for that matter. Or perhaps it’s for not dying that they can’t forgive me, for coming out of the sanatorium and reappearing at gatherings where I was supposed to pretend people didn’t know what I’d been sick with. My aunt Dot still swears that my father was wrong and that I caught TB
after
going to the San, caught it from the other patients. My father has been a model of light-heartedness ever since she raised the possibility.

“Tuberculosis is not nearly as class-conscious as my relatives. It doesn’t arbitrarily exclude the rich. It’s really very democratic. It didn’t hold my having my own room at the San against me, like the other patients did. A better-dressed tubercular they’d never seen. ‘A
doctor’s daughter in the San,’ they said. ‘It just goes to show.’ TB didn’t worry about being ostracized for consorting with the likes of me. It tried to kill me just as hard as it tried to kill the others.

“At any rate, within a year I looked like you. Well, maybe not that bad, more like an X-ray. But I’m better now. I’m still in quarantine, mind you. That’s why I live out here all by myself. To keep from infecting people.”

I fell for that one, too, there flashing across my mind an image of the inside of the place I had heard so much about but never seen. The San. Rows of beds. Wheelchairs. Crutches. It’s a wonder I did not ask her if, before her father’s diagnosis, she had found herself lying on her back a lot.

Fielding laughed at my distress and assured me that she was not contagious. The only lasting effect of her illness, she said, was that as the result of surgery, her left leg was and always would be perceptibly thinner and shorter than her right, causing her to walk with a limp and necessitating that she wear on her left foot a thick-soled orthopedic boot.

I looked at her. It was hard to believe she was only twenty-six years old. There were deep shadows beneath her eyes. She, too, was little more than skin and bone, and the frame on which the skin was stretched was not as large as I once fancied it must be. I could not reconcile this body with the one I associated with her name.

The man’s clothes she wore must have belonged to someone the size of the old Fielding, for they hung as loosely on her as mine did on me, though she still seemed she would be twice my size if only she would stand erect. She had acquired, in addition to her limp, a slight stoop that began from the waist. There was something, not only in the way she spoke and gestured and moved about the shack, but also in her very posture, as if she were mocking the disease that had tried so earnestly to kill her, embellishing its effects.

She was drinking more than ever before, making up, she said, for the two years she had spent in the San, where drinking was
strictly prohibited and where consequently she had consumed only half as much per day as she was used to. She drank from the same silver flask. I never saw her refill it, nor did I see any bottles, empty or otherwise, about. Her silver-knobbed cane stood in a corner by the door. She saw me looking at it.

“I take it with me when I go walking on the barrens,” she said. I tried without success to picture that.

“So what do you do here?” I said.

“I work for the railway,” she said. “I started out just living here. I heard there was this abandoned section shack, and I asked if I could rent it. It’s not the sort of place the doctors, my father included, wanted me to go, but I thought if I lived in a place like this I could get some writing done. I’m writing a history of Newfoundland.

“Anyway, the spring before last, I was hired with some other women to tar the railway ties. It grew from there. I had more free time than the other women, not having a family to look after. The men, most of whom are very sweet and treat me like a widow who’s been forced by her husband’s death to eke out some sort of living on her own, asked the railway to hire me to do what they consider to be nuisance work. I tar the ties, not just along my section, but for miles on either side of it. I’m also a spotter; I patrol the tracks, looking for blockages, and clear them if I can. I shore up the railway bed with gravel now and then.

“The men — I’m a half-foot taller than some of them — they do the major work, the things they pretend to think I’m not strong enough to do, or wouldn’t know how to do properly. They won’t let me help them lift the rails when they need replacing. They know I’m a townie and a doctor’s daughter. They call me Miss Fielding.”

I wondered how she was regarded by the wives of the section-men, the daughter of a St. John’s doctor out here on the Bonavista branch line, alone. It was hard to picture her, as she was presently constituted, fending for herself, chopping the wood I had seen
stacked up behind the shack, pumping the trolley, tarring the ties, shoring up the railway bed.

“What are you doing out here, Fielding?” I said. “What are you playing at, being poor or being a man?”

“I have no desire to be the latter,” she said. “And as for the former, I don’t have to play at it. I accept no money from my father. And I’m not paid very much, even by railway standards. Far less than the men.”

“You’ve changed,” I said and heard in my voice a tenderness I had wanted to suppress. She shook her head, as if she did not want, would not permit me, to talk about New York.

“As you can see,” she said, “I am not at all embittered by the events of the past few years; on the contrary, the experience has so renewed my faith in humankind that I have forsworn the use of irony until the day I die.”

“Whatever brought you here,” I said, “you’ve been here far too long.”

“I think my chances of a relapse here are actually less than they would be in St. John’s, where I couldn’t afford to live very well. I made up for catching TB when I told my relatives I was going to be a writer. They were overjoyed, for as you know, no family that can’t count among its progeny at least one unpublished writer is taken seriously in St. John’s. And then when they found out I was supporting my writing by working on the railway as a sort of sectionman, well, you can imagine how thrilled my father was, his daughter pursuing not just one but two of the most preferred professions. I’m all my aunts and uncles and cousins talk about these days.”

I had never in my life heard such a steady stream of irony. I don’t think she spoke more than half a dozen straightforward sentences during the three days I spent convalescing in her shack.

She told me that it was her bed I had been sleeping in and that I could go on doing so until I left, while she would sleep on the cot in the room she called her study, not because she wanted me
to have the better bed, but because she did not want me in her study, her
sanctum sanctorum
, as she called it, “the San” for short; a sign bearing that name was nailed to the door, as if to ward people off.

I did not catch so much as a glimpse of the inside of her tiny study, for she kept the door closed and padlocked while I was on my feet and did not go in there to work until after I had gone to bed. What I had thought in my delirium was the sound of ice pellets was the tapping of her typewriter.

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, O
CTOBER
21, 1925

Dear Smallwood:

How smug you’d be if you knew that I’ve been writing in my journal to you ever since. Not every night, but many. More nights than not
.

Now, with you in the next room, it feels as though I’m talking to you through a knothole in the wall. Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus sleeps while Thisbe speaks words that Pyramus will never hear
.

I have known for weeks that you were coming. I heard it first from the woman in the mile house next to mine. “There’s a man named Smallwood walking clear across the tracks,” she said. “Branches and all. To unionize the sectionmen.” You couldn’t just walk the main line. No. You had to walk the branches, too. I’ve been getting unasked-for updates on your progress ever since. “He’s twenty miles outside Deer Lake. Not a lick of meat left on his bones.” What do you mean
left?
I felt like saying. “Nor a lick of leather on his boots.” Phonse at Six Mile House has been charting your progress on the map on his kitchen wall. Smallwood is coming
.

My homecoming was momentous, too. The island appeared, then vanished, then appeared again as stars do when you look at them too long. I thought it was an optical illusion. I didn’t know that my eyes were opening and closing. I must already have been sick when I left New York. The woman beside me at the rail sent her husband down below to get some water. “You’re burning up, my dear,” she said, holding the back of her hand against my cheek. How cool it felt. I told her I was fine. The sea gale was blowing full in my face. All around me passengers were wearing scarves and hoods. How could I be burning up? But neither she nor her husband left my side until we docked in St. John’s, where they led me down the gangplank, at the bottom of which my father was waiting
.

He was so startled by how much I had changed that the first thing he did, before he even said hello, was take my pulse. People gave us a wide berth while he was doing it. I didn’t even know I had changed until I saw it in his face. It had been months since I had seen anyone who knew how I used to look. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” I said. “I should never have let you leave,” he said
.

He took me straight from the boat to his consulting room. And from there straight to the San. I hadn’t seen St. John’s in two years. Nor would I see it again for another two
.

The first few months were not so bad. At Christmas, I lined up with the others and read a message to my father that was broadcast on the radio. He was a chest doctor, but he did not work at the San — it’s a wonder anybody did — and not even for him could they relax the rules of quarantine. We wrote each other letters. Mine I dictated to a nurse so that no paper I had touched would leave the place. My stenographer, my father called her. She always wrote postscripts to my letters, asking him to admonish me for bad behaviour. “Where she gets her licker no one knows.”

But after Christmas it got worse. In July, they told him that if he wanted to see me one last time, he should do it soon. But
he did not come. He said later he thought that if he came to see me, I would know that I was dying and might not fight as hard to live. Was this really why he stayed away? He could see I had my doubts. I still do. But he might have been telling the truth. Maybe if he
had
come to visit me I
would
have died
.

I saw you, Smallwood, from my study window when you knocked before the storm. I was sure the snow would hold off long enough for you to make it to the next mile house. And even after it started, I sat here hoping it would turn to rain. I was told by men who are not often wrong about the weather that it would. What if I had waited too long and been unable to find you? Another secret I would have to keep. It reminded me of the nights I sat up writing while you were stranded in the ice on the S.S
. Newfoundland.
The very absurdity of you surviving that storm just to perish in one on dry land made me sure the snow would change to rain. On the other hand, a one-man catastrophe might be more your style
.

You must have thought of the
Newfoundland
yourself. No one’s shoulder to place your hand upon. Nor anyone to place his hand on your shoulder. If I hadn’t found you, I’d have gone to the next mile house and asked for help. Assuming I could have found it
.

I found mine because of something Phonse told me when I first came here. There would be days and nights, he said, when the fog or snow would be so bad that I would miss my signal lantern. I hadn’t thought it was possible and took his advice only when he insisted. I fastened a ship’s bell above the door and on the nail that held it hung a coil of rope. When I set out to find you, I tied the rope to the rail on the far side of the track
.

Coming back, it seemed I had gone twice as far as I should have and still not tripped the bell. I wondered if I had tripped it and not heard it. I thought about going back, then decided that as I was pumping into the wind with half a passenger aboard, I would give it ten more minutes. A few minutes later I heard it. A
muffled clanging above the roar of the wind. A beckoning bell. I groped around until the rope I could not see was in my hands
.