The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (59 page)

“You’ve kept it a secret all these years?” she said. “Just like me?” I nodded. Sobbing, she ran to me and she took me in her arms. “Oh, my boy, my poor boy,” she said. “I’m sorry. What you must have gone through since then. You were only, what, fifteen? There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of Mr. Mercer. Every month, since he died, I’ve been going by myself and putting flowers on his grave. To think that someone else knows, that someone else has always known. You can’t imagine, Joe, what a relief that is to me. I’m glad it’s you, Joe. God made sure that it was you.”

It was not the reaction I had expected. I hugged her hard but
broke our embrace and told her I could not stay for dinner after all, there was something urgent I had to do.

“I’ll pray for you,” she shouted as, my vision blurred with tears, I ran from the house. “I’ll pray for you and your side in the referendum. I won’t vote for you, Joe, but I’ll pray for you. Don’t tell a soul.”

I had my bodyguards take me to Fielding’s boarding-house. I was certain now that Hines knew who had sent the letter, and that probably it was Hines himself. For what reason he had done it, I had no idea, but I was sure he had. I felt elated. Whatever else Fielding had done, however much she preferred Prowse to me, she at least had not done
that
. I had been right all along about that if nothing else.

“There is a dreadful secret that involves a book and a man you never knew.” The “book,” the only book that had played a large part in my life, had to be the copy of Judge Prowse’s
History
from which the words comprising the letter to the
Morning Post
had been cut. And the man I never knew had to be Hines.

Of course I planned to use my discovery to discredit Hines, who I believed could do our cause quite a bit of harm, especially since the
Backhomer
was so widely read around the bay where our support was strongest. But then, too, there was Fielding, who had yet, in her columns, to declare herself either for or against Confederation, but had been attacking independents and confederates alike. She was read almost exclusively by townies, and it was in St. John’s that our support was weakest. I doubted that she would go on writing as she had been once I told her what I knew.

“Smallwood,” Fielding said when she opened her door. “With Cashin here just last week, I wondered how long it would be before you showed up.”

“Cashin was here?” I said. I knew he had been. She knew I knew.

“To ask me to support him,” Fielding said. “I regretfully declined. Come in, come in. Sit down and stay a while.”

I went inside. The room looked just as it had when I had last come to visit, the afternoon I sat beside her bed. Now we sat at her writing desk, which was swept bare of everything except a bottle and a glass.

“Hard at work?” I said.

“You seem fated to come begging favours from me, Smallwood,” Fielding said. I decided that for a while, I would let her think it was that simple.

“You know,” she said, “I would have come out in support of the Commission of Government, I offered to before the first referendum, but Commissioner Flinn told me that, in light of what I had written about the commission over the years, yet another encomium would be superfluous.”

“Still at it,” I said, pointing at the bottle on the table.

She smiled. “Compared with the old days, I’m a prohibitionist,” she said.

“You think Confederation is just another hare-brained scheme of mine, don’t you?” I said. “Like the piggery. Like the
Book of Newfoundland
.”

“Actually,” she said, “I had a somewhat longer list in mind.”

“We’ll win this time,” I said.

“Smallwood,” Fielding said, “much as I look forward to these once-every-five-years visits of yours — ”

“Aren’t you going to take a side in this thing, Fielding?” I said. “Don’t you care which way it goes?” I was going through the motions, waiting for my chance. “What did Cashin have to say?” I said.

“Oh, you know the major,” Fielding said. “ ‘Aren’t you going to take a side in this thing, Fielding? Don’t you care which way it goes?’ That sort of thing. I helped him drink the bottle of Scotch he brought with him, but more than that, I said, I cannot do.”

“What did Cashin say about me?” I said.

“He said that you were worse than Judas Iscariot, who at least had the decency to hang himself. But that’s as close as he came to insulting you, I swear.”

“I have nothing against the major,” I said. “He’s fighting for what he thinks is right. He’s not afraid to take a stand — ”

“Don’t go getting all homiletic on me, now,” said Fielding.

“It’s hard for a certain class of Newfoundlander to get ahead in Newfoundland, Fielding. Under the Commission of Government or responsible government, it always will be. Under Confederation, we can make a new start. We can make them pay for what they’ve done to us.”

“Who’s we? Who’s us? Who’s them?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Fielding. Look around you. You live in a hovel. You drink yourself unconscious every night. You write yet another column every day. And you think
I
repeat myself. Where do you think all this is leading? Journalism is a poorly paid, losing game. You’re not the daughter of a doctor any more, don’t kid yourself.”

“I know whose daughter I am,” she said.

“I wonder if you know the man who was in my mother’s house this afternoon? I think he knows you.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about, Smallwood?” Fielding said, a touch too loudly to sound convincing.

“He calls himself Tom Hines now,” I said. “I don’t know what he used to call himself. I worked for him in New York at a paper called the
Backhomer
, which he still publishes. I didn’t know then that he had changed his name. Apparently, he left Newfoundland, it would have been while you were in the San, I think, went to Boston and, over the next five years, nearly drank himself to death. Then, or so he said, he had a stroke, and because of it some sort of vision or conversion. He was baptized in the Pentecostal Church and left Boston for New York, where he became a minister. The paper was his ministry and his readers were his congregation. His flock, he called them. The
Backhomer
. You must have heard of it.”

“I know it,” Fielding said. “I glance at it from time to time, looking for ideas. There’s always a picture of this Hines fellow in it standing in front of this tiny church in Brooklyn — ”

“The Pentecostal Church of Newfoundland in Brooklyn,” I said. “As you know, the Pentecostals and the Catholics are against us. Hines is here just for the referendum, a few weeks to help defeat Confederation, then he’s going back. I think he could be quite — influential — if he isn’t stopped.”

“But what does all this have to do with me?” Fielding said.

“I think you know who Hines used to be.” I said. I took out from inside my jacket a keepsake copy of the
Backhomer
from the twenties. I opened it to the page that bore Hines’s picture and handed it to Fielding. She stared at it.

“By the time that picture was taken,” I said, “it would have been ten years since you’d seen him. Ten hard years. I dare say he had changed a lot, even aside from the stroke that paralysed one side of his face. Do you recognize him?”

“It’s … it’s not a very good picture,” Fielding said, keeping her eyes averted from mine. “It’s so old.”

“It’s the picture in which he looks most like he did when you saw him last,” I said. “You know him, don’t you?”

Fielding nodded. “He never had a beard back then. Never wore glasses. He never dressed like that. His face … his face is not — ”

“He told me you didn’t write that letter or send it to the
Morning Post
.”

Fielding stared at me, then hung her head. “I don’t know how you wormed it out of him,” she said. “But you’ve got all you need to stop him now. What do you need me for?”

I sighed. For this at least I did not have her to blame. I was not cursed with loving for life a woman who had once hated me enough for that. And I did still love her, for all that I had sworn otherwise when I saw Prowse jauntily emerge from her boarding-house that night. I had thought of her many times since then and had come to the realization that it was not the sum of her words and deeds but
some essential Fielding I was drawn to, who for me could never change and from loving whom I would never be reprieved.

I tried to look poker-faced, but when she glanced up she saw that I had tricked her. She smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Well, you must know something,” she said. “What is it?”

“When you were in the Harbour Light, you gave me the letter that Reeves gave you, remember? The
Morning Post
letter.”

I took out of my pocket an envelope and gingerly removed the letter, which was itself like an envelope now, for most of the words had fallen from the paper. I poured them out on the table, where, curled up and yellowed, they looked like pared fingernails.

“These words,” I said, “that were pasted on this paper came from the judge’s book. The
History
. I recognized one or two of the words and then I looked through my copy of the book and found the others. I’ve written out the text of the letter.” I handed her a folded piece of paper. She took it from me and read it, hands trembling, though I wondered if they always did by now. She shook her head.

“Ancient history,” she said.

“Why did you give me the letter?”

“I don’t know. To see if you’d notice what book the words were from. As a kind of joke. I didn’t know you had crossed paths with … Hines. I don’t know. I couldn’t stand to keep it. I couldn’t stand to see it destroyed. I knew that you would guard it with your life. And you were involved. Your life was affected by that letter, too —”

“Not like yours was —”

Fielding shrugged.

“What was his real name?” I said.

“You can find out if you want to,” she said.

“What happened at Bishop Feild?” I said. “Don’t you think you’ve kept this secret long enough?”

As if she had been asked to do so a thousand times and was at last relenting, she got up and went to the closet at the foot of
her bed, opened the door, reached up and took a box down from the shelf. She put it on the table, rummaged around for a while, then extracted a yellowed edition of the
History
. It was so tantalizingly close I almost grabbed it from her hands. I changed my mind again. She
was
guilty. But Hines had been involved. How satisfying it would be to see at last those little windows in the pages, ellipses where the words had been.

She sat there, staring at the book’s outer cover.

“There should be a word missing from the title page,” I said. She ignored me, went on staring at the book.

“For God’s sake, Fielding,” I said, “just open the damn book to the title page.”

Fielding stood up and hurled the book across the room, barely missing the window, all but falling down in the process. She collapsed into her chair and sat back, breathing heavily, her eyes closed. She reached out for her glass, felt for it, picked it up before I could help her and took a long swallow of Scotch, still breathing hard as she swallowed.

“You look at the God-damned book,” she said, pointing, eyes still closed, to where it lay, open but face down, beneath the window. “You’re the one who’s so obsessed with the past, not me. There it is, the literal past, Smallwood; the history of Newfoundland. Go take a peek.”

If she thought to shame me out of it by recommending it to me in this fashion, she had figured wrong. I crossed the room, picked up the book and opened it to the title page … from which were missing the words and letters I had expected would be missing.

I closed the book and placed it on the table in front of Fielding. She did not pick it up or even look at it, or at me. She slumped in her chair, cradled her glass with both hands against her stomach.

“Turn the front cover,” Fielding said, “and read aloud what you see.”

I picked up the book again and turned the front cover. In ink that had run slightly, some lines had been carefully, painstakingly
written. I read them aloud. “ ‘To Edward, on the day of your graduation from medical school. University of Edinburgh, May 9, 1901. Your loving parents, May and Richard Fielding.’ Your father’s book.”

“Keep reading,” Fielding said. Below the first inscription, there were several lines of illegible scrawl. And below those: “ ‘For Edward Fielding. My grandson tells me he and your daughter are good friends. Friends as you and I might have been had we gone to school together.’ ”

I felt myself reddening with resentment, embarrassment. I fought not to let it show.

“Actually, that’s not really from the judge,” Fielding said. “It’s from his son, Prowse’s father. Prowse took me to see the judge one day to have him sign my father’s copy of his book. He scrawled something we couldn’t make out, so Prowse took the book to his father and he wrote that inscription, a decipherment of the judge’s, he said, but I’m not so sure. The old man seemed pretty far gone to me. Prowse’s father even wrote a note of explanation to my father about how the judge had palsy or something and only his family could make out what he wrote.”

I suffered all the more keenly because I had to hide what I was feeling. So Prowse had done exactly the same thing with Fielding. Except he had not owned up to Fielding that the “translation” was his. I had long since known what Prowse was like, but I felt more betrayed by him now than I ever had. How many copies of the judge’s
History
were floating around with inscriptions forged by Prowse to the fathers of his friends?

“I believe your father has one just like it,” Fielding said.

I looked at her. She was not smiling. She was staring reflectively at her glass of Scotch. Prowse had told her. He would have taken her to see the judge before he took me and might therefore have convinced her that the inscription to her father was genuine, while the one to mine was just a joke. How many jokes had she and Prowse shared about me over the years?

“So where does Hines come into it?”