The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (60 page)

“Hines wrote the letter,” Fielding said.

“How long have you known?” I said.

“I knew it all along,” said Fielding.

“Why did he write it?” I said.

“The old Hines did things like that,” she said, “just to keep himself amused. Drunks need more than booze to keep themselves amused, which you know as well as I do.”

“Then why did you confess to writing the letter?” I said.

“I confessed because … because I panicked. Because Hines said he was going to tell Reeves that Prowse did it.”

“Prowse?” I said. She nodded.

“The past Hines put behind him,” Fielding said. “The past he’s always writing about. Prowse and I were part of that. We used to get Hines to buy booze for us. There was a whole other life outside the gates of Bishop Feild and Bishop Spencer, Smallwood. Hines told us, Prowse and me, about the letter. He had borrowed the book from me — I should have known he was up to something. We thought it was funny at first, a great trick. Until he told us who he planned to blame it on.”

Fielding reached for her glass, but her hand was shaking so badly she could not pick it up.

“It would just have been Prowse’s word against Hines,” I said. “Reeves would have believed Prowse, not some drunk —”

“Hines knew about us,” Fielding said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Exactly what you think I mean,” said Fielding.

I felt myself turn crimson with hatred for Prowse. My face was burning. “
Us
? You and Prowse? While you were still in school?”

She said nothing.

“But so what if Hines knew about Prowse and you. He had no proof, it would still have been his word —”

“He was a photographer for the
Morning Post
,” she said. “We let him take a picture of us once. Not doing anything. Just lying there. We thought that was pretty funny, too.”

I could not look her in the eye.

“How did you know Hines wouldn’t just go ahead and blackmail Prowse into confessing, too?”

“I took a chance,” she said. “I figured at the worst I would save Prowse from having to take the blame all by himself.”

“You were that determined to stick by him?”

“And at the best — Well, there was no point getting both of us in trouble.”

“He should have confessed, too,” I said.

“I know that now,” Fielding said. “But Prowse is Prowse.”

“I’ve sometimes thought you confessed for my sake —”

She said nothing, looked away.

“And all the while, when you and Prowse were supposedly on the outs, all the while Prowse was treating you like dirt at Bishop Feild —”

“As I said, Prowse is Prowse. It ended at some point. I can’t remember exactly when.”

“Well, I think I’ve got enough now to silence Hines,” I said.

“And what if he won’t be silenced? What if you threaten him him with going public with what you know and he says go ahead? I know men like Hines. They like nothing better than informing on the men they used to be, no matter what the crime.”

“If he says go ahead,” I said angrily, “then I go ahead.”

“And then what happens to Prowse?” she said. “Have you thought of that? That picture of us may still exist, for all you know.” I wanted to ask her why it should matter in the least to either of us what became of Prowse. But I was afraid of the answer. And I knew that if I got going about him, it would all come out. The night I watched him from outside her boarding-house. The light in her room. On, off. On, off. Our afternoon together.

“It won’t come to that,” I said. “Hines will back down.”

“You’re willing to take that chance? Would you be willing if
your
livelihood,
your
reputation was on the line?”

“I have nothing in my past —” I was going to say “to be ashamed of” and I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew it. “I have nothing in my past that they can use against me that they haven’t already used. They’ve said I flunked out of Bishop Feild; they’ve said a thousand times that my father is a drunkard. And don’t forget, Prowse is a prominent confederate. Having him discredited could hurt our cause. If I thought there was any real chance of that —”

“Smallwood,” Fielding said, “I’ve never asked you for anything before and I’ll never ask for anything again. Please, don’t confront Hines with this.”

“I have to,” I said. “Maybe even if I thought there was a risk, I’d do it. Confederation is too important. But there is no risk.”

Her hand steady now, she sighed, raised the glass to her mouth and drank its contents. She turned away from me. “Then at least promise me you won’t tell Prowse you know about all this.”

“I’ll promise you that. I have no reason to tell him anyway.” I paused, my eyes full of spite-hot tears. “You’ve loved him all along,” I said. “You’ve never stopped, never —”

She picked up the bottle of Scotch and hurled it with all her might against the wall. It smashed into tiny shards that went flying past my head and the Scotch sprayed out across the wallpaper in a map-like stain. The force of the throw carried Fielding to the floor, onto her hands and knees. I bent to help her up.

“GET OUT,” she screamed. “GET OUT.”

A column she must have written before my visit ran the next day, but the day after that the first panel on the third page of the
Telegram
was filled with something else.

It was soon going round that Fielding had “disappeared” without a word to anyone as to where she was going. I checked with her
landlord, who told me that he did not know where she was but that he expected her back, for she was still paying the rent on her room, which contained all of her belongings. All that occurred to me at the time was that it seemed I now had one less worry, namely, that at some point Fielding would come out in favour of independence by making Confederation the sole target of her columns.

I went early the next morning to the boarding-house where, my mother had told me, Hines was staying. I was informed he had already checked out. It occurred to me he might be hiding from me, and perhaps he was, until the next ship sailed for the mainland. For it turned out that I was right, not Fielding, though I am sure Fielding attributed Hines’s sudden departure from Newfoundland to my confronting him with what I knew.

Hines never spoke a word in Newfoundland against Confederation, nor was there any partisan mention of the subject in subsequent issues of the
Backhomer
. He had known, that afternoon in my mother’s house, that I had blundered onto his secret. There were things, it seemed, that not even Hines could afford to have attributed to his former self, things for which he did not think his congregation would forgive him.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty-Nine:

THE ODE NOT TAKEN

Boyle develops a love/hate relationship with Newfoundland and, never able to resolve this ambivalence, writes two odes, which we here alternate, verse by verse.

When sun rays crown thy pine-clad hills,
And summer spreads her hands,
When silvern voices tune thy rills,
We love thee, smiling land.

(When men do drown for lack of gills,
And, dead, wash up on land,
Their wives their silvern tears do spill,
And keen and wring their hands.)

When spreads thy cloak of shimm’ring white,
At winter’s stern command,
Thro’ shortened day and star-lit night,
We love thee, frozen land.

(When shrouds of snow, beguiling white,
At winter’s cold command,
Do shorten day and darken night,
Where art thou, frozen land?)

When blinding storm gusts fret thy shore,
And wild waves lash thy strand,
Thro’ spindrift swirl and tempest roar,
We love thee, wind-swept land.

(When rotting sculpins line thy shore,
When capelin swarm thy strand,
The stench is such one hears men roar,
“Thou reekest, wind-swept land.”)

As loved our fathers, so we love,
Where once they stood we stand,
Their prayer we raise to heav’n above,
God guard thee, Newfoundland.

(As lived our fathers, we live not,
Where once they knelt, we stand.
With God nor King to guard our lot,
We’ll
guard thee, Newfoundland.)

As Loved Our Fathers

I
T WAS ALL
I
COULD DO
to keep myself from running to the basilica and kissing the feet of Archbishop Roche when he denounced Confederation in the
Monitor
, the official Catholic newsletter. The archbishop, in editorial after editorial, said that Confederation amounted to treason, a treason that would betray the men who built our country and cause the country itself to become “tarnished” by the Canadian, royalist, socialistic, dole-dependent way of life against which we could protect ourselves only through continued independence. The baby bonus, he said, was “an incentive to fornication.”

I knew these editorials would galvanize support for Confederation among fence-sitting Protestants, who outnumbered fence-sitting Catholics two to one. The Orange Lodge distributed to all its members a letter denouncing the Catholic Church for denouncing Confederation. I myself called the Catholic Church the tail that wags the dog.

What had seemed like just another election now began to seem more like civil war. It was as if only with the entry of the
churches into the campaign did people finally realize what was at stake, only then were they convinced, or fooled into believing, that
everything
was. The Catholic appeal to patriotism and the Protestant call to “bring to naught” the attempt of the Catholic Church to “dominate Newfoundland” did more than just stir up sectarianism. It forced us to face our long-buried demon of identity.

We confederates took out on the independents the shame and guilt we could not admit, even to ourselves, to feeling, and the independents were all the more fanatically for independence the more they doubted, the more tempted to join our side, they felt.

In St. John’s, days before the second referendum, flags of every kind flew everywhere, as if bunting week had been declared. The raising of the pink, white and green on one side of a street provoked the raising of the Union Jack on the other, though it was by this time no longer clear which faction was favoured by which flag. No longer did neighbourhood vie with neighbourhood, or street with street, or even house with house. The population was as atomized as it could get. It was not uncommon to see, on the same house, one window with a poster exhorting passers-by to vote Confederation and another exhorting them to vote for independence. In houses all over the city, mealtimes were like that scene in Joyce’s book where Stephen’s aunt and Stephen’s father argue bitterly about Parnell.

Grown-ups who knew that, unlike them, children could travel unmolested through the streets, put them up to marching in parades, beating drums and blowing horns, stalling traffic.

One such parade in support of independence went right past our offices. There was a child on each sidewalk and one in the middle holding aloft a street-wide, slogan-bearing banner that blocked my view of the chanting horde behind them. In the rows of houses on either side of the street, grown-ups leaned from upper-storey windows, looking down as if some sort of coup by children that they were powerless to stop was under way. The children sang a verse from a song written by the “antis” in 1869:

Would you barter the rights that your fathers have won?

No! Let them descend from father to son.

For a few thousand dollars’ Canadian gold,

Don’t let it be said that our birthright was sold.

They sang, to the air of “A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing,” a song called “The Hero of 1948.”

Our skies above look brighter, our paper mills now hum,

There’s iron ore in Labrador, enough till Kingdom come;

The U.S.A. she wants our fish, the long dark night is o’er,

So don’t surrender, Newfoundland, don’t give up, Labrador.

A country-wide grudge match had been declared, an arbitrary means of settling old scores, old grievances that had nothing to do with politics.

Ostensibly the wager was the future of the country. But really it was the question of who for all time could claim that they had “won.” What it was they’d won seemed not to matter, as long as the winners could feel they had been vindicated. Here was a contest that you could never live down losing and that over winning you could gloat forever.

Spouses, brothers, sisters, parents, children, churches, unions were divided, not along religious lines and not, though they would have told you otherwise, because their politics were different.

Throughout the second campaign there prevailed a kind of anarchic, atavistic party, like a Mardi Gras or mummer’s festival without the masks. Under the exemption, the amnesty conferred by such occasions, anything was permitted. No one gave any mind to how things would be afterwards, when this exemption had been lifted, when the issue had been settled, for it seemed at the time that the fight, having become an end in itself, would last forever.