Mundy Pond

FOR YEARS, THE ONLY religious symbol in the house had been a plain wooden cross above the stove. A token wooden cross, just in case. My parents hedging their bets.

She had never insisted we go to church, so everyone but me was quite surprised when suddenly my mother became a student of religions, “reading up” on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps.

“What are you up to?” my father said, when she started bringing home catechisms, prayer books, hymn books, missals, Bibles of every denomination. They lay scattered all over the house, publications of the Church of England, the Church of England (Reformed Episcopal), the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic Church. She even read up on what she had formerly dismissed as “crank” religions, such as Christian Science and the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

She did not just read, she went to services as well, often taking me with her because, in spite of her newly awakened curiosity, she seemed to be afraid to go alone. I believe I saw the inside of at least one church of every denomination in St. John’s. My mother sat or stood, an aloofly critical observer, listening, watching not just the ministers but the congregations. She was like some dispassionately shrewd shopper who would forgo buying altogether if she had to.

She spoke most favourably of the New World evangelical religions.

“I am looking for the real thing, Joe,” she said, “the genuine article, and I have yet to find it.”

One Sunday afternoon, she told me she had a secret that she would tell me if I promised to keep it to myself. I thought I was about to hear about the book and Mr. Mercer. I promised and she told me she had been “convicted of sin” and would soon be “saved.” She told me that she had, that past Tuesday, been converted in the Bethesda Mission of the Pentecostal faith on New Gower Street, the Ark, as it was called, and was to be, the following Sunday, one of forty baptized by immersion in a body of water on the heights of the city known as Mundy Pond.

“I don’t know what came over me, Joe,” she said. “I went to the mission just to see what all the fuss was about, everybody was talking about the Bethesda Mission and this woman, this Miss Garrigus, but something happened, Joe, something happened.”

It must have been clear from my expression that I was frightened and did not want to hear what had happened, for she stopped speaking and turned away from me, putting her hands over her face. I wanted to keep my distance from this religious fervour for fear of coming down with it myself, losing myself to it. I was terrified of the idea that something more powerful than my own will might be moving me along, or would if I gave in to it. I could see already that she would never wholly be mine as she had been before and would never think of me as wholly hers.

The head of the Pentecostal Church in any diocese was called the overseer and had to be a man, but up to now no suitable men had been attracted to the Ark, so Miss Garrigus was unofficially the overseer, with the only sacrament she could not perform being marriage. My mother hung a large portrait photograph of Miss Garrigus above the front-room fireplace. In it, Miss Garrigus wore her hair up, piled high above her head, with a cleft down the middle so that it seemed to form the letter M. She wore a black dress with a perforated-lace collar, from which there hung a cross-shaped lace doily. One hand rested on a cane, the other held open on her lap a large black Bible. She stared out from the photograph disdainfully, unnervingly. She looked as though she could size you up in half a second, as though she had heard every excuse there was for loose living, moral weakness and Godlessness ten times over and could not be fooled. My father looking at the photograph, called her Alice in Newfoundland.

Before Baptism Sunday, my mother took me to hear her preach. I wondered if she was hoping that I, too, might be converted.

Miss Garrigus was an “unrivalled revivalist” — her own assessment — from New England, who that night, in a sermon of which, for fervour and soul-stirring eloquence, my mother said she had never heard the equal, told her congregation that her own conversion had occurred in a dilapidated barn in Maine.

“Barn born I was,” she said. “I have spent the last twenty years revivalling, travelling the world, preaching, baptizing and saving souls. But recently, at the age of fifty-two, I felt the call to Newfoundland; I felt compelled by the Lord to come to Newfoundland and establish here a mission called the Ark. The shape of Newfoundland began appearing in my dreams, first a vague shape that each night grew more distinct and began to look like some sort of island, though which one I could not tell. Eventually, it was Newfoundland I saw, though I did not know it, I did not know what Newfoundland looked like. I drew the shape I saw in my dreams and showed it to a friend, who told me I had drawn a map of Newfoundland, a map that was accurate in every way.” Miss Garrigus then unscrolled the map she had drawn and showed it to the congregation and told how, upon consulting an atlas, she had her “call to Newfoundland” confirmed beyond all doubt when she saw that the capital of what was soon to be her diocese was called St. John’s, after St. John the Baptist and St. John of the Gospels, who ended the Book of Revelations and indeed the Bible as a whole with the watchword of the Pentecostal Church, “Jesus is coming soon.”

“Newfoundlanders, you are all New Found,” she said, “foundlings on the doorstep of salvation. You are here in my mission today because you have no church, because no other church would take you in. Or should I say, because you would not be taken in by other churches.

“There is a woman in this congregation,” she said, “who has been keeping to herself an awful secret, something she thinks no one else knows, though someone does; something she believes she will never be forgiven for, though she will. Hear me, my dear woman; hear me, sister — I will not name you, for you know who you are, and God knows, for God knows everything — God, if only you will ask Him, will forgive you.”

This “woman” could have been almost anybody, but I could see why my mother had been so affected.

My mother was baptized in early June, in water from which the last ice had melted but a month before. She arrived back home on Sunday morning in a cart driven by a Pentecostal couple from the Brow. She was wrapped in a blanket, her hair was matted to her head and face and her clothes clung, still dripping water, to her body.

“I’m saved, Joe,” she said weakly, lips quivering. “I’m saved.”

“Take care of your mother, boy,” the man said gruffly. “Bless you, Mrs. Smallwood,” the woman said as they drove off. Their ragged old horse clopped slowly down the hill.

I took my mother into the kitchen, where she sat shivering, arms folded, looking like someone who had been saved, not from damnation, but from drowning and had been hustled home before she caught pneumonia. My sisters urged her to go upstairs with them and change into something dry, but she looked as if she hadn’t heard them. Her eyes seemed focused inward, as though on some vision she had had and was forbidden to reveal.

I don’t know what happened to my mother that day on the shore of Mundy Pond, but something did, something that altered her forever. I vowed that if God Himself appeared to me, I would assure Him that I would rather save myself than have Him do it.