Consummation Comes

WITH THE COMMISSION of Government in power, I could not stand to be around St. John’s. I decided I would try to start up a fishermen’s union along the south and southwest coasts of Newfoundland. It would mean going to places that could not be reached except by boat, and not even by boat in the winter, when the ice-field floated south and ice and land fused together like two halves of a jigsaw puzzle. From that point on, I would have to walk, unaccompanied. Winter would be the best time of the year to go, for most of the fishermen would not be fishing, and meeting with them and organizing them would be, if not easy, at least possible.

Using money I borrowed from people sympathetic to the labour cause, I hired an old thirty-eight-foot one-masted schooner with an eight-horsepower motor and a crew of one, a retired fishing skipper named Andrews from the southwest coast, who assured me he would go only as far on this expedition of mine as his schooner could, so I had best decide before we set out if I could manage the rest of it by myself. I assured him I could and told him of my walk across the island. “That ya have yer land legs I don’t doubt,” he said. “But those don’t look like sea legs to me.”

We set out from St. John’s after Christmas. Within a day, Andrews resigned himself to the fact that he had not a first mate but a passenger who would be no help to him no matter how painstakingly he explained to him what to do. Because of the motor, Andrews was able to take an occasional break from his struggles with the sails and rigging while I stayed below trying to fool my body into believing that it was not at sea.

I had seen hundreds of men like Andrews on the waterfront years ago, men who in their old age had not softened, men who by their forties had achieved their final form. He would climb the rope ladder in the roughest of weather to the top of the mast and, with one hand on it, lean out and scan the sea ahead for obstacles. He was about my height, but much stockier and dressed in what I can only describe as a full-body butcher’s apron, a begrimed white leather raincoat with a hood he never used, going bareheaded no matter what the weather.

We sailed for several days, putting in at harbours on the south coast at night, there being no unionizing to do until we were well past the halfway point of the coast.

Andrews took me to the community of Garia, abandoned since 1873 when the entire population of two hundred left en masse for Anticosti Island. He took in with a sweep of his arm the grey houses hunched together in the snow, their roofs saddle-backed, windows gone, doors hanging on a single hinge or likewise gone; houses built on the site of other houses of which now there was little trace, perhaps some rotting, fallen fence posts, the sunken pilings of some old foundation that lifted the house so high off the ground that a man could crawl beneath it.

“My father came from here,” said Andrews. “There used to be two hundred people here. A lively place it was one time.” The day would come when, because of me, there would be hundreds of such places around Newfoundland, abandoned islands and coastal settlements, ghost ports whose populations had been forcibly transferred to employment centres.

There were many reasons why the people lived where they did on the south coast, Andrews explained. The small islands, for instance. There was another country around the coast of Newfoundland, a country of islands, a circumscribing archipelago of satellite republics, bound together only by their residents’ tacit agreement not to interfere with one another. Before the invention of the engine made it possible to do so, the only way to reach the fishing grounds was to live offshore on little islands that lay within a shorter, less arduous and treacherous row or sail of the deep water. And far from civilization, there was little or no competition for the fish.

Between stops, we stood on the bow of the schooner regarding the somehow oppressively spectacular scenery, the houses in their drearily bright and cheerful, state-of-the-universe-denying colours, the fiord-like inlets, the pink-sunset sea, the pewter-coloured water of the harbours in the dusk, the light on the hillsides fading like a fire burning down. As always, I felt obliged to say or do something commensurately profound, but could think of nothing.

Andrews told me that if we sailed straight south from where’ we were, we would miss South America by several hundred miles, never so much as come within sight of it but bypass it altogether and eventually come up against ice at the other end of the world. “Nothing that way but water,” he said, as if our facing in a direction in which there lay no land until you reached the edge of the Antarctic ice-field summed up perfectly how he felt at that moment.

We sailed sometimes within a few hundred feet of shore, looking up at great ramparts of granite and sandstone, sheer cliff faces of islands that rose abruptly from the sea, as if large pieces of the main island had broken off like icebergs from a black glacier never-melting bergs of rock. We passed between these islands and the larger one, facing the latter, the headlands of which were even higher and so sheer that in most places not even birds could find a spot to perch. If you were so close to the cliff that you could not see the top, you were too close, Andrews said, for there were undertows that this boat, even with its little engine at full throttle, could not escape.

It was hard to believe Newfoundland was an island and not the edge of some continent, for it extended as far as the eye could see to east and west, the headlands showing no signs of attenuation; a massive assertion of land, sea’s end, the outer limit of all the water in the world, a great, looming, sky-obliterating chunk of rock.

I did not see until I was almost upon them the first fissures in the cliffs, the first real fiords, which were a mile or two miles wide at the mouth, sunless corridors of stone so well sheltered from most winds that they were calm, glacial green, like the water in streams above the timberline, a deep opaque green five hundred fathoms deep. These fiords meandered inland, gradually narrowing, the cliffs slowly sloping down on either side to where a stream or river poured into the sea.

We sailed up some of these fiords, all the way up to where, on river plains, lay communities whose wharves and fishing stages from a distance could not be distinguished as such, they looked so much like driftwood on the beach. Only when we were very close to it did the “driftwood” resolve into artificial shapes, as did the houses on the slope behind them. The only things well kept in these places were the headstones in the cemeteries, stones that, like so much else, had been brought in by boat from St. John’s or some other part of the world that the people whose resting places were marked by them had never seen. Three-century-old cemeteries. How startling, how incongruously opulent the green-veined marble monuments seemed, the tablets, pillars, columns, angels, stark stone crosses and bronze crucifixes among the shabby huts and shacks. Some marked burial plots for so long left untended that only the tips of the monuments showed above the scrub and snow.

There was a point on one beach where you could see all the way down the fiord to the sea, a jagged line of light between the cliffs, a lightning-bolt’s width, a bolt caught as though in a photograph. As we headed back down the fiord towards the sea, the bolt of light widened slightly each time we took a turn until it suddenly spread outward like the flash from some explosion and we were in the world again.

Churches were visible for miles offshore. They were built on the highest points of land. Their three-spired façades, two of equal height flanking a taller one that bore a cross, made them look like Pentecostal doves, giant, once white, now grey birds perched where fishermen could see them while they worked and use them for navigation aids while they rowed back home.

At last I began my “unionizing,” a grand word for it as it turned out. Not even Andrews, who had spent most of his life on the southwest coast, could believe the places I insisted that we visit. On one tiny island there lived a dozen people in one house, a single extended family, only three of whom were fishermen. I could not make them understand what a union was. The population of another island had dwindled down to one, a man who might have been anywhere from fifty to eighty and who, it was clear by the state of his wharf, had not fished for years.

Often we were far enough out from shore that I could see into more than one bay at a time. I sized them up, trying to decide which of them looked most promising. The settlements in the farthest recesses of the bays looked as if they were hiding from each other. The houses were perched at staggered altitudes on steeply sloping cliffs, often shored up by stilts where no foundations could be dug.

One day I pointed to a scattering of houses on the main island and told Andrews to head there. He complied, shaking his head. To get there, we had to navigate a set of reefs, the upcrops of which he told me were called Hit or Miss Point and Nervous Rocks. By the time we had passed between them, I had decided I would just as soon spend the rest of my life in this tiny place as navigate those reefs again.

At the sight of an unfamiliar person in their harbour people came running from their houses. They ran, it turned out, because to the first person to shake my hand would go the privilege of serving us a cup of tea or putting us up for the night. I was greeted with open-hearted bemusement, welcomed into a home where my insistence on talking unions and politics was viewed as a forgivable, though not to be encouraged, shortcoming. Of course they would join my union, they said, seeming embarrassed, as if it impugned their hospitality for me to have to ask them for anything. But it turned out they had no money for union dues, nor for anything else.

As the winter wore on, the islands of bare rock were vastly outnumbered by those of ice. Any colour but white was incongruous among the growlers, bergy bits and icebergs, as if the rock and not the ice were only passing through. Most of the coastal towns looked like base camps for expeditionaries who had long since moved on to somewhere else, box-like houses, a cluster of buildings like provisions stacked on some ice-surrounded point of land.

The cliffs became what Andrews called snot-faced, coated in places with sea-water-green ice. What the rest of the year was a trickle of water down a cliff face had by increments throughout the winter become a frozen torrent, a freshet of ice layered lavalike with a sheen of running water on the top.

When finally Andrews spotted the ice-field in the distance, he put in at the nearest port. “If I were you, sir,” he said, “Pd turn back now. I wouldn’t walk this coast in winter for the king himself, let alone for unions.” He gave me a pouch of oatmeal and raisins, which he assured me I would be glad to have before too long.

I bade him goodbye and the next day, telling myself that as long as I knew which way land lay, I would not end up like the men of the S.S. Newfoundland, I set off along the shore until I reached the ice. On the map I had prepared before leaving, virtually every community was highlighted by an x. Most of the place names were French, though their inhabitants did not pronounce them as the French would have. It was a long time since people of French ancestry had fished here. French ships had been confined to fishing the northeast coast by the terms of the first French shore treaty in 1713. The French had never lived here, only fished here in the summer, then gone home. But the names they gave the coves and bays and islands remained, their meanings unknown now to the people who spoke them every day. Rencontre. Isle aux Morts, Deadman’s Island. It was pronounced Ilomart. Grand Bruit. Big Bear. Cinq Cerf. Margaree. Rose Blanche. Harbour le Cou. Petites. Lapoile. Bay le Moine. Bay de Vieux.

The walking was treacherous, especially near the shore, where the ice tended to accumulate first and where there were the most pressure ridges, rafted ice layered vertically in jagged crags created when two opposing pans had met, neither yielding, so there was nowhere for the ice to go but up. I sometimes had to walk for miles just to find a way between the ridges.

There was always open water far out from shore, and the waves from without carried on beneath the ice, the surface of which exactly mimicked that of the water beneath it, rolling, swelling, cresting, troughing, for the ice was not like lake or pond ice, not a solid sheet from shore to shore, but pans of ice from elsewhere that had packed together. Walking on it was about the closest thing to walking on water that you could get. It was like riding a vessel that took on the shape of the water. I could see the water move beneath the ice like limbs beneath a blanket.

As I walked along, I felt the ice rise beneath my feet, felt myself being lifted and then lowered and then lifted again. I discovered that it was possible while walking on the ice to become seasick. One second you were walking uphill, the next downhill. The water below moved shorewards but the ice did not; you rose to a crest on the ice, then felt and saw that crest move on ahead of you while another swell began beneath your feet. It was like walking on the skin of a massive animal.

Jumping to shore, dismounting the ice, was an art in itself. It was in many places pushed up onto the rocks, so although it was easy, once you were on the rim ice, to step ashore, getting onto the rim ice was something else. There was often a fissure between the rim ice and the pack ice through which, at the arrival of a wave onshore, sea water bubbled up. It took a certain knack to time your step — and a step was all it was, not a jump, if you knew what you were doing — from the shorewards-heaving pack ice to the rim ice, a knack that I never did get, so I always waited until someone on land saw me standing there, forlornly, incongruously.

When I made my inept leap with my distinctive flourish of self-abandonment, all but resigned to being swallowed up in the fissure, falling the moment it opened its green sea-water-frothing mouth to take me in, the men on land would grab me. As the wave of ice I should have used to launch myself to safety passed beneath my feet, I would lose my nerve, jump too late, just as the water bubbled up, and would wind up all but running on the spot, the slick wet ice beneath my feet, before I was yanked ashore, toes dragging on the ice behind me. “We got ya, sir, we got ya,” the men said, politely trying not to laugh.

In oil-lamp-lit houses that reminded me of living on the Brow, I was given to eat dearly come by tins of ham or generic “meat,” treats reserved for visitors, to put in front of whom the salted or, even worse, fresh fish the others had to settle for would have been the height of bad manners. How I longed to have what they were having and what they thought they were sparing me the hardship of having to eat; how I longed to gorge myself on damper dogs fried in oil or fat dumplings in a boiling pot of codfish stew.

Not that they “gorged” themselves. Even of fish, salted or fresh, there was precious little. These people in whose houses I nightly increased by one the number of plates that must be filled were verging on starvation. Because the merchants could not afford to give them credit for their fish, most of the fishermen did not have the wherewithal even to catch enough to feed themselves and their families. They had no diesel oil for their engines, no tools or wood to repair their codtraps or their boats, no canvas for their sails, no twine to make new nets, their old ones having frayed to bits of string that now were used for mending socks or making mitts.

Everyone had the same breakfast, boiled duff, which was flour and water cooked in a bag then left until it hardened like a biscuit. The only way to get it down was to eat it smothered with molasses, which there seemed to be no shortage of. They sent me off in the morning with what they called a sealer’s lunch, hard bread so hard you did not so much chew it as gnaw on it and thereby got the soothing illusion that you were eating something. They also gave me chunks of fried salt pork that when it froze in my pocket or rucksack became so brittle it snapped off like toffee. It was unbelievably salty and every so often I got down on my hands and knees to drink from pools of water on the ice.

One day, when there was not a breath of wind and no sign that any might be in the offing and it was therefore possible for those whose dories were still seaworthy and whose coves were not iced in to row out to the fishing grounds, I went out at the invitation of a fishermen before sunrise to handline for cod. I faced him in the boat as he took the oars and, with his eyes averted from mine, looking out across the water, rowed for hours without changing his pace or his expression. He was, he told me later, keeping his eyes fixed on some landmark, but landmark or not I’m sure he would have looked the other way. I had yet to have someone look me in the eye for long, as if to do so would have been an impertinence.

After reaching his destination and dropping anchor, he slumped over exhausted, head down so that I couldn’t see his face. The sun was coming up now, the first pale light of dawn was in the east and in the sky a silent seagull rose and fell.

After a few minutes, the passing of which we both pretended not to notice, the fisherman rose wordlessly and took out from beneath the prow a wooden spool of fishing line. There was perhaps a hundred feet of line, but only about every tenth knot was fitted with a hook. The sea was as calm as it ever gets, with the dory rising on tidal swells a hundred feet apart and not a crest in sight. The water was impenetrably black and strewn with dark green kelp, the air what he called green, meaning fresh, though to me it was pungent with the smell of brine.

We lowered the hooks and smoked in silence until he deemed it was time to haul them in again. He knelt nearest to the gunnel and I knelt beside him. The line that had slid so easily into the water was unbelievably heavy. The two of us tugging with all our might took in at most three feet before I had to rest. He nodded, straining to pick up the sudden slack. “I finds it better not to stop,” he said, as if to rest or stop was just a matter of personal preference and to do the latter nothing I should be ashamed of. “Jus’ tell me when yer gonna stop, sir, so’s I won’t let go the line.” His teeth clamped on his cigarette, he went on pulling. I joined him every few minutes, taking breathers in between. Of the ten hooks, seven of them bore codfish that he said weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds and that we, mostly he, had dragged up through a hundred feet of water. When the last of the line was in the boat, he lay back against the prow, chest heaving. I looked at him lying there, eyes closed, in his tattered watch cap and layers of bedraggled clothing, the palms of his gloves worn through, his hands rope-burnt and bleeding, the butt of a burnt-out cigarette between his lips. And now he had to row us back. I had expended the energy of a day’s walk in about an hour; he, in the past few hours and the few to come, about five times that.

The farther from the ice-free part of the coast I travelled, the more eccentric became the people I encountered. In many places, I could barely understand what was being said to me, and barely make myself understood. On one little island, a man hand-pumping water into a wash-pot in his porch informed me in explanatory tones: “For now we dips the bucket right into the well.” Since he was clearly not dipping a bucket, but was using a pump, I was mystified as to what he meant, not realizing until hours later that by “for now,” he meant “’fore now” — before now, in the past. He had, as far as I could tell, no other way of referring to the past except by this phrase, which to me meant the present.

On another island I was told, until I could no longer stand not knowing what it meant, that I looked like my night had been nothing but a “dwall” from start to finish. “What’s a dwall?” I said to the man in whose house I was waiting out a storm, which earned me a long look. After an explanation largely consisting of other words I did not know, I was able to discover that to “dwall” was to spend a night neither asleep nor awake but somewhere in between. I at last had a single word to describe how I almost always slept.

I dwalled every night on mattresses that consisted of “brin bags,” tightly meshed potato sacks filled with woodshavings or hay. I preferred the woodshavings to hay, which made the bedrooms smell like the stalls where they kept their horses.

There was, of course, no electricity in any of the houses, no running water, no heat other than what the single woodstove in the kitchen could produce. In a few houses there were fireplaces, but they went unused for lack of coal or scarcity of wood. Many of the little islands had long since been denuded of whatever trees had once grown on them, and their residents had to set out like hunting parties across the frozen bays in search of wood on horse-drawn sleds on which I often hitched a ride, shielding myself against the chips of ice thrown up by the horses’ hob-nailed hooves.

Often there were no schools. There might be a small church in which the most prominent citizen each Sunday morning spoke some sort of service. Perhaps there would be a visit or two a year from some missionary minister or doctor. They had never seen an automobile, a train, a motorized vehicle of any kind except a boat. They had travelled farther from their houses by sea than by land, and even then only as far as their fishing grounds, their longest land journey being the two-hundred-foot-long horse path that wound its way among the houses and the rocks.

I had been prepared for resistance to the idea of unionizing from people who led such a solitary, atomized existence. What I had not realized was how cut off from the world in both space and time these people were. Most of them did not understand or even have a word for the concept of government. Had never heard of Sir Richard Squires. Did not know there had taken place any change in our status as a country. Had only the most rudimentary understanding of what a country was. And at the same time were destitute beyond anything I imagined when I first set out. And these were the people I had thought to unionize, organize? I was able to get across only the notion that I had come to try to help them. But as I had with me none of the forms of “help” they were familiar with — no supply boat, no medicine, no clerical collar — they regarded me as something of a crackpot, showing up from out of nowhere empty-handed but apparently convinced that my mere presence among them would somewhow improve their lot. Yet if I had told the head of any household that from now on I would live with him, he would have assured me I was welcome.

It would take more than unions, and more than anything the Commission of Government might be inclined to do, to save these people. I felt ridiculous, useless, little more than an itinerant beggar, a deluded townie who fancied he had come to help them and who without them would not have made it through one night.

In bed, on overcast nights, there was a darkness so absolute that I lit matches just to assure myself that I could still see. It was hard to believe in the existence of St. John’s, let alone New York, while confined to such a place.

On moonlit nights, the glow from the ice and snow was such that you could see for miles along the coast or out to sea, everything looking as it might have after days of freezing rain. Somewhere out there, there was water; somewhere out of sight the sea began, the ice-field formed its own coastline, and along that line, when the moon was out, light and darkness met, the light ending so abruptly it was as though beyond the ice lay not water but the emptiness of space, the edge of the world, if a man were to fall off which he would fall forever.

On clear nights, when there was no moon, the sky was more star-filled than dark. The light seemed to be shining down upon us through some threadbare fabric.

Always, at night, the darkness making it more noticeable, there was the sound of the sea, each place with its distinctive sea sounds; in the rare open harbours there was the clattering of beach rocks and chunks of ice as a wave withdrew, or if there was no beach, the din of breakers crashing in a pattern that was constantly repeated on the rocks below the house.

In the iced-in harbours, during the coldest nights, when there was not enough room for the expansion of the ice between islands that might be miles apart, fault lines formed. I could hear, as I lay in bed, the ice-fields grind together and boom as fault lines two miles long were created in mere seconds. Sometimes the booms were faint at first, the sound becoming louder as the crack in the ice drew near to the house, or fading into silence, depending on which way the fault was headed. If it grew louder, I would wait for it to pass the house like a roaring train, wait for it to pass and then recede. Some of the fault lines travelled more or less straight towards the house. I lay there, imagining that bearing down on me was a horizontal lightning bolt that would strike the house to pieces. There would be a final, deafening boom when the fault ran through the rim ice that coated the first twenty yards or so of shore, then the sound of shards and chunks of ice raining down upon the house.

And there was the strange sound, too, when the tides were changing, of the water beneath the ice, a low rumbling as though from underground and vibrations that made the windows rattle.

One night I heard a rumbling that I thought must be an avalanche, for it came from behind the house. I jumped up in a panic, only to be assured by a young man dressed like me in longjohns and staring out the back window that “it’s the Lapoile ’erd, that’s all, sir. Nuttin’ to get all worked up about.” His parents obviously concurred, for they were still in bed.

He may not have been “all worked up,” but he was watching them nonetheless, watching them pass by his house on their way down to the ice, the Lapoile herd of caribou that he said always came by this time of year. I did like him and stood there with my hands and face pressed against the glass. All I could see at first was a torrent of shadows, but soon I could make out some slower-moving caribou. They were smaller than I had thought they would be, three or four feet high, each with racks of antlers so large and many-pointed they seemed head-heavy, barely able to look up to see where they were going.

“Where are they headed?” I said.

“Northeast,” he said. “Back ‘ome to the barrens for the summer. Lookin’ for food.”

“Do you hunt them?” I said.

“We got all we can use out in de smokehouse,” he said. “Not everybody got a gun and even less got bullets. Black bears gets more of them than we do.”

Codfish, now caribou. Rather than subject me to which they had served me tinned bologna.

All night long they passed the house, between the house and other houses, a deafening stampede that made even a dwall impossible. In the morning, when I got up, they were still going by. They stretched as far as I could see along the coast, between the rim ice and the rafted ice, a stream of antlers and moulting, shaggy, white-grey rumps, winding its way along the base of the headlands, bound for the first fiord or riverbank that it could follow north.

I was told that there were ten thousand of them in the herd, and that, like me, they were using the ice as a shortcut to get where they were going. I stayed put that day, doing nothing but watch them trot by in their mass migration. The smell of them was overpowering, a musky acrid smell. They trod their droppings underfoot, churned it with the snow, so for days afterwards their road-like trail stretched out of sight in both directions.

I was not used to sleeping so close to the sea. I preferred nights when, because of a storm, the sounds of the ice were as various and deafening as thunder. Better I be kept fully awake than mesmerized into a dwall by the haunting drone of sea sounds. I thought, not of uncomplaining Clara grown accustomed to my absence or my children by whose progress through infancy I would not allow myself to be diverted more than momentarily, but of Fielding.

I could only imagine for us a union so devoid of context that it was almost featureless. To invest it with detail, to try to imagine where and how we might be together and what it would be like only made me realize how foolish of me it was to brood on something that would not only never happen but that I didn’t really want.

What a nuisance her existence was to me. I was certain that if I could somehow purge her from my mind, I would be much the better for it. How much easier might it be then to cleave to Clara, to not begrudge her that modest allotment of devotion that a proper sort of wife deserved. I was obscure and destitute, but soon not to be, I hoped. Married to Fielding, I was certain, I would have stayed obscure and destitute forever.

And yet it seemed the woman had fated me to a life of furtively and shamefully attending to myself like a schoolboy in the dark. I wondered if enlisting in some rigorously prescriptive religion might constrain me from this habit, which I sometimes slipped out of bed to indulge in even with Clara sleeping there beside me. For days afterwards, I would feel guilt-ridden and depressed.

Sometimes, to keep the length of the interval between our couplings from becoming a source of embarrassment between us, I gave in to her suggestion that we have what she playfully referred to as a “bout,” but I would find myself losing interest midway and, determined to see the act through to its conclusion, inspired myself by picturing Fielding reclining on the moss in the Spruces. Poor Clara, at such times, thinking something she had done had caught my fancy, would so fervently respond she would have to turn her face in to the pillow to keep from crying out.

Lying in these houses on the southwest and west coasts, I would hear someone in the next room toss and turn on their mattress and it would remind me of my mother the night I stood outside her room. The sound of her breath indrawn through clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. Could she have been doing it to muffle moans of pleasure? I wondered. It seemed inconceivable to me. “Smallwood, get off me,” she had said dismissively when the squeaking of the bedsprings stopped.

I visited almost every settlement on the south and southwest coasts, no matter how small. Most of the people there had never heard of unions, had not the faintest idea what a union was or what difference it would make to their lives if they belonged to one. Only in Corner Brook and a few other larger towns was I able to find anyone who would listen to me. By this time it was early spring and in some places, where there was not much sealing done, the fishery had started. In the Bay of Islands, my old stomping grounds from the days when I campaigned for Sir Richard, I signed up hundreds of fishermen to my co-operative union.

Unfortunately, and unknown to me until too late, most of them, after six months, had not paid one cent of dues and my co-op had collected less than 6 per cent of the Bay of Islands catch. I had thought we were getting somewhere with the 6 per cent and had been as surprised as the fishermen to find out that all the earnings from it had been eaten up by overhead and we were bankrupt. Explaining to fishermen that they would have been no poorer if they had given their fish away or never caught it in the first place had been difficult, though not so difficult as getting out of the Bay of Islands unharmed after doing so.

I made it unscathed to the mill town of Corner Brook, found a bed in a boarding-house and slept for thirty-six hours, not in a dwall but deeply, obliteratingly. When I awoke, I went without breakfast to the train station.

Feeling humiliated by my failure, my ineptitude, I hardly glanced out the window as the train began its eastward run across the island. Just before nightfall we came to an unscheduled stop in the Topsails, where the snow on either side of the tracks was piled so high it was dark inside the train. We started, stopped, started, stopped, stalled in that eerie tunnel of snow for hours at a time, barely inching forward when we moved, the cowcatcher groaning against the snow that blocked the tracks. I had no food, having spent all the money I had left on my train fare home. What should have been a twenty-four-hour trip took nearly three times that.

We arrived in St. John’s on a Friday afternoon. I walked home to Gower Street, up the hill from the train station with my suitcase only to find there was no one in the house. I guessed that Clara and the children, whom I hadn’t told that I was coming home, had gone to spend the weekend in Harbour Grace with Clara’s parents. Clara had left the door unlocked, as she always did when she went out while I was away.

There was mail for me on the kitchen table, among it an invitation to a press reception at Government House. I threw it aside, sat there as the house grew dark. I was a would-be politician in a country in which politics was obsolete. A would-be unionist in a country where even the minority that understood what a union was were too poor to pay their dues. A reporter in a country in which reporters were told by a commission from abroad what they could and could not write. And if all this would ever end nobody knew.

I picked up the invitation from the floor. It had always been the case that you were no one in St. John’s society if your name did not appear on the Government House invitation list, but this was especially so under the Commission of Government, when Government House was viewed as some far-flung wing of Whitehall.

The commissioners wished to meet the press. There was a dinner party to which the publishers and editors of the long-established papers were invited, after which there was a reception for the rest of us.

With my engraved invitation was included a reminder, bearing the commission’s letterhead, of what constituted “proper attire.”

“While we realize,” it read, “that it would be unrealistic of us to expect some of those to whom invitations have been sent to attend dressed in the manner normally required at such functions, we do ask that you do everything within your means to make yourself presentable.” It read almost as though they wanted me to have the good grace to decline and settle for the honour of merely having been sent the invitation. I considered declining, telling myself that to attend such a lavish event would be hypocritical even for the somewhat compromised socialist-at-heart-if-not-in-practice I had become. On the other hand, I would, by staying away, be doing only what they wanted. I would go, I decided, dressed just as I was. How else could I go, having no better clothes than my Harris tweed slacks and Norfolk jacket anyway?

By the time I set out for Government House, there was a northeast wind blowing in from the ice that for weeks had jammed the entrance to the Narrows. A freezing rain that I was certain would soon change to snow was falling, but as I had no money for a cab, I had no choice but to walk to Military Road from my house.

When I knocked on it, the door of Government House no sooner opened than it began to close, and all that saved me from having to march straight back home was my sodden invitation, which I fished from my pocket just in time. A liveried fellow who reminded me of Cantwell, the Squireses’ butler, took it from me and, holding it by thumb and forefinger, looked doubtfully at it as if he thought I must have stolen it from someone or found it discarded on the ground.

“You are Mr. Smallwood?” he said, as if he had heard of me, which flattered me, though his tone of incredulity did not. He spoke with a heavy St. John’s accent, which, given the way he was dressed, struck me as ridiculous.

“Come in, sir,” he said, kindly, deferentially. “You’ll catch your death of cold in what you’re wearing. I might be able to find you something dry.”

I didn’t realize until it was too late that his concern was genuine. I assumed this was his way of hinting that Governor Anderson had made provision for fellows like me who showed up attired “unpresentably.” I pictured myself walking about in some obviously borrowed, ill-fitting suit.

“I’ll wear what I’m wearing,” I snapped. “And I won’t stand here waiting to be inspected. Either show me in or show me out.”

“Of course, Mr. Smallwood, of course,” the poor fellow said and took my hat from me. “You can go straight in, sir.”

I smoothed back my hair with my hands, wiped my glasses dry on my lapel, put them on and strode quickly into the reception lobby, hoping to so abbreviate my entrance that I would not be noticed. It worked, except that the managing editor of the Daily News, who I was sure had been at the pre-reception dinner spotted me and waved, not so much by way of greeting as to draw attention to me. Or so I thought. I felt so conspicuous I suspected everyone of trying to make me more so.

I waved back but walked with feigned purpose in the opposite direction, vaguely entertaining the notion that I would keep moving until I was sufficiently dry that when I stopped a puddle of water would not form at my feet. I was wet through to the skin; my clothes, for once, were clinging to me, my pants matted to my thighs.

I think I would have left had I not seen Prowse standing with a group of men who I knew worked for the commission, Prowse dressed just like them in a smart-fitting tuxedo with a black bow tie. I wondered what he was doing there, this being a reception for the press. They were all standing at one end of the buffet table; beside Prowse, champagne glass in hand, was a woman who I guessed was his wife. She was dressed as impeccably as the governor’s wife, in a blue evening gown, a black hat with a large white feather, elbow-length white gloves. Prowse saw me looking in his direction and nodded at me, half raised his glass in a token of salute. I sloshed across the room and joined his group.

“I’ve often wondered what you weighed soaking wet, Smallwood,” Prowse said. “I don’t suppose you’d let me lift you.” The others laughed.

“What are you doing here, Prowse?” I said.

“Working. I’m an assistant of Sir John Hope Simpson’s. What are you doing here? I thought you’d retired from the press —”

“I can’t believe you would have anything to do with this lot,” I said. “Only a year ago, you were working for the Liberals, for Squires.”

“Are you implying that the commission is not politically neutral,” Prowse said, “and that for me to work for it makes me some sort of turncoat? What does that make a socialist who works for Richard Squires?” Again the group broke out in laughter.

“So what have you been up to lately, Smallwood?” Prowse said. “I hear your latest attempt to unionize the fishermen met with the usual success. You really are a hack of all trades.”

“And what are you?” I said.

“A master of one.”

“You’re so full of it, Prowse,” I said. “I’m surprised there’s any room left for the booze.”

“If a man looked at a woman the way you’re looking at that food, Smallwood,” Prowse said, “he’d be arrested. Why don’t you just go over there and eat something, for God’s sake?”

I had been looking at the food. I suspected this reception did not rank high on the Government House scale of lavishness, but there was more to eat and drink than I had ever seen gathered in one place before, all of it arrayed on tables pushed against the back wall. I could not take my eyes from it at first. There were heaping platters of smoked turkey, slices of cloved ham, salmon and trout and arctic char carved into chunks and adorned with wedges of lemon and pineapple, piles of cucumber sandwiches, bowls of pâté, cakes with thick pink icing, frosted jugs of lemonade and bowls of punch. At the end of the tables opposite ours, a white-hatted chef stood beside piles of plates and trays of glasses and cutlery. When he was not carving or pouring, which was most of the time, he stood with his hands behind his back and his feet spread wide apart as though he was guarding the food.

The Newfoundlanders acted as if they knew, and wanted the British to know they knew, that such a spread was not meant to be eaten but to be admired. Some were simply too proud, in front of others, to admit to being hungry, though I doubted that more than one in ten of them had eaten properly that day. I was in this last group, though the “others” I was primarily loath to admit my hunger to were those who with money from our treasury had supplied the food, namely, the British. I knew that if I were to touch a morsel, I would put aside all thought of keeping up appearances and gorge myself. I knew because others, a few so famished or so weak-willed they could not afford the luxury of self-consciousness, were doing just that.

On the other hand, opinion seemed to be unanimous that to take a glass of champagne when offered one from a well-loaded tray was quite acceptable. A waiter bearing aloft a tray of champagne-filled glasses did not even slow down as he neared me, so I helped myself. I moved away from Prowse’s group.

It was possible to look amused, aloof while sipping champagne or even while tossing it off a glass at a time, as I began to do.

I drank several glasses, and though I found it sickly sweet, I preferred it, near teetotaller that I was, to rum or whisky. Soon I began to feel better, less concerned than I would have been without the champagne to see in the oval mirror on the wall what might have been a sculpted likeness of myself, my clothes hanging in rigid folds on my body. I dispelled the illusion by toasting my image in the mirror, and felt pleased when it reciprocated. The Guards Band seemed to be playing all my favourite songs. I felt like dancing. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into the eyes of a man I vaguely knew, a reporter who seemed to be swaying back and forth.

“Better sit down,” he said sympathetically, and led me to a chair against the wall. “Haven’t exactly got a hollow leg, have you? When did you last eat?”

Not that day or the day before; the day before that perhaps, I wasn’t sure. I remembered that while recruiting in the Bay of Islands, I had walked over five miles of hills to a place called Tickle Cove, where I was invited in for a meal by a fisherman who lived alone in a makeshift shack. Everything in the place was makeshift. His table was a door laid across two sawhorses, his two chairs were lobster crates, his cups tin cans. He boiled tea in an empty biscuit tin, rendered a thin slab of fat-back pork on the damper of his woodstove, then smeared a slab of dole bread in the melted fat-back, laid it on the lid of the biscuit tin and handed it to me. It was not until I was nearly finished that I realized that what I was eating was to have been his dinner, that he was not eating, though he seemed to be getting great satisfaction out of watching me. Whether it was this poor fellow or myself I felt sorry for now, I was not sure, but I suddenly felt myself on the verge of tears.

“What do you think, Smallwood? Will you go over with me and shake their hands?” my acquaintance said. Across the floor, the reporters were queuing up to a receiving line that consisted of Governor Anderson; commissioners Hope Simpson, Lodge and Trentham and their wives; our three commissioners, Alderdice, Howley and Puddister, and their wives, one Anglican, one Catholic and one non-conformist, as if it mattered that all three factions be represented, since our commissioners had no power anyway. I looked at the wives, wearily, perfunctorily shaking hands with men they hoped they would never see again.

“We live in an occupied country,” I said, “and that it has been occupied at our request only makes it that much worse. All these Newfoundlanders, putting on airs to impress the British who laugh at them behind their backs, trying to pretend it’s because of other Newfoundlanders the British had to bail us out, not them, as if the British are just reinforcements who will help them do away with laziness and ignorance, then leave.”

The commission had been convening now for more than a year. Though Governor Anderson was the titular head, “chairing” the commission the way he “governed” Newfoundland, it was common knowledge, and clear from the way the others, Anderson included, deferred to him, that Hope Simpson ran the show.

I walked unsteadily across the floor and joined the queue. Prowse was now standing at Hope Simpson’s side, introducing him as each member of the press corps stepped forward.

Hope Simpson wore, aside from an unwavering, stern, hyper-vigilant expression, round-rimmed spectacles, a knee-length coat with turned-up cuffs and a line of large silver buttons down the right-hand side and a waistcoat buttoned tightly to his neck. He wore some sort of pantaloons, with stockings over those, and on his feet a pair of low-cut, square-buckled glistening black shoes. At his left side, he wore an ornamental sabre, the handle of which he held against his body with his arm. In his left hand he held, for no reason I could think of, a small green book and a pair of white gloves. He had spent most of his life in far-flung, exotic postings — India, China, Greece — heading commissions made necessary by the slow dismantlement of the British Empire, overseeing the abandonment of colonies no longer worth colonizing or the withdrawal from those no longer willing to put up with being colonized.

He was sixty-five years old and his stockings brought out the shape of his old man’s legs up to his knees, a fact that, in my drunken state, seemed especially affronting. He had strong-looking calves and a pair of finely turned ankles, which only made it seem all the more ridiculous that an old man should be so vain as to show his legs in public.

While waiting my turn, I drank another glass of champagne. Prowse whispered something to Hope Simpson when I was next in line to shake his hand.

“Lord Hope Simpson,” Prowse said, “this is Joe Smallwood.”

Hope Simpson extended his hand, and giving Prowse a withering look in the face of which he did not flinch, I shook it, trying to affect mock admiration, bowing so low I almost fell over.

“It is a pleasure to at last meet the man whom I have for so long admired at a distance,” I said.

“I would thank you for saying so, Mr. Smallwood,” Hope Simpson said, “and would be more than willing to return the compliment if I believed it was sincere. You’re the Bolshie fellow who’s been trying to unionize the fishermen, are you not?”

I looked again at Prowse.

“Are you aware,” I shouted, adopting my stump-speaking voice, “that some people believe you insulted the Newfoundland people when you divided their legislative chamber into offices? But then, you must be, or you would not have been overheard saying, ‘What need do a people without a legislature have for a legislative chamber?’”

“Mr. Smallwood, as you seem to be the only person in the room who is unaware that you are drunk, I am willing to ignore that remark.”

“You dismantled the Newfoundland Museum,” I shouted, “to make way for more offices, and so scattered its exhibits that they will never be recovered. ‘And so I have,’ you tell people, ‘but what of it? What did that museum commemorate but three hundred years of misery and failure?’”

“Good night, Mr. Smallwood.”

“You have been quoted as saying, ‘St. John’s is a squalid town —’”

“There is a man behind you, Mr. Smallwood, who would like to shake my hand.”

“There is a man in front of you, Sir John, who would like to wring your neck.”

At this, Prowse and another man moved forward and took hold of me by the arms and began to drag me towards the lobby.

“Let him go,” Hope Simpson said. Lodge stepped up to him and whispered something in his ear, his head bobbing emphatically.

“Let him go,” Hope Simpson said again, dismissing me with a flick of his gloves and turning away. Prowse and the other man released me but watched me closely. My glasses had fallen off and as I bent to retrieve them I staggered.

A group of men, Prowse included, surrounded me and walked with me towards the door.

Outside, it was snowing. We stood in shelter on the steps of Government House. No one said a word. Prowse stared at me, but I pretended not to notice. The snow, driven by the northeast wind, was thickening and beginning to gather on the ground. Despite the lateness of the hour, it was brighter now than when I had arrived, the snow reflecting what little light there was. That in any other context the sight would have been a cheerful one made it all the more depressing.

“Here,” Prowse said, thrusting some bills at me, “take a cab home.” Again I ignored him. “You’re ruined in this town, Smallwood,” Prowse said. “You’re ruined in this country.”

I looked at the horse-drawn cabs and motor cabs that lined the driveway, the horses stamping and blowing. The drivers had taken the sudden appearance of a dozen men on the steps as a general exodus and were watching us expectantly.

The man who had greeted me at the door came running from inside with my overcoat. I put it under my arm and stepped out into the snow.

“Like father, like son,” Prowse shouted when I was halfway to the gate. I did not stop.

The next day I longed to talk to Fielding, though I had no idea what I would say to her, nor any reason to think I would be cheered by what she said to me. I went to her boarding-house on Cochrane Street, knocked on her door but got no answer. I began to leave when the door across the hall opened a crack. I could barely make out a stubble-bearded old man in a grimy undershirt.

“Lookin’ for her what writes the columns, are ya?” he said. I nodded. “She’s at the Harbour Light,” he said. “Went in yesterday. Says she’s gonna quit the booze. When I heard ya comin’ down the hall, I thought ya might be her. ‘I knew ya wouldn’t last,’ I was gonna say.” He chuckled and closed the door as if my coming to look for her somehow bore out his prediction.

The Harbour Light was operated by the Salvation Army. It was on Harbour Drive and bore the painting of a lighthouse on its exterior, a lighthouse from which a beacon blared out the words Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.

A small set of marble steps led to the lobby and a desk, behind which sat a Salvation Army nurse, a middle-aged woman all dressed in black with the initials S.A. sewn onto her collars and lapels. I asked her if I could see Miss Fielding. She brightened immediately. “You’re the first visitor she’s had,” she said. “It will lift her spirits a great deal to see that someone still cares about her. It’s a good thing you came when you did. She won’t be in any shape for visitors much longer.”

She escorted me to a small empty room in which there were a table and two facing chairs, not what I thought the visitors’ room would look like. I sat down and minutes later Fielding came in, wearing not a hospital gown but her own clothes; she even had her cane.

“Look at you,” I said.

She sniffed and raised her eyebrows, then sat down sideways to the table, stretching her long mismatched legs, her button-booted feet crossed, the thick-soled boot on top. She tapped her cane repeatedly on the floor.

“The nurse says you’re not getting many visitors,” I said.

“Not true. There’s been a steady stream of aunts, uncles, cousins,” she said. “The Fieldings have always been famous for pulling together when one of their own winds up in the drink tank. My aunts have been baking non-stop —” She sighed, weary of her own irony, it seemed.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said. “You haven’t gone a day without a bottle in fifteen years, let alone without a drink.”

“I’ve had my last drink,” she said. “I had it two days ago, April 16, 1936.”

Her whole body was shaking already.

“What made you decide?” I said. “Why now?”

“It seems to be a time in Newfoundland when people do strange things.” She smiled. She had heard about my run-in with Hope Simpson. Why shouldn’t she have, since word of it was all over town?

“Did you know,” she said, “that our first legislators met in an inn, a tavern from which they were evicted because they couldn’t pay the rent? Their landlady sold their mace and their Speaker’s chair. Put an ad for them in the papers. For Sale: One mace and one Speaker’s chair. And sundry regalia, including the sergeant-at-arms’ ornamental sword. It all wound up in England. We had to buy it back at an auction. ‘What am I bid for these articles from the Parliament of Newfoundland?’ Apparently, the bidding was quite brisk.”

“I’ll come to see you every day if you like,” I said.

“Really, Smallwood,” Fielding said, “I wish you wouldn’t —”

“You’ll need someone to help you pass the time,” I said. “I know what drinkers get like when they’re not drinking.”

When I went to see her two days later, she was much worse. Her head quivered uncontrollably as if she were in the advanced stage of some sort of palsy. Every so often a jolting tremor passed through her whole body as if she had awoken suddenly from sleep.

“You looked better when you were drinking,” I said.

“I’m trying to quit drinking, Smallwood,” Fielding said. “And there’s something about the sight of you that counteracts that impulse.”

“Everything counteracts that impulse,” I said.

“Why are you … here, Smallwood?” Fielding said, trying to stifle a tremor that passed through her when she was in mid-sentence. “You must think there’s something to be gained from it, is that it? I heard about your run-in with Hope Simpson. Perhaps you’d like me to write a column about it, make up a lot of witty things you wish you’d thought of at the time, and let you pass it off as yours.”

“You’re the most cynical woman I’ve ever met, Fielding,” I said, standing up. “You — you helped save Sir Richard’s life. I’m just returning the favour, that’s all.” I still could not bring myself to mention that she had saved my life, or to thank her for it.

I swore I would not go again, but the next day I changed my mind. The nurse at the desk told me that Fielding was very sick. “She really is,” she said. “Sometimes visitors think the patients just don’t want to see them. They had the doctor in last night. They had to put her in a straitjacket. He gave her some sedation, but we may have to send her to the hospital.”

I was not able to see her until ten days laten We met in the same room as before, but I doubt that it seemed the same to her. She hobbled into the room on her cane, still tremulous but not looking quite so wild-eyed as before.

“Two weeks,” she said. “The doctor said I’m passed the worst of it, the withdrawal part of it. I hope to God he’s right. This is the only place I’ve ever been that makes me miss the San. I can’t say I’m any happier to see you, though.”

Before I could react, Fielding held up her hand. “Sit down, Smallwood, sit down,” she said. “I take that last one back. It must be sobriety talking.”

I sat down.

“You know what I’m afraid of most?” she said. “I’m afraid that now that I’ve quit drinking, I’ll quit writing, too. Or I’ll keep writing, but it won’t be any good. And I might not even know it.”

“Maybe you’ll be a better writer,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get more work done than before.”

Fielding was silent for a while. Then she told me she was dreading being released because she doubted that “out there” she could resist temptation. I told her I was sure she could, but she shook her head.

“You may not believe it,” she said, “but I’ve appreciated your coming to visit me. In fact, I’ve got something for you. A token of my appreciation.” She took an envelope out of her coat pocket and handed it to me. Inside it were two letters, one that read:

Miss Fielding:

I’m leaving Newfoundland, for good, thank God. I was going through my files recently and found this. I thought you might like to have it.

Headmaster Reeves

The “it” referred to was the letter to the Morning Post. I had had only a glimpse of it before. Reeves had read it aloud while standing with his back to me. Though the glue with which the words had been pasted to the sheet had dried, the words, crumpled and shrunken, still adhered to the paper.

I sat down again. “Why would he send this to you?”

Fielding shrugged. “Perhaps he really thought I would like to have it. As a keepsake of sorts.”

“I guess he was right,” I said. “You’ve kept it for the past ten years. It must mean something to you.”

“Well, I don’t want it any more. You can have it if you want it,” Fielding said. She put up her hand before I could protest. “I just want to get rid of it, that’s all. I’ve had it long enough. If you don’t want it, I’ll throw it away or burn it or something. I just thought I’d offer in case it meant something to you. It means nothing to me any more.” She spoke the last sentence so pointedly I realized that she saw herself as having made a new beginning now that she had quit drinking.

But why was she offering me the letter? Her explanation seemed unconvincing. If I were in her position, I would have destroyed it the instant I set eyes on it. It was certainly not the kind of thing I would hand over to someone else, let alone the very person it had been designed to injure. It must be that it would mean something to her for me to have it.

I had not let drop the possibility that someone other than Fielding had written it. Since I had first suspected it might be Prowse, that night when he and I met at Sir Richard’s, I had thought about it a lot. And although I could come to no conclusions regarding Prowse, it had come to seem more and more unlikely to me that Fielding was the author of the letter. There was the question of why she had waited so long to get her revenge. Nearly three years. And why, having gone as far with her prank as she had, would she have been so stricken with remorse that to clear me she confessed? I was merely suspected of having written the letter; it could never have been proven that I had, and therefore the trouble she had saved me from was out of all proportion to what she caused for herself. None of this explained, of course, why she had given me the letter. If she wanted me to know the truth, why didn’t she just come right out and tell me what it was?

At any rate, now that I had seen it again, I could not stand the thought of the letter being destroyed. Perhaps I believed that as long as it existed, there was some hope of finding out for certain who had written it.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “And the note from Reeves, unless you want it?” She shook her head. I shrugged. “Then I’ll take that, too.” I put both letters back in the envelope and left.