Chapter Six Chapter Six THE COURTS. THE NUMBER OF DEFENDANTS WHO WERE POOR WAS absurdly blatant, disproportionate. The phrase most often spoken by a judge: “Your circumstances do not mitigate your guilt.”
The lawyers. A fraternity hardened by the terms of their profession, exchanging cryptic jibes, laughing as if no one but one of their own could possibly understand them or appreciate their special hard-nosed brand of humour. I could see the men they once were or might have been, the men they would have liked to be—and see, too, how this common disappointment was a kind of joke among them, ironic amusement at the idealism of their youth.
“They’re having a field day with your comeuppance,” my father said. “All the papers. All the enemies you made. They’re all saying that Herder fired you because people lost interest in your Forgeries. That man Reeves will not stop crowing about your downfall.”
“My downfall. My comeuppance. Have I come up or fallen down?”
“You will never learn your lesson, girl. They have left you with nothing and you go on making jokes.”
“It’s your assessment of my prospects that keeps me so light-hearted.”
“I have done my best with you. The best that circumstances would allow.”
“How much better off everyone would be if not for circumstances. I propose a society for the eradication of circumstances.”
“You smell like you’ve been drinking, girl.”
“I smell like what I have been drinking. Which is Scotch. It seems I have a taste for it. And a tolerance.”
“No sooner do I put a stop to one scandal than you find yourself another. You are a woman barely older than a girl, for heaven’s sake. How did you acquire a taste and a tolerance for Scotch? Not in this house. Not from me. I never drink. Not even brandy.”
“Acquiring a taste for it was easy. The hard part was acquiring the Scotch.”
“How long—”
“Months. I was having trouble sleeping.”
“You must nip this disgraceful habit in the bud.”
“We must nip nipping in the bud in the bud.”
“This confirms it. No one in my family has ever turned to drink.”
“I shall keep an eye out for a tall man with a taste for Scotch. How many of them could there be?”
“God only knows whose child you are. Someone passing through St. John’s from who knows where. Going who knows where.”
“Yes, I could tell from the moment I met her in New York. I could just see her gallivanting round the waterfront in search of roughnecks. Sneaking out at night while you were sleeping. All your suspicions seemed far-fetched until the moment I set eyes on her. And then it struck me just how well you knew your wife. So many secret liaisons. Men whose names she can’t remember any more, if she ever knew them in the first place. Do you think she even knows herself who my father is? I could see her sizing me up, trying to remember which one of them I looked like.”
“Stop it. I have never accused her of such behaviour.”
“Of what, then? Cheating on you with a better class of men? Gallivanting round at garden parties in search of doctors who were passing through? Or visitors from Whitehall? Perhaps I am the daughter of some bibulous aristocrat. Lord Lofty of Kent, sir.”
“You think you know that woman, but you don’t. You think you know people, but you don’t. What they are capable of doing.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth—”
“Perhaps you could hint darkly at some of them.”
For some time, it had been the printer’s devil who brought my Scotch to me from Herder, who acquired it for me. It was true, as I told my father, that I had had trouble sleeping. It had got to the point where I simply could not sleep at all, though I was always tired.
I tried in vain to ration my supply of Scotch, to make it last from one payday to the next, could not resist drinking as much per day as I wanted to until I had exhausted my supply with days or even a week to go before I would be paid. Herder would sometimes give me an advance, but he was reluctant, because he knew where the money was going.
“Maybe that job is not for you,” he said, which heartened me until he made it clear that there were no other jobs. I knew that no other paper, no other editor in the city, would hire me.
“I can do the job,” I said. “I’m just getting used to it, that’s all. Once I’m used to it, I’ll be able to sleep like I did before.”
“I can no longer, in good conscience, keep you supplied with Scotch. I’m sorry, Fielding.”
“What you need, miss,” P.D. said, “is something really strong.”
“I don’t suppose you know someone who could find me something really strong,” I said. He nodded.
Herder’s printer’s devil was now my supplier as well as my delivery boy. No longer the middleman, the boy, known as P.D., could lay his hands on nothing but gin. I instructed him to keep a permanent eye out for rum or whisky, but gin was all I ever got.
“Juneshine,” he called it, after the juniper berries from which it was locally, and illegally, made. It came in bottles without labels, amber bottles with fat, unattenuated necks such as you might find in a laboratory, stoppered with ragged chunks of cork. Instead of having the clear-as-water look of commercial gin, juneshine was cloudy and often had juniper needles floating about in it, as well as other unidentifiables that lay on the bottom like specimens of some sort that the juneshine was intended to preserve.
“They said to tell you this is something really strong, miss,” P.D. said. Who are they? I felt like asking. I assumed he meant his parents, from whom he hid the pennies that I gave him. “They said to tell you not to drink it straight.”
“You didn’t tell them who I am?”
“No. They tells me to tell everyone not to drink it straight. You’re supposed to mix it with something sweet. Like spruce beer. I can get you some spruce.”
“I suppose they make the spruce beer too, do they?”
“Yes, miss. But they don’t charge much. Especially not for juneshine customers. Some people mixes the juneshine with syrup or juice, but spruce beer is better for your stomach. It settles your stomach so you don’t get sick. Junibeer is the best. That’s what they calls it.”
“Junibeer?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Why don’t they mix it themselves?”
“’Cause you can’t leave it mixed for very long. The bottles might blow up. The juneshine blows up sometimes too, but the junibeer is worse. You can’t leave it lying around too long, not even in the icebox. If you don’t drink it after a week, you’re supposed to get rid of it. Just in case.”
I couldn’t decide if this was well-meant advice dispensed at their instruction or a tall tale meant to sell more beer by discouraging customers from hoarding their supply of juneshine. How strange it was listening to him, this twelve-year-old advising me on the most cost-efficient and least-nauseating way of getting drunk on juneshine. As full of helpful hints about the use of his product as any salesman.
“All right, P.D. Get me some spruce beer.”
He always made his deliveries before dark, he said, so I would hurry home as soon as court let out in the afternoon. He came to the house on the pretence of having been sent to get my copy for tomorrow’s paper. When I heard the knocker, I let him in and we exchanged commodities, he giving me juneshine and spruce beer, me giving him money, including a penny for himself, and my court stories. I began to think that his job at the Telegram was merely a cover, for he often referred to other customers and I wondered how multiple daily deliveries were possible unless he had somewhere in the city to store the juneshine and spruce beer, as well as the empty bottles that, with each delivery, he collected and brought back to them.
“You writes up people’s names from court, don’t you?” he asked me one day.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m the court fink for the Telegram.”
“’Cause you got caught for forgery, right?” he said.
I saw that he was impressed with me for having been “caught” for something, me, this woman who lived in circumstances so unlike his own, in this big house on Circular Road. Even if he had no idea what forgery was, he respected me for having been up to something either illegal or disapproved of by the ’Stab, the name for the Constabulary.
“Yes,” I said. “I was caught for forgery. That’s how I ended up in court.” It occurred to me that he could not read one word of the stories he took from me for Herder. Had not been able to read one word of the Forgeries. An illiterate printer’s devil.
Sometimes, walking to the courthouse in the morning, I looked across the harbour at the Brow, where he lived. Columns of smoke rose up here and there from the dense woods above the houses. Any one of them could be coming from the still where my juneshine and spruce beer were made.
“Have you ever been caught?” I asked him.
“No, miss,” he said, shaking his head as if he had never considered the possibility. “Have they ever been caught?” I said. “No, miss,” he said, though he looked grave this time. He knew what the implications of their being caught would be for him. He must have been conspicuous walking about with those wrapped bundles clutched against his chest, especially on streets like ours where there were no stores and not much traffic.
“Has no one ever asked you what you have inside those bundles?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “I just tells ’m clothes and shoes. From Sally Ann. If anyone asks to look inside, I’m s’posed to drop everything and run. They’d have to be some fast to catch me. But no one ever asked me yet.”
He’ll wind up in jail one day because of me or someone like me, I told myself. I pictured him dropping a bundle by accident on some busy downtown street, the bottles breaking, the juneshine and spruce beer soaking through the paper onto the ground, the whole mess reeking of illicit alcohol.
But I kept on buying juneshine from him. And the spruce beer to wash it down. From just such a boy as my unacknowledged son might one day be.
The spruce beer came in dark green, long-necked bottles, stoppered, like the juneshine, with cork. It had to be kept cold, or else it all but exploded when you pulled the cork, froth shooting from the bottle like champagne. The spruce beer was even cloudier than the juneshine, with whole spruce twigs on the bottom and spruce needles swirling about like some ingredient used to insoluble excess.
Every evening, I performed the same ritual. Carefully poured into a glass a small amount of juneshine, a quarter of an inch or less. Then put a tea strainer on the glass and poured the spruce beer through it an ounce or so at a time. By the time the glass was full, the tea strainer was as well, with little twigs and needles. I thought of some man from the Brow making his way home through the woods at twilight, bent beneath the weight of a load of spruce and juniper branches, smeared from head to toe with turpentine. It was by no means an unpleasant image. Nor was that of his wife, picking the sticky black berries from the juniper branches, then notching both kinds of branches and skinning the bark from them until nothing but bare wood remained. Then the juneshine and the spruce beer being made, one after the other, in some sort of makeshift cauldron that the couple stirred with two-by-fours or shovels. I liked the idea of this covert, illicit, almost occult labour going into the making of the glass of junibeer that I would soon be drinking. And the idea that the junibeer was made from trees just like the ones I looked at every day, trees that grew not far away, on the Brow that was visible from almost everywhere I went.
I had to keep the whole matter hidden from my father. He rarely opened the icebox and even then only after work when he was thirsty. He ate only one meal a day, a large lunch that he had delivered to his surgery, and after consuming which, he took a nap. Nevertheless, I cleared the icebox of spruce beer and juneshine before I went to bed. After he came home, I waited for an hour until I was sure he was asleep and crept downstairs to replenish my supply. Once asleep, he was all but unwakeable, so I knew it was highly unlikely that he would catch me in the act. I sampled the junibeer twice each evening, drinking a small amount before I went to bed, and a larger amount before I went to bed the second time, enough to make me sleep soundly until morning.
At my first taste of junibeer, I almost retched. It was not the taste so much as its breathtaking potency that surprised me. Black spots of the sort I sometimes saw when I stood up too fast swarmed before my eyes. My usual cure for this was a deep breath, which on this occasion I couldn’t manage. After the impulse to gag passed, I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me and my body had forgotten how to breathe. I went out onto the back steps, gasping to no effect several times until at last air rushed in all at once and I gulped it down like water.
After that, I used less juneshine and more spruce, experimenting until I found a proportion that was drinkable. The main difficulty with concealing my new habit from my father was the smell. I stoppered the juneshine as quickly as I could after pouring it, but still the kitchen reeked as if a juniper tree had been left in it for days. The smell of the spruce was not as strong, but it mixed with that of the juneshine to create an odour of hyper-fermentation. I burnt wood in the fireplace instead of coal and closed the flue for a while so that smoke spread through the house, explaining to my father when he came home that I had done so by accident. The next nights, I left all the windows open. But I knew some long-term solution was needed, so I smoked more cigarettes than usual, using the cheapest, most acrid smelling tobacco I could find, the Yellow Rag I had long ago forsaken for Royal Emblem.
“It is a most unladylike habit,” my father said, “smoking cigarettes.”
“So is having children out of wedlock,” I said.
“It is even reprehensible in men. I don’t know why you took it up. I have never so much as smoked a pipe.”
“All the lawyers at the courthouse smoke,” I said. “And the other reporters.”
“All of whom are men.”
“Yes, but it’s hard to resist taking it up when everyone around you is doing it.”
“Suddenly you are following the crowd?”
“I don’t plan to make a habit of conformity, believe me,” I said. Unsure just how volatile the junibeer might be, I kept it far separate from my lit cigarette—the junibeer on one end of the table and the Yellow Ragarettes on the other, I went back and forth between them, sipping, smoking, sipping, smoking. It wasn’t long before I was rolling Ragarettes while lying in bed, while writing, while sitting in the courtroom. It also wasn’t long before I was drinking junibeer as more than just a cure for sleeplessness.
I was as careful as I could not to be seen sipping from the flask, but I dropped it on the floor of my office one day and two of the bailiffs saw the junibeer that spilled out. The bailiffs grinned at me and then at each other but said nothing. But in no time, word of the contents of my flask got around.
“So what’s your poison these days, Fielding?” one of the prosecutors asked me.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and he shook his head and laughed. I would have left the flask at home from then on, but I found it too difficult to get through the day without the junibeer.
“Two months on her first real job and she’s on the ’shine and the cigarettes,” one lawyer said.
“Junibeer,” another lawyer standing next to me announced one day. “You smell like the inside of the Black Mariah on a Sunday morning. You’ll be dead in six months drinking that stuff.”
I suppose it was inevitable that word of the flask would get back to my father.
“I was told,” he shouted upstairs to me one night when he got home from work, “that you were seen at the courthouse with a flask of something.”
I got dressed quickly and went downstairs, smoking a cigarette, still feeling the effects of my first nightcap.
“Junibeer,” I said.
“Are you insane, girl?” he said. “Do you realize that you could be arrested?”
“It seems unlikely,” I said.
“In the courthouse? Surrounded by police and prosecutors? And judges?”
“And criminals,” I said. “Your name is mud among them.”
“You’re drunk. You’ve been drinking.”
“Been drinking but not drunk.”
“Why have you taken to drinking?”
“It helps me sleep.”
“I could have given you something for that.”
“No laudanum, thanks.”
“Junibeer. Do you know what that can do to you? I’ve treated people who became ill because of drinking that. People have died. Where do you get it?”
“Not from anyone you know.”
“What must they be saying at the courthouse?”
“They call it Fielding’s Remedy.”
“Because I’m a doctor. Fielding’s Remedy. Dr. Fielding’s Remedy, they might as well be saying. You are to promise me you will never drink again.”
“It would only be a promise that I would break. It would only be a lie.”
“You won’t stop breaking the law?”
“I won’t promise that I’ll never drink again. Perhaps it really is time that I left this house.”
“Do you realize that I was one of those who signed the petition for prohibition? One of the prominent citizens whose name appeared on that list that was published in the papers? I didn’t just vote for prohibition.”
“I would have voted against it. If I had the right to vote.”
“Don’t tell me that, on top of everything else, you’ve become one of those awful suffragettes?”
“Cigarettes, suffragettes and junibeer. It’s quite a threesome, isn’t it?”
“My God—”
“Don’t worry. I haven’t become one of those awful women. God knows what women would vote for if they had the vote. Even if they did have it, I’d be too young.”
“Junibeer. The young woman they all think is my daughter, thrown in jail.”
“So could you be. The junibeer’s in your icebox at the moment.”
“Good God, girl, you’ve lost your mind. You’re drunk. And have been in public. What a disgusting spectacle. And people blame me for everything you do.”
“Whereas they only blame me for some of what you do.”
“What?”
“Never mind. As you say, I’m drunk. It’s not as if you can put a notice in the paper. Dr. Fielding is no longer to be blamed for what his daughter does.”
“Is this how you intend to spend your life, blackening my name? No doubt you’ll still be at it when I’m gone.”
“At some point, people will blame only me for everything I do.”
“I wish that were true. But such a day will never come.”
“It will come sooner the sooner I move out.”
“No. I won’t have you moving out. A girl your age. Dr. Fielding’s daughter in some dive. Disgraced again. What sort of place, what sort of dump could you afford? A room in some boarding house. You have no idea. I have seen such places. The way people live. The things that go on. You have no idea how such places are regarded.”
“If you would like to supplement my income, perhaps I could afford a decent place—”
“There is no decent place for a woman by herself. A woman living alone. Other men’s daughters are well on their way to getting married.”
“If you are waiting for some man to take me off your hands—”
“I am not waiting. I am not an idiot. You have—disqualified yourself. You will never marry well. That confession. Those Forgeries. Now this—”
“And I haven’t exactly saved myself for marriage, have I—”
“Do not speak to me like that. My God, you cannot be mine.”
“Regarding what you call this. I think we could come to some arrangement.”
“Meaning what?”
“Not laudanum. But you are a doctor. You could prescribe something else for me.”
“Something you would fill your flask with and take with you to court.”
“What if I promised to take my medicine at home?”
“Prescribe something—”
“Yes, and I also don’t mean some patent medicine like Brown’s Bronchial Elixir or Beef Iron and Wine.”
“You are too young. I could not prescribe alcohol for you.”
“Then prescribe it for yourself. Diagnose yourself with some disorder of the nerves. I have heard at the courthouse that half the doctors in town are prescribing for themselves.”
“I doubt that any are prescribing for their underage daughters.”
“As I said, prescribe it for yourself. Have the prescriptions filled yourself. What druggist would doubt that the father of Sheilagh Fielding needed help to calm his nerves? People will blame your condition on me.”
“People will think I have taken to drink.”
“They will think you are doing what most of them are doing. Finding a way past prohibition.”
“I have been a teetotaller all my life. Before prohibition, my colleagues teased me because I didn’t drink. Wouldn’t have a brandy with them. Or even smoke cigars.”
“You are my father. People will accept that as an explanation for any change in your behaviour. And they will assume that you take your medicine at home, to help you sleep. It’s not as if you’ll be going to work drunk or smelling of alcohol.”
“A sorry state of affairs. You need only turn aside from alcohol.”
“I do not wish to turn aside from it. I don’t plan to be a dipsomaniac, a common drunk. But I find it makes me—I think less about some things that I would rather not think about at all. And sleep. It helps me sleep. I worry less about not sleeping.”
“This arrangement. It amounts to blackmail. I go along with it or else. You go on dealing with these moonshiners from the Brow. Go on breaking the law. Risk winding up in jail. Jail would be the end of both of us.”
“Father, for most people, finding ways to get their hands on alcohol has become a game. They drink more now than they ever did. The law will be repealed. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Blackmail. Shameful. Further proof that you are no child of mine.”
But he agreed to the arrangement. Wrote himself prescriptions for alcohol. Went to several druggists in the vain hope of disguising “his” level of consumption. When he came home from work, he left the alcohol for me in a brown paper bag on the kitchen table where I found it in the morning after he had left the house. By tacit agreement, the delivery was never made in person. The alcohol never passed from his hands to mine. I kept the bottles at all times in my room, in a dresser drawer so that not even by chance could he set eyes on them. I never drank in his presence. Was never in his presence when I had been drinking. He returned the empty bottles to the druggists to have them refilled, collecting them from the back porch where I left them. I mixed the raw alcohol, known as “alky,” with anisette and with a kind of carbonated soft drink that had no brand name but was simply called “aerated water with sugar.” Unlike the Juneshine, it was as clear as water. Alky, anisette and aerated water. Triple A, I called it.
It tasted much better than the junibeer and did not leave me feeling so queasy in the morning. At first, I did as I promised him and drank only at home. Though I could have used a glass, I preferred to drink from the flask, roaming about the house with it in the inside pocket of my vest, sipping from it while I read or wrote. I took one mouthful in the morning, then put the flask in my dresser drawer and headed off to the courthouse. At lunchtime I hurried home for a drink that would tide me over until afternoon.
My father was right. Word that he was self-prescribing the Cure soon got around. But I was right as well. I was assumed to be the cause of his “condition,” the reason his nerves were so constantly on edge that he could not make it through the day without his “medicine.” Dr. Fielding’s Condition was my nickname for a while.
“It is a humiliation,” my father said, “facing those same men week after week. A doctor should not be looked down upon by druggists. I can tell what they think of me. That I am malingering. Just another person pretending to be sick so they can get the Cure. A doctor taken to drink. Writing himself prescriptions for it. Worse than the worst of his patients. All this I endure so that I can bring home this ‘alky’ for a mere girl who is forbidden it by law. I am breaking the law, committing crimes to get you your supply. I must be losing my mind. To think that I agreed to such a thing. If word got out.”
I broke off my arrangement with P.D. He came to the house with a delivery of juneshine and spruce beer that I had ordered weeks ago. I paid him for it but told him he could keep it, sell it elsewhere perhaps, and keep the surplus profit for himself.
“Will they be angry when you tell them I don’t want their juneshine any more?”
He shrugged. “Ya gave up drinkin,’ did ya?” he said.
I decided it was better to say yes than to tell him that I had a new supplier, especially as he might repeat what I said to them, who might choose to blame their loss of a customer on him.
“Just as well,” he said. “Them what drinks junibeer for long goes cracked.”
I continued to see him every day. He would come to the house to collect my court stories in the afternoon and to receive his customary penny.
“What are you planning to do with the money?” I said.
“I’m goin’ away as soon as I can,” he said.
“Away?” I said. “Away from St. John’s?”
“Away from Newfoundland,” he said. “Boston, maybe. Or New York.”
One day, a new printer’s devil came by to get my stories.
“Where’s P.D.?” I said.
The boy, who could have passed from a distance for P.D., shrugged. “My name is P.D. now,” he said.
I asked Herder about P.D.
“He never showed up for work,” he said. “That’s all anybody knows.”
March 12, 1917
I am not yet twenty, yet feel sometimes like I have lived a hundred lives. I have created two. And feel certain that there will not be others. Their names are David and Sarah. But I do not think of them by name. By those names or by other ones. I sometimes wish that she had never left that note. I should have left it on the pillow, as if to say to her, I do not wish to know their names. Or: I have my own names for them. Or: why do you presume I care what you will call them? But I took it with me as though accepting the terms of some bargain we had made. The note the last part of the bargain. The last stage of our transaction. If you give me your children, I will let you know their names. You will take nothing of your children with you but their names. I keep that piece of paper with me, always. As if otherwise I might begin to doubt that they exist.
Sometimes, when I go to bed, I put the note beneath my pillow. And am surprised to find it still there in the morning. In spite of it, I have no dreams. None of New York. None of that suite in her house. No dreams of my children. While awake, I think of them, but I have yet to see them in my dreams. What I imagine them to be, imagine them to look like. You may have their names, but you may not dream of them. A bargain made a thousand years ago. To dream of them. What a torment it might be.
Was it both of them I heard? If not, which one? Daughter. Son. Sarah. David. Their initials are transposed. Daughter David. Son Sarah. I cannot dream of them because they cannot dream of me. I have gone to sleep clutching that piece of paper in my fist and, waking with an empty hand, searched the blankets in a panic. I have dreamt of doing that and woken with the piece of paper balled up in my fist like the one thing I salvaged from the dream.
My father can foresee no future for me. To him, future means marriage. Or some spinsterly career. The Spencer Spinsters. Less embarrassment if one remains unmarried for a reason. Or rather if, having been left on the shelf, one makes the best of it. “A woman in your situation could do worse.” His great fear, that I will do worse. Though he cannot, or will not, guess what worse might be.
A woman in my situation. I would have to go away, far away, and hope to somehow start again. As all the Spencer women are rumoured to have done. Each with something in her past that only time or distance could erase. My father imagines I could be a teacher, somewhere. And then remembers that I never finished school, and why. A teacher who betrayed her teachers and her school. A woman whose “past” took place at school could never hope to be a teacher no matter where she went. No matter how long ago. Miss Emilee all but said so.
I met her on the street last week as I was walking past the Feild. Late in the afternoon, the playing fields of both schools long since deserted. I believe she saw me from the window of her house and came out to meet me. Though she pretended that she, too, was strolling aimlessly along. Our meeting a coincidence.
“Hello, Sheilagh.”
“Hello, Miss Stirling.” I always thought of her as Miss Emilee. Miss Emilee, who had kept my secret to herself. I saw it in her eyes. You have had a child since we last spoke. But neither one of us will speak of it this time.
“You have been causing quite a stir,” she said and smiled. A smile of unstinting kindness and affection.
How few such smiles there seemed to be. My throat constricted. I had to swallow twice before I spoke. Do not cry here on the street and leave her with no choice but to take you in her arms. Tiny Miss Emilee, clinging to me as if she were the one in need of comforting.
We talked for a while as if nothing in my life was out of order.
“What are your plans, Sheilagh?”
I told her, truthfully, that I had no plans.
“I would offer you a place at Bishop Spencer if I could,” she said.
“Which I would gratefully decline,” I said.
She nodded in that worried way of hers. How long can you go on doing what you do? She didn’t ask. She could see that I understood my situation and that for either one of us to dwell on it was pointless. A fall day. The usual clattering stampede of leaves along the street each time the wind came up. Don’t cry. Better not to tell her everything. Better not to make her feel more helpless than she did already.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “Me writing that Forgery as if you wrote it.”
She smiled. “You should have seen Headmaster Reeves.”
“Well. He has had the last laugh.”
“There will be other laughs,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “There will be.”
What does my father think as he goes shamefaced to the druggists? Each script of eight ounces of alky costs a dollar. But eight ounces makes a lot of Triple A. I give him as much money as I can, almost every cent I make. I eat next to nothing and would eat no more if I were rich. But he says that I will put him in the poorhouse.
What will I do? How much longer can I stand that courthouse? Were I to somehow stick it out for years, I would have daily encounters with Prowse, whom I saw last week. Spoke to last week. He is articling at his father’s firm. We met on the steps of the courthouse.
“Fielding,” he said. “Good God. What happened to the other half of you?”
“A good many people,” I said, “have got their pound of flesh.”
“A living example of what junibeer will do.”
“And you, Prowse,” I said, “are a living example of what roast beef will do.”
He had filled out even more and had the beginnings of a “barrister’s belly.”
“I have sense enough to keep body and soul together,” he said.
“I see no evidence,” I said, “of soul enlargement.”
“You see no evidence of anything, Fielding.”
“I saw none against Smallwood.”
I shrugged.
“You got what you deserved, didn’t you, for writing those Forgeries of yours?”
“I stepped down,” I said. “I had grown tired of writing them.”
“The way I heard it, certain people grew tired of reading them.”
“People who find reading tiresome.”
“The same old Fielding,” he said. “You still think making smart remarks will get you somewhere.”
“Yes,” I said. “The same old Fielding. Nothing new since we saw each other last.” He looked quizzical, as if he thought he was supposed to know what my tone of voice implied. Their names are David and Sarah. Prowse. Staring at me with no indication that he’d ever touched me. I had once loved him. But he would not let himself love me. He could not be both my husband and Prowse.
“Goodbye,” I said, lighting up a Yellow Ragarette as I walked away.
I will have to find another job before Prowse is called to the bar. The sight of Prowse every day. A constant reminder to me of what he doesn’t know. A constant reminder of them. His face, his voice, his presence every day. Their faces, voices, presence. I could not endure it.
I felt, just for a few moments, how I felt that day on the school grounds when he turned away from me. To suddenly find myself unloved. The day after our last day at the judge’s house. Betrayed. Dismissed. The sensation of falling. Almost sick to my stomach. How did I manage to keep from crying? Prowse exulting with the others. Go, Fielding, go! While I stood there, remembering as if it had not been the day before but years ago that we had—twilight in the judge’s house. My face burning. Both of us still out of breath. The smell of coal. How quickly my body grew cold when he pulled away. Silent with his back to me. Faint sounds from horse’s hooves. Two people, two voices, passing by. For them a day, a moment like other days, other moments. Oblivious to us. It seemed impossible. I looked at his face, his eyes, his mouth. Like him. Already, perhaps, they look like him. They will be tall like him and me. How tall will Sarah be? Height a disadvantage for a woman.
Smallwood. Him too I have met. I saw him first. Hands in his pockets. Drew his trousers tight so I could see how thin his legs were. What happened to the other half of him? He was half gone to begin with. When he went to Bishop Feild. We forgo food for different reasons. Me because it interferes with drinking. Him so that his siblings can have his. Unlike P.D., he gives his money to his mother, who hides it from his father.
But he no longer looked incongruous as he had at Bishop Feild. Duckworth Street was full of others like him. How out of place Prowse would have looked on that same street. Men like Prowse will be one day do not walk the streets. Only the distance from their carriage to the door.
God knows how long Smallwood had been walking when I saw him. His face in profile like an axe. That same Norfolk from the Feild. The one he held together with both hands as he stood encircled by the boys. Short work of him, I thought back then. But now I could see what a fight they would have had. Where is he going? Where has he been? With nothing in his pockets but his hands. That jacket whose only purpose now was decoration. His shirt showed through at the seams so that the sleeves seemed unconnected to the shoulders, as if they might have been pinned to his shirt. The whole thing might have been a dozen separate pieces pinned onto him in the semblance of a jacket. I imagined him donning them one by one. Assembling the jacket piece by piece like a tailor in the early stages of his work. His socks showed through the toes of his boots. His hat looked like someone had used it to butt out cigarettes. His glasses were all tape and bits of string. His years at Bishop Feild had left no mark on him. There was nothing left of the boy whom Prowse befriended and betrayed, nothing but that defiant stride. No one without a destination, with nowhere to go, could look more like a man bent on getting somewhere fast than Smallwood.
“Smallwood,” I shouted. He jumped, startled, as if no one had ever said his name before. As if to be accosted in the street could only mean trouble. What sort of reverie? What could so preoccupy that mind? He stopped and looked furtively around as if preparing to defend himself. I was across the street.
“Over here,” I said. I waved, as if I needed to. He stared at me but did not cross the street, so I crossed over to his side, forcing a motorcar whose driver recognized me to stop.
“Smallwood,” I said. “It’s Fielding.” As if he might otherwise have confused me with some other woman who was six foot three.
“Fielding,” he said. “You look like you’ve been sick or something. Nothing fits you any more.”
“Nothing ever did fit you,” I said.
“Everything I’m wearing once belonged to someone else,” he said, almost boastfully.
“Yes,” I said. “He used to go to Bishop Feild.”
“What do you want, Fielding? Planning to get me into trouble again?”
“I got you out of trouble.”
“After you got me into bigger trouble. Why did you write that stupid letter to the Morning Post, anyway? Did you actually think they’d print it?”
“No. I thought they would ignore it. It was just a prank. That got out of hand. At your expense.”
“Well, I never would have graduated anyway. Reeves would have seen to that. You certainly got his goat. With those Forgeries of yours. I knew they wouldn’t let you keep writing those for long. So what are you doing now? I suppose it’s no great thing to lose your job when your father is a doctor.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
He seemed not to know that I was Harold Dexter.
“Nothing much. Still living with my father.”
“I’m not.”
“Why would you be living with my father?”
“I have things to do, Fielding.”
“Such as? You should see a doctor, Smallwood. You really don’t look well.”
“You are the daughter of a doctor and look at you.”
“I have an excuse for not eating. I drink instead.” I took the flask from my pocket, sipped swiftly from it and replaced it.
Smallwood shook his head. “What in God’s name is in that? It smells like—”
I told him the ingredients, but not my source, of Triple A. He shook his head. I told him I had started out on juneshine and spruce beer.
“Junibeer,” he said. “One of my father’s favourites. A woman your age. And you could be arrested.”
“You, I suspect, have a better excuse for not eating. You have no food.”
He denied this. Denied having no money for food. Denied having no job.
“Smallwood,” I said, “you would deny it if I accused you of needing to wear glasses. You would deny it if I accused you of wearing glasses.”
He began to walk away. He was right. Reeves would never have let him graduate. The “quality.” The “quantity” Reeves and others called the poor majority. The mass of men. He seemed to have no mass at all. The immaterial. Most of the “quantity” were like him. A mass of shadows. It might have been not his clothes but the parts of his body that were pinned together. Adhering out of habit. Yet the optimism, the ambition of that stride. A member of the quantity, but for him anything is possible. Knows what he wants and just how to get it. An outlook so at odds with his appearance and his circumstances that he seemed delusional.
“The Morning Post,” I said, “is looking for a court reporter.”
Now we are rival reporters. He had heard of Harold Dexter but had no idea it was a pseudonym, let alone mine. How surprised he was to see me in my “office.”
The lawyers are merciless with him. With us. Though he hardly seems to notice. They know our “history.” Neither of us has told them how he got the job. They think it some hilarious coincidence. Two “bitter enemies” working side by side. Fielding who framed Smallwood, ruined his meagre prospects, then confessed, thus getting herself expelled. Now elbow to elbow.
“Working elbow to ear,” they say. Not joined at the hip. Joined at the hip and shoulder. Hilarious, they think, the difference in our height and bulk. Even in my present state, I am twice as broad as him. Fielding and her sidekick. “More meat on her cane than there is on you.” They talk to my cane, pretending that it’s him. Fielding and her nephew. Manservant Smallwood. Known collectively as Fieldwood. “Here comes Fieldwood,” they say, as we enter court. My cane is Bigwood. Lots of ribald “wood” puns at his expense. And mine. My preference for Bigwood. Poor Smallwood. Do I sit him on my lap? Do I bounce him on my knee? When will he be starting school? He seems oblivious, but I defend him anyway.
Smallwood worries that his father will show up in court some day. Public drunkenness. Buying from bootleggers and causing a disturbance. Profanity. Resisting arrest. He scans the courtroom docket every day in dread. He frequently encounters people that he knows or knew, boys, now men, that he grew up with. Friends of his father whom his father, like mine, calls “associates.”
“Smallwood?” my father said when he first heard that we were colleagues at the courthouse. “Then you must quit your job at once,” he said. “How can you consort with him? After what he did. The likes of him. The dregs. Have you forgotten who he is? He must have no shame. That business in New York. God knows what he would do. Who he would tell some day if you tell him something after you’ve been drinking. Or worse. What he did once he might do again, especially if you’d been drinking. Take advantage of you like before. My God, he must never know. I would think that, of all the people you wanted to stay clear of—have you lost your mind? You cannot associate with him. You will wind up telling him your secret.”
“I told you I will never speak of it,” I said. “Never. He knows nothing about that business in New York and he never will. No amount of Triple A could loosen my lips about that. It is by pure chance that we wound up working together. I can’t quit my job. I might never get another one. Herder is the only man I know who doesn’t mind my—reputation.”
“Have you no shame?”
“I have no choice.”
Smallwood asks often about what New York was like. Doesn’t understand my reticence. “You spent, what, six months there? Six? In the greatest city in the world. And you never talk about it.”
I describe New York to him as I have seen it on postcards, in photographs, in books. I repeat descriptions of it I have read.
“What do you remember most vividly about it?”
“The Brooklyn Bridge,” I said. “It’s—an amazing bridge. To tell you the truth, Smallwood, all I did while I was there was argue with my mother and her husband.”
“Six months in New York,” he said. “You must have seen every inch of it. I would have. Did you go to Central Park much?”
“Yes,” I said. “Central Park is very beautiful.”
“I don’t think I would ever have come back,” he said. “All this must seem so different to you now.”
“Very different,” I said. “Before New York, and after New York. That’s how I see my life.”
“Before New York and after New York. Yes I can see that. St. John’s must seem so small. You must think about New York all the time.”
“Yes. I do. All the time.”
“Do you think you’ll go back?”
“I don’t know. I may never see New York again.”
“I’m going there some day. And if I do come back, I’ll be prime minister of Newfoundland. Also some day.”
I smiled. He said it as if his ascension to the top was as good as accomplished, preordained. I smiled, he thought condescendingly, but I was touched. I foresaw no such rags-to-riches rise in his future. Foresaw disillusionment and disappointment. And pointless persistence.
“I will have the last laugh,” he said.
His self-confidence entirely unjustified and entirely unshakeable. Reporting for pennies a day. Talking as if he is ideally situated to surpass all the lawyers and judges he works among.
Smallwood says his publisher has convinced one of the merchants to let him write about the seal hunt. See it first-hand. He has a berth on the S.S. Newfoundland. Captain Westbury Keane is the skipper. Son of “old Man Keane.”
“I won’t be allowed to leave the ship,” he said.
“Not even if it’s sinking,” a lawyer said.
“I have to watch the seal hunt through binoculars,” Smallwood said. What an image. Smallwood at the gunwales of the otherwise deserted ship, the only man left on board the S.S. Newfoundland, a pair of binoculars pressed against his glasses, trying, as always, to make out what is going on “out there.” Trying to understand a world that will always keep him at a distance.
“I’ll see everything that happens on the ship,” he said. “Close up. I’ll have a bunk like all the other men.”
“Are you sure you won’t be sharing one?” said Sharpe. “It would be a shame to waste three-quarters of a bunk.”
The lawyers are laying bets on his chances of survival.
“Three weeks,” he says. He could be talking about three weeks in New York or London. “Because of me, people will find out what it’s really like.” His stories, he says, will be telegraphed daily to St. John’s.
“Yes,” I said, “after Keane blacks out the parts he doesn’t like. And puts in the parts that you left out.”
He is convinced that other reporters are jealous of him. With the exception of me, he says, for, being a woman, I am “automatically ineligible.” No women allowed on board. Bad luck. Even a woman my size.
“I don’t believe in bad luck,” he said. “I’m not superstitious. But you have to admit that a woman on a ship would be distracting.”
“Smallwood,” I said, “a more distracting, less likely sight on a sealing ship than you is something I cannot imagine.”
It is just as I told him it would be. The “realistic” accounts of the seal hunt that bear his byline are romantic adventure stories. “Over the side the brave men go and the hunt is on. They are sealers of great skill who jump from one ice pan to the next as matter-of-factly as you or I would walk on solid ground.”
“He’s quite a writer,” Sharpe said, to which I replied, “He is more likely to write a story describing lawyers as brave men with great skill than he is to have written that.”
But there is no more talk of Smallwood. Rain for two days, but now the wind has changed. Slant-driven sleet is clattering like stones against the windows and the walls. Not even my father, exhausted though he is, can get to sleep. Better sleet than snow in wind like this. Though not, perhaps, for sealers.
I wonder if my father hopes that Smallwood perishes out there.
A gust just then. Something somewhere in the moorings of the house began to break. Some piece of wood that no one has laid eyes on for more than twenty years just came to life.
The blessing of the fleet. Ten thousand on the waterfront. Women crying as if their men were off to war. Smallwood standing like a sealer in the rigging of the S.S. Newfoundland. Absurd. Absurdly touching. Hoping to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. Despite his spectacles. Despite his size. He looked, at that height, like some delinquent stowaway who would surely be discovered and ordered off the ship before it left. “Come down from there, you little—“The crowd laughing. A moment of comic relief in all that gravity. His glasses sparkled in the sunlight as if he was a lookout with binoculars. Priests and ministers of all denominations. His mother there to see him off, no doubt.
Another great gust. What might have been a beam of wood breaking with a single snap. My father on his feet again. We will soon see how vital that beam of wood was to the house. The sound of sleet has stopped, but the wind is worse, so it must be snowing. The curtain on the landing billows inward as though the window is ajar.
No news for two days now. Rumours. Rumours of everything. That everyone is safe. That everyone is lost. That this ship is still afloat. That this one sank after it was crushed by ice. All the ships will soon be home. All the ships are lost. The entire fleet gone down.
I spoke to Herder, asked him what he thought. He looked at me. “You haven’t slept in days,” he said. He knows about the Triple A. I told him I’d run out but would soon be getting more. He said I was a no-booze, no-snooze kind of drinker. “Not the worst kind. Not by a long shot.”
Asked me if it was because of Smallwood I was losing sleep. I said it was. “As unlikely as it seems, we’ve become good friends,” I said. He looked at me again. I shook my head. “Nothing more than friends,” I said. “Good friends.” Smallwood doesn’t think of me as a woman. I mean, he doesn’t think of women as women. I’m not sure he thinks of them at all. I suppose he might if one could help him get ahead. If he discovered her by chance. Women are not part of his strategy. Or wouldn’t be if he had a strategy. Smallwood has goals, but he does not have plans. And his goals are always changing. All he is sure of is that he wants to be remembered.
If the S.S. Newfoundland is lost, will Smallwood be remembered? To be overlooked by history, rightly or wrongly, his greatest fear. To be demoted to a kind of non-existence. His life erased, as if it never happened. What does he see in the courtroom? A mass of soon-to-be-forgotten souls. Lives that will never be recorded, never read about by future generations. The fate of most women. Hence his disinterest. The exceptions he talks about as if they are a kind of sub-group of famous men. Not women with masculine natures, but women chosen arbitrarily by fate to be remembered. Women who, like monarchs, succeed to the throne of fame by an accident of birth.
In the six months since I helped him get the job, this is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him. I didn’t think I’d miss him this much. And now, with all these rumours of disaster.
What, given all that he knows me to be and how I am commonly regarded, must he think? “Fielding,” he hopes he will have the chance to say one day. “Sheilagh Fielding. I knew her when I was just a court reporter.” One of those memorable characters a man encounters on the road to success, a character powerless but eccentric, and long since surpassed by him, an amusing reminder of his early days when others fancied him to be on a par with her, when only he believed that this job was temporary, a paying of dues for the life to which he would soon be moving on.
No one can stand to stay indoors. I have never seen so many people on the streets. People walking who haven’t walked the streets in years. Even on those streets that have been shovelled free of snow, like the ones downtown, there are no carriages or cars. Because in carriages or cars you cannot stop to talk to strangers.
I spent a whole day out there myself, walking, talking. Everyone exchanging rumours. Mostly optimistic ones. Reassuring ones. Remembering past storms that, in spite of all the worry they caused, did not take any lives. People commending the skill of the sealing captains and their crews. If anyone could bring a ship home safely through a storm like that, he could. They could. The Keanes. They probably made port somewhere and even now are sipping cups of tea, their only concern being how worried we must be. For them. People laughing. Imagine. They’re worried about us. But the laughter never lasts. And people move on to see what the next person coming down the road will say.
It feels, outdoors, even when we’re only walking, like we’re doing something. Like our itinerant vigilance will somehow help. Even if, from where people are, the Narrows are not visible, people glance constantly in that direction while they talk. Through the Narrows they departed and through the Narrows will return. As if a straight line through the Narrows would lead them to the answer, if only they could follow it.
If I know old man Keane. If I know Captain Westbury. If I know George Tuff. Names, legendary names, to shore against the storm. Names that, in the past, have warded off misfortune. Remember how George Tuff kept these twenty men alive and brought them home. That’s right. No need to give up hope. We’ll cry if it comes to that, but for now we’ll stay strong for one another. Never mind the wind. Don’t forget to say your prayers. Make sure you go to church. God bless you now, my love. My dear. My darling. Duckie. My son. Misses. Skipper. Every old man, especially an old man who has children, is referred to with respect as “skipper.”
“Any minute now we might see the flags on Signal Hill. That’s right.” The signal flags they fly from the Box House. Mercantile flags to let the merchants and pilot boat operators know which ship is on its way. No flags for four days now.
Everywhere, heads nodding. Women in head scarves conferring on street corners. Children gravely watching from a distance. They say the Southern Cross went down off Port aux Basques. All hands were lost. “I won’t believe it until they bring his body back to me.” People crying in the streets. Women consoling a mother whose son or sons were on the Southern Cross. Whose husband was. Or father. Brother.
Women, when they see me walking by myself, assume the worst. “Did you lose someone, my love?” Then remember who I am, that I have no siblings, that my father is a doctor and I am—Fielding.
“There is a friend of mine,” I tell them. “A close friend on the Newfoundland.” They nod, thinking they know what I mean by “close” but not asking for a name. “Well. No word, yet, my love, about the Newfoundland. Don’t forget to say your prayers. I got two boys on the Newfoundland. They’ll both be coming back. They’re all right, you just wait and see. Your fella, he’s all right too, I bet. Did you hear about the Southern Cross?” Somehow comforting. That the Cross was lost. As if it increases the other ships’ chances of survival. God singled out someone else for sorrow. The unthinkable happened, not to mine, but hers. Not to me, but her. He must have spared mine. Me. He would not take them all.
The courts are closed. The stores are closed. But my father has not missed a day of work. Few doctors have closed their surgeries. Supplies of every conceivable form of sedative are running low. Laudanum. Patent medicines. Alky. The police are seizing moonshine, giving it to doctors. No alcohol-related arrests are being made.
My father discontinued my supply of Triple A, but I got hold of some juneshine. Now and then I drift off to sleep but wake as though from the impact of a fall. Over and over. Better to stay awake and write. Impossible to read. Everything seems like a non sequitur. No book, not even the Bible, addresses the one thing that seems worth addressing. I have not gone to church, nor have I prayed. Given to fits of repentance when scared. Who said that? Saved while in a state of dread. Converted while terrified. There are other ways to look at it, I know. The balm of grace. Solace in a time of sorrow. The inconceivability of hopelessness. All is never lost. We will see them all again. Every one of us is loved except the damned. And who are they? No two people can agree. Blessed are they who mourn. The Sermon on the Mount. Even that, the most beautiful of all things ever written, seems like nothing but mere words tonight.
Smallwood. The only way I could imagine him losing weight was amputation, but perhaps his bones are even smaller now. The Smallwoods are not sealers. They’re a seafearing family. Smallwood’s father went to Boston years ago and had it been possible to walk there he would have rather than get on board a ship.