Chapter Twelve   

September 29,1924

MY FATHER, WITH THE HELP OF SOME CRONY AT THE office of the railway, has arranged for me to stay at a section shack on the Bonavista branchline, the sort of shack usually occupied by the men who maintain the railroad. They and their families live in shacks strung out at one-mile intervals across the island, and on the peninsula branchlines, the nearest to St. John’s is the Bonavista.

I have been assigned some token tasks in exchange for my pay, which is less than one-third that of the men, most of whom I am stronger than despite my limp and lingering illness, for they, their wives and children are malnourished.

In spite of the isolation, I hope each morning to find that a letter from my Provider has been slipped beneath my door. I fear that he might be interfering in the lives of my children and want him to tell me he is not.

I try not to speculate about him and his motives, try not to think too much of the children. Or of Smallwood.

It is common knowledge that I am “fresh from the San,” though no one could be “fresh” from that place. I am largely left alone, but a few of the older men who have probably known survivors of tuberculosis come by with winter vegetables from the little “farms” they cultivate behind their shacks. And with rabbits and trout. The staple foods. There are so many ponds and lakes that more of the Bonavista is below water than above it. The waters are teeming with trout that I catch using a stick of bamboo, some nylon line, a single hook and earthworms that lie stranded on the grass after it rains.

“Why do you want to live in such a Godforsaken place?” my father said. To him, all places but St. John’s are Godforsaken. He didn’t wait for an answer, perhaps fearing he would inadvertently make me reconsider. His relief was transparent. She does not wish to move back in with me. Or even to live in St. John’s. Or to write for a newspaper.

During my stay in the San, he had grown used to my absence. Grown accustomed to the most that he could hope for by way of peace of mind.

Who knows how long my sojourn here will last? No one but Herder asked me. He wanted me to resume writing for him and was as perplexed as my father when I told him I meant to live on the Bonavista for a while.

Perhaps Smallwood wonders where I am. Though I hope not. “Whatever became of Fielding?” is not how I wish to be remembered. Perhaps Miss Emilee thinks of me. To persist in someone’s memory. To be remembered. Not memorialized. Commemorated. She was not unloved who is remembered.

The unqualified love of a single soul. I do not have it. I never have. Though in that letter that he sent me in the San, he wrote that he hoped I had found strength in the knowledge that I was not forgotten. An indirect way of saying that he loved me? The first letter, on the ship. All who are loved have no reason to despair.

Whom do I love as I long to be loved? My children, whom I do not know.

Must I withhold love from my father because he is not capable of love? There is no argument, no case that can be made for love. One loves or one does not.

It seems I have always known that it was here. For the Bonavista, no word will suffice, not even one from a long-forgotten language. From before the obsolescence of silence.

Cold and calm in late September. And all one sees of water is what it reflects—the sky, the shore—and all of it is fading now. Between sunset and moonrise, there is nothing but the inside of this shack, lamplit; lamps in the windows double and disperse the light.

I hear the night train, a blast of its whistle for every shack, each approaching blast louder than the one before. The locomotive, whistle blaring, shakes my shack as it goes by. The cars behind it shake it less, a rattling succession of anticlimaxes until the whistle sounds again, and again, as though the train is hurtling down some never-ending hill.

Bedtime on the Bonavista, and I know that, if I dimmed my lamp, I would see the others dimming too, as though withering in the train-borne breeze.

All lights out might be the message of the whistle, the sole purpose of the train to mark the end of day, a roaring reveille, the silence in the wake of which seems so heavy it makes me drowsy for a while.

But only for a while. I never fail to fall for it, the promise of sleep, for the notion that my body and my mind know what is good for them, sleep unabetted, uninduced, sourceless, irresistible.

Each evening, my ears still ringing from the last blare of the whistle, I lie down, fully clothed, on my bed, hoping to fool my body. I am merely lying down to think. See—would I leave my boots on if my purpose was to sleep? No. Think, close my eyes the better to reflect and concentrate, is all I mean to do.

And always I step back in fright from the brink of sleep. My whole body gives a jolt as it braces for the impact. Something within has saved me yet again from a non-existent peril.

My hands folded on my stomach, my boots beyond the end of my too-short bed, I open my eyes and stare at the planks on the ceiling. I lie there long after I am certain that sleep of the kind I crave will never come. Until I feel, as I no longer do when I am standing, the difference in the weight of my two boots. One buttoned boot, and my new boot with its thick and clunking orthopaedic heel.

My new boot. For my new, ancient-looking leg. The heel held in place with a metal strap and extra nails. The doctor told me to be careful with it. I would many times knock it against things, he said. Or I would rely too much on my right leg and there would be even less strength in my left one than there could be. I would tire far more easily than I had before.

A sturdy boot and a matching spare.

Night after night, after the charade of bedding down, I struggle out of bed again. To read, to write and afterwards to drink. The Prohibition Law is still enforced, despite rumours that it is soon to be repealed. But booze of all kinds is easy to come by out here. There is a still in every clump of junipers.

Wooden crates whose labels of “ginger beer” are meant to fool no one are weekly unloaded from the train. Juneshine. Callabogus. For those, like me, with more money and a greater thirst, rye and even Scotch. The latter I drink on Saturday nights. Rye and spruce beer otherwise. From the same chipped enamel mug I use for tea, though I sip from my flask when I’m outdoors.

I sense from some of the men I “work” with that I am regarded as “lonely.”

Work. I take away the brush they clear from the sides of the railbed, pile it on my trolley car, which I have only recently been deemed strong enough to operate alone, and pumping the handle, make my way to the nearest body of water, on the shore of which I burn the brush.

It is a job that any child could do.

The men paint the ties with long-handled brushes that they dip in boiling vats of tar. They shore up the ties with gravel, and the railway bed with soil brought in by the train for that purpose, there being no soil on the Bonavista that would not, in a matter of days, either blow away or settle so deeply that more would soon be needed.

They replace rusty spikes, warped nails and rotting ties and leave it to me to clean up after them, wordlessly moving on from one task to the next.

I have displaced no one from their job. The work I do was formerly done by some of the men’s wives for nothing and they are glad to be rid of it.

I suspect the real source of my pittance of an income to be my father, though I sign a railway receipt every two weeks.

When I see a man half my size slashing at a stand of alders with a machete, I feel like grabbing his arm and showing him, using nothing but my cane, how it should be done. My cane that, after all these years, I wield as expertly as if it were a sword.

The men appraise me, stare at me as I lurch ungainly about, my lame leg moving forward as though in parody of something. I dress much like the men, as much as available clothing allows—coveralls large enough to fit me; beneath those, checkered shirts and once-white undershirts.

I wear leather-palmed, khaki-coloured gloves, as they do. Also what they call a “sod,” a grey peaked cap that, no matter how tightly I tie my hair back, often blows off in a gale and is retrieved by one of the men because I cannot move fast enough to catch it.

They appraise my face most closely of all, my face that not even the smudges of soot from the brush fires can disguise. The face of a young woman who, though she looks older than she is, is still attractive. I look at myself in the mirror in my shack. Let down my hair. My eyes are unchanged. My lips that in the San were cracked and scabbed are smooth again. But mine is also the face of a woman not only St. John’s-born but of the quality, not of the bay or the scruff like the sectionmen.

Whatever you’re here for, their kind but intractable faces say, you’ll never belong, no matter what. You are, for reasons we cannot fathom, a visitor in our lives.

Mabe they think it has something to do with my illness, which of course it does. What would they think or say if I told them of my children or my Provider? They think I’m out here because of my leg. Also true. And because of my history, my time at Bishop Spencer and my brief stint as Fielding the Forger, some sketchy version of which they know.

But none of these, nor all of them together, explain to their satisfaction what I am doing here or how long I plan to stay or might be capable of staying.

I have deserted my place in favour of finding one among them, which I cannot, ever, do. They are waiting for me to come to this realization, to reconcile myself to it. Waiting patiently, for they know the outcome is certain.

I stand daily as close to my bonfires as I can to warm myself, for it is the cold, the sheer length of time spent outdoors at this season of the year, that affects me most. My bones—all of them, not just those of my afflicted leg—have been made by my illness more susceptible to cold, porous, desiccate, something.

There are times when I feel a kind of chill in my belly, a weight like the one that heralded my illness in New York, and I fret that my illness is returning, that this feeling portends a relapse, partial or complete. But so far it has always gone away.

I stand close to the fire, on the leeward side of it, back on to it so that I can endure the smoke, and look out across the water that some days, depending on the size of the pond and the strength of the wind, is whitecapped, the waves all racing away from me towards the distant shore.

The water, because the sky is uniformly overcast, is grey, even black. And all around the water the treeless boulder-littered bog of Bonavista. Blueberry bushes, their leaves a russet red, bobbing in the wind, the few remaining alder leaves crackling like bits of ancient parchment.

The memory-stirring smell of fall; real particular memories, but other kinds as well, intimations of some life beyond recall or never-lived, once-hoped-for, now-forgotten things, an elusive imminence that in the end yields nothing, only tantalizes.

We knock off work early enough to make it home by twilight, some heading up the tracks, some down, silent with hunger and fatigue.

Only on those homeward marches as, one after another, the sectionmen reach their homes and bid the rest of us goodbye, do I feel some sense of camaraderie and a suspension of the awkwardness that otherwise is always there between us.

“Good night, miss,” they say when we reach my shack, a staccato chorus in which there is no scorn or irony, only a kind of faint tenderness because, unlike them, I live alone, but, like them, have worked all day, am bone-weary and, they think, not far from sleep.

Fall on the Bonavista. It seems portentous of anything but winter. Portentous of nothing. Wholly itself. As if out here it is always fall. Snow always on the way but never here. Remnants of a summer that no one can remember. A season that prevails, persists throughout the camouflage of winter and the fleeting dream of summer. Fall is real, indigenous, definitive, a prelude with no successor.

Every house has a name, two words of which it shares with every other house. My house is Twelve Mile House. The numbers, passed down through generations, are spelled out like ancestral names above the doors of every shack, including mine.

Twelve Mile House’s line of succession was interrupted when the family that once lived here moved away. Some man whose last name I do not know as good as abdicated, renounced the family profession, the legacy of generations, and no one has yet been found to take his place.

The families always accompany the men. Children spend their entire childhoods here. Some men and women their entire lives. They have no choice, for the trains run throughout the year. This is not seasonal employment like working “on the boats.” All or nothing. All and nothing for the children for whom there are no schools and whose parents cannot read or write. No place to play but in the woods, away from the trains, away from the cinders and sparks that in summer their fathers have to stamp out with their boots. Away from the wheels. Childhoods, whole lives spent out here.

The children, though some have seen a train go by ten thousand times, always stop to watch one do so yet again, to watch awestruck from a distance as the great machine that dictates the terms of their existence passes by. Such an anomalous spectacle making such an all-inclusive din cannot be ignored.

No more than the anomalous spectacle of me can be ignored as I pump my two-man trolley down the tracks. I must be the most unusual thing that most of these track-children have ever seen.

They throw things at me from the cover of the trackside alders and blasty spruce—apple cores, small trout, half-eaten sandwiches—while their mothers, standing in the doorways of the shacks, warn them to leave me be.

It seems they like to regard me as some sort of witch, whom their parents are unable to defeat and whose troublesome presence they have no choice but to endure. My height, my limp, my buckled boot, my cane, my flask, my working side by side with men, all confirm me as a witch.

I oblige by tracing what they think are spells in the air with my cane, letting the trolley coast, drawing circles and X’s and triangles, which causes them to duck and seek cover.

These mock spells earn me disapproving looks of consternation from their mothers, who seem unsure of my intentions.

Their names are David and Sarah. Their birthday is April 17,1927. They have had eleven birthdays. I have celebrated eleven times.

Each April 17, for eleven years, including one here at the section shack, I have thrown a one-woman party. Twice in the San when I was barely able to move.

How strange it was in New York, wondering what they might be doing, what their birthday wishes were. What sort of party they were having. What gifts my mother gave them. And what went through her mind as they unwrapped them.

Do they each make a wish and blow the candles out together? Or is there a cake for each of them?

Here in the shack I made a cake and gave anyone who visited a piece. Told them I was celebrating my birthday. By midnight, more than half of it was left so I threw it in the fire. Happy Birthday, David and Sarah.

I look at my cane. The last birthday present my mother gave me. The only one I still have.

What, on my birthday, does my mother do? May 22. There have been eleven of those since they were born. All it ever seems appropriate to do is wish them well. Best wishes to you both on this my special day. Here’s to you. One last drink. And may it be tomorrow when I wake.

Every Sunday, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, the church caboose goes by. The sectioners line the tracks to receive the blessing of one of the clergy on board.

Priests, ministers, pastors all stand side by side and, according to the denomination of each section shack, one of them makes, from the slow-coasting train, the sign of the cross.

I always watch from my doorway as they pass Twelve Mile House. The first couple of times, one of them shouted, “What are you?” meaning what denomination, but my lack of reply discouraged him. Now the riders of the church caboose go past my house in silence, staring down at me with disapproval.

The one good, lasting side effect of my illness is that I seem to have developed an immunity to hangovers. All I feel upon waking is hunger, though my weight remains the same or even decreases no matter how much I eat. “It’s a good sign, that appetite of yours,” one of the men who comes to visit and who can spot a drinker at a glance tells me.

I climb the ladder on the side of my shack, pull a rocking chair tied to a length of rope up after me, and sometimes sit out rocking on the roof and drinking until early in the morning, nodding off in the chair and waking to the sound of chirping birds, the sky faintly blue, the Bonavista dimly visible for miles.

My rocking chair, about which I walk from time to time, following the doctors’ orders not to remain seated for too long, my “ginger beer” bottles and my lamp, because of the glow from which I cannot see as far as the edges of the roof-—I must make quite a sight to anyone watching from the nearest section shack.

I sometimes hear footsteps in the gravel between the rail ties, but though I say hello no one answers.

My first thought, the first time I heard them, was that it was some man who, wondering if I wanted “company,” lacked the nerve to declare himself. Or changed his mind. Or else was flummoxed by my being on the roof.

But after the footsteps went by, receded into silence, they returned minutes later from the other direction, this time stopping right in front of my shack.

“Who’s there?” I said. Whoever it was had no lantern, no light by which to navigate the tracks and keep from stumbling on the ties. There was no answer but neither did the footsteps continue. I felt certain I was being stared at by someone who knew that, because they were outside the circle of light from my lantern, I couldn’t see them. I grabbed the lantern and turned the flame down low, just short of extinguishing it. But my eyes, accustomed to the light, could make out nothing in the darkness.

The footsteps, the sound of boots crunching on the crushed stone between the ties, resumed. Unhurriedly. Almost lazily, as if my unseen companion wished to make it clear that it was not because I challenged him that he was moving on.

I remind myself it could be anyone.

One sectionman visiting another. Men who know the tracks so well they do not need a light, men who do not wish to disturb others who are sleeping. Men buying or selling or drinking juneshine. Better to do it out here than in front of disapproving wives and impressionable children.

But always, on the way back up the track, the footsteps stop when they draw even with my shack. Whoever it is sometimes stands there for minutes, staring, I am certain, at me, at my shack, my window. As if the shack was once his and I displaced him from it.

Lately I have been turning off the lamp and waiting for him. I hear the footsteps at a different time each night. Anytime from just after dark to just before sunrise.

No pattern. Most nights I do not hear them at all. Again, no pattern. Not every other night, or every third night. I might have to live in darkness for weeks to catch a glimpse of him.

And lately, too, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been hearing things, so irresistible is the notion that my Provider followed me from New York, and from the San. That the footsteps I hear are those of his delegate, the same man, both brazen and elusive, who in New York was my protector.

My Provider. My protector. I know it is absurd that any man would or could go to such lengths, undetected, to follow me.

In the San, the other patients told me that, in my delirium dreams I often spoke of my Provider. By Provider they thought I meant God, thought I was praying, beseeching God to sustain me through my illness or, if his Plan was otherwise, to have mercy on my soul. “Faith is a wonderful thing,” Nurse Nell said.

“What did I say about my Provider?” I asked her.

“You speak like you’re afraid of Him, as you should be,” Nurse Nell said. “You ask Him questions. You ask Him for advice. You ask Him what He wants from you. You tell Him you know He would not hurt His children.”

There are no crowds here among which to blend in as he, as they, did in Manhattan. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone but me has lived along these tracks for years.

From coast to coast the railway runs and so do the section shacks. A community six hundred miles long and fifty feet wide. Impossible to infiltrate.

I went up on the roof again tonight despite the cold.

He stopped directly opposite my shack. I tried to provoke him into saying something.

“Lovely evening for a walk. I suppose you don’t need a light if you know how far it is between the ties. How fast do you think you could go without tripping and falling down? There must be others who share my curiosity, depending on how far you walk, how many shacks you pass.

“You must wonder what I’m doing up here. I’m not the walker I used to be, but I still like it outdoors. And there’s nothing out here flat enough to rock on but this roof.

“I use the trolley if I have to travel far. You’ve probably seen me going by your shack. It’s not hard once you get it going, is it?”

Nothing.

“That’s all right, don’t say a word. Your silence speaks volumes. More people like you, that’s what we need. If more people went out walking after dark, staring into other people’s windows, the world would be a better place. But try telling that to people who insist that a visit is not a visit unless you see their face and each person goes through the motions of answering when spoken to.

“Well, they can have what they call their ‘conversations.’ Me, I prefer to be stared at in silence by someone lurking in the darkness while I speak.

“Do you do this at every shack or only mine? Every shack, I dare say. That would explain the rifle shots I hear some nights. Have the sectionmen been shooting at you? Most of them are all right, but there’s the occasional crank who objects to being spied on by strangers after midnight. Don’t let their kind discourage you, though. What odds if some trigger-happy sectionman shoots you dead some night? More people like you willing to sacrifice everything for a worthwhile cause, that’s what we need.”

Still nothing. He’d never stopped for so long before. I thought I could hear him breathing.

“You do realize, do you, that you may have to share these tracks with a train from time to time? You deserve to leave something more behind than a stain on a cowcatcher or to have the only words you ever spoke, an exclamation of surprise or even an expletive, drowned out by a ten-ton locomotive.”

A sniff that might have been a kind of laugh. I had the feeling that if I screamed and shouted for help he wouldn’t speak or move.

“I’ve been courted by shyer and slyer men than you, so if it’s a date you’re looking for, there’s no need to feel ashamed. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ I asked a man one time. He said many a cat had had his tongue. But he used a synonym for cat. I forget what it was. So what’s got your tongue? Perhaps you have an eye for a finely turned orthopaedic boot. Some men do, you know.”

No sectionman would stand there, listening to this.

Might he be in the habit of coming down the Bonavista on the train? And going back by train? Somehow, somewhere debarking and reboarding, though there were no scheduled stops anywhere near my shack.

At last, as if he had grown tired of my rant, he began to walk away, his only acknowledgment of my soliloquy being that he seemed to kick the gravel and send a spray of stones ahead of him that pinged off the iron rails.

When I could no longer hear the sound of his footsteps, I climbed down from the roof and, in my haste to get indoors, left the rocking chair behind. The wind came up later that night and I heard the empty chair rocking slowly back and forth on the roof above my bed.

No amount of Scotch could convince me to go outside and climb up on the roof to get the chair or make me so oblivious to the rocking on the roof that I could get to sleep.

I took the chair down at first light and will never again go up on the roof.

I have asked my visitors and neighbours if they have heard the footsteps on the tracks at night, and got all sorts of responses. One woman admonished me not to ask such things in front of children, though there were no children around when I asked.

The old men who come to visit seem mystified by my question. No one has ever encountered my “ghost,” which I fear is how he is now being spoken of.

I’m told that no one visits the shacks on either side of mine at night, since such a visit would involve at least a two-mile walk in the cold. Certainly no one without a light would venture out.

I believe my questions have enhanced my already considerable reputation for oddness and eccentricity. I am looked upon as the tall, lame, cane-wielding woman who lives by herself and, perhaps because of her fondness for drink, is given to hearing things at night.

“A man from New York is on his way,” a woman shouted to me from the doorway of her shack. Her announcement must have been a warning to me, that I would soon be dealt with by this man from New York.

I stopped the trolley and, so out of breath I could barely speak, said, “What man from New York?”

She shrugged and made a face as if she thought it was news enough that a man from New York was coming and she couldn’t imagine what else about him I expected her to know or thought was relevant.

The men confirmed her declaration. A man from New York was coming. He had weeks ago set out on foot from Port aux Basques, walking the tracks, every inch of the mainline and the branchlines, in an effort to unionize the sectionmen who could not be contacted by post because they couldn’t read. Nor, as the railway was opposed to the union, could this man from New York make his way from west to east by train.

I thought of Smallwood right away. Who else could it be?

Once a week, as the train was going by, the engineer would throw me a copy of a St. John’s newspaper, usually the Evening Telegram or the Daily News, neither of which, I was certain, would make mention of this attempt to unionize the railway whose trains delivered their papers across the island.

But I scanned the next paper, which turned out to be the Morning Chronicle, and found a small item about this unionizer from New York who was identified as “J.R. Smallwood.”

The “J.R.” made me smile in spite of myself. I had no doubt that Smallwood had supplied the name himself. He had probably even written the story and sent it to the Chronicle, who reprinted it verbatim.

Over the next couple of weeks, whenever I was told or overheard that a man from New York was on his way, I interrupted.

“He’s not from New York,” I said. “He’s not even from St. John’s. He is, God help us all, from Gambo, the hamlet of Gambo. He is a bayman of short stature with the touch of Midas in reverse. Every time he touches gold it turns into lead. He is a false prophet preaching socialism who, in exchange for unionizing you, will steal your souls.”

The sectionmen stared at me, mystified, almost frightened it seemed, for I had never spoken to them before in that fashion.

“His name is Joe,” I said. They looked in need of reassurance that my preamble had been nonsense. “He’s as harmless as his name. He’s the fellow that because of me had to leave school. But at one time we were friends. I knew him in New York.” I stopped. “Never mind,” I said. “You should all join the union. It could mean more money. Two and a half cents an hour more maybe, according to the papers.”

All anyone talked about for days was Smallwood. I burned the newspapers that were thrown to me from the train. What the source of their information was I didn’t ask.

“He’s wored the soles clean off his shoes,” a woman told me. “His feet is all bandaged up. He’s almost starved to death. He reads the Bible as he goes. Nonstop. Knows it forwards and backwards. Says grace at every meal. He’ll be comin’ down the Bonavista any day now, lookin’ for a place to sleep. It’s a wonderful thing he’s doin’, no matter what you says.”

On a day in late October when everyone but him must have known that the first storm of the winter was imminent, a Sunday afternoon, he knocked on the door of Twelve Mile House.

I had been trying to nap, and getting up, peeked out through my bedroom curtains. There he was. I might not have recognized him had I not known that he was coming.

In New York, where he had seemed nothing more than skin and bones, he must have weighed twice what he did now. He was hatless, his balding head browned and blistered from whatever sun there had been the past two months. There was so little flesh on his face that the tip of his normally pointed nose curved inward like a beak.

He wore exactly what he’d been wearing when I saw him last. That threadbare Norfolk jacket, which it would not surprise me thirty years from now to hear that he was buried in. A once-white shirt whose buttonholes were joined with twine. Tweed trousers that flapped like sails behind him. The soles of his boots were entirely detached and tied to them like skate blades.

He wore about his neck a strange contraption, something like I’d seen cigarette-girls wearing in New York, except that he carried not cigarettes but a battered suitcase on which rested a large book with ribbons hanging from the edge of its spine, unmistakably a Bible.

The old man at Eleven Mile House would not have sent him on to me if he thought the storm was soon to start. So I decided not to answer the door. It would take Smallwood half an hour at the most to walk to Thirteen Mile House, where they were sure to take him in.

Stepping back from the curtains, I listened until he stopped knocking, then peered out again to see him plodding, shoulders hunched, down the tracks.

He need never know that I was here. Or, if one of the others told him about me, we could easily avoid each other. I lay down again and closed my eyes. I was sure he wanted to encounter me no more than I did him.

I was thinking of our last moments together at Hotel Newfoundland when I heard what might have been a battery of hens pecking at my kitchen window. I swung off my bunk and looked out through the curtains. In the fifteen minutes since Smallwood had knocked on my door, the storm had not only begun but closed in so that I could see nothing but white outside. A great gust of wind shook the shack.

I hastily put on my work clothes, and over them a seaman’s coat that an old man at Six Mile House had leant me.

I took off my boots, pulled on my Wellingtons, wrapped a scarf around my neck.

The trolley was parked outside the shacks, on a set of siderails from which it was easy to push it on to the main track.

At the last moment, I remembered the snow bell. It hung above my door inside the shack, a length of rope attached to it that was tied to a hook outside, above the door.

I unhooked the rope, made my way across the track and tied the rope to a tree, knotting it several times. The rope at knee height, I tested it, pushing it with my leg until I heard the gonging of the bell. Then I set out on the trolley to find Smallwood.

He will go to his grave thinking it was me who rescued him.

It was me who dragged him from the bunk. He was alternating between delirium and complete unconsciousness. I dragged out the tub in which I took my baths and, cramming the stove with coal, filled every metal receptacle I had with water from my indoor pump. I poured the boiling water, as well as some cold, into the tub until it was about half full. Then I went to the bunk, hurriedly removed Smallwood’s clothes and carried him to the tub.

He was limp but far from heavy in my arms, all bone blades and tips, a skin-sack of bones that seemed to rattle when he breathed.

He stirred slightly as I lowered him into the water, but his eyes remained closed. I arranged his arms so that he hung by his armpits in the tub, his head tilted back and resting on one of the handles.

His body was like that of some just-liberated prisoner of war. Sixty pounds at most, I guessed. I had seen throats like his in the San, all sinew and Adam’s apple, the throats of men deemed beyond help by the doctors.

As I smoothed his long hair back from his forehead, I looked down and through the steam saw bobbing just above the surface the one boneless part of him. The pink tip of it anyway, buoyed up by the water. It looked like a closed, hairless eye, a sleeping Cyclops.

Not exactly Penis Rampant. Penis Reticent. Penis Oblivious. It sounded like the Latin name for something. I added more hot water to the tub.

“You were singing.”

“Singing what?”

“‘The Ode to Newfoundland.’”

“I thought I was a goner.”

“Me too. Both of us. Until I heard the bell.”

“Who taught you that?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been here so long I don’t remember.”

It was three days since his rescue. He was soon to leave, ignoring my protest that, despite the fast-melting snow, he was in no condition to continue with this mission of his.

“Nearly there,” he said. “I can’t quit now.”

Three days. He had begun eating after the first day. Fried potatoes and trout.

I told him about my illness and my time at the San. He tried not to look at my boot or notice as I limped around the shack.

Each of us was taken aback by how much the other had changed. I was only twenty-seven. He was twenty-six.

He asked me what I was playing at, being poor or being a man.

I let him think I performed the duties of a sectionman.

He derisively called “my” letter to the Morning Post a masterpiece. I merely looked at him, waiting to play my trump card.

When I told him I would not join his union, all he did was smirk.

“I was here,” I said. “In this shack. The day of the storm. I saw you knocking on the door. I decided I would let you perish. But something changed my mind.”

“What?”

I shrugged. “I told myself that I should at least do as much for you as I would for a total stranger.”

“Guilt.”

“Don’t mention it. You would have done the same for me. For the same reasons.”

I left the shack for a few hours. He was gone when I got back.

Even attempting to find him would not have been possible if not for the railway tracks and the trolley car. I could not even see the car from the shack.

There was nothing on the Bonavista bigger than a stunted spruce to impede the snow and wind, the former just dry enough to drift like sand, the latter, which had been a light westerly breeze when I looked out the window, now howling from the northeast, the gusts against my back sending me stumbling forward, arms extended lest there be some unseen obstacle in front of me.

I felt the upward slope of the railbed beneath my feet and slowly climbed, keeping myself from sliding backwards by grabbing clumps of grass with my gloved hands. Once I crested the bed, I stopped and looked about, hoping a momentary lull in the wind might reveal the trolley car.

But there was no lull, so, guessing that the car was on my left, I headed east and tripped over the snow-bell rope, causing the bell above the door of Twelve Mile House to clang. I grabbed the rope with one hand, as I should have done upon last leaving the shack, and walked forward, hoping to find the trolley before I used up all the slack.

I found it by banging my bad knee against it. The pain was such that I fell to both knees and would have fallen prostrate had I not remembered the trolley, which I grabbed with one hand a fraction of a second before I would have hit the wheel face first.

I paused to let the pain subside, wondering how much damage I had done to my leg, afraid to feel it to see if it was broken.

What I had thought was the wind was the sound of my breath, magnified by my scarf as though I were wearing a snorkel. I was alarmed by how rapid and shallow my breathing was and, in a moment of panic, almost pulled off the scarf as if, without it, my breathing would return to normal. I felt as though I were immersed in the sounds of my own body and doubted I could rescue anyone or even preserve my own life in such a state.

I struggled to my feet and was relieved to find that my left leg held my weight as well as ever. Without my corrective boot with its thick heel, my gait was even more lopsided, almost as if I were wearing but one shoe and the other foot was bare.

My hand still on the trolley, I managed to compose myself and, feeling about the machine with both hands, found the steps. I climbed up, sat down and groped about until I had hold of the crank, whose handles, when the car was stationary, were always upright.

I pulled down with all my strength and felt the car begin to move.

Smallwood, after he got no answer at my shack, had continued east towards Thirteen Mile House, which meant I would have to drive almost straight into the wind. But at least, I told myself, I know which way to go.

I continued cranking the handle until I felt the trolley glide in a semicircle, then right itself on the main track.

Surely no trains would have been dispatched, with a storm so obviously on its way. Or any that had been dispatched were certain to be stalled somewhere.

I pulled harder on the crank. I could not hear the wheels, the grinding and squeaking of which were usually audible a mile away, but I felt the trolley moving and a corresponding increase in the wind against my face.

How would I find Smallwood? The most I could hope for was that he was keeping to the tracks and I would collide with him, or that he had laid down on the track and the wheels of the trolley would bring up solid against him without doing him serious injury.

One mile from my house to Thirteen Mile House. I prayed that the man in Thirteen Mile House had strung his snow bell across the tracks. You were supposed to do it for the sake of others who might somehow have lost their way. If I reached Thirteen Mile, rang the snow bell without having found Smallwood, I would knock on the door. And hopefully find Smallwood safely inside, holding forth to the family about God knows what.

What a strange congress that would be. An unprecedented gathering for the inhabitants of Thirteen Mile House. Twelve Mile Sheilagh and the esteemed unionizer himself arriving on the same day, in all likelihood staying overnight or even longer. Me arriving at the door clad like a sectionman. The first time Smallwood had seen me since New York.

I kept cranking the handle, but slowed down in case I should overtake him. I braced myself for the surprise of a collision, not that I expected an especially jarring one, given Smallwood’s height and weight. It was possible, if he lay down lengthwise between the rails, that I would run right over him without knowing it.

My arms weary, I let them drop to my sides, thinking it would do no harm to rest. The chill in my belly that I had been feeling lately was more pronounced than ever. It was as though I had just finished drinking a glass of ice water, a prospect that, despite my circumstances, appealed to me.

I felt my inner clothing begin to cool against my skin, though my face was hot. Wondering if I was feverish again, I was tempted to remove my scarf and feel the wind and snow on my forehead and my cheeks, hear something other than my breath, something other than my heartbeat, which was still thudding in my head.

Flecks of sleet pinged off the trolley wheels. I hoped for a while that the snow would change to rain but then remembered that there had been sleet when the storm first started.

If anything, there was less of it now, a thought that so disheartened me I thought I would be sick.

I heard a voice, wind-borne, somewhere up ahead, seemingly far distant. It was, as unlikely as it seemed, that of someone singing, the pitch and volume rising and falling, though the melody was either elusive or that of some song I didn’t know.

Who else could it be but Smallwood? Hopefully not some ’shine-inspired sectionman belting out a shanty in the doorway of his shack, one so drunk and spellbound by the storm that he had forgotten to play the snow bell out across the tracks.

Enlivened by guilt, I pumped the crank faster, coasting now and then to listen. The voice, though still audible, seemed not to have grown any louder.

He might be singing to fight off despair or the urge to lie down in the snow and go to sleep, singing to focus his mind.

I marvelled that he was able to sing, able to summon sufficient breath to make himself heard above the storm.

I could not call out to him for the wind was in my face and would blow away from Smallwood whatever sound I managed to make.

Back to cranking the trolley.

I was more exhausted than I’d been on my worst days in the San. I dropped my arms to my sides again and let my head drop to my chest, telling myself that I was resting, that I had not given up, and that once I caught my breath and regained my strength, I would resume the pumping of the crank.

I raised my head when I heard the voice again—or a voice, at least, not singing this time but speaking, and much closer.

Its owner, it seemed, was directly in front of me. I pulled the brake on the trolley and said, “SMALLWOOD. SMALLWOOD, IT’S ME, FIELDING. WALK THE WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING. LET THE WIND TAKE YOU TOWARDS ME.”

“NOOOO!” A protest. A refusal to be misled, to be drawn towards the siren voice of this projection of his mind. It was a mistake to have identified myself.

“WALK TOWARDS ME,” I shouted. “DON’T RUN AWAY. WALK TOWARDS ME OR STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”

“NOOOO.”

Without considering the folly of it, I got down from the trolley, limping badly, my unsupported left leg giving way with each step as though its foot were asleep, pain shooting up my thigh into my hip where the bone was most attenuated by my illness.

Even hobbled as I was, it took me no time to overtake him. I saw him the instant before I would have collided with him. He was hatless, his head white like that of a hooded hawk. There was no sign of his suitcase, though the rope from which it had hung was still looped about his neck.

He was ill prepared for the weather, not even wearing gloves. I grabbed the neck collar of his jacket, at which he struggled with such fury to free himself that he pulled us both over the side of the railway bed, the two of us tumbling in tandem as I wrapped my arms around his skinny frame.

Had we not come to rest against some alders, we would have rolled into a track-side pond.

“LET ME GO,” Smallwood screamed, thrashing about. I put one knee on his chest.

“STOP,” I shouted, staring down at him. He looked as though he thought I was some death-heralding apparition.

I pulled off my scarf. “LOOK,” I shouted.

For a second, stunned, incredulous, he stared at me, then screamed, “NOOOOO” again and batted the air with his hands.

With an upward thrust of his hips he managed to roll out from under me, got quickly to his feet and began to run. In seconds he was gone from view.

“SMALLWOOD,” I screamed and set off after him.

All but suffocating now that I no longer wore my scarf, I turned round to shelter my face from the wind. My forehead ached from the cold and the sleet-flecked snow. How stupid to remove that scarf. Stupid even to climb down from the trolley and run after Smallwood.

I tried to puzzle out my location. The wind was northeast, assuming that, during the past few frantic minutes, it had not changed direction, so the railbed had to be on my right. I should, by heading the way the wind was blowing, find the slope of the bed and, having done so, the tracks, along which, with one hand on a rail, I would crawl until I found the trolley.

The snow was knee-deep in places, which worried me as it seemed I had been scuffing through it until now. I remembered watching a snowstorm from my bedroom as a child and seeing man-high drifts form in seconds, then just as quickly vanish, the snow-scape shape-shifting like the surface of the sea.

The wind propelling me, gusting against my back so that my coat fanned out like a sail, I plodded on until the snow was so deep I could go no farther. I stood there, buried to my waist.

I managed to rotate slightly in the snow but, when I tried to raise the knee of my good leg, found myself tightly wedged in.

I wondered if I should try to pull my feet free of my Wellingtons, frostbite being preferable to the alternative, then dismissed the notion as yet another born of panic. I had no choice but to continue to struggle.

I did not even have my cane. I had taken it with me when I left the shack but had forgotten it when I climbed down from the trolley.

I tried to create a cavity by moving my legs back and forth. The snow was as tightly packed as if it had fallen weeks ago.

I clawed with my hands, but the snow I scooped aside was soon replaced twicefold. Keep your arms above the snow, I told myself.

They would find me “standing” upright, perhaps, as they had the sealers, the snow by which I had been entombed blown away and me frozen in some posture of reconciliation or despair.

They might be able to tell from the disposition of my limbs and my proximity to the railway bed and the trolley car what had happened, what grave but heart-rendingly simple errors I had made and what my last hours had been like.

Close to safety, to survival I might be found. A stone’s throw from the trolley or the nearest section shack whose inhabitants had been oblivious to my dilemma.

“HELP,” I shouted. And even with the roar of the wind in my ears and the hiss of sifting snow, I could tell that my voice was weak, my cry for help half-hearted. Death. My death. After surviving the San, to die like this, in a failed attempt to rescue Smallwood, who, had I only answered the door when he knocked, I would now be having tea with in my shack.

An image, ludicrous: nothing but my head above the snow, seemingly disembodied, eyes wide open, mouth agape, my long hair fanned out behind me, my hat still on my head.

I laughed. I still feel cold, I told myself. A good sign. My teeth chattered, my body shivered. I folded my arms.

My body interred in snow, an exception in the landscape. And Smallwood somewhere nearby. Two frozen figures. A pair of statues situated and disposed to tell an age-old story, a myth illustrative of some universal human failing or desire, some fatal flaw of character.

Notice how the woman seems to be … See how the man is trying to …

I tried to rouse myself into panic, spite, indignation, bitterness. I thought of the sealers. No one knew why mere boys had survived while the strongest of grown men had not.

Keep your arms above the snow.

Those who recover you will remember you in dreams.

Their names are David and Sarah. How sweet it would have been to touch them once, to hear them say my name. My mother leaving them notes on their pillows. Her name was Sheilagh.

The snow was at my armpits now, the palms of my hands flat on the surface of it.

A pair of snowshoes that might have fallen from the sky appeared in front of me. Before I could look up, they were flanking my head, the person wearing them standing behind me. I tried to turn around but couldn’t.

A pair of enormous boots.

I felt hands take hold of me beneath the arms and was about to protest that someone my size could never be pulled from the snow in this fashion when I felt myself rise as though propelled from below.

I turned around and found myself looking straight at someone’s chest, at a black coat buttoned down the front. Tilting my head back, I saw what I took to be a hallucination—a green rubber gas mask. The person in the mask, his hands on my shoulders, moved round, backtracking in the snowshoes until he was in front of me.

I guessed he was a full head taller than me. It felt strange to be loomed over like that, to feel as I now realized others did when standing close to me.

“You,” I said. A man such as the father of a woman my size should be.

He crouched down until his head was at my waist, then moved forward so that my upper body slowly fell onto his right shoulder.

He stood, his legs unsteady for a few moments. He took three backward steps until he found his balance, then turned and walked straight into the storm.

I felt like a child who had misbehaved to the point of having to be carried home against my will.

One arm around my legs, just below my backside, he trudged through the snow, lurching from side to side but never falling.

I saw nothing but his coat and the tails of his snowshoes. I pressed my closed mouth against his coat to avoid having the breath blown from my body.

I suddenly remembered Smallwood and began shouting his name, thrashing about. My rescuer continued his forward, windward march. I struggled to free myself, then felt the sting of two slaps on my backside.

Reaching up with one arm, I tried to grab his collar. Slap, slap, slap, each one harder, more emphatic than the one before.

My backside stung so much that I almost forgot my other complaints, my aching left leg, my sleet-needled forehead, the undersides of my wrists so chafed with snow and cold that they were bleeding.

I hung limp, sulking with humiliation, spiteful at the ferocity of my chastisement. My rump stung as if all that slapping had bared it to the snow. My eyes were hot with tears, because of Smallwood’s fate, my own helplessness, the obtuse single-mindedness of the man over whose shoulder I was slung like a bag of flour.

Soon we were climbing the slope of the railway bed, my rescuer fanning his snowshoes out until their tails were all but touching, side-tracking up the slope that, in spite of the whiteout, he had somehow found. As he had the trolley.

When he set me down, I raised my hands, meaning to remove the rubber mask, but he took hold of my wrists, around which his hands closed completely. He held me motionless and stared at me.

I could not see through the snow-encrusted glass of the gas mask. As the mask was strapped on over a fur-fringed hood, I could not even see his hair.

He pointed at the trolley with his gloved finger. When I climbed up, I saw, in the space between the two facing seats, Smallwood prostrate on the floor, his hands and feet bound with twine, his glasses still looped with string about his ears.

He was motionless, the amount of snow on him suggesting he had been that way for quite some time. I wondered if he was still alive. Beside him, attached to his coat by twine that was looped through the only intact buttonhole of his jacket, lay my cane.

My rescuer gestured to one of the seats. I sat down and took hold of the handles of the crank to keep from being blown off. Judging by how hard it was just to lift my arms, I doubted I could help him move the trolley.

Unfastening his snowshoes and tucking them under Smallwood, he climbed up and sat facing me. He gripped his end of the crank and raised it with such force that I lost my grip and had to catch the handles on their way back up.

They jarred my hands but I managed to keep hold of them. Soon, with no help from me, my arms were going up and down. We moved along the tracks much faster than I had ever been able to make the trolley move, faster, I suspected, than any two sectionmen had ever made it move. Too fast, I worried, given how much snow and ice might have built up on the tracks by now.

I looked down at Smallwood. Perhaps all my rescuer had rescued of him was his body.

I looked up. The man in the mask was still staring at me, the pumping of the trolley seemingly so effortless for him it required no concentration. I was his passenger, though to an observer it would have seemed that I was doing my share, my arms rising and falling as fast as his.

My face was hot with what I feared was a relapse of my illness, a second bout that I would not survive.

I felt drowsy. My head fell forward several times.

Each time I woke, my arms were limp at my sides and we were moving more slowly, as if my rescuer was planning to stop and somehow secure me to the trolley. Each time, with alacrity, I grabbed the handles to assure him of my lucidity and strength, and the trolley picked up speed again.

In between these blackouts, I looked at him through half-closed eyes. No word would do for him except “immense.” He seemed to be of another order of human altogether, twice as big in the torso, arms and legs as an average man. His knees, to make room for the crank, must have been splayed five feet apart.

The coat was all but able to contain him, every inch of it drawn tight, looking like it would burst at the seams.

His boots, which must have been custom-made, might have been twice the size of any I had seen before.

“Who are you?” I said, though I did not hear the words, only felt them in my throat.

He continued to stare at me.

I wondered if he knew about the snow bells, if he was listening for them. He might, at the speed the trolley was going, not hear one if it rang.

For all I knew, we had already passed a section shack and failed to hear the bell that would have meant salvation for us all. Unless it was too late for Smallwood.

But he was cranking the trolley as if he had no doubt about his destination. Perhaps I would soon see his face, soon know his story, soon be sitting safely with him in some section shack.