The Big Why (36 page)

Bob Bartlett was, as they used to say then, inverted.

I have seen Bartlett in the Explorers Club, drinking Guatemalan rum on the house, telling stories of Peary, polar bears, and shipwrecks. I have walked him home, to his room in the Murray Hill Hotel, and listened to him complain of the ignominy of it all, that he must exchange these delicious stories for a meal and a drink. He did not use the word
ignominy
. He said
wrong
. The wrong of it all. I join a circle of men, he said, and they begin to goad me into a Peary recollection. It is a fall of dignity. It is degrading.

But this was all decades after, when Bartlett had been reduced to making coin off his name. It’s one thing to lecture and another to find yourself holding a glass of whisky, realizing you are the embodiment of the word
regaling
. To regale is fine, as long as the tone of your regaling is not the reason youve been invited. If your story has honourable rather than cynical intentions. The dinner and the salad and then desserts and coffee and then the nod over to the map room, the wooden cork smacking out of the neck of twelve-year-old whisky, and the interlude that signalled it was Captain Bob’s time. The fat cigars.

He did it and the worst part was the agreeing. A man retains the structure of integrity, even after he has sold off the shelves of goods that integrity insisted should never be sold. And so Bob Bartlett walked about as a proud shell of a man. And that was when he drank. He drank as a youth and he drank in his forties. There was a ten-year period in the Brigus house, under his mother, when he drank nothing. And it was this period of life that he tried to spread over his entire life. It was his ideal of the good man, and he wanted to construct himself ideally. Maybe all men do. Perhaps that is our downfall.

It was nine years later in New York City. Tom Dobie had come to work on the Manhattan skyline. He looked me up. He assumed I would want to see him and he was right. I can forget people, but if you return to my mind and have made an impression, then I am eager to see you.

I was working on salvaging a life with wife number two, Frances. I had come into my own as an artist. I had commissions, I was writing a book about my travels with my son in Alaska, and I felt I deserved the acclaim. I had incorporated myself and severed my ties with Charles Daniel. I was making a lot of money, but I worked hard for it.

Tom Dobie: I been working with Jim Cole of Colliers. Jim he invented the safety belt and safety wire for ironworkers. They love us cause we got experience climbing tall masts of ships in storm. I’ll work this winter, then return to Brigus in summer to fish. That’s why they call us Fish here in New York.

You want a drink?

Yes let’s get a drink.

He was much older now. He shaved, but he had two patches of shadow on his cheekbones. His beard, if he let it grow, would start right under his eyes.

We walked down the road and dogs barked deep into properties. Up ahead a white truck with the words
am but once
painted on the back doors. I thought, So true. We are but once. We are but once, I said aloud, and Tom Dobie agreed with the tone, not knowing what I meant. And as we got closer I saw what the doors on the truck really said:
am bul ance
.

How’s Coaker?

He’s minister of marine and fisheries.

His party is the government?

His party, Kent, won eight seats.

This did not explain how he could be in government.

It’s a minority government. Coaker says it’s the proper thing.

So he’s become one of them. Did the regulations go through.

No sir the exporters are not regulated. But salt fish is on the decline.

Refrigeration.

Yes, that’s the key. Theyre doing away with salt fish. It’s too much time and work.

I believe it will make a comeback.

That’s an old-fashioned thought, he said. You got to use the freezer.

We reached the Green Dolphin and we both ordered beer. I asked him about Emily.

You havent heard.

I’m just asking about your wife.

She was pregnant, Tom Dobie said. That’s why we married. I was glad about it, he said, but I knew it wasnt mine.

She was pregnant when you got married.

When I got home from the army.

You were too young. When they sent you back.

They sent me back because of Emily.

But it wasnt yours.

Well I was happy to give her the breeze. See I’ve never been interested in that sort of thing, with women. Never really got into it. So she was pregnant and that looked good — I got leave from the army and we was both going into St John’s for work. We were to work until Christmas and then go back to Brigus for the winter. That was the end of my leave from the army. I’d be eighteen then and they’d ship me over. Emily got a berth aboard a schooner bound for Harbour Grace. The
Neptune
, her uncle captains her. She put on salt fish and cod oil. The schooner was going to put in at Brigus. I had more time so I took the train.

Anyway they left harbour and two days later this storm came over us. Knocked everything out of the water. We didnt hear from the
Neptune
. Never heard nothing. Two weeks went by and six schooners were lost. Then a third week and a boat come into St John’s. She’d heard the
Neptune
’s danger bell out on the water. Gave her fresh water. The captain said they were fine — they were going slow for St John’s. But then there were hurricane winds. Two months solid of nothing but storm. I wrote up the anxiety notice for the paper. Tony Loveys aboard her too. Gave her up for lost. We were all grieving. We been through some tough times there in Brigus.

Then we heard, we got a telegraph from Scotland.
Neptune
safe in Oban port.

Scotland?

She had crossed the entire Atlantic. I got a telegraph from Tony Loveys, he was bosun on board. Emily was alive, he said. But she was in hard shape. During the crossing they’d thought she would die for sure. She admitted she was pregnant. Her fingernails turned black. They decided they’d have to keep her on deck, wrapped in a sail for three days, but after that, if no sign of land, they were to bury her in the sea.

She was wrapped up in a sail.

No, boy — that was if she perished. But she hung on.

And they spotted land. It was the
Hesperus
towed them in.

The crew made arrangement for passage back to Newfoundland aboard the
Nova Scotia
. The doctor decided it’d be wiser for Emily to stay on, what with the war and all. She was halfway through the pregnancy. So she stayed. She stayed with this Scottish family, and that’s where she met this man.

Me: You never wondered who the father was.

Tom: She loved me, but she’d gone and done something.

And this Scottish fellow.

I think she thought this might be a good thing. He’d been married, he was an older man. His wife died early. Emily had the baby. I hope he takes good care of her.

Tom looked at me then, So youve done all right.

I’ve prospered. But not because the kaiser came through.

Still waiting for your Iron Cross.

Tom said that after the war he left Newfoundland and he’s been working foreign ever since. Now with the scaffolding. Remember Stan?

Stan Pomeroy, yes.

I never even told Emily the truth there. That Stan liked her.

I think we all knew that.

It got me riled. All I wanted was a life with Emily. And yet it felt wrong. I couldnt figure it out. It wasnt until he was dead that I figured something out. Did you know that? When he perished, do you know what we did? We had him, me and Tony Loveys, we had him in the twenty-five-foot skiff. It was rocking with fish, fish in the skirts and the vees, and me and Tony we’d never witnessed the like. Stan’s body in the middle of the cod trap. We hauled him aboard and Tony was bawling. I told him to roll out the canvas sail from the cuddy across the loose fish and the gangboard. Now put Stan’s body on it. Strip off his shirt and haul off his boots. His wet trousers. We got him naked. And I got naked too. I stripped down to nothing and I told Tony Loveys to do the same. Jesus Christ do it, I said. Now lie down like I’m doing. We got to warm him up. Get on the other side of him. Hold him close, push your heat into him. Rub his hands, rub his legs. But his back is solid cold, Tony said. I said, Hold yourself, Tony. Can you imagine being Stan? Lying there with the two of us buck naked around you. Youre probably just ears by then. Listening to the likes of me calling to you, rubbing your chest, pressing you.

The thought of it, I said, makes me want to get up and move.

Yes, you want to achieve less the image of a corpse.

It’s alarming, I said.

It jolts you alive, Kent. It woke me up. I watched Stan’s mouth, I waited for breath. But no breath. Just the chill in his body. I was turning cold too, and Tony Loveys got up out of it and pulled his clothes back on and stood over us, shivering and yelled his frigging lungs out, Get us back home out of it. He was hysterical, and all I could think of was Stan Pomeroy.

You loved him.

We were young men, Kent.

A few years later I returned to Newfoundland for a weekend. This was after my second divorce and I was on my way to Greenland on board the cutter
Direction
. It was not a planned stop. We hauled in for repairs and fresh provisions. I looked up Tom Dobie. He was working in a slaughterhouse. I found him having a smoke outside the building. A cow beside him. It wasnt much of an operation. He shook my hand — I noticed he was missing an index finger. He finished the cigarette. He savoured it, measuring out his puffs. Then he took the cow in by a rope through a ring in its nose. I went in to watch. Inside, a basin and a rut in the floor. He tied the cow to a ring set in the floor so its head was low. Took a pistol and fired right into the forehead. The cow shuddered, buckled immediately, and went down. Tom shoved a twelve-inch length of bamboo cane into the hole the bullet had made and wiggled it about. The cow went berserk, working out all of its reflex actions. He hoisted its rear legs onto two hooks and yanked the cow to the ceiling, its nose an inch from the ground. He sharpened a knife on a strop and skinned the entire carcass, even the face. The eyes bulging out of its hideless face. He slit the belly and chest and out plopped all the organs on the floor. A splash of blood whipped across the gutter. He whistled and a boy came down a hallway with a wheelbarrow. The boy tipped the wheelbarrow and had all the organs in the wheelbarrow in four shovelfuls. Then whisked on. Tom used a saw and cut the cow in half down the middle. And there were the two halves of a dead cow ready to hang. The butchering took about ten minutes. He went out for another smoke.

I asked him about the pistol. It’s not a real gun, he said. It has a .
22
cartridge inside that fires and the vacuum pushes a steel pin into the cow’s head.

He was in hard shape. We went and had a drink near the finger piers. Tom Dobie said to me, If I had three hundred and fifty dollars, I could economize and get along on that to supply myself.

He’d been looking around St John’s and sizing things up.

Take oil clothes. A fisherman has to pay four dollars a suit for oil clothes. If a man had the money he could buy flour bags and have them made out of that. Flour bags are the very best thing you could make oil clothes from. They’d last you for three years. I could make them for sixty cents, and then the oil costs about one dollar, but you’d have a number-one suit. Mother knitted my underwear and I dont waste very much. Take a pair of rubber boots. Theyre worth three dollars. In the fall we have to pay four dollars for them.

Last year he worked the salmon racket. And it was a failure.

Salmon, he says, have a magnetic pulse in their heads. They swim on the north side of the bays. No fish in the middle of the bay, five hundred feet of water.

He did not make five cents at the salmon. It was after the fifth of August by then and he had to go back to Brigus. Mother set out six barrels of seed potatoes last year and we got forty-five barrels. But this year we only got sixteen barrels because of the canker. Total failure. Mother, she got to look after everything while I’m away. Cabbage, turnips. Also beets. Last year she had to cut three thousand hay and stow it away for the season.

They had four sheep and one horse last year, but they had to sell them all and last year Tom Dobie had to sell his cart wheels. Two hundred and fifty dollars, that would get them through the winter.

He’d been to the lighthouse department, but they had nothing to offer him. He’d been to the department of postal and telegraphs and been told they had more men than they needed.

If I only had a chance I could get along. If someone would back a note for me at the bank, I would come home in November and pay it all back and have a little for myself.

I asked if he’d been on the dole.

When the prime minister gave the dole I took the shovel and went over to Bell Island and worked there. I bid there two years and later on went to New York. That’s when I saw you. I followed a horse there for a bit and then got onto the big steel. Afterwards I came home and got a job in construction.