The Big Why (37 page)

Now he was laying brick and digging foundations and working at this here slaughterhouse.

Yes sir, until after Christmas and then I’m going home.

I heard they might open up another ore mine.

Well there’s three hundred idlers there now and they will get the first of the work.

And what about the fishery.

I dont have much edge for it.

Are you a believer in motor boats?

Oh yes. But I recall when rowing was the only means to go fishing. Sure when you were out in Brigus that’s how we done it. They got more time to fish now since they have the six-horsepower coaker. You can get there much quicker than by rowing, and you can remain out until half an hour before nightfall. When you had oars you had to leave after dinner to get in. Of course gasoline is high and quite an expense in the motor boat.

You think a man without a motor boat can compete with a man owning one?

No. Not very well. When I first met you, I was — what? — sixteen. I didnt know what the world was. I thought the world was mine. But I had a limited vision because of the poverty of my family and the small view they had of the world’s offerings.

Me: The very opposite is true of me. I had reduced circumstances, but I expected the world. I came from a family used to the world. Because of my background I was used to expecting, and expecting puts you in a position to receive.

Youre sitting there saying that, he said, with a big shit-eating grin.

Youre misreading my face. I’m not pleased about it.

Youre excited by it.

Tom, I want to back your note.

Out on the hill, as our cutter left port, the sheep’s laurel blanketed the slopes like small pink popcorn. Warm wind, but it was still cold off the land. Carrots were up, beet leaves, turnip, peas. The comfrey too, in big stands, as though someone, just below the surface, was grasping it in handfuls. The hopeful vegetables. I was leaving all this, tended.

I spoke to Kathleen before she died. She had become, after our divorce, more religious. She had become more herself and rebelled against my atheism. But her private Christianity, over thirty years, had ground her down. And now she had cancer.

Is Jesus still your saviour?

Kathleen: I couldnt say. Except that he’s not a comfort any longer. I’m shedding skins. I’m losing a lot of friends. I’m honest with people now. I might have to get some new friends. I’m interested in different kinds of people now.

What kind.

Well, there’s not many around here. A lot of the things that I thought were me arent me. I’m sick of a bunch of the old stuff. You helped me. What I’m really interested in is art and writing by women. I was looking at my bookshelf and thought, Who wants to read it? The fundamentalist, one-way dogma has to go. Though I still believe in immortality. The integrity of our personhood. I definitely experience a spiritual reality that I hope will translate into immortality. I’ve had an injured state of mind and been annihilated. And now I wonder why people must be so relentlessly themselves. You, for instance. Were a bulldozer.

Yes. But why couldnt you just let it not affect you.

I wanted to be with someone who was forgiving.

I could see the kindness in that now.

In the end, she said, it’s all about repercussions. The sum of your acts, and your concern for or indifference towards those who have loved you. The question is not have you been loved, but have you loved.

The thing is, I am a man of ambiguity. But I portrayed assurance. I had to convey that. Give it off. I did not want anyone to sense a whiff of doubt.

I have become a public man living a quiet country life. I have a dairy farm. My house in Ausable Forks burnt down and I rebuilt it. I will defeat entropy. I love hosting parties and my neighbours put up with me. When youre a little more famous, your neighbours will submit. But my friends are New York friends. I have given up on marrying myself to the rural as if it were the only truth. My only belief now is that if you keep moving, perhaps the laws of nature will forget how old you are.

When I was eighty-six, I received a strange letter. The envelope said Office of the Premier, Province of Newfoundland, Canada. The premier, a Mr Smallwood. What a fine letter. He’d felt compelled to write me, he said, for in compiling facts for his
Encyclopaedia of Newfoundland
, he had discovered my fifty-year-old correspondence with the government of Newfoundland, his government. He was shocked by the treatment I’d received. He’d been prepared, he said, to write a letter of apology to my son or daughter. He was then mightily pleased to hear that I was still alive, happily living out my time in Upstate New York. He wrote:

Would you come back here? Would you be this Government’s guest on a visit back to Newfoundland, including Brigus? Please forgive us for past injuries, and please be magnanimous enough to be our guest some time at your convenience.

With assurances of my highest regard,

Joseph R. Smallwood

I was stunned.

And vindicated. The premier had read my correspondence and was shamed. They wanted me to return.

And so the next summer I returned, with my third wife, Sally. I have lived with Sally for longer than I did my first two wives put together. And yet there are events in youth that form you so strongly that a mere year can live within you for the rest of your life. Part of me has always regretted the failure of my Newfoundland plans. That is the reason for this book. To discuss openly the very events that caused my will to be rebuked.

We flew into St John’s in the dark. There was trouble with the plane’s braking. The runway slick with rain. There was a family in the seats beside ours. A girl held a goldfish bowl in her lap — she had held it the entire flight. One goldfish. We touched down and veered, lurching a little to one side. We skidded along the tarmac, until the tarmac ended. The highway lights through the dark trees. The plane pushing its wings a little into the woods. Then we stopped. I was pleased to be with Sally — I have learned in old age the grace of how to be a good husband. I thought, If we die here on this tarmac in Newfoundland, it will have been a good life. I will have died where I once thought I would die. We looked at each other and prayed there would be no fire. The intercom and then the pilot, Welcome to St John’s. We heard sirens, the flash of emergency vehicles in the dark, the applause of the passengers, the happy goldfish, but we used the stairs down to the ground. It was woods. Behind us, a line of idling taxis perched at the end of the runway, their low beams shining in our faces, fire trucks in the distance. The taxis had beaten the fire trucks, to take us to the terminal. The rain began again and we sat in a taxi. It is nice, Sally said, in the rain, to sit in a car.

In the morning I saw that St John’s was a nicer-looking town. Still a bit roughed up, but not so sordid. I met the premier. There were photographers. The papers were interested in my story: I was the famous spy of Brigus. They call it Kent Cottage now, Smallwood said, but not after you. It’s named after the place in England.

The premier was tanned. He had just returned from Cuba. He had met with Castro. I like, he said, island nations.

I have met the man, I said. I hear doves land on him.

We made a film, Smallwood said. I should show it to you sometime.

We visited the government buildings, the university, and the new shopping mall. Smallwood was proud of it, and he had a right to be proud. It was not picturesque, but can you expect people to live in squalor just so you can have good material for paintings?

It might look a little less pretty, I said, but it’s healthy and functional.

The city was modern. We drove to Brigus. We passed a boot factory and a building where they produced chocolates.

We’ve got to get the people off fishing, Smallwood said. That’s stone age. We have mining and hydro, paper mills and shipbuilding. There’s chemicals and oil refining and agriculture and logging.

It’s satisfying, I said, to see the Old World transformed.

I like to cast aside old allegiances.

Me: Losers imitate winners.

We stopped near Frogmarsh. Me and Sally, the premier and his wife. Smallwood’s wife was called Clara, the same as my daughter. I told them about the war map, which was the painting of my nude family. They knew all about it. Even so, I was looked on with admiration, and I realized that my great age granted me a certain respect. I had known Prowse, for instance. They were talking to a man who had spent time with Judge Prowse.

I looked for the Dobie house. A trail down to a valley where the damson plums grew wild. Apples too. Morning glories and a field of hemp nettle like lavender. A boat jigging for cod, its red side looking blue in the shadows. The first thing I noticed was that all the fences were gone.

What do they do to keep out the cows.

Smallwood: There are no cows, Kent. Did away with the cows. We have a central dairy now, in St John’s. Supplies all the Avalon. Got a lovely creamery too, makes butter out of petroleum.

The plum trees were wild and tall. You could see how they framed three sides of a house that did not exist — a ghostly perimeter of a house long gone. This, I said, was the Dobie house.

We walked behind the plums and found a rock wall. In the front field the high grass covered a garden that had a corrugated ripple.

A young man lived here, I said. A fine young man who helped me once.

Old potato drills. There were fields now. Long, wide fields. All the fences had rotted, the houses fallen in or moved.

Resettled, Smallwood said. We got rid of a lot of poverty. There was a lot of that all along this shore. The shore was rotten with it. But Brigus will survive. Brigus has old money.

The Bartlett house. Who lives there now.

The spinster Eleanor.

Bob Bartlett’s sister?

Yes she’s still around. Of course you knew her.

Eleanor came out to meet us.

Well chop the beam, she said. You must be going up for ninety years of age.

We had not known each other well, but she was polite and friendly. Could she hug, she asked, the German spy who lived down the path?

I just came by, I said, to remind you to put in the tulips.

Oh, tulips, she said. Theyre no good for flowers.

We walked down Rattley Row to the far shore. There was exactly half a house. Sliced in two like a dollhouse. It was the Pomeroys’. Someone had zipped through the middle with a chainsaw, had used the wood to build a shed. The frame of the house and the bedrooms upstairs all tilted. But the roof still solid, and the floors too.

Not a nail used in her, Smallwood said. Tight as a drum.

Me: What a house that was.

Smallwood: Theyre a bit savage, hey. With culture.

I’d say.

You got to live now with a bucket of keys.

We walked down the lane to my house. It had been maintained, and not renovated. It looked pretty good, except that the figurehead was gone. An elderly man had lived there after me. A polite English professor who was a Sunday painter. The brook was the same, though the trees around it had grown. The trees had changed. Gerald’s pear tree had survived, and it was magnificent. I leaned over and picked one. It was hard, but I ate it anyway.

A Gerald pear, I said.

Sorry?

A friend of mine.

Smallwood: I’ve heard of a Bartlett pear.

That’s funny.

I pointed to the shed. That’s where I painted my German eagle.

They laughed at that. They all knew the story.

We went inside. There was propane now. The old stoves and fireplaces were gone. Replaced by modern kerosene heaters. The rooms were tiny. Six people had lived here, I said. It was strange to see my third wife in here.

I was born, Sally said, the year you lived here.

Smallwood: Will I put the kettle on?

Yes, I said.

We took the kettle and I found the dipper hung at the brook by the gate. You still had to do that.

I believe Kierkegaard: It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view. Kierkegaard thought that he was quoting Marcus Aurelius, but he got it wrong. Aurelius wrote: To recover your life is in your power. Look at things as you used to look at them, for in this lies the recovery of your life.

It is not enough to have been loved. One must have loved. To love is to give yourself over. It is to realize trust. Trust is not something you can acquire. You cannot train yourself. There is no fitness class to trust. You must cultivate love and push love towards the seeds of what interests you. Give out the heart. If you do this, then you will have lived. And you will be loved. Those who kill themselves are often well loved. Gerald Thayer was loved. He was an exuberant man. A man of life. But there was a weight to him, and in late fall, on his way to meet me, that weight stopped him. I was on my farm in the Adirondacks. He’d hit a wall, he said. He’d left Jenny. He had family money, but he had no work. He was thrilled by his children. I take it as an accident. As an evening that overtook. I think it surprised him — he was a man who had never broken a bone in his body. But on his way here, he was driving. On his way, in a small town in Upstate New York, he stopped for the night. I have been to this small town. I have seen that time of year, when the light is a constant pale grey. It is past fall, the trees and fields are bare and all that’s promised is a long absence of anything with buds. It happened there, in his hotel room, at dusk. It is a mournful time, that part of the world and that season. The season, the scene, the air are all favourable to numbness and isolation. He did not arrive in Ausable Forks and then Alma called to tell me. After all those years it was Alma Wollerman. Alma had been in his passport. He had his passport with him. Alma called to tell me. Gerald’s gone.