The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (11 page)

Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing
The Newlander’s Cure
, a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have never been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well.

Mundy Pond

F
OR YEARS, THE ONLY
religious symbol in the house had been a plain wooden cross above the stove. A token wooden cross, just in case. My parents hedging their bets.

She had never insisted we go to church, so everyone but me was quite surprised when suddenly my mother became a student of religions, “reading up” on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps.

“What are you up to?” my father said, when she started bringing home catechisms, prayer books, hymn books, missals, Bibles of every denomination. They lay scattered all over the house, publications of the Church of England, the Church of England (Reformed Episcopal), the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic Church. She even read up on what she had formerly dismissed as “crank” religions, such as Christian Science and the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

She did not just read, she went to services as well, often taking me with her because, in spite of her newly awakened curiosity, she seemed to be afraid to go alone. I believe I saw the inside of at
least one church of every denomination in St. John’s. My mother sat or stood, an aloofly critical observer, listening, watching not just the ministers but the congregations. She was like some dispassionately shrewd shopper who would forgo buying altogether if she had to.

She spoke most favourably of the New World evangelical religions.

“I am looking for the real thing, Joe,” she said, “the genuine article, and I have yet to find it.”

One Sunday afternoon, she told me she had a secret that she would tell me if I promised to keep it to myself. I thought I was about to hear about the book and Mr. Mercer. I promised and she told me she had been “convicted of sin” and would soon be “saved.” She told me that she had, that past Tuesday, been converted in the Bethesda Mission of the Pentecostal faith on New Gower Street, the Ark, as it was called, and was to be, the following Sunday, one of forty baptized by immersion in a body of water on the heights of the city known as Mundy Pond.

“I don’t know what came over me, Joe,” she said. “I went to the mission just to see what all the fuss was about, everybody was talking about the Bethesda Mission and this woman, this Miss Garrigus, but something happened, Joe, something happened.”

It must have been clear from my expression that I was frightened and did not want to hear what had happened, for she stopped speaking and turned away from me, putting her hands over her face. I wanted to keep my distance from this religious fervour for fear of coming down with it myself, losing myself to it. I was terrified of the idea that something more powerful than my own will might be moving me along, or would if I gave in to it. I could see already that she would never wholly be mine as she had been before and would never think of me as wholly hers.

The head of the Pentecostal Church in any diocese was called the overseer and had to be a man, but up to now no suitable men had been attracted to the Ark, so Miss Garrigus was unofficially
the overseer, with the only sacrament she could not perform being marriage. My mother hung a large portrait photograph of Miss Garrigus above the front-room fireplace. In it, Miss Garrigus wore her hair up, piled high above her head, with a cleft down the middle so that it seemed to form the letter
M
. She wore a black dress with a perforated-lace collar, from which there hung a cross-shaped lace doily. One hand rested on a cane, the other held open on her lap a large black Bible. She stared out from the photograph disdainfully, unnervingly. She looked as though she could size you up in half a second, as though she had heard every excuse there was for loose living, moral weakness and Godlessness ten times over and could not be fooled. My father, looking at the photograph, called her Alice in Newfoundland.

Before Baptism Sunday, my mother took me to hear her preach. I wondered if she was hoping that I, too, might be converted.

Miss Garrigus was an “unrivalled revivalist” — her own assessment — from New England, who that night, in a sermon of which, for fervour and soul-stirring eloquence, my mother said she had never heard the equal, told her congregation that her own conversion had occurred in a dilapidated barn in Maine.

“Barn born I was,” she said. “I have spent the last twenty years revivalling, travelling the world, preaching, baptizing and saving souls. But recently, at the age of fifty-two, I felt the call to Newfoundland; I felt compelled by the Lord to come to Newfoundland and establish here a mission called the Ark. The shape of Newfoundland began appearing in my dreams, first a vague shape that each night grew more distinct and began to look like some sort of island, though which one I could not tell. Eventually, it was Newfoundland I saw, though I did not know it, I did not know what Newfoundland looked like. I drew the shape I saw in my dreams and showed it to a friend, who told me I had drawn a map of Newfoundland, a map that was accurate in every way.” Miss Garrigus then unscrolled the map she had drawn and showed it to the congregation and told how, upon consulting an
atlas, she had her “call to Newfoundland” confirmed beyond all doubt when she saw that the capital of what was soon to be her diocese was called St. John’s, after St. John the Baptist and St. John of the Gospels, who ended the Book of Revelations and indeed the Bible as a whole with the watchword of the Pentecostal Church, “Jesus is coming soon.”

“Newfoundlanders, you are all New Found,” she said, “foundlings on the doorstep of salvation. You are here in my mission today because you have no church, because no other church would take you in. Or should I say, because you would not be taken in by other churches.

“There is a woman in this congregation,” she said, “who has been keeping to herself an awful secret, something she thinks no one else knows, though someone does; something she believes she will never be forgiven for, though she will. Hear me, my dear woman; hear me, sister — I will not name you, for you know who you are, and God knows, for God knows everything — God, if only you will ask Him, will forgive you.”

This “woman” could have been almost anybody, but I could see why my mother had been so affected.

My mother was baptized in early June, in water from which the last ice had melted but a month before. She arrived back home on Sunday morning in a cart driven by a Pentecostal couple from the Brow. She was wrapped in a blanket, her hair was matted to her head and face and her clothes clung, still dripping water, to her body.

“I’m saved, Joe,” she said weakly, lips quivering. “I’m saved.”

“Take care of your mother, boy,” the man said gruffly. “Bless you, Mrs. Smallwood,” the woman said as they drove off. Their ragged old horse clopped slowly down the hill.

I took my mother into the kitchen, where she sat shivering, arms folded, looking like someone who had been saved, not from damnation, but from drowning and had been hustled home before
she caught pneumonia. My sisters urged her to go upstairs with them and change into something dry, but she looked as if she hadn’t heard them. Her eyes seemed focused inward, as though on some vision she had had and was forbidden to reveal.

I don’t know what happened to my mother that day on the shore of Mundy Pond, but something did, something that altered her forever. I vowed that if God Himself appeared to me, I would assure Him that I would rather save myself than have Him do it.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Four:

QUODLIBETS

Robert Hayman, who flees Cupids and helps start up and govern a colony called Bristol’s Hope, from which he soon returns to England, writes a book called
Quodlibets
, a miscellany of odds and ends, a corrective to the nonsense that Vaughan is churning out, which unfortunately never appears in its original form but is amended, bowdlerized by Vaughan before publication. (Prowse, in his
History
, mistaking Vaughan’s edition as authoritative, dismisses
Quodlibets
as “a curious medley.” Prowse was completely taken in by Vaughan, to the point of believing that Vaughan travelled to Newfoundland and began a colony at Trepassey, when in fact he never in his life sailed far enough from England to lose sight of shore.)

We are in possession of one of the rare copies of the original
Quodlibets
. In the Vaughan edition, the following poem appears:

The aire in Newfoundland is wholesome, good,

The fire as sweet as any made of wood,

The waters very rich, both salt and fresh,

The earth more rich, you know it is no lesse.

Where all are good, fire, water, earth and air,

What man made of these would not live there?

Here is the poem as it appears in Hayman’s notebooks:

The aire in Newfoundland unwholesome is, not goode,

One cannot goe outside without a hoode.

The Waters, salt and fresh, they are like ice.

All who fall in perish in a trice.

Fire is rare there is so little woode,

For growing ought the earth it is no goode.

Against life do all the elements conspire.

Man made of water, earth, aire and fire,

Hearken not to William Vaughan, he is a liar.

Harold Dexter

T
HOUGH
I
LEFT
Bishop Feild voluntarily, I would forever feel that I had failed there, and it would be the presiding failure of my life, the first in a list that, for a long time, seemed as if it would never end. When, in the last quarter of the century, I came to oversee the writing of my encyclopedia of Newfoundland, I would see to it that under the entry for Bishop Feild, no mention was made of me. The explanation I would give for this was that I did not deserve mention among those who, after graduating from Bishop Feild, went on to be Rhodes Scholars or otherwise distinguished themselves. The real reason was that I did not want Bishop Feild getting any credit for what I went on to do.

In 1915, I had what today would amount to a grade nine education. I would one day have a legion of learned men answering to me, deferring to me, terrified of me; Oxford-educated lawyers, Harvard-educated doctors, university professors, civil servants, all afraid to lift a pencil, and with good reason, without first clearing it with me. I would one day, in the House of Assembly, make the Sorbonne-educated leader of the opposition look like a fool. But I
never stopped believing, deep down, that these men were my betters, my true superiors; nor, I now realize, did they.

My father was right. The Boot beckoned, but not just the Boot. Life back home beckoned, back in the old house among my ever-proliferating siblings. Since I had left for Bishop Feild, my mother had had two more children, bringing the total to ten, and another one was on the way. If there was any way I could avoid being one of twelve people in a three-bedroom house, I was going to take it, even if it meant the Boot. That every word that came out of my mother’s mouth these days had to do with her newfound faith didn’t help matters either.

My mother spoke to Fred Smallwood, and it was all but decided that I would work in the factory in some capacity. I was no more inclined than my father to spend my life making or selling boots and shoes, but for a while it seemed like the only way I could afford to move out.