Other young men were going off to war, but I was — inasmuch as a fifteen-year-old can
be
anything — a pacifist and had vowed that even if conscripted, I would not go.
I thought about leaving for the mainland. I knew that to get into the States I would need a certificate of health and TB-exonerating X-ray plates, so I went to see a doctor.
For all his sympathy, he could not restrain a smile at the sight of me when I took off my clothes in his examining room. I doubt that he had ever seen a less promising, more self-deluded applicant for emigration. I was myopic, already all but blind without my glasses. I weighed — he checked the scale a second time to make sure that he had read it right — a whopping eighty-seven pounds. I was malnourished, he said, even by Newfoundland standards. I half-expected him to tell me that at forty-five, my character was dangerously low. He determined, from listening to my lungs, that I was “pre-tubercular” and would almost certainly come down with tuberculosis unless I changed my eating habits. He prescribed fresh fruit, vegetables and meat as if these things were lacking
from my diet only because of an oversight on my part, not because I could not afford them. I left his office wishing I had never been to see him.
I could not stop thinking of myself as “pre-tubercular.” My mother had always been warning me against tuberculosis, telling me I had better watch out or I would wind up dead or “on my back” in the sanatorium, the San, we called it. The phrase was just vague enough to give the disease an extra-sinister dimension. I did not know that lying on your back was part of the cure for tuberculosis; I thought it was one of the symptoms, and so lived in dread of being overcome by the urge to lie supine. When I went to bed, I lay down prostrate or on my side and if, when I woke up, I was lying on my back, I feared the worst.
I walked aimlessly along Water Street, head down, brooding on my doom and was thus engaged when I all but bumped into someone.
“Excuse me,” I muttered.
“The poet ponders,” said a voice. Fielding’s. She looked different than she had before, was dressed differently for one thing. She wore a black blazer over a white, high-necked blouse, a long pleated cotton skirt and black shoes with narrowly spaced buttons that started from the toes. It seemed to me that it suited her more than the dresses she used to wear at school, which I had always thought were fifty years out of date. (She still carried her cane. For the moment it was tucked, knob facing me, beneath her arm.) But something in her face had changed, too; its flesh seemed to have sagged slightly, as if something basic, something fundamental, had been extracted from her.
It did not matter to me who it was. I would have poured out my troubles to the first person who would listen and it never occurred to me that, all things considered, she might be disinclined to. I told her about the doctor’s prognosis and about the looming of the Boot. When I was finished, she said she thought she had a solution to both my problems.
She told me that her father, the doctor, had those patients of his who needed to gain weight drink one bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon Yeast Beer per day for 120 days. I thought she was joking, but she assured me that she was not and said we could go see her father about it if I liked. I demurred.
“Some of his patients already have tuberculosis and it works for them,” Fielding said. I reminded her that I was not old enough to drink.
“Nor am I,” she said, raising from the pocket of her jacket, just far enough so I could see it, a gleaming silver flask. I was taken aback.
“Don’t let anyone see that,” I said. She pursed her lips with scorn and regarded me as if she had not seen my like before. I began to make objections, but she dismissed them with a wave of her hand. She told me she knew how we could get the beer.
“You’ve got to start right away,” she said, “or you won’t get to 120 before Prohibition starts.” A prohibition bill had already been passed in the House of Assembly and was to come into effect 127 days from now, she said, which meant I had to get started within the week.
I told her there was no way I could do this while I lived at home, and no way I could afford to move away from home until I got a job.
“Follow me,” Fielding said. We walked wordlessly, side by side, up the hill to Duckworth Street, where Fielding pointed at the window of the
Evening Telegram
and an ad that said Court Reporter Wanted.
“Meet me here a week from now at nine p.m. and we’ll get you that body-weight-augmenting beer,” Fielding said. “Thus is Smallwood saved by Fielding from tuberculosis and the Boot.”
She walked off before I could — well, not thank her, for I was not sure yet that thanks were in order, that anything would come of either the beer or the job that I was about to apply for. I went inside and I assumed I must have been the first to inquire about
the job, for I had no sooner done so than I was told that it was mine and that I would start in two weeks.
When I told my mother that night that I was moving out and had found a little room in a boarding-house on Duckworth Street, she jumped up and started walking around the room, shaking her head as if she could already see me, alone, sitting, shoulders slumped, on some bed, heartbroken by journalism in my little room on Duckworth Street.
“I’ll be able to get more work done if I’m on my own,” I said. “And I’ll be closer to where I’ll be working. I’ll have more money to give to you to help out with the children.” My mother, though she was not so naive as to be swayed by my arguments (if I had to pay room and board, how much money could I give her?), saw that my mind was made up and gave me her blessing.
The first thing I did on moving into the boarding-house was tack up an oilcloth map of Newfoundland, not including Labrador, since it was not clear at that time, and would not be until 1927, where Labrador left off and Quebec began. I had bought it from a man who assured me that unlike paper maps, it would last forever and would never get dirty, for all you had to do was wipe it clean with a wet cloth. He cited as evidence of its durability and stain-resistantness the fact that its previous owners had used it as a tablecloth. “Ate off it for years,” he said. “You’d never say it to look at it, would you?” It was quite large and I suspected that in the days before it became a tablecloth, it had been used in a schoolroom somewhere where a knowledge of Newfoundland geography was more highly prized than it was at Bishop Feild.
Every morning, before work, using the oilcloth as my model, I drew the map of Newfoundland. My goal was to be able to draw it as well from memory as I could draw the map of England. For the longest while, after I began drawing Newfoundland, it was the map of England I saw when I closed my eyes at night, as though my mind were sending forth this primary shape by way of protest — which it needn’t have bothered doing, since England had been
so early imprinted on my brain that no amount of drawing other maps could supplant it. Newfoundland was far more difficult to draw than England, what with its half-dozen major peninsulas, themselves endlessly peninsulated, and its infinity of bays and inlets. Perhaps this was the point my mind was trying to make; I had mastered a perfectly good map already, why was I bothering with another, more complicated one? I must have drawn the map of Newfoundland from memory a thousand times before I stopped, admitting to myself that I would get no better at it. My last maps, drawn when I was twenty, are nowhere near as good as the maps of England I drew when I was twelve.
A week after our first meeting, Fielding and I met again in front of the
Telegram
at nine at night. I could not afford to buy the beer all at once, so I decided to buy it in five batches of twenty-four. I was surprised that Fielding would have any dealings with the sort of man we got it from, an all-but-toothless fellow in a ragged overcoat whom we met at the back of a warehouse on the waterfront. He kept looking nervously around while we completed our transaction. I gave him twenty-five cents, he handed me a wooden case that he said contained the beer, though it was labelled Ginger Ale. When he took his hands away and left me holding it, it dragged me to the ground. Even with Fielding holding one end, it took all the strength I had to straighten up, and even then my arms were shaking. “Hope you don’t have to go too far,” the toothless fellow said. I shook my head. “If the ’Stab stops ya,” he said, “don’t say where ya got it, if ya knows what’s good for ya.” We lugged it, stopping to rest now and then, up the hill to my boarding-house.
With the door and the curtains closed, we opened the wooden case, which did, indeed, contain Pabst Blue Ribbon Yeast Beer. “There you are,” Fielding said. She took her silver flask out of her pocket.
“We can’t have you drinking alone,” she said, unscrewing the stopper and taking a pull on the flask.
“What’s in that, anyway?” I said.
“Scotch,” she said. We sat at my little table. She drank from her flask and I drank my first, tuberculosis-proofing bottle of beer, all but gagging on the taste. It was all I could do to drink the whole bottle and I was as drunk afterwards as I ever would be in my life, not to mention queasy. The only thing that kept me from throwing up was Fielding telling me that if I did, I would have to drink another bottle. I thought about drinking a beer a day for 120 days and wondered if, at the end of it, regardless of what my weight might be, I would have acquired, or awakened, since it might be in my blood, my father’s taste for alcohol. It seems ridiculous when I think about it now, but to a boy not quite sixteen, it was a real dilemma: which form of doom should I risk, alcoholism or tuberculosis? To my relief, the taste of beer did not grow on me. I never, after finishing one, had the slightest inclination to start another.
I hung a little slate on my wall and wrote on it in chalk the number 119. Thus began the countdown. Every night, after I choked down another beer, I erased the old number and wrote in the new one, and every tenth beer I weighed myself, only to find that I had not gained an ounce. Still, I kept at it, thinking that perhaps I would gain weight only after drinking all the beer, that after the consumption of beer number 120, presumably a scientifically arrived at number, some sort of weight-gaining mechanism in my body would kick in. It did not. At the end of Fielding’s prescription, I had not gained an ounce.
“Smallwood,” she said, when I confronted her with the news, “I believe you would not gain weight if you consumed a cow a day while lolling in a hammock.”
That first night at my boarding-house, drunk on half a beer and wondering how in God’s name I was going to choke down the other half, I brought up the matter of the letter to the
Morning Post
and Fielding’s aborted attempt to frame me for writing it.
“That was a silly thing to do, Fielding,” I said. She agreed that it was.
“Wanted to get back at you,” she said. “And I believe I may have been a little drunk when I conceived my plan.”
“Drunk?” I said. “You were drunk? You were only fifteen.”
“Actually,” she said, “I was seventeen. I’m eighteen now. Didn’t start school until I was seven, nearly eight.”
“So what have you been up to since?” I said.
“Oh, not much,” she said. “My father wants me to go to school abroad, then go to college at some place like Mount Allison in New Brunswick. But I think I’ve had all the schooling I can stand.”
“Me too,” I said, pushing the beer away from me as if she had said it was beer she’d had enough of. She pushed it back to me.
“Drink up,” she said. “Someday you’ll thank me for it.”
Court stories were among the most widely read in any St. John’s newspaper, but for reasons that I would soon discover, the court beat did not enjoy a corresponding popularity among reporters.
The courthouse was a massive Gothic stone structure built into the side of a hill, with its front entrance on Water Street and its rear entrance a hundred feet up the slope on Duckworth Street. Consequently, about half of it was underground, and most of it was off-limits to reporters. Each of its four levels was an endless maze of courtrooms, cloakrooms, judge’s chambers, registries, jury rooms, clerk’s offices and, in the catacomb-like basements, the holding cells from which, by way of a series of tunnel-like stairways, prisoners in loudly clanking chains were brought up to appear before the bar. In the courtroom, you could hear them ascending long before the admitting door opened.
There were six dailies in St. John’s at the time, and all of them had regular court reporters. Among the other five reporters was one from the
Daily News
who used the pseudonymous byline of Harold Dexter.
Harold Dexter turned out to be Fielding. I met her in the little room, not much bigger than a closet, that was set aside for the press.
“Hello, Smallwood,” she said, not looking up from the copy of the
News
that she was reading. She pulled from the inner pocket of her jacket her silver flask and extended it to me.
“For God’s sake,” I said, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. No one had. She shrugged, took a long drink from the flask, then put it back in her pocket. She then took out of another pocket, unwrapped and popped into her mouth, a peppermint candy.
“You might have told me,” I said.
She shrugged.
Fielding was regarded with a kind of irony-laden fondness by the lawyers. I could tell they knew her history, though they never mentioned it. One of them by lineage, if not by gender or profession, she was to them a kind of mascot. They loved indulging her apparent belief that wit could compensate for her gender and for her failure at school and put her on a par with them, make up for the fact that she, the daughter of a doctor, had had to settle for making her own living and doing it by, of all things, writing for a newspaper.
“What do you make of us lawyers, Fielding?” a beefy, prosperous-looking lawyer named Sharpe asked her one day.
“If you were paid by the acquittal, Sharpe, you’d be skinnier than Smallwood here,” Fielding said, and there was a great burst of guffaws from outside the press room, Sharpe laughing loudest of all, as if the impotence of Fielding’s wit was the real joke.