The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (16 page)

The dead of the
Newfoundland
were not even in the ground when the seal skinners, standing shoulder to shoulder along the waterfront, were skinning pelts on sloping tables at the foot of which lay tubs into which tumbled the hunks of blubber they hacked off with their knives. Once the sealskins were scraped clean, they would be sent to hide houses the world over, including a few in St. John’s. Someone somewhere would wear a sealskin hat made from a seal killed by a man from the S.S.
Newfoundland
.

It was while I was watching the skinners that Grimes approached me. He was so well-dressed that I took him for a merchant until I saw the little wooden wheelbarrow beside him. It was piled with blue pocket-sized books. He raised his bowler hat in greeting. “George Grimes,” he said. “Member of the House of Assembly.” He reached into the wheelbarrow and handed me a book.

“I am giving you this book,” he said, his tone formal, the words sounding rehearsed. “It is specially designed so that you can carry it with you anywhere you go. I want you to read it, and if, after doing so, you want to be a socialist, I want you to come see me at this address.” He handed me his card. Then he moved on and repeated his spiel to the person next in line.

“Who corrupted the Senate? The capitalists. Who fixes congressmen? The capitalists. Who purchased the Illinois state legislature? The capitalists. Who bought the St. Louis aldermen? The capitalists.”

So the Illinois state legislature and the St. Louis aldermen had been bought. I was outraged, though I could not have found either Illinois or St. Louis on a map. For years afterwards, whenever I heard the word
capitalist
, what came to mind was the St. Louis aldermen as I had pictured them when I was sixteen, a couple of dozen burgomasters sitting around in a circle, rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of being bought.

Then there were the counter-questions: “Who can stop corruption? The socialist. Who believes that all men really are created equal? The socialist. Who cares about the working man? The socialist.” After I read the closing paragraph of
What’s So and What Isn’t
, I believed that I had found my calling, a way to ensure that the deaths of the men of the S.S.
Newfoundland
might be redeemed: “A socialist is a man of destiny. He is the only man who has read the signs of the time. He is therefore invulnerable. He draws his shining lance and challenges the champions of every other economic thought to meet him in the arena of debate. And they slink away like whipped curs.”

That seemed like something worth being, a man someone like Abe Kean would slink away from like a whipped cur, an invulnerable, lance-wielding master of debate. It was all very well to want to be a journalist, but whose life could you save or even improve by writing for a newspaper?

I put this question to Fielding the next time she came to my boarding-house.

“To the best of my knowledge,” Fielding said, “I have never saved anyone’s life by writing for the
Telegram
, though I might save my own if I stopped.”

I showed her
What’s So and What Isn’t
, and she browsed through it, every so often drinking from her silver flask. “Well?” I
said. “What do you think?” She drew breath as if to say something, looked at me, looked down at the book, shrugged.

“I suppose there might be something to it,” she said.

We went straight to Grimes’s house, and on his doorstep I earnestly declared to him our desire to become socialists. Fielding stood wordlessly beside me. “I want to be a socialist,” I said — “like you,” I would have added, except I didn’t want to sound presumptuous. I don’t know what I expected; I suppose to be welcomed into the fold with equal ardour.

“Step into the porch,” said Grimes. “I’ll be right back.” He closed the front door, opened the door to the hallway, stepped hastily inside, then closed the door.

Judging from its façade and what I had glimpsed of it when he opened the door, his house was as large and as well-appointed as my uncle Fred’s, which surprised me. As Fielding and I stood waiting in the porch, we heard voices inside, Grimes’s and that of a woman, his wife we presumed, with whom he seemed to be arguing, though the only word I could make out was the one with which she began every reply in a kind of “I will brook no dispute” tone, which was
George
.

Soon, the door to the hallway opened again and Grimes backed out, holding in his arms a box of books, fifty copies, he said, of
What’s So and What Isn’t
. As he was handing me the box, his wife poked her head out of the nearest room. I tipped my hat to her and Fielding said hello. She gave a grudging nod. She looked at me, as Fielding later put it, “as if she hoped you were not a measure of her husband’s standing in the world.” It would be a long time before I cut the kind of figure that would reassure the wives of my associates.

We never did get past the porch of Grimes’s house, though we spent a lot of time with him over the next few months. I started pressing copies of
What’s So and What Isn’t
on everyone I knew or met, and one week we joined Grimes in what he called his Sunday
walkabout. It was his habit on Sundays to go from door to door, pitching socialism to the citizens of St. John’s. Fielding and I stood mute at his side like the socialist trainees that we were. At each house, he introduced us before reciting his speech, which mostly consisted of phrases pulled straight from John M. Work. Grimes stood on doorsteps and calmly and reasonably explained how the current economic system would be overthrown and another put in its place. And how would this come about? “Preferably by the ballot box,” Grimes said. “If necessary, by revolution. Do you have any questions? Very well, then. Good day to you, now.”

His manner and his message were so completely at odds that I don’t think people understood what he was advocating. It was hard to square Grimes with the picture of the socialist put forward by Work. “Any revolution,” Fielding said, “that depends upon Grimes drawing his shining lance will be a long time coming.”

It was true. He was the least ardent, most phlegmatic, deferential socialist I have ever met. No one would be put out or inconvenienced by Grimes’s revolution, let alone disenfranchised. I wondered if the Cause knew what its man in Newfoundland was like. In his arena of debate, the House of Assembly, where he ought to have been challenging the champions of other economic thought, he made speeches about the need for more jobs and better roads.

Mind you, I didn’t come off too well in comparison with John M. Work’s man of destiny either, in my tattered overcoat and hat and horn-rimmed glasses. We made quite a sight for a while, George Grimes and his post-adolescent aides-de-camp, Joe Smallwood and Sheilagh Fielding. There is a photograph of us from that time, standing on the waterfront with a group of grinning dock-workers we were trying to unionize behind us: the stolid Grimes in his bowler hat and tweed overcoat striking a statesman-like pose with both hands behind his back; me on one side of him like some bespectacled scarecrow, hawk-nosed, owl-eyed; Fielding incongruous on the other, smiling, one eye half-closed as though she is winking at the camera.

We succeeded in starting up a few locals of the international unions that Grimes was affiliated with, but inevitably, there was a falling out between us. I told him one day I was not content, as he was, to lay the groundwork for a revolution that I would never live to see. “Our day will come,” Grimes said, sounding like some preacher consoling his congregation with the promise that in some nebulous next life, things would be better. If I had known my Marx, I would have warned him against making a religion of socialism.

“But don’t you want to be there when it happens?” I said. “Don’t you want to be part of it?”

“I’m part of it now,” Grimes said.

“We’ll never get anywhere the way you’re going about it,” I said. Grimes looked at me with a kind of wistful fondness, as if I was just the latest in a long line of protégés who had become impatient with him and moved on; as if he had known all along that this would happen. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he said, holding out his hand to me and smiling. I fancied there was some principle at stake that was more important than friendship or politeness and refused to shake his hand, keeping both of mine in my pockets. On the verge of tears, blinking rapidly, I half turned away from him. Grimes, as if he assumed I had spoken for her, too, extended his hand to Fielding, who took it.

“We’ll meet and talk again,” he said, as if he was telling me that I should not let this refusal to shake his hand keep me from contacting him once I realized how foolish I had been.

“I’m sure we will,” said Fielding.

The docks, I decided, were where a true socialist should be, not canvassing from door to door.

All along the waterfront were the fish-merchant warehouses, where the salt cod was brought ashore, dried and stored and later stacked in the holds of ships bound for England, where it was consumed at ten times the rate per person that it was in Newfoundland. Barge cranes moved back and forth all day, loading, unloading
stacks of salt cod the size of houses. The technology of preserving fish had not changed in five hundred years. Soak it in brine until its every fibre was so salt-saturated it would be safe from rot for years, then dry it in the open air.

Salt cod lay drying everywhere within several hundred feet of the harbour. The Battery, the fishing village within the city at the base of Signal Hill, where the rock was so solid that not even holes for outhouses could be dug, was paved with yellow cod. It lay on the rocks in backyards and on elevated fish-flakes near the water, raised up as though in some primitive funeral rite, cod split and cured in brine and set out to dry in arrowhead-like Vs. When it rained, everyone rushed out to turn the cod over so that the side with the rain-impervious, leather-like skin faced upward. Otherwise, the cod was spread out to the sky and whatever flew there, including gulls and crows who, as if to spite the fishermen for salting the cod past what even their palates could endure, shat on it from great heights. Not that it mattered, for you could not eat the cod anyway without soaking it for days in water and then boiling it for hours, after which it was still so salty that the least of the complaints that were brought against it was that once it had been smeared with birdshit. Still, though he brought it home for the others to eat, my father would not stoop to eating food treated so disdainfully by birds and dogs and everything that flew above or walked upon the earth.

All along the harbour, outside the white warehouses of the fish merchants, cod was spread out on the ground to dry. It was on every spare square inch of ground of what the merchants liked to call their premises. It was even spread on steps, with just enough room between the cod for men to walk toe to heel as though on two-by-fours. It was leaned slantwise against the buildings, spread on roofs that themselves were spread with tarp or old sails.

The cod lay airing on the ground through days of overcast and fog. On the rare sunny days, it was covered with flies that
would rise up and settle down as you walked along, a single wave passing through this pool of flies, keeping perfect time with you. Inside the warehouses, the salt cod was stacked storeys high. To walk into a warehouse was to walk into a city of salt fish, columns of cod rising up like buildings between which there was barely room for a man to walk.

The docks reeked of the hybrid smell of fish and brine. The wind off the cod was so salty that it made me sneeze and my eyes run with water. Sometimes when I breathed the air, my throat turned to fire, and when I tried to speak, I had no voice, could get out only a rasping, rattling cough as if I had inhaled a chestful of smoke. I never did acquire the ability to tolerate the omnipresent smell of cod. Walking among it always made me long for the clean-aired elevation of the Brow.

Backing onto Water Street were the massive, all-white warehouses of the merchant families, warehouses that bore the names of their owners in huge block letters that you could read from the Brow. Also named after the merchants were the little side-streets that led from Water Street to Harbour Drive, the “coves,” inlets between the palisade of buildings. Gower’s Cove, Job’s Cove, Baird’s Cove, Harvey’s Cove, Crosby’s Cove. When you emerged from one of these coves, a gust of wind would hit you in the face as if you had just stepped outside from the cabin of a ship at sea.

The sealers, the fishermen, the barge-boat crews: it was workers such as these that could most benefit from socialism. I began making speeches on the waterfront. Fielding rounded up my audiences for me while I stood atop a crate, strode up and down the waterfront and gestured with her cane at sailors and stevedores who lined the rails of ships that were moored with hawser ropes thicker than my legs.

“Joseph Smallwood,” Fielding said, barker-fashion, reciting a pitch I had composed for her, “registered member of the International Socialist Party, will give a speech at three o’clock in Baird’s
Cove, the likes of which you have never heard before and will never hear again and which none of you will soon forget.” Curious, bored, incredulous, they came down from the ships to hear me speak. Even at the age of sixteen, I could hold an audience, for a while at least.