The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (31 page)

I put you in the tub — yes, I saw, of course I saw, just how apt your name is. (Just kidding. But you see, I could have punned more cruelly on your name at Bishop Feild than to call you Splits.)

And then, for the first time in my life, and I dare say for the last, I watched you sleep. You without your glasses. (Another first for me. You were still wearing your glasses when I found you, though the lenses were coated with ice and snow. I put them in my pocket, and later, afraid they might shatter if I put them on the stove, left them to thaw out on the table where they lie now in a pool of water.) How strange you looked. As if you were missing your most distinctive facial feature, lying there minus something as uniquely Smallwood as your nose. Your head above the blankets was like a skull with nothing left but skin
.

I tried to tuck you in, but you fought me off, I presumed because you knew that it was me. Finally you slept, though you breathed too rapidly at first. You reminded me of me when I was at the San. Then something in your face relaxed or was erased, and your mouth fell slightly open. I thought you might be dying. But you had just fallen deeply asleep. Vulnerably, unguardedly asleep. You as you would look if for one moment you could forget that the world was watching
.

I’m glad you’re still alive
.

After that first day and night, when she did not think it was safe to leave me unattended, Fielding went back to work. Once, on the morning of the second day, I looked out the window and saw her, goggled and scarved like some early aviator, pumping her trolley along the tracks, going up and down, her arms out in front of her,
as if she were doing knee-bends. She seemed quite adept at it, and far stronger than her appearance had led me to believe.

When she passed the shack and disappeared around a bend, I put on my coat and went outside. Though it was warmer, there was still snow on the ground and I had to wade through it up to my knees to reach the back of the shack, where I hoped there would be a window through which I could see her study. There was one, but it was boarded up. So that my tracks would not lead too obviously to the study window, I walked about in the snow on all sides of the shack and the outhouse and, satisfied that she would not guess my reason for venturing out, headed back inside, noticing, as I did, another little sign above the door that read Twelve Mile House.

I slept most of the day, read a little from each of my books except the Bible, unable to concentrate on one for long.

“I see you gave yourself the grand tour,” Fielding said when, late in the afternoon, she came back to the shack. “Too bad about those shutters on the window.”

I felt myself redden. I could think of nothing to say until my eyes fell on the book I had left on the kitchen table.

“Have you read Prowse?” I said, feigning innocence, picking up the book and extending it to her. “But I suppose you must have, if you’re writing a history of Newfoundland.” How it must have irked her to hear me say that name, though she did not show it.

“I’ve read him,” she said, smiling as if to acknowledge a lame attempt at wit. She did not take the book.

She went about preparing a supper of salt fish and potato cakes, which we ate in silence. I told her that like so many of the people I had met in New York, she was just playing at being poor and being an artist, and like them she was sustained by the knowledge that she could go back to her life of affluence any time she liked. I
felt
like telling her this shack of hers was a palace compared with the Coop or the Floor or the marble bench in Bryant Park that for three weeks had been my bed. But looking at her
while she ate, I felt that nothing I could say would faze her, that as far as she was concerned, her two years in the San had changed her in some way I could never understand.

“That letter to the
Morning Post
,” I said, “was a masterpiece.”

“Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” she said, smiling. “Anyway, those scores were settled long ago, Smallwood. You shouldn’t dwell so much on the past.”

On the third night, when we were again sitting at the table after dinner, I told her that I was feeling up to continuing my walk and would be leaving in the morning. I went to my suitcase, took out a union-membership card and slid it across the table to her.

“There you go,” I said. “Just sign that, give me fifty cents and you’re a member of the union.” She pushed the card back to me and drank from her flask, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Every sectionman from here to Port aux Basques has joined,” I said.

“That’s their business,” she said.

“The others won’t mind that you’re a woman,” I said, “or that you do less work.”

Fielding sniffed derisively.

“Why won’t you join?” I said.

“That’s my business.”

“You know the issues — ”

“I know what you think the issues are. Two and a half cents an hour — ”

“That’s a lot of money to some people.”

“It’s a lot of money to me.”

“Then why won’t you join?”

“I never join anything if I can help it.”

“Did someone from the railway — ”

She laughed.

“I know what this is about,” I said, “and you said
I
shouldn’t dwell so much on the past.”

“It’s not about the past,” she said.

“Then what is it? There’ll be a union with or without you. You’ll get your raise whether you sign up or not. Unless there’s a closed shop. In which case, you might lose your job.”

“I’ll get by,” she said. “I’m on the lighthouse-keeper waiting-list and the waiting-lists of various other hermit professions. You aren’t planning to swim the coast to unionize lighthouse-keepers next, are you?”

“I mean it, Fielding. You could lose your job.”

She slammed down the flask, stood up and looked at me.

“The day of the snowstorm,” she said, suddenly out of breath, “before the snow started, you knocked on that door.” She pointed at it as if to corroborate what she was saying. “I looked out, and when I saw that it was you, I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to join the union, but because I knew the storm was coming and I was hoping you would perish in it. I sat in here for two hours after the storm set in before I changed my mind, before I went out to see if I could find you.”

It seemed to me that she had lost something by this admission, that the balance had tilted in my favour. She must have seen by my expression that I thought so, for she shook her head as if I had said something she felt it was beneath her to answer. She went into “the San” and closed the door.

I lay awake for hours after I went to bed, listening to the tap-tap-tap of her typewriter on the other side of the wall, measured, unconcerned, unceasing, as if to emphasize that nothing momentous had occurred, that nothing I said or did could register on her scale of significance.

She was gone when I woke up in the morning. On the table was a note, instructing me to lock the door behind me when I left. And there was a postscript: “Don’t mention it. You would have done the same for me, if I were a forty-five-pound dwarf.” I did not until then realize that I had not thanked her for saving my life. She would not have had to save it if she had opened the door in the first place, I
told myself, which of course I had not known about until last night. I wondered if that “forty-five” was just an accident, or if an allusion to my lack of character was intended. She was so inscrutably ironic, it was hard to know what to think about anything she said.

The note infuriated me and I tore it to pieces, then picked them all up and put them in my pocket so she would not know how much she had got to me. I wrote several notes of my own, but every one seemed lame compared with hers and I crammed those in my pockets as well.

I looked at the door of her padlocked study. I had a sudden urge to break it down, to take the axe from behind the stove and hack the door to pieces. I wanted to read that history of hers to see if I was in it, for I was sure I was. And her journal. Fielding’s books, her revenge upon the world, in which, I had no doubt, she portrayed herself as hard done by and stacked the deck against tokenly disguised versions of everyone she had ever known. I went so far as to take the axe into my hands. But in the end, all I did was leave and lock the door behind me.

Fielding was the sole hold-out among the sectionmen. Six hundred and ninety-nine joined the union, one did not. Sleep-tormenting numbers, numbers to obsess about, 699 and the one that got away. I remembered my mother quoting from the New Testament about their being more joy in heaven over finding the one that went astray than over the ninety-nine who were never lost. And presumably more grief if the one that was lost was never found.

Fielding had found me when I was lost. It was irksome to have your life saved by someone who seemed to value it so little, especially when she had once valued it so much. She had saved me only because she had known she could not live with the guilt she would have felt had she left me out there on the tracks to die. That was all it was, I told myself: guilt, not love. She had more than atoned for what she had done to me at Bishop Feild. I was now so far in her debt I could never pay her back.

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Fourteen:

NIGHTS IN THE SHIP

An Irish planter in Newfoundland describes the manner of his recruitment in County Cork, by what means he was transported to the New World and reports thereof his first impressions:

I walked bent over from the waist,

My head erect, my hands upraised.

Three days had I been in the stocks,

And now for rum did roam the docks.

My shape betrayed my circumstance,

As did the split seam in my pants.

“There be one not long released,”

Some man did say — then all sound ceased.

I woke, the world was all a motion,

Asail were we upon the ocean.

’Twas dark, I heard the sound of retching.

“Fret not,” said he, “it be not catching.

Of what I have you need not fear.

It’s nothing more than
mal de mer
.”

And yet I soon did have it too,

And like this man my guts did spew,

Though he for puke did have me beat —

A week it was since I had eat.

“Where bound are we?” said I, ’twixt heaves.

“For Newfoundland, I do believe.”

“For Newfoundland” said I, in shock.

“My God, there’s nothing there but rock.”

“Not so,” said he, “ ’tis paradise.

The man who sold me said so, twice.

I used to him indentured be,

But soon, thank God, I will be free.”

Whate’er became of this poor soul?

When they took us from the hole,

They sent him one way, me another.

We neither one did see the other.

Clara

I
DID NOT ACTUALLY
make it to St. John’s. I made it to Avondale station, within thirty-six miles of the city, where I was met by a train at the end of which was a private car occupied by the director of the railway, who told me the pay cut would be rescinded and he would be honoured if I would agree to be the railway’s guest for the last leg of my trip.

I knew what he was up to, knew he did not want me, in my state, looking the way I did, to stagger down the tracks and walk into the station in St. John’s, where the press might — I liked to think so anyway — be waiting for me, a walking martyr for the sectionmen, a barely breathing symbol of the railway’s miserly intransigence. But I was too exhausted to resist his offer. I rode the train the thirty-six remaining miles into St. John’s.