The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (49 page)

I am mocked by thoughts of famous sleepers. The apostles who dozed off the night before the crucifixion. Rip Van Winkle. I tell myself that if I have to, I can go out and buy some sleep. I have put aside the price of one night’s sleep, one bottle of
Scotch, put it in a can and taped the lid tightly shut. I don’t plan to spend it, but I need to know that if I wanted to, I could
.

Even at three in the morning there are places I can go. Places I used to go. Tap, tap, tap on the window with my cane. “Is that you, Miss Fielding?” A man who expects such interruptions climbs out of bed to let me in. “Writing late tonight,” he says as the money changes hands
.

I miss that, walking with a purpose through the streets at night when every house is dark. The elation of that long walk home
.

When things were going well, I slept through the day, rose when the sun set, wrote in summer until midnight and in winter until three, then stayed up until sunrise
.

It seemed that it was always night. I looked out on the rows of houses, the theatres, the shops on Water Street, cars parked in driveways — all part of some existence that for years had been on hold, that hadn’t changed since darkness fell
.

I still walk at night, more than I used to, though for different reasons now. I cannot sit still doing nothing the way I could when I was drinking. I walk around my room, reading, smoking, for as long as I can stand it, then go out
.

I walk through the neighbourhood where I grew up, past what used to be my father’s house, past Bishop Spencer, where I went to school. I pass the Newfoundland Hotel, where the Hope Simpsons occupy three suites, which they say they find “cramped
.”

I go past the sprawling solitude of Cochrane’s house and then the hundred-year-old legislature, which from the outside looks the same as it did before the commissioners came. The old Colonial Building. How much older it seems now than it did two years ago
.

I climb the steps and sit between the pillars, in this city, in this country that, at this time of night, still feels like mine. I am on the eastern edge of the island, on a peninsula joined to the rest by a strip of land so narrow it could vanish with one tidal wave
.

I have never crossed the island. I have left Newfoundland but only from St. John’s by boat
.

I think often, while sitting on those steps, of the core where no one lives and through which no roads or railways pass and where lakes no one has canoed or even seen go on for miles, the core that William Cormack and a Micmac named Sylvester walked in 1822 just to prove it could be done
.

At some point I head home. From my fire escape you can see between two trees the lantern lights of dories as they put out through the Narrows, and you can hear their engines unless the wind is up
.

In the houses of the Battery, the lights come on when mine go off. People whose lives are spent in counterpoint to mine, whose days start when the sun comes up and end when it goes down. Before the sun comes up, in fact
.

They are out there on the water now, hooks baited, a hundred hooks on a thousand feet of line played out/hauled in by hand, waiting for the bottom-feeding cod. Almost no one can afford to buy their fish, but they catch it anyway and with it feed themselves
.

As they start their day, I draw the blinds, lie down on my bed and pray for sleep. The can that holds a great deal more than the price of one night’s sleep lies out of sight, at the back of my closet
.

What if this vigil I am keeping never ends?

Fielding’s Condensed
      
History of Newfoundland

Chapter Twenty-Three:

WHITEWAY THE GOAT

Newfoundland is notorious for getting the best of absurdly onesided deals, yet Newfoundland herself has sometimes been taken.

No name in Newfoundland history is more synonymous with “goat” than that of William Whiteway, who in 1878, when the British respond to his request for a trans-island railway by offering instead to make him a Companion of St. Michael and St. George, declares that he will hold out for the railway. Henceforward, in Newfoundland, it is said of anyone who is hoodwinked that he was “Whitewayed.”

The Barrelman

F
IELDING WAS RIGHT
. It
was
a time in Newfoundland when people did strange things. Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, I was given to starting up enterprises that everyone but me knew were doomed to fail. There was something about abject hopelessness that inspired a delusionary optimism in me, a belief that for me, if for no one else in Newfoundland, prosperity lay just around the corner. It was like the euphoria I felt in New York after going without food for days, or the warm drowsiness that overcame me when I almost froze to death on the Bonavista.

The country was crawling with destitute inventors, entrepreneurs seeking “backing” for one thing or another, and they were, I was convinced, undermining my credibility. How could I get backing for
my
sure-fire schemes when investors took me to be just another of the crackpots who were rolling up like capelin on the beach? Among my sure-fire schemes was an encyclopedia called
The Book of Newfoundland
, which I edited and thousands of copies of which wound up stacked like cod in some warehouse on the waterfront, for no one could afford to buy it.

I approached the manager of a radio station called VONF, the Voice of Newfoundland, and pitched to him an idea for a fifteen-minute program to be called “The Barrelman,” after the masthead lookout on a sailing ship, a program of local history and anecdotes, of which there were several years’ worth in my unsold, unread, unheard-of encyclopedia.

In October 1937, I began broadcasting to Newfoundlanders as the Barrelman on Monday to Friday, from 6:45 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. each night. I stated that the purpose of the program was to make Newfoundland better known to Newfoundlanders. No one was more surprised than me when it caught on.

“The Barrelman” began and ended with six chimes of a ship’s bell. “BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG. F. M. O’Leary presents ‘The Barrelman,’ a program dedicated to making Newfoundland better known to Newfoundlanders.” And there was a single chime before and after each commercial for products made or distributed by F. M. O’Leary Ltd., the company that sponsored the show and paid me fifty dollars a week to host it. I was at last making a decent wage and was able to buy a house for Clara and the children.

At first, I merely plundered
The Book of Newfoundland
for ideas. I spoke about Newfoundlanders who had made a name for themselves abroad — Sir Cyprian Bridge, the only Newfoundlander to become an admiral in the Royal Navy; John Murray Andersen, who succeeded Flo Ziegfeld as the producer of the Ziegfeld Follies. I told tales of disasters, shipwrecks, battles, war heroes, Newfoundland inventors — like the Newfoundlander who had invented a device for diverting torpedoes and another who had made important refinements to the gas mask.

Then I lessened my workload by having my audience write a portion of the program; that is, I read on the air stories I encouraged my listeners to send to me, stories that showed “how brave, hardy, smart, strong, proud, intelligent and successful Newfoundlanders are.”

“Some people,” I said, “and some of them are living among us, don’t think much of Newfoundlanders. I am trying to show that they always succeed every time they get a decent chance. Send me your own stories. Send me your verses, your home remedies, your recipes.” I promised that all those whose items were used on the air would receive a free bar of Palmolive soap. I killed air time by announcing on each program how much air time I had so far filled as “The Barrelman.”

“I have been broadcasting to you now for a total of seven thousand, three hundred and forty-three minutes,” I said. “I have spoken seven hundred thousand, four hundred and ninety-seven words.”

Field Day, December 3, 1940

BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG.

F. M. O’Leary presents “The Barrelman,” a program dedicated to making Newfoundland better known to Newfoundlanders. And now, Joe Smallwood, the Barrelman.

“Good evening, Newfoundlanders. Here is tonight’s interesting fact, sent to us by a Miss Fielding, whose fascinating letter I will read in full: ‘Dear Mr. Barrelman: It has come to my attention that there are in the world a number of books — I am endeavouring to find out how many and will let you know when my research is complete — in which no mention whatsoever is made of Newfoundland.’ BONG.

“Serve your pet Pet Milk. Pet Milk is made in Newfoundland and is therefore better than any other pet milk in the world. BONG.

“Miss Fielding further writes: ‘I am myself in possession of several such books, including
A Guide Book to Chilean Songbirds
, the absence in which of the word
Newfoundland
is so inexplicable that I have written its publisher demanding an explanation.’

“The Barrelman says, ‘Go to it, Miss Fielding.’ This is the kind of pride in Newfoundland I was hoping my program would ignite. Why should we take this kind of treatment lying down? We deserve to be mentioned in books as often as anybody else. Imagine a book in which no mention whatsoever was made of Iceland.

“Newfoundlanders, send me your recipes, your sayings, your local customs. All over Newfoundland the old ways are dying out. I for one would want nothing to do with a Newfoundland in which it was no longer the tradition to shoot the Christmas pudding out of a pot with a shotgun. BONG.

“Buy Palmolive soap. It is not made in Newfoundland, but it smells better here than it does anywhere else and also cleans the skin more effectively. I myself have found this to be true. BONG.

“I am privileged to announce that among those people who listen with rapt fascination to my show each day is no less a personage than Governor Walwyn, who writes, ’Dear Barrelman: Congratulations on your marvellous program. Every day, Mrs. Walwyn and I invite people in from the street to sit with us in Government House around our little radio to listen to your show. At six-thirty, Mrs. Walwyn goes down to the end of the driveway and beckons to passers-by, hailing them with her now-familiar greeting: “Come one, come all, the Barrelman will start in fifteen minutes.” Seconds before you go on the air, she comes running, skirts held aloft, back to the house with a horde of excited citizens behind her. What a merry time we have, her ladyship and I, listening to your program while our guests politely bolt down every drop of tea and every crumb of biscuits that we put before them, some so intent on not offending our hospitality that they selflessly forget to listen to you. It is all we can do to hear
your voice sometimes, what with all the munching and slurping that goes on, and no amount of urging can convince them to put aside their concern for us and indulge themselves, which breaks our hearts, knowing as we do how starved for information they must be.’ BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to say goodbye until tomorrow. This is the Barrelman, on behalf of F. M. O’Leary, bidding you farewell from the masthead.”

As I sat at my microphone in the radio studio in St. John’s, I remembered sailing the south coast with Andrews in the
Margaret P
., and then walking the ice-bound southwest coast; the people I had met. Take away their radios and they lived not much differently than people in such places had a hundred, even two hundred years ago.

Castaways making do with what they were able to salvage from the wreck of their arrival.

And I had still not seen most of Newfoundland, the Great Northern Peninsula, the northeast coast, the east coast beyond the Bonavista, the coast or interior of Labrador. It was in such places that the lost Newfoundlanders whose photographs appeared in the
Backhomer
were born and from them made a clean break, never to return. It was strange, sitting at my microphone, knowing I was being listened to in places I had never seen and never would but whose names I knew by heart. The people in these places knew my voice but not my face, thought of me not as Joe Smallwood but as the Barrelman, a mythical personage like Santa Claus.

When I first began broadcasting, I had to resist the urge to shout to make myself heard, as if I thought I was addressing the whole country through a loudspeaker. I sounded on my first broadcasts as though I were issuing a country-wide order to head inland because of the imminent arrival of a tidal wave.