The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (70 page)

Perhaps only an artist can measure up to such a place or come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. Absence, deprivation, bleakness, even despair are more likely than their opposites to be the subject of great art, but they otherwise work against greatness. Or the sort of self-sacrificing, love-driven person who Sir Richard said did not exist.

Or Fielding, who is both. Fielding to whom no monuments will be raised, after whom no streets or buildings will be named. Unlike me, in whose name books have been written, plaques placed, statues erected.

She loves me, but not just me. But I love only her.

I tried, for the fifteen years of public life I still had left after I rode the train with her to Port aux Basques, to camouflage by great accomplishments my broken heart.

I could not admit to myself that what I was attempting was impossible. Having gained power so late in life, and having no way to console myself for losing it, I could not renounce it. I no longer had the luxury of patience, was no longer able to disbelieve in my own mortality. If I was going to live to see Newfoundland transformed and live to take the credit, that transformation would have to happen soon and therefore as the result of some grand, unprecedented scheme.

I went to Labrador, was flown inland to where, ten thousand years ago, the earth dropped out from beneath the Churchill River. Suddenly, as suddenly as when the earth beneath the water first gave way, the falls were there, the mist from them billowing about
the plane, while visible through it was that great plummeting convergence of white water. Below me, said the man whose dream it was to harness it, was the power to make turbines ten storeys high spin like toy propellers.

By a corridor of conveyance that would carry this power from the wilderness of Labrador to the cities of the south, the gulf between Newfoundland and the New World would at last be bridged.

F
IELDING’S JOURNAL
, M
ARCH
17, 1989

Dear Smallwood:

I was there the night in ’72 when you made your farewell speech, in the drill hall in Pleasantville, a huge arching shell of a place that, because the Americans once owned it, reminded me of David. How cold it was that night. It would have been cold inside if not for the number of people who came to hear you say goodbye, two thousand of them crammed into a hall meant to hold six hundred. I stood by the wall as usual, to have something to lean against, though the metal was so icy to the touch I could feel it through my coat. There was a part near the top that buckled whenever the wind blew especially hard. I remember looking up and wondering if it would hold
.

Seventeen years ago. Others spoke on your behalf, telegrams were read. One, from Louis St. Laurent, with whom you signed the terms of union, made you cry. Then you spoke. For an hour you spoke. Embellished your accomplishments, made light of your failures or ignored them altogether. But it was exactly what they expected you to do. When you finished, they rose to their feet, cheering, crying, clamouring to see you or touch you as you left the stage, relieved that after hanging on too long, you were letting go at last.

You were carried from the drill hall on the shoulders of two men. Raised above the crowd, you took the full force of the wind when you got outside. You turned your face away, held your hat up to your ear to shield yourself
.

They carried you to the new car they had bought you as a farewell gift and set you down. You waved one last time from inside the car, then drove off, moving slowly through the crowd that followed you to the gates of Pleasantville. Then you drove off up the boulevard beside the lake
.

When your car passed out of sight, the cheering stopped. There was an interval of silence, hesitation, a collective revery that lasted until the next great gust of wind sent everyone running back the way they came, laughing and joking as people will who are commonly afflicted by the weather
.

I walked back with the help of a man who did not introduce himself and called me Missus, and clearly wondered what I was doing out alone on such a night. “Here, Missus, take my arm,” he said when he saw me picking my way gingerly across the ice. He walked me to my car
.

I’m told that on the night of your last election, you had your chauffeur drive you around the city while you listened to the radio, as if you were still campaigning, as if you thought your chances of winning were somehow better as long as you kept moving. You almost, but not quite, outran defeat. Not until the next day was it certain you had lost, and not until weeks later did you admit it to yourself
.

You tried everything to stave it off. Ordered recounts where none were needed. That you offered to appoint to the Cabinet any member of the opposition who would cross the House was the worst-kept secret in St. John’s
.

You resigned at Government House in the drawing room where you were first sworn in as premier. That night, Tories, and no doubt independents who hated you then as much as they had in 1949, went out on their back steps and, in a celebration
mocking that of referendum night, fired shotguns in the air. The pink, white and green appeared on flagpoles from which, for twenty-three years, no flags had flown
.

I always thought of you when I drove along the isthmus of Avalon. You can see the ocean there from both sides of the highway. And the ruins of the refinery at Come by Chance, the smokestacks like the skyline of some long-abandoned city. Failed and mothballed except for the token banner of flame that they tell me still flutters from one stack. It was that little flag of flame, its unwarranted cheerfulness and optimism, that reminded me of you
.

The country is strewn with Come by Chance-like monoliths, the masterpieces of some sculptor who worked on a grand scale and whose medium was rust. Quarries, mines, mills, plants, smelters, airports, shipyards, refineries and factories, to all of which paved roads still lead, though no one travels on them any more
.

You all but gave away Churchill Falls, which you had hoped would crown your career as Confederation had crowned Mackenzie King’s
.

They tell me you cannot read, write or speak, but can only understand the spoken word. You whose life was one long holding-forth have no choice now but to listen. You are a captive audience. Stroke-stricken. Struck. “He was always having strokes,” Prowse said, but he meant the judge, not you. You nod or shake your head, point to what you want. Your grandchildren read to you, letters, books
.

They made you a recording of the judge’s
History,
took turns reading it. Old Prowse speaking to you in dozens of different voices. I would love to hear it. I imagine you thinking, When the voices out there stop making sense, the voice in here will, too. Perhaps, after the next, you will be like a man my father once described to me, who knew the names of things but was unable to think in sentences. Your mind an inventory
of the world. Like your
Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador,
which I have heard is almost finished
.

I made you a tape, too, which by now you will have heard:

Dear Smallwood:

I am told that as neither of us can travel, this is the only way we can communicate. I have to confess I wrote this down and am reading to you now. It seems a shame we cannot see each other one last time. This is so one-sided, me talking to you, you not talking back, and me not even there to hear myself and to watch you listen. There was a time when I would have given anything to see you stuck for words. I still would, to tell you the truth
.

I think often these days of what my father said when I asked him if he believed there was an afterlife: ‘The grave’s a fine and private spot / Where none I think do ought but rot.’ It doesn’t seem as funny now as it did down through the years. It is unfortunately true that we cannot make the sun stand still, nor can we any longer make him run
.

I consider myself hugged and kissed by you, Smallwood, and am thinking now of you bidding me goodnight. You may, if it pleases you, do likewise with me
.

Field Day, June 6, 1959

On this day 130 years ago a woman who was known to the people of this city as Nancy April and to herself as Shawnawdithit died in St. John’s. She was the last Beothuk Indian.

When I was in my early twenties, I came down with tuberculosis and was confined for two years to the San. There was
little to do but read and one of the books I read was Howley’s book about the Beothuks.

Nancy was named April after the month that she was captured, as her sister was named Easter Eve after the day that
she
was captured and her mother Betty Decker after the boat on which she was transported from her place of capture to St. John’s.

In 1823, the three of them were often seen walking the streets of St. John’s together, wearing deerskin shawls over the dresses they were given by the whites with whom they lived.

When curious children gathered around them, Nancy made as if to chase them, which caused them all to scatter, at the sight of which she laughed out loud. Everywhere they went, people gathered round to gape. Of the three of them, only Nancy seemed unafraid. She sometimes went so far as to mimic the looks of wonderment on the faces of the people that they passed. She was perhaps too young to understand; or perhaps she was feigning unconcern to reassure her mother and her sister, who were sick.

People reported seeing them so laden down with ironmongery, which they planned to take home with them, that they could barely move. I have often, since reading Howley, thought of those three women, not two months removed from their world, wandering around in one full of things they had no names for, laden down with bits of iron that they found discarded on the ground but that in their world, if only they could make their way back to it, could be put to precious use.

After a failed attempt to reunite them with their tribe, of whom there were by this time not more than two dozen left, they were sent to live with magistrate John Peyton and his wife in the town of Exploits, near the river of that name on which, for no one knows how long, the Beothuk depended for their livelihood, and where Nancy’s mother and her sister died in the fall of 1823.

Nancy was for several years a servant in the Peyton household, where she learned very little English, but enough to tease Mrs. Peyton about how hard she worked her servants.

A society to prevent the extinction of the Beothuks was created in 1828 by William Cormack, who brought Nancy back to St. John’s to live with him. Cormack suggested that she learn English and, in turn, teach him her language and way of life. She could not read, but she could draw quite well and name what she drew and some of what she saw. Cormack introduced her to people as “my interesting protégé.”

She drew many sketches for Cormack, some depicting Beothuk dwellings, clothing, weapons and burial practices, and narrative maps showing where certain members of her tribe were killed or captured and the path of what is thought to have been their final expedition. When Cormack left Newfoundland, Nancy was sent to live with Attorney-General James Simms.

I think often, too, of Cormack leaving Newfoundland in the spring of 1829, when it was certain that she would soon die, unwilling to wait a few weeks more. It is not recorded why he left, though as he was single and quite well off, it seems likely that, if he had wanted to, he could have stayed.