The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (71 page)

She knew she was the last Beothuk. How, other than sad, this made her feel, she was unable to communicate. Nor can I imagine it, any more than I can a world that would seem as alien to me as ours must have seemed to her. “As for beds,” Cormack said, “she did not understand their use,” and instead slept on the floor beside them.

I am not much better able to imagine the point of view of the men at whose hands so many of her people died. I like to think that in their place, I would not have done what they did, but that is something I can never know.

But when I was in the San, I was drawn, morbidly drawn perhaps, to read and re-read Howley’s book, and I was young enough to think that Nancy and I had a lot in common.

It was said of her that “she could not look into a mirror without grimacing at what she saw.” That sentence would not be out of place in my obituary. She was described as having been “stout but shapely before she fell ill.” Some people might say the same of me. We contracted tuberculosis at about the same age. I survived, for no other reason I can think of than because I understood the use of beds.

My father could not bear to watch me die. When he was told my death was certain, he stopped coming to the San to see me. I had very few other visitors. It was partly my father’s abandonment of me that made me identify with Nancy. I fancied that Cormack had been in love with her and had gone away because he could not bear to watch her die. There are times when I still think it might be so.

She made a great impression on people long before they knew that she would be the last Beothuk. But it is hard not to think of her as that, “the last Beothuk,” perhaps presumptuous to try in what is, after all, an address to absence, silence.

She was buried on the south side of St. John’s, below the Brow, not with those whose graves she drew, not with those whose beads she wore, but with the Church of England dead, the Church of England poor, her grave unmarked. Her remains lie somewhere near the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, but where exactly no one knows.

According to one person who knew her while she stayed with Peyton, she had left behind her in the interior two children about whom she “fretted constantly.” Nowhere else except in this one account are these children mentioned, so I am almost able now to persuade myself that they did not exist.

When I was in the San, I liked to think otherwise, however, because I had two lost children of my own.

I had a son and have a daughter who were conceived in St. John’s and born in New York. I met my daughter and my granddaughter for the first time two years ago.

I met my son for the first and last time three months before he died in France in the Second World War in 1944. I saw him before that when he was five years old. Once, I stood behind him on a sidewalk in New York, without him knowing I was there, without my mother knowing. From time to time, even though they were holding hands, my son looked up at my mother as if to make sure that she was still there. That was the last time I saw my mother.

I made the trip to New York by train and by boat, as I did when I first left Newfoundland in 1917 and again in 1920. The island looks the same now as it did back then.

It doesn’t matter to the mountains that we joined Confederation, nor to the bogs, the barrens, the rivers or the rocks. Or the Brow or Mundy Pond, or the land on which St. John’s and all the cities, towns and settlements of Newfoundland are built. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if we hadn’t joined.

I gave my granddaughter a copy of Judge Prowse’s
A History of Newfoundland
, a book that is not as easy to find as it used to be. Prowse, boomer that he was, was also a confederate. He presides throughout the History with his gavel and his Bible, calling Confederation with Canada “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Consummation has come and jarred one hemisphere.

We have joined a nation that we do not know, a nation that does not know us.

The river of what might have been still runs and there will never come a time when we do not hear it.

My life for forty years was a pair of rivers, the river that might have been beside the one that was.

On the day this country joined Confederation, I was hiding out from history, mine, yours, ours. I went back to a section shack on the Bonavista branch line that I once fled to years ago to write a book that I hope will one day be published. I stayed
there for months, wondering, waiting — about what, for what, I hardly knew.

I thought a lot about my parents: my American mother, who came to Newfoundland but went back home, without me or my father, when I was five; my father, who didn’t know I knew that he betrayed me and thought that if I found out, I would no longer love him. He was wrong about that, as he was about so many things.

I sat alone in the section shack the night of the second referendum and listened as the results from each region were announced. The signal was weak, the numbers barely audible through a drone of static as if they were coming from a remote country I had heard of but had never seen.

When I was certain that the issue had been decided, I turned off the radio and went outdoors. There was a ladder on the side of the shack that led up to the roof, where I kept a rocking chair and where I liked to sit on nights when it was clear, as it was that night, to look at the stars and to watch the trains go by.

There was no wind. The moon, nearly full, was reflected in the ponds around the shack. I could see the glint of other ponds from what I guessed must have been ten miles away.

It was July, but it was cool enough that I could see my breath, and a sheen of condensation lay on everything. I sat in the chair, rocking slightly, imagining, as it was almost impossible not to do on such a night in such a place, that I was the sole person on the planet.

And then I heard the train, long before I usually did, long before it passed the shack, for the conductor, who was obviously a confederate, was blowing the whistle constantly. I saw the locomotive light far off in the distance. For a while, it looked as though nothing but a light was coming, but then I saw the dark shape of the train.

It was not a passenger train. Perhaps it was a freight train with some cargo as oblivious to politics as the ponds that it was passing. Or perhaps this was a run purely for the sake of celebration, not so much of victory as the enemy’s defeat.

For a few seconds there was nothing in the world but sound, the continuous blare of the whistle, the chugging of the train. The conductor saw me and waved his hat as he went by, grinning gleefully, as if he hoped I was an independent. To spite him, I waved back. I saw his mouth form the words
We won
.

What did he imagine we had won? What, had he “lost,” would he have imagined he had lost?

I watched the train until it disappeared from view, the sound of the whistle receding. Something abiding, something prevailing, was restored.

I have often thought of that train hurtling down the Bonavista like the victory express. And all around it the northern night, the barrens, the bogs, the rocks and ponds and hills of Newfoundland. The Straits of Belle Isle, from the island side of which I have seen the coast of Labrador.

These things, finally, primarily, are Newfoundland.

From a mind divesting itself of images, those of the land would be the last to go.

We are a people on whose minds these images have been imprinted.

We are a people in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood.

During the writing of this novel, I consulted many books, far too many to list here, but I acknowledge a special debt to D. W. Prowse’s
A History of Newfoundland
(London, 1895), and to Richard Gwyn’s
Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary
(Toronto, 1972).

I would like to thank Anne Hart of The Center for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, and Ingeborg Marshall, an independent scholar and authority on, among many other subjects, the Beothuk and William Cormack.

I owe personal notes of thanks to my tireless and supportive agent, Anne McDermid, and to my editor at Knopf Canada, Diane Martin, whose guidance, patience and advice helped immeasurably in the founding of
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
.

Don’t miss the next novel by Wayne Johnston

The Custodian
of Paradise

Turn the page for a preview of
The Custodian of Paradise
.…

One

A
CLAUSE IN MY MOTHER’S WILL TERSELY STIPULATED
: “I leave to Sheilagh Fielding, the only child of my first marriage, the sum of three thousand dollars.” It was because of her money that I was able to come to the island of Loreburn. I had gone for days to a place in St. John’s called the Registry, which was overseen by a small, middle-aged man known as the Vital Statistician. V.S. I told him I was doing research for a book, an explanation that he at first accepted.

Each time I saw a zero in the population column in one of the census ledgers, I asked him how I might get more information about it. It turned out that there were islands listed as unoccupied that in fact were inhabited by some lighthouse keeper and his family. Why, in the opinion of the census takers, these people did not count, V.S. didn’t know. He said that perhaps, on these islands, the isolation was such that no lighthouse keeper could endure it long enough to be said to live there.

I fretted over the reliability of V.S.’s information. It would mean the end of my venture if I wound up by mistake on some island that was occupied. After I had paid to get there
from St. John’s and back, there would be almost no money left. And word of my curious behaviour would get round and I might be prevented from trying again.

I told V.S. that by “deserted” I meant an island on which there had once been a settlement but whose population was now zero, not one that had never been settled. “I know the difference,” he said.

An island on which it was at least hypothetically possible to live. There had to be one more-or-less intact house and a beach where one could land or moor a boat.

What a nightmare it was trying to navigate that census. It seemed that people lurked like submerged rocks under all those zeros. How tired of the sight of V.S. I had become. And he of the sight of me. “I can’t be spending all my time on this obsession of yours,” he said at last.

Many times I went to V.S. thinking I had found my island, only to have him declare it “seasonally occupied” or tell me that its population was “uncertain.” Uncertain. I never bothered asking for an explanation. Each time, I tried to hide my disappointment. “I see, yes,” I’d say, nodding as if my book had just moved one increment closer to completion.

“There’s a war on, you know,” he said to me one day. Yes, I felt like saying, and what contribution to its outcome do you imagine you and your registry would be making if not for my intrusions on your time? Though unaccustomed to holding back, to needing anything from another person so badly that I could stand to keep my opinion of them to myself, I said nothing.

I decided that my island had to be along the south coast, where there would be the least ice in the winter and spring, where whomever I depended on for supplies could reach me all year long.

Late one summer afternoon I found it. Loreburn. Population: zero. The last resident had left in 1925. It was used as a summer fishing station until 1935. Abandoned since. No lighthouse. No “uncertainties,” it seemed, after I consulted with V.S.

I did not conceal my excitement from him. “It’s perfect,” I said.

“For what?” he said and looked at me with frank suspicion. I wondered if he had already spoken to someone about me. He knew my reputation. He might even think I was collaborating with the Germans. It seemed at once ridiculous and highly likely.

There were signs everywhere in the city, urging Newfoundlanders to be vigilant, even around people they had known for years. Your neighbours might be “pacifists” hostile to “the effort.” There was no telling what their “sympathies” might be.

How this little man would love to help catch a collaborator. A spy. He looked as though he
hoped
I was one. Researching remote islands. Deserted islands. That might be used for who knows what. Radio transmissions, perhaps. Claiming to be writing a book, yet never writing down what he told her. This woman who in her column criticized everything, mocked everything, rejected everything. This woman who admitted in her column to frequenting “establishments.”