Baltimore's Mansion (9 page)

When it was very late and the car was dark and almost empty and most of those still in it were asleep, I looked out the window at what, at that hour, I could see of Newfoundland, dark shapes of hills and trees, a glimpse, when the moon was out, of distant ice-caught ponds. The towns in the interior, though they tended to be larger than the coastal fishing towns, each one depending on some single industry like mining or pulp and paper, were few and far between. These were new towns, settlements of this century, in some cases post-confederate, lived in by people who had moved in from the coast or from small islands off the coast. But even in the core there were a few small, unaccountably located towns a hundred miles apart, nothing more than clumps of houses really, all with their porch lights on, but otherwise unlit, occupied by people who, though it passed by every night, rarely saw or even heard the train. People left over from towns built up round industries of Smallwood's that had already failed.

From Corner Brook, we followed the Long Range Mountains southwest to Stephenville Crossing, going downstream along the black, cliff-channelled Humber River. Sometime early in the morning, I fell asleep again and did not wake until the sun was up. Someone said we were thirty miles from Port aux Basques.

Until the ride back from Port aux Basques, we had a day to kill. There was not much more to do in Port aux Basques, especially without a car, than watch the ferries come and go. That is what we did, after we spent the night in the Holiday Inn that had been built for Come Home Year and had not been filled to capacity since.

Port aux Basques harbour had been dredged and redredged and hacked out of rock to accommodate the huge Gulf ferries after 1949. It looked like a quarry at high tide and at low tide like a reservoir that had been all but drained of water, the high water line ringing the harbour basin, a white salt stain on the rocks, strands of kelp hanging down from it into the water like dark green climbing ropes.

My father pointed out to me an island, on the leeward side of which, he said, Basque fishermen after whom the town was named used to lie in wait in their boats for schools of whales. He told me of the sealing vessel
Southern Cross,
which in April of 1914, while trying to make it back from the ice floes laden down with seventeen thousand whitecoat baby seals, sank with the loss of 170 men. No trace of her or her crew was ever found, despite the fact that she got near enough to home to be spotted momentarily by the telegrapher at Port aux Basques. The
Southern Cross
that almost made it and yet no trace of which was found. What a typically Newfoundland disaster that seemed to be, the ship that almost made it but that didn't for reasons no one was able to explain.

Everything ended or, depending on your point of view, began in Port aux Basques: the highway, the railway, the Gulf run. In between the sudden, short-lived euphoria of arrivals and departures, the place was desolately empty. The port was for leaving and arriving, not for staying in. No one who could help it, no one who knew boredom when they saw it coming, spent the night in Port aux Basques.

My father found the whole concept of the car ferry hilarious, cars driving into and out of the holds of boats. The Gulf run from Argentia, near St. John's, had only recently begun and
he had yet to go there, so this was a first for him, as was everything for me.

We watched a ferry arrive, churning up half the harbour, turning the green water white as it described a slow circle, then backing up to the dock and dropping its massive metal door, which doubled as a ramp.

“It's like the troop ships at Normandy,” my father said. The port was a beachhead for tourists who poured off the troop-ship-like ferries in cars and trailers and transport trucks. Cars driven by motorists who you could not help thinking had been behind the wheel since the ferry left North Sydney and seemed to know exactly where to go sped off. They left Newfoundland the same way, like an invasion force withdrawing with almost comic haste, its mission either accomplished or abandoned as hopeless. The whole thing seemed portentous of some mass evacuation.

We watched as hundreds of cars assembled on a parking lot the size of several football fields waiting to drive onto the Gulf ferry. Some had out-of-province licence plates — Canadian, American — but most bore the plates of Newfoundland.

Every day of the summers since the road went through in '65, hundreds of Newfoundlanders drove to Port aux Basques, took the ferry to the mainland, then spent their vacations enjoying the previously unheard of luxury of endless driving, endless space. The number of car owners increased threefold after 1965. Air travel was still, for most people, too expensive or too exotic. With the road, and without the train, Newfoundland was suddenly transformed from a country where it was pointless to have a car to a country where you could not get by without one. “Going for drives” became the rage, the way it had in other parts of the world in the 1920s.

Several lanes were reserved for transport trucks, which lined up in convoys and were always the first on and the first off any ferry. I had heard there was not enough room on many parts of the highway for two transport trucks to pass without one relieving the other of its sideview mirror. Only a few people boarded the ferry the old-fashioned way, walking on, some bus passengers, some backpacking students who had hitchhiked across the island. “The boat used to dock side-on,” my father said scornfully, “not stern-on like that. There used to be a gangplank.”

Every day for years these melodramas of departure and arrival had been going on without my knowledge. I had been nowhere. I had never been this far west before. On the island. In the world. Children half my age looked out at me from the windows of the cars that went on board the ferry, travel complacent five-year-olds to whom I was sure my unworldliness was obvious.

I decided that when I left the island for the first time, it would be by boat. It would be appropriate, the first time, to watch the land slowly fade from view. I looked out to where the ferry was headed, but there was no more sign of land than there was when you looked out to sea from the Gaze at Ferryland.

Only according to the map was Canada closer than Ireland and England. Places I had never been and could not see were all impossibly far away, nebulously elsewhere. My father saw me looking wonder-struck. It must have occurred to him that this was the first time I had ever set eyes on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “It looks just the same on the other side,” he said. “For a while, anyway.”

I nodded as if I had assumed this to be the case. But I did not really believe it. Crossing the stream of fog on the isthmus
of Avalon was momentous enough for now. This other crossing I was contemplating I could not imagine. The other side of
this
Gulf was remoter than the moon, on which men had just landed and which I had seen with my own eyes countless times. Only on TV and in photographs had I ever seen the world alleged to exist beyond the shores of Newfoundland. I had read about it in books, but any book not set in Newfoundland was to me a work of fiction. Anywhere but Newfoundland was to me as fabled a place as the New World must have been to Cabot or Columbus.

“We should drive here sometime, Dad,” I said. “All of us. Or we could leave from Argentia. Take the ferry across. On your holidays.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, we'll do that soon.”

A man told my father that some people had taken the bus from St. John's to Port aux Basques so they could take the train back to St. John's. And people from Port aux Basques and from other places between there and St. John's planned to take the train to St. John's, then go home by bus. My father could not understand this. You were either for the bus or for the train. You could not have it both ways.

“They're all a crowd of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said.

There were not many purists like us who boarded the train that morning, but what few there were were easy to spot because of how travel-weary they looked, about to begin their second crossing of Newfoundland in two days.

It was clear from the outset that there would be no sleeping on this trip. Nor was anyone likely to complain about the
noise. It was as if invitations had been sent out to a train-borne talent contest.

Two old men in coveralls got on board wearing accordions but otherwise without luggage. A fiddler warmed up on the platform. “Or at least I hope he's warming up,” my father said. He wondered if it was all some sort of celebration got up by the government.

A man boarded with a set of spoons hanging from his belt. Another fellow step-danced as if to a tune that no one else could hear, standing ramrod straight, arms rigidly at his sides, moving about among the people on the platform who paid him a disconcerting lack of attention. He was very trim, well-dressed except he had no jacket, just a shirt and vest and slacks and gleaming black shoes. My father said he was either performing some sort of send-off for the train or was completely mad. Luggage was generally scarce. Some people carried nothing but bottles of rum tokenly disguised in paper bags. Others toted impossible-to-disguise cases of beer.

“We couldn't save her, so we might as well give her a proper send-off,” one beer-laden man said, as if to disarm the conductor as he handed him his ticket. Drinking was permitted almost everywhere, in the observation car, the smoking car, the dining car, coach.

“I wouldn't want to have your head this time tomorrow,” the conductor said, shaking his own head but grinning. I had seen two bottles of Royal Reserve rye whisky in my father's suitcase.

We stowed our luggage in our berth, then went where everyone else was going, to the observation car. Most of the people who had got on board did not have berths. They
were travelling coach, probably unable to afford a berth but in any case with no need for one on this occasion, for they had no intention of even spending time by themselves, let alone sleeping.

The purser was cheered when he broke out two bottles of Champagne. On every run from now until the last one in the spring, my father said, there would be Champagne. A token of mollification. I foresaw a long twenty-four hours for children and other non-drinkers. There were not many children. There would be little for me to do but watch the grown-ups.

The step dancer eventually got on the train. Now that he had stopped dancing, people took notice of him and called him by name, Walter.

“Not much room to scuff in here, Walter,” one man said.

“He don't need much room,” a woman said. Walter said nothing, just smiled, as if in humble acknowledgment of fame. Nor did it seem that anyone expected him to speak.

The accordionists came up the steps to the observation car. They were so alike that they must have been brothers. They began to play, making a sound like a hundred car horns blowing in raucous celebration of a wedding. No one else seemed to mind. No one paid much attention to die scenery or the blue sky and white clouds visible through the glass roof. A singalong was soon under way, of Newfoundland songs, though there was not a railway song among them or one in which the word “train” was even mentioned.

I kept my eye on Walter. He sat near the circular staircase that led up to the observation car, beside the accordionists. He did not move a muscle. There was nothing to indicate that he was keeping time with the music or even remotely aware
of his surroundings. Then he stood up and, as if in a trance, began to dance as he had on the platform, as if driven to do so by some force he was helpless to resist, though he was so stiff that all of him except his feet did seem to be resisting. He looked nonplussed but composed, as if, though it was a longstanding mystery to him why his feet behaved the way they did, he knew he had no choice but to wait for them to stop. He went up and down between the aisle while everyone clapped along.

Soon others were dancing, as many as the limited space would permit. Glasses were abandoned, temporarily or not, all over the place. I poured the contents of a couple into an almost-empty Coke bottle and proceeded to get drunk for the first time in my life. My father saw what I was up to but said nothing. His main concern was not that I was drinking but that my mother not find out.

Having downed most of the contents of my Coke bottle at the rate that I normally consumed Coke, I felt as though I might be sick. I kept perfectly still, concentrating on not being sick, convinced that unless everyone around me kept perfectly still and concentrated on my not becoming sick, I was doomed.

Luckily for me, sleep came first. I passed out in a chair by the window. When I woke up hours later, the party, accordion driven, was still going strong. People looked out the windows, but only to see where we were, to revel in how much of the journey still remained. Time was being measured solely in terms of space. The party would last for 638 miles, and so far we had travelled only 160.

A mummers' troupe was on the train, though we in the observation car did not realize this until we heard a voice from
the bottom of the stairs say “Mummers allowed in?” and another “Any Christmas here?”

“Mummers!”
someone shouted.

From below the observation car, there was an explosion of sound from which we had not even begun to recover when there came climbing up the stairs like some invasion force a troupe of mummers, all wearing costumes that disguised not only their identities but their genders, the lead one holding above his/her head with both hands a suitcase-size radio that was cranked up to what must have been full volume and playing some sort of frenzied raucous jig.

The other mummers, perhaps ten or twelve of them, fell in behind him/her single file, half-jogging, half-shaking, each using to deafening effect some sort of noisemaker — one was playing on his/her hip a set of spoons, another had what looked something like but wasn't quite a tambourine, another had on his/her arm a shield-like drum and was beating it with both ends of what appeared to be a pepper grinder; another was not so much playing as blowing into a mouth organ in a way that sounded like the random honking of a flock of geese; another was rattling on the end of a stick or whip what was supposed to be, and for all I know may well have been, a bladder full of peas.