The Big Why (27 page)

Tom Dobie: He doesnt know his own mind, that bear dont. Or maybe he’s a her.

Bartlett: I named her Maureen, after an old girlfriend of mine.

Rupert was holding a cat. A survivor of the
Karluk
, he said. They left a seal carcass for the bear. They had three hundred pounds of walrus meat. Every bit of it good to eat, Bartlett said later. Ate the same thing myself. Then we all came ashore and we walked up to the Bartlett house.

Charlie Chafe, mobbed by his two sisters.

Charlie, youre older.

He had gone through a severe anguish. A physical strain. A short-lived but terrific hardship that coats the youthful body with an arthritic veneer, a shell that protects the other life — that allows that other far different but certainly less distinguished life to emerge. Charlie Chafe laughed at it. I need to keel out for a spell, he said. And then flaked out on a daybed in the parlour. I’m like a busted wire, he sighed, like I been hit with electricity. We partied on.

Bartlett got the bear off Greenland. The fellow who named Greenland, he said, must have been in the real estate business. First they’d noosed a male polar bear, madder than a march hare. It got away and beelined home to tell it all to the missus. Missus came out and that’s who we ended up with. A feisty one for sure, women usually are.

Charlie: I served the men their meals. I never served gentles before. I polished boots and fed sled dogs. I’m only twenty, he said. I’d never been out of Conception Bay. Me and Captain the only Newfoundlanders on board the
Karluk
, hey, Captain Bob.

Bartlett: There was this cat. And a Newfoundland pony.

Emily: I love the smell of horseshit.

Charlie: Let’s hear James Murphy’s “Song of the Apples.”

Emily sneezed.

Me: You just wet my entire hand.

At least no one’s said I’m loud.

Me: Been meaning to tell you, Emily. Youre wet and loud.

She twisted herself on the piano stool. Come here, she said, and I’ll give you a smack between the eye and the ear where you can’t lick it.

She stared with all of her youth into my bare eye.

Dont tempt me.

A shudder went through me, for I knew I was tempted. I went outside. I exhaled. I looked at the bear out on the island. A wild, white, chained element. I rubbed my arms. It was as if Emily’s vigour had splashed upon me. Rupert and Kathleen sitting on the bottom step. Rupert was pointing at something, their shoulders touched, and then she pointed at the same thing. I went back inside to the Artic Room. Charlie Chafe was holding forth.

Charlie: We lived on a spit of land and we did not know how long Bartlett would be. We forked into three parties like Bartlett told us. We had nine dogs and the cat. In the third month a man shot himself from an episode of panic. The boys in one party died from the canned meat. Only Kuraluk had a good aim. Whenever we ate seal or walrus we felt better.

Tony Loveys: You were gone so long we thought you learnt the huskimaw.

Charlie: I was on the hand of it. I became pretty primitive, I got to say. I understand now the desire for raw meat.

Bartlett: You relaxed into coarse mannerism.

Boys, it was the most efficient manner to live by.

Bartlett: I call them coarse now, but at the time you were refined to the predicament.

I looked out the window just as Rupert and my wife went for a walk.

Me: Yes, this is true of all time and place.

On a hunt with the sled Charlie lost the trail and a storm picked up. He staggered about with the dogs all evening until he found one of the shelters he’d built in a pressure ridge two months previous. He huddled in this but did not sleep: I was afraid to sleep. My foot was frozen and my teeth were hackering. I watched myself wiggle the foot. I cursed myself for not paying attention to the foot. I packed the dogs around me.

In the morning the storm continued and the dogs howled about the sled. He unleashed the dogs and let them go, except for one. He chained his wrist to this dog, it was the dog he trusted most. The dog pulled him through the snow. For six hours he staggered after the dog. By then he’d gone ice blind. It was like having sand in your eyes, he said. He prayed that the dog would catch a scent.

After six hours, that dog he crested a ridge and there, in a bowl of snow, was home.

Charlie had three operations on his heel, the gangrene carved away with a pocketknife. The gangrene was fresh and bubbly and gas rose from it, a good sign it was the wet gangrene. The wet is what you wanted.

They had to improvise. And when a ship came by they took it. Charlie: They had been looking for us and then we knew Captain Bob was safe. Only then. We met Skipper Bob in the Bering Sea. We transferred over and Bartlett had new clothes for us.

Me: You look in fine shape.

We didnt know Bob had made it, he said again. Until this ship picked us up.

There were tears in Charlie Chafe’s eyes, and Bob Bartlett put an avuncular hand on his shoulder. It was Charlie he had wanted to see alive, to bring him home to Brigus. He was only twenty. He had been eighteen when he left.

I went outside and found Rupert and Kathleen with our children, picking black currants. I heard Rupert say, Come on over here Kath.

He called her Kath. The polar bear watched us, a prisoner on Molly’s Island.

Do I have anything to worry about here?

This made Kathleen furious.

I was worried about the size of the house. About raising four youngsters in it. Tom Dobie said the Pomeroys had thirteen children in that house, and I could not believe it. Thirteen, I said. Where did they put them all. Tom: Well, not all at once. The first half-dozen was gone into the world by the time the last half-dozen rolled in.

He was down by his flake, collecting the fish to store. Bartlett aboard the
Morrissey
mending rope. Tom Dobie: You spread the fish and then carry it to the store. And goodbye to that.

Bartlett was aboard the
Morrissey
night and day. He preferred it to his own bedroom. My sweetheart, he said, the
Morrissey
. She’s so handsome. He kept an eye on the bear and they stayed for eight days. And then Bartlett took the bear down to New York, for a zoo. The cat stayed at Hawthorne and lived under the stove.

An American expedition, he said, theyve just come back from Greenland. Theyve combed the area north of Greenland. Spent four years looking. Mapped every square mile and figured out, mathematically, that no Crocker Land exists.

A hoax?

Not a hoax, Bartlett said, I saw it. A range of mountains to the northwest. Clear as those hills behind us. But it must have been rafted ice. We wanted to see land. We needed it.

Bob Bartlett made me a tomato sandwich. Fresh tomatoes from his garden, fresh bread from his sister. He cut thick slices of tomato and we sat down to the sandwiches. Nothing beats a tomato sandwich, he said.

You know what I miss most, I said. My mouth is starving for corn.

It’s a marvel isnt it, corn.

Fresh raw corn. It looks manufactured. It’s a colour so pale it’s almost no colour.

It’s a colour that warrants the study of colour.

I wanted to strip yellow ears of corn from a green field. To tear the intelligent skins away and eat the baby kernels.

You should, he said, go berry picking.

And that’s what this mouth did. It discovered the fall berries and the fruit of apple trees. It wasnt all bad. It was not all dead food.

We went berry picking. The side of the hill full of berry pickers. I heard a voice call out, Have you filled your empter yet? Tom and Emily. The small bucket that you empty into the large one. My family all bent to the industry of berries, young love in the hills.

Bartlett heard about the Hearn affair. He was anxious about it. It vexed him. He asked about the fine and I told him how I’d paid it. That is when he told me what he’d heard. That I had plenty of money. You cross-hackled him and then became a man who can pay a five-dollar fine right there in court. What kind of man is that. You want to be a man of the people, Bartlett said. But scenes like that divorce you from them. High-learnt and full of money. They cannot help looking at you as different.

I said I so much wanted to fit in, to be invisible. To merge.

Not all men, he said, are destined to blend in. It’s not always a matter of choice. Do me a favour, he said, and stop paying for things in front of people. Get credit at Chafe’s. Pay him discreetly at the end of the month.

The Big Why

I am a lonely American in this dismal little British colony. The thought of the land is stupefied by dogma.

— Rockwell Kent
letter to the
New Republic
,
1915

Then the war came. I took it as a personal insult. That the world was intruding upon the life I was living. Small union jacks were tilted out of bedroom windows. It was autumn. The war was a surprise — most of us did not know that it would come. But when it did we were alert to it and, of course, within minutes what was unforeseen had become inevitable. I saw men act differently. They became men who knew they had to absorb war. Women were knitting grey socks as if they had always knitted grey socks. As if war were a season for which knitted socks were mandatory.

There were meetings. The word
crucial
was used. And
effort
. The word
deploy
. I guess there were orders from elsewhere trickling down to small communities like Brigus, but all I saw were the local executions of work. Now excess muscle must be devoted to the war push. This was aggressively agreed upon. I am speaking of the men in charge here — in the fishermen and their families I saw little change. There was no genuine rise in patriotic zeal. But they were attentive. They were on call to duty. They were obedient, though they were not won over by nationhood. The men signed a sheet that committed them to the war, until it ended, or for no longer than a year. That seemed reasonable. These men were used to signing on to positions of a year or more and going foreign. The assumption that it would be less than a year made the thought of being a soldier a novelty.

I was concerned about this signing up. I went to Billy Cole’s to see the boys. Tony Loveys, Charlie Chafe, and bald Patrick Fardy. I kept away from Fardy. They were drinking rum. I ordered a bottle. Billy Cole lifted a plank in his kitchen floor and pulled up a string. On the end of the string a dusty bottle. I asked if they felt loyal to England. Did they really want to join a European war. Didnt it have more to do with economic interests than a true evil that had to be quashed. Where was the badness. Who was being suppressed. Werent they, the soldiers, werent they the ones who would be most afflicted?

They were obliging me. They nodded. They were not keen. But the fishery would be over soon, and sure a stint in the army with proper wages. A winter in Europe. A trip across the ocean? It all sounded like a change in the weather, and what the hell, cheers to that.

We went to church. And I asked to sing — I sang a Schubert tune. During the middle of it there was a clearing of throats. I sang louder. I sang in a more guttural way. Murmurs.

I looked at Kathleen, her face in her hands.

No one said a word except Bartlett.

Fine tune, he said. But next time, surely to God you know a song using the King’s English.

I wanted to express, I said, how lovely the culture is of the country we’re about to destroy.

Did you know, Bartlett said, that that very culture has submarines off the coast here? If ever a supply boat heads for England, I’m sure there’ll be Schubert aplenty sung beneath the waves.

There was talk of a submarine. Idling in Conception Bay. It had sunk three frigates heading out of St John’s harbour. There were rumours that Germans were coming ashore at night, raiding farms for fresh potatoes and carrots. A lady in Cupids swore she saw three men in military costume make off with her cow. Two young lads spied some foreigners in a dinghy collecting water from a falls into the ocean.

Emily Edwards, teaching the children how to play Catching Thirds and Hidey Hoop. They played Hoist Your Sails and Run, a version of hide-and-seek. The child in Emily mixed with the element of adult supervision. The youth in her and the fresh authority of her, they mixed to create a surplus. This surplus engaged the corner of my eye. I did not want to be tempted. I refused to think about it and I did not say anything to Kathleen. I kept the thought at a distance, a garden of cold roses. I used to say everything, now I’m circumspect. I will halt an inquiry. For instance, I wanted to ask Jenny Starling — this was years later — what she thought of Gerald’s writing. But then I remembered that they have a relationship now. And that she loves him. And I did not want my question to be construed as doubt in his worth. Some people, and those some are many, believe that when you ask a question, it is for reasons that are not altruistic. They will turn your words. I used to be this way. I turned inquiry into bad motive. I believed people held opinions of me, judgments, when they did not. They might have said snarky things, but that is not the same as holding an opinion. The snarky statement is made, and it flies through the air like a sneeze and lands in a foreign ear. It is this ear that makes the judgment. And passes it on. So rumour goes. How furious I am about fixed opinion now, when I know so much is taken from overheard moments of thought.

So I kept my attraction to Emily to myself. There would be no pronouncement from the stage built in the front of my brain, a stage where words could be issued like a press release, words that pretended raw emotion was dispassionately considered. I would will the gut attraction away.

Gerald Thayer could lecture, but I knew him. I told him of walking in after a poetry reading when he was answering questions from the audience, and he said there is a word for that. When you enter at the climax. A Latin word. But he could not remember it. It began with an
A
. This is learned. He knew he conveyed an ignorance while at the same time attempting learnedness. The learnedness was not earned and his only authority was over his body language. His ignorance was betrayed to an eye like mine.

Gerald’s father had a refined appearance, well kept, except for his neck. Abbott Thayer’s hair grew out coarsely and there was something angry and Scottish about the back of his neck. The very blind part of his body betrayed a rawness. Whereas Gerald was less self-conscious and his neck was smooth and tame.

Kathleen: Rockwell?

I’m working.

There’s a man at the door.

Do we owe him money.

He’s a constable.

It was nine in the morning. It was the man who had brought my court summons during the Hearn affair. He was sizing up the outside of the house. Abbott Thayer once told me that, with everyone, there is an unusual quality of light. And if I remark on that quality it will make the person stand out for you. This constable. He is inspecting the outside of my house. The edge of the summons, he’s scraping it against the bottom of his nose. His nose is yellow, and the cut of his hair is dark and precise. Yes, his colouring is clipped and neat. He isnt happy with his prospects, with the event before him, for the results of the event are not predictable. He is the type of man who does not celebrate the unknown. He shook my hand, he leaned around me.

So you work there, Mr Kent.

I shut the door.

Yes.

Mind if I have a look.

Yes.

You do mind.

Yes.

Cosy house you got here.

We find it pleasant.

Just we’ve had a complaint, sir. Silly one. But youve caused a bit of a stir. It was you, sir, who had that row with Mr Hearn?

The constable was pretending we hadnt met before. He took out a small notebook.

Hearn had a row with me, I said.

Man of the people are you, Mr Kent.

Pardon?

Wouldnt share a field, is that right?

I took him to the gate and explained the Hearn affair. I am happy to share all things, I said. It was Hearn who wished to possess. However, I’m quite over it, I said.

I opened the gate.

There was some thought, Mr Kent, that you might not be fully behind the effort.

The effort. I’m
E
for effort.

To fight the Germans.

I will fight no Germans.

So you oppose England.

I’m dead against the war.

But surely the British position is just.

The man was poised with a pencil to his notepad.

The British, I said, make a good condiment. Beyond that I see little to recommend the British. You spell condiment with an
i
.

But surely you dont support the Germans.

I am a supporter of great culture, I said. Have you read Bach? Listened to Goethe?

You know you look a bit like a German.

How can you respond to that? I bid my apologies, excusing myself from a longer interview by having to tend to my pregnant wife.

I watched him walk up the path, past the Pomeroys’. He waved to Old Man Pomeroy. And then Old Man Pomeroy had him over.

Kathleen: What was that about?

I’m not sure.

When the war began the trees lost their leaves. And I thought, Why trees, why green, why the futility of it. I was caught up in the belief of progress, and now I saw turmoil. There was chaos. I read about entropy. If you left a pile of bricks and time was infinite, then a moment would arrive when the bricks, through random change, would form a wall. That was my thought. But this is not true. The bricks, without work injected into the system, will become a simpler structure. They prefer to turn to dust. I saw the world now starved of energy from the sun. It was turning to dust. It was returning to a simpler form. It was becoming nostalgic. Nostalgia can be good. It is incorrect to think of nostalgia as merely the pain one feels in returning to home. Memory never matches the reality of home. Nostalgia is the friction between home itself and the memory of home. A friction that turns time to dust.

All my life I’ve wanted to strip sentimentality from nostalgia and be left with the hearkening. With the strange newness of return.

I spoke to Bartlett about the constable. He was surprised.

He came from St John’s?

I think perhaps a branch from Conception Bay.

The one from Harbour Grace, Bartlett said. Who came about the Hearn affair.

Same fellow. But it had more to do with my view on the war. He said I looked like a German.

Well, you were born there.

I was born in New York.

I thought I heard you had a bit of German.

I like Germans.

So do I. Look, I wouldnt worry about it. They have nothing to do in Harbour Grace. They are a curious bunch down there. Their interest will wane.

But something about it dispirited me. I walked back to my little house with no electricity and no running water. I wrote to my mother. Please send a copy of my birth certificate. It had come to that. Cramped with three children and another one on the way. At least that child will be a Newfoundlander. My life was beautiful in ways but also old-fashioned. I was a modern man living an old-fashioned life. I was trying to blend the two and it seemed a bad idea. It was never a good idea — dont let anyone tell you otherwise. It was never a good place to be. I thought I could disappear in Brigus and lead a pure, natural life, free of suspicion. But I was misguided. My motives were not true. I didnt just want to live here, I wanted its customs to inform my work and make it unique. I wanted to make my name in Brigus. I was using the culture. I was exploiting it. And what I was creating is not what happened here.

There may be no reason. Or there are no reasons. Reasons may be an idea.

I had mustered up good faith with my wife and now I began a ten-year decline of mortgaging. I began to trade on good faith. We sat in the garden eating crabapples from Pomeroy’s garden. They were hard but edible. I left my core on my wrist and Kathleen picked it up and ate it. I liked that she ate the cores of fruit. She ate it and looked at me.

Are you wondering, I asked, about the faith I have.

I’m thinking of the love I pour into you.

Youre hoping I might repay it.

Occasionally there’s an instalment.

It’s not a personal thing, Kathleen. I’m not trying to be mean about loving you, only avoiding disappointment.

The way I figure it, Rockwell, is youre working in the space between wanting to be in love and leaping into the act of loving.

I loved her, and yet the ease of that love was crumbling. I was realizing that there was another Rockwell Kent. Or an agent that acted on my behalf. I lay awake at night and stared at the corner of the window, where the light bordered on the dark room. It reminded me of a window of childhood, when my father was alive. I would hear him in his study. Some precise sounds that happened on the face of his desk. There is something to be said about the desperation to be loved that affects those who’ve lost a parent. But what surprised me was my realizing that I wasnt in charge of what I’d been reminded of. It’s one thing to decide to think of childhood, another for that remembrance to come upon you without your asking. And this happened to me, I realized, all day long. Some intuitive agent was making connections for me. I sensed this was the agent too that checked my ability to love. I wanted to love my wife. The desire for love was there, but the agent would deny it. If you are upset with what I’m writing then obviously we have different tastes about what gets written down.

The thing is, since she was pregnant she was less interested in sex. Well, that was one brutish thing. There are often about eight things. But for most of us, brutish things are the hardest to overcome.