The Big Why (3 page)

Gerald: If you disappear up there no one will notice. And if it doesnt work out, if you come back to New York, this will be your last time in a disappeared state, so enjoy it.

This has turned out to be true.

I boarded the train to Brigus and was again bumped up to first class. So far I had been good. I had been flirtatious, but nothing outrageous. The carriage was not half full. I had four seats to myself. I rode through the snow out of the life I was living. There is the life you lead, which contrasts with the desire for a higher conception. On that train to Brigus I thought I was heading towards a supreme excellence. I admire this goal. In my art too. That seems to have been my downfall.

I was wondering all this on the slow train to Brigus. The corners of the houses packed with snow for extra insulation. I was excited but wondering. I was mediocre, true, but I was romantic as well. I was vainglorious, holier than thou, a king of pigs. I was all of that. But all of that was about to face a challenge. I sat in first class, happy in my aloneness until three boys ran in, wrestling one another and fighting for the window seat.

We just sold our rabbits in St John’s, one said. And then, Who are you?

I am Rockwell Kent.

They were delighted to hear I was on my way to Brigus.

We’re from Brigus, they said. Youre that American painter.

They were Tony Loveys, Stan Pomeroy, and Tom Dobie.

I was told, Tom Dobie said, to keep an eye on you.

Who told you that.

Rupert Bartlett.

Oh yes, I said. And your name is Dobie. A Robert Dobie was to show me a house in Brigus.

That’d be my father, Tom said.

He’s gone now, Stan Pomeroy said. He’s dead.

Tony Loveys: Look.

He pointed out the window to some men in an open tilt, shoeing ponies.

I’m sorry about your father.

Tom Dobie chewed on his finger. He had fair hair and blue eyes.

There were men hauling wood with fresh sleds made from the same wood. Their arms and backs bent to work.

Was it recent.

It was last year.

Stan Pomeroy: It was down the Labrador.

I didnt know what else to say. They were turned to the window. What are they preparing.

Theyre in collar, Tom Dobie said.

In collar?

The men are sealers, Stan Pomeroy explained. Theyre cutting firewood and logs for spars and punts.

The air was clear and the snow ten feet deep. Often there was nothing to see, the snow from the railroad’s right-of-way ploughed so high on either side. So then you were reduced to looking at the window itself. There was a bright green mould on a leather flange where the thick glass met the wood. A bead of condensation on which the mould drank. I can love even that. Back then objects were made from living things. Nothing was inert.

The coachman came by. Are these boys causing a havoc?

Not at all.

To them: Youre not supposed to be up here.

Neither am I, I said. And ordered tea for the four of us.

I was five days away from my family now. It’s true that I had mixed feelings about my escape, but for the moment I was delighted. No event is simple, however, and I missed my family too. I have the skills to make friends anywhere, but I do get exhausted by the constant newness of solitary exploration. I was northeast of everything. Everything is all youve walked past and witnessed and smelled and touched. I was proud of the strong pigskin suitcase that rode in the baggage compartment. I felt good in a wool coat. It was a good coat — I had found my chest size.

The tea arrived in two pots to share with the boys. It came on a wicker tray with the coat of arms of the country of Newfoundland — a caribou. The tea service was pewter and the milk rich and white.

Some good to be drinking tea on a train.

It’s a treat all right.

Me: Apparently youre not used to treats.

I had created delight. This milk has come straight from a cow, Tom Dobie said, and then chilled with a block of ice sawed from a lake. It’s as though products in the icebox, I said, grew cold from the fear of the ice block crushing them. The boys laughed at the novelty of that thought.

Tom Dobie: It’s beginning to snow a perfect smother.

The train turned and sank and lifted and stopped to have drifts shovelled away.

Is this the stop?

You could see nothing but snow.

Let’s have a look, Stan Pomeroy said. We got out: there was a white horse on the tracks. It was walking in front of the train, pure white. It was as if the horse was the source of the snow, the snow leader. A man ran after it, and the horse bolted ahead. Then the train moved, but it had to brake, for the horse had slowed down.

What’ll we do about this horse.

Let’s dart in the woods, Tom said. We’ll go up ahead.

He and Stan put on snowshoes and walked into the trees. They were gone a minute. Then they appeared in the distance, trudging up the grade out of the woods, ahead of the horse. They walked back down towards it. The horse hesitated. The train pushed the horse along, and Tom and Stan Pomeroy snagged the horse by the neck and led him off the tracks and down into the trees. The train passed and then the boys ran up and got back aboard. The horse watched.

Good work, I said.

It snowed harder then and you could feel the train ploughing through drifts. I ordered tea biscuits, and as I buttered one I saw the flash of my face in the polished steel of the butter knife. I was thirty-one, the age I had wanted to be all my life. It is an age when important work gets done. But now I was anxious that I wasnt doing the correct work and being praised. I was a smart, educated city boy used to riches who, through bad luck, had become poor but refused to appear impoverished. I supported labour unions. I read Darwin. I was a socialist. I did not, outwardly, believe in God. I believed that if He existed, He’d forgive me.

I passed around the tea biscuits. With jam on.

It’s funny but true that we always feel old, except in retrospect. I was very young, I realize, but I felt older than I wanted to be. My hair was thinning, but I kept it short and I prayed that it would thin in a graceful manner. I loved my wooden paintbox, which I had under my seat. I had pride and I was chuffed. This would be my time. I kept pressing my heel to the box and feeling proud of it.

An hour later and the train shuddered to a halt.

We all got out to have a look at the snow. There were about thirty people on board, all men. A vast hurl of snow. The stokers passed out shovels. Tom Dobie, as we dug out the choked wheels, pointed at the bright moving blur of a ginger fox. The stoker said okay and we got aboard again. The engine ran furiously, trying to grind through the snow. The drifts became worse. The driver jammed her into a field of powder.

We got out again to look at the front of the train.

Tom Dobie: That’s a lost cause there.

It was buried. The whole side of the hill just a white slope, no sign of a track. Snow whipping past us horizontal. There was no edge to the snow where your eye could rest.

Tom: We’ll make Brigus before the train if we start walking now.

He pointed to the trees, but I didnt see Brigus, just the tops of trees. The boys were to snowshoe there, at least get into the woods.

Isnt it a little treacherous out there.

Tom: If you start in snow you’ll have fair weather for the rest of the trip.

May I join you?

Yes boy you can come along.

The driver had an extra pair of bear paws, he called them. Oval snowshoes with no tail. Made by someone unhandy to make a wooden bow, Tom Dobie said. I took a satchel with chocolate and an extra pair of socks and a roll of canvas I thought might be useful. I’ll pick up my suitcases in Brigus. The driver laughed: I’ll race you. The boys each had a pack with a tumpline over the forehead. The driver wished us luck.

We left the train in the storm and I followed the backs of the three boys. They were entering a whiteness, a flat and bright canvas. We crossed a fluorescent slope and ducked into the white trees. When we were among the trees the wind died down. I tugged an evergreen by a branch, just to see its coat of snow slip off. Bright green needles underneath. We shoed through some small valleys of plump snow. There were no shadows.

Lift your racquets like this, Tom Dobie said. Pretend like youre a partridge. He called the snowshoes racquets. I was sweating from the exertion.

They were cousins, Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys. Tom Dobie went shares with them on a cod trap.

So, I said, about your father. Bob Bartlett gave me his name.

You were talking to Bob Bartlett.

He was in New York.

We havent seen him now in two years.

He’s on his way. But your father.

Yes, that was my father and Bob Bartlett probably dont know he destroyed himself last winter. But that house, I know that house, she’s run into cruel hard times, hey boys. The Georgian one by the Pinch, he said to Tony and Stan.

They said, No sir she’s all broke up.

Tom Dobie was quiet and smouldering. He was dressed the way the men dressed, with a muffler and a peaked cap. But he was wearing old seaboots that fit a man and were meant for summer. They were his father’s. Such was the fate of the son. There was the doomed whiff.

Arent your feet cold.

My feet are all right.

I said that my own father was dead. That he’d died when I was seven.

It was just last winter, Tom Dobie said. We had a rough time of it down the Labrador. We couldnt make a go of it. It’s just me and mother now.

We had a boil-up in a droke — a sheltered bunch of trees. We walked for another hour. At the edge of a frozen bog they pointed to a grey-and-white caribou stag. He sniffed the air and the weight swivelled in his chest. Gone in a second. We walked over to his tracks.

Tom Dobie: How about here, boys.

Yes, good as any.

Then I realized they planned to camp overnight.

Perhaps, I said, we should have stayed with the train.

No sir we’ll get to Brigus faster than you ever went directly.

I was not happy about this. But there’s exuberance for you. I had left the train and now it was getting dark in a woods I did not know with these three strangers.

They made a bivouac, chopping small trees for a lean-to, limbing the boughs and making a floor of them. The boys had spent the winter doing this, catching rabbits in central Newfoundland. They had made a trapline and boxed the rabbits and shipped them into St John’s aboard the train. They had each cleared a hundred dollars from T. J. Edens and now they were heading home to go sealing.

I put the canvas over us — a canvas I would later paint on — and we slept together. I slept well. I woke up with Tom Dobie’s arm over my shoulder. His young, relaxed face. It was sweet. I could hear dogs.

In the morning they fried bacon. Stan Pomeroy had caught a rabbit in one of eight slips he’d set overnight. The slips were not wire but made from sail twine. The rabbit was in one they called a hoist, a snare at the end of a sprung branch. He’s pretty to see, Tom said, a rabbit hung in its hoister.

Stan Pomeroy chopped through the back legs with an axe and pressed the front paws off with a knife. He tugged the white fur off like unrolling a sock and then jointed the purple body and fried it in the bacon fat. They shared it out.

No thanks, I said.

They looked at me.

I dont eat meat, I said.

You dont eat meat. Boys he dont eat meat.

Give me some of that bread. I’ll be fine on bread.

Tom: Is it like a religious thing?

It’s a belief. That we’re better off when we dont eat animals.

You mean youre going to live out here and not eat any-thing.

There’s grain and vegetables and beans and rice. There’s a lot you can eat. I’ll eat fish. I’m not opposed to fish, and I confess I like eggs. I’ll even eat a chicken.

Too bad we never snared you a grouse. All year round. Boy youre gonna starve on that.

They ate into the rabbit and bacon with some bread and tea. I shared out my chocolate, which they all admired, and I noticed they did not eat but saved. We drank the tea stark naked — without milk or sugar. Tom Dobie poured the bacon fat into his mug and gulped it down. The enamel mug was caked with the fat. It was becoming a smaller and smaller volume for anything to be poured into.

What’ll you do when it fills up.

I’ll just ream her out, he said, and start over again.

It was a raw clear day, the snow packed down, the day after a storm.

I opened my eyes to this. Another day of snowshoeing. I prepared to march. I am a man of acts, but I tell you, each act begins like exercising a stiff muscle.

Lift your legs high, sir, Tom Dobie said again. They were having a good laugh at my struggle.