The Big Why (5 page)

I said to Gerald Thayer, Perhaps Kathleen’s not enough.

Gerald: Enough is asking too much. Then he said, Is she lazy?

No.

Then there’s something. There will be something in her that’s praiseworthy. She will have a talent. If there’s a — no, find the talent and you will love her.

I thought it was good sex, getting along, be unboring.

No, it’s talent. And avoiding laziness. No one is enough. That’s why you have friends.

Tom Dobie said that house on the Head belonged to the Pomeroys. They had closed it up for the winter. We walked into Irishtown, past the Stand where the two churches stood, around Jackson’s Quay and Grave Hill and down through Pomeroy’s fields, where Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys were cutting firewood on a sawhorse. They did not wave. Ice at low tide passed through the footing of the bridge. And was slit up by it. It was slit in two. Seagulls sat on the rocks and on the ice. Low tide, Tom said. The low water revealed twelve feet of dark wet rock and then the bright snowline, like a receding gum. Tom Dobie named every place we came to because I asked. Up Rattley Road, which narrowed to a cart path, the snow had collected in the corners of the path. Youre going to need your racquets if youre to push through this, he said.

We left Brigus outright and the path widened to an arm of soft white land between the rough rocks. Printed in values of grey, white, and black, as though the land were an engraving done in zinc. There was no colour, except for the blue of the sky. Pointy tips of fir sticking off the horizon of hills. It’s a landscape on a human scale. We crested this and now the cottage that I’d spied with Rupert’s binoculars, snug and rough, in behind a screen of young juniper, their limbs coated in fresh snow. The house was quite to itself, the windows boarded up. There was not one footprint near it. There was snow here beneath the trees, and it had moulded itself and hardened from the prevailing wind.

We stood at the gate. It stank of creosote. I was overjoyed.

That house have seen a better day, sir.

It will see even better, Tom.

The little house stood on a sheltered terrace that had been dug from the steep hillside on the north side of the bay. It was just one and a half storeys built into the side of the hill. What you saw of the roof through snow looked sound and the foundation solid, and on these straight qualities I trusted. I was right to trust.

That house, Tom said, havent been lived in for a generation. But whoever built her was thinking about grandchildren.

We walked to it.

Dont know who’d want to live in her, though. Youre closer to Cupids than to Brigus.

He said the glass had been taken out of the windows and stored under the stairs so it wouldnt bust.

There was four feet of level ground in front of the door before the hill began again its tremendous descent to the bay. The house seemed like a predicament, a toehold.

What a spot.

There was a stunted tuckamore, the nest of a gannet.

If meagre, I said.

I paced off the house and it was thirty-seven feet long.

Tom on the side called out, Fourteen feet wide.

Your feet or my feet?

Just regular twelve-inchers, sir. I made an allowance.

Fourteen feet, then.

Pointing to a hollow, You can do your nuisance over there until we fix you up an outhouse.

There were two chimneys. A wealth of chimneys. I turned back to town.

Dont you want to have a look inside, sir?

I’m used to the insides of things, Tom. And I’ll tell you, the outside of a thing will inform you a lot of its innards. Now let’s go meet the rest of the world.

I hired on Tom Dobie. What William Blake wrote: He whose face gives no light will never become a star. I subscribe to this, though it’s not the entire story. If you are full of light then you must be aware that smaller lights are intimidated. Light attracts but also makes people close their eyes. And so it’s never enough to be large and generous. A star must permit smaller lights to shine. This is something I did not know until I was in my forties. I was a brash young light who read Blake.

We spent the days shovelling the house out, removing some hay the Pomeroys had stacked in there. The ceilings were an even six feet. Lucky I’m a short man. We pried off the boards and caulked in the windows. I got one fireplace working half-heartedly. We stripped the walls and glued on muslin and walked to Chafe’s to pick out some pretty paper. Tom Dobie nodded to Chafe.

How’s your mother, Bud said.

Thanks Mr Chafe. She’s fine.

You’ll be needing salt pork.

We’re all right.

Havent come in for anything in a while.

How’s the credit.

Youre all right, Tom.

I chose colours I knew Kathleen would like.

Jas Kelly came in and asked for some flour. A butt of pork. Some molasses. Chafe took up a ledger and marked it down. Jas pencilled in an
X
and took his supplies.

As we walked back I asked Tom about it. So you dont pay for it.

Chafe tots her up.

And when do you pay for it.

He lets us have it on credit until the fall. Then takes off what our fish brung in.

You sell your fish to Bud Chafe.

He has a culler. What come in and tells him the price.

So you dont know the price.

Chafe is good. He gives us what is fair.

So he pays you and you pay him?

There’s no money as such.

Does Jas Kelly know what that flour cost him?

It’s all in the ledger. Chafe got it in the book.

Does it matter if he buys it today or next month?

I guess the price changes. Yes, she do change. Chafe writes her down, the provision and the date.

So youre saying Jas Kelly doesnt know what he spent today.

Fishermen usually just get the provisions they need. It’s there in the book. Chafe keeps her all written up.

It sounds odd. It sounds feudal. So you dont know what you owe Chafe.

He says our credit is good.

But youre reluctant to get some provisions.

We didnt have a good year last year, okay? Chafe’s been good to keep us supplied. Mother doesnt want us to be too beholden.

I slept at the Bartletts’. I asked Rupert about how Chafe deals with goods. The truck system, Rupert said. Fishermen in debt to merchants. There are worse than Chafe.

But you deal with fish.

The Labrador fishery, yes. And we set a price after St John’s. We keep it competitive. Now a young man like Tom Dobie, he’s to his gills in with Bud Chafe. Been with him now so long, through his father. Can’t get out from under him.

So you could call him an indentured servant.

The system, Kent. It works.

To whose benefit.

Well, men like Dobie and Jas Kelly get grub and supplies when they have no money. They’d starve if not for Bud Chafe.

But theyre at the mercy of Chafe in the fall. Chafe can set his own price for fish.

There’s no other way to do it, Kent. Unless youre angling to have a fellow like William Coaker move in. And that’s bad news. A union. All that’ll do is create another level of bureaucrats. No it’s best this way.

After a week I moved into the house. I borrowed a green tent from Rupert. I set the tent up in the main bedroom above the kitchen. I did a romantic thing. I lit three stout candles and took out my father’s flute. It’s a silver flute that my mother gave me. I dont really like the flute. It’s a bit ethereal and tight-assed. But I wanted to learn how to play it. I knew playing the flute was the opposite to how the main waters of my character flowed. In the tent with the candles and the window’s three little panes of glass over the frozen harbour, it sounded good.

I woke up in the morning. I woke up to light filtering through the fabric of the tent. But I had forgotten about the tent. I was looking at the effect of the canvas. My father took me once on a train for a weekend in the Adirondacks, and a snow had fallen. We were staying in a cabin. Snow had caked against the cabin windows. I remember waking up to the pattern of light breaking through the snow on the window.

I braced myself to the cold. The stove was out and I could easily roll over for another hour. But I flipped off the blankets and pushed my feet into socks, untied the tent flap, and wrestled on a shirt and sweater. I walked down the stairs and pissed on the snow near the front door. I had a brown wool hat. I took to wearing the same clothes.

The floors were frozen. Frost on the coffee pot. A pair of gloves I’d left on a chair surprised me for a pair of hands. I love the cold. It was the reason I had come here. Discomfort had become an obsession. Or it may be that I hated discomfort so that I got a kind of exultation from the effort of overcoming it. Truth: I had wanted to live the rest of my life in Newfoundland. But it turned into sixteen months. It was enough to consider love and heartbreak and commitment and humour in the face of the crushing ache of being alone in the world.

There was snow in the firs, and the branches were heavy and solemn. There were valleys of trees, with arms of snow frozen up into the valleys. If you must have it all culminate. If you insist. It came down to a small chunk of time that broke me. It formed me. It pried apart my backbone and left me beached. It shucked me. I will tell you of a desire to live with a rural people, to love them and be loved.

The mornings were bright and clear. I had kindling and I shivered until the stove was hot. I had ordered seven tons of coal and a collier was on its way — Rupert told me that his brother, Bob, was captaining it. But I laughed at my cold bones and I kept opening the stove door to see the orange faces with their grey noses in the flames. I love being on my own.

Tom Dobie had learned a lot from his father. He had his father’s tools and the fate of the father was a story I pieced together from Bartlett and the Pomeroys. It was a story of starvation and a rifle in Labrador. But I could not ask Tom about it. It would come, I thought.

My own tools — my father’s tools — were on their way from New York. Kathleen was sending them. And so I made do with the Dobie tools. I ordered wood from St John’s and then found out that the Pomeroys had a pit saw just over in Cupids.

Why didnt you tell me, Tom.

I thought, Tom said, you wanted wood from town.

I imagined a large enterprise, instead a shed with Stan Pomeroy and Tom Dobie inside. A hole in the ground and Tom in the hole wearing a veil of crepe, sawdust on his shoulders. I had plans to build on to the south end and also shore up the sills and footings. A studio and an extra bedroom for the children.

Each morning at eight Tom arrived carrying half a pie or a large piece of cake or some fresh bread wrapped in a cup towel. This was from his mother. I made coffee, and if he had cake we broke into it for breakfast. The brook was my fresh water and the outhouse was at the north end, near the trail to the naked man and the lighthouse. If it was cold out Tom suggested we split some wood.

He’ll cleave better if it’s frosty and it’ll warm us up.

The birch was fragile under the axe. The cracking echoed off the hills. I am the only one on this side and I wanted them to know I was at it.

We know youre at it when there’s smoke coming out of your chimney.

From here you can see the cup of the cove, but they can see me too. The landscape changed depending on the snowfall.

The axe over Tom’s head, hovering. Then whipping it down on the junk. Sometimes he’d lay the wood on its belly, to split in through the stomach.

It was hot work, and Tom stopped to take off his jersey. He pulled the jersey and shirt and undershirt all over his head and down to his wrists. And he stood there, a boy of sixteen, letting the sweat on his kidneys evaporate in the cold February air, his wrists chained by the bulk of the shirt and jersey.

As Tom and I rebuilt the house I had time to think of Jenny Starling. I like to ruminate on past lives when I work, to see how my life could have been different. I had known Jenny before Kathleen. I’d lived with her for six months. She had this angled forehead and she spoke quickly. I was going to marry her, but she was already married. Jenny was getting a divorce from her husband, Luis Starling. But did I ever truly think I’d marry her? I thought about this as I hammered home a ten-inch nail. I enjoyed looking at Jenny’s eyebrows. You wonder how much talent and mystery a person needs in order for you to want to live the rest of your life with her. And Jenny had a nervous tension. She had no children with Luis. Luis, of course, hated my guts. He wanted her back. Everyone wanted her to return to Luis. Jenny’s father, George Crocker, disowned her.

We lived in Monhegan. I taught at the artists’ colony there. I built a house, a house a bit like this one. But I was not convinced by Jenny. There was something unruly about her, something in her I couldnt contain, and it worried me. So when I met Kathleen Whiting in New York, I decided to leave Jenny Starling.