The Strangers' Gallery (20 page)

Whether or not the landlady was ever paid her rent is another question. The accounts I've read of this particular incident, all undocumented, no sources given, but all by reputable chroniclers of our past (a provincial archivist, a newspaper editor, two historians, and a legislative librarian and editor of Hansard), are a veritable daisy-petal chant of historical contradiction:
They paid her, they paid her not. They paid her this, they paid her that. She was paid twenty years later, she was never paid. She was paid in 1833, she was paid in 1836.

“Newfoundland historiography in microcosm,” the seventy-three-year-old Miles Harnett had proclaimed after perusing the Mary Travers file, as he sat me down for an advisory chat late one winter afternoon in the Research Library. “Sometimes you get the feeling,” he said, “that the so-called
hisstorians
always nod off over whatever it is they're reading and drift into an opium reverie like Coleridge over historian Samuel Purchas's
Purchas His Pilgrimage,
or
Purchas His Pilgrimes.
”

Miles himself had been sipping from
a suspicious-looking bottle of amber-coloured water all afternoon. It might not have been an opium derivative, but I'm sure it wasn't cod liver oil.

“When they wake up,” he continued, “they have the distinct recollection that they've dreamed the whole history of Newfoundland, like Coleridge's dream of ‘Kubla Khan,' and when they
try to get it down on paper, they're interrupted by the archivist from Porlock telling them that the place is closing and they have to go, so they only manage to recover a few fragments. ‘All the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast,' said Coleridge. That's as good a description of Newfoundland history as I've ever heard.”

At the Travers that evening the young Miles Harnett had stared so long and hard at the bottle of cod liver oil and at the painting of Mary Travers that the two images were permanently imprinted on his consciousness and would, in his later years, evoke for him all that came to pass in the months and years leading up to April 1, 1949. Not that he would ever talk about 1949. “‘And after this our exile,'” he said one time, quoting from his favourite poem, “Ash-Wednesday.” I wasn't sure if he was referring to his short-lived physical exile on the mainland, his “forty months in the wilderness,” as he once referred to it, or to his permanent spiritual exile at home in Newfoundland.

11. REMEMBRANCE DAY

Do you not believe, my friend, that there are many solitary soulswhose hearts demand some outrage, something to make them burst?

—Miguel de Unamuno,
Our Lord Don Quixote

Y
esterday, on Remembrance Day
, appropriately enough, Anton made the acquaintance of the Great Rememberer, and we accompanied him to the official ceremony downtown. We walked from Miles's house in Churchill Park to the National War Memorial on Water Street. Though Miles was in his early seventies now, he was a vigorous septuagenarian, perhaps reaping the benefits of an athletic youth, his race-walking marathons. But the onset of asthma in his early thirties forced him to give up that peculiar sport, whose participants—arms pumping, faces raised to the heavens, smiling in sweet agony, feet never leaving the ground, buttocks roiling—look as if they are neither running nor walking, but engaged in a bustling burlesque of both.

Traces of this race-walk style are still evident in Miles's gait today. Despite the asthma, inherited from his father, and a hernia—probably what is now called a sports hernia—he would leave us in his wake on a walk downtown. It would usually be more of a hike than a walk. He carried a compass instead of a watch and was fond of telling us what direction we were heading in, though we usually followed the same route every time. He also informed us on every trek that not a single one of the infamous consternation of St. John's streets followed a true north-south or east-west direction. (Whether this was true or not, I had never attempted to figure out.) And every hike began with the usual heigh-ho:
Northwest for Baccalieu
—as we headed northeast.

I began to think that this compass-carrying was something more than an affectation. The device was attached to his wrist by a multicoloured beaded strap that had been woven by his sister. (For Miles, this was uncharacteristically endearing.) The strap was, I fancied, Keats's “flowery band to bind us to the earth,/ Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth/ Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,/ Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways…” His nature was, as I saw it, fundamentally noble and hopeful. At bottom, there was something vulnerable and terribly
innocent
about him, though I could see that anyone looking at him from the outside would see him as a classic case of the resentful, angry, bitter, ignoble man, oversensitive to slights and humiliations.

Perhaps he needed his compass, a connection with physical, geographical space, to compensate for his disconnection from time, at least present time. He was obsessed with the past, humiliated and haunted by it. Every day, it seemed, was Remembrance Day for him.

After accompanying a group of visiting archivists on a so-called Haunted Hike of St. John's one summer evening—a touristy guided tour of all the places where murders and other foul deeds had taken place, ghastly apparitions had been sighted, weeping statues witnessed, and other signs and wonders had appeared—I began to think of Miles's walking tour as Harnett's Historical Haunted Hike. But the only one being haunted in this case was him.

Miles lived in an old rundown house on Pine Bud Avenue. He had a bogus address as well, an actual city street, but one with no houses on it. I'd heard him give it out on at least two occasions—6 The Dardenelles, Georgestown, NL, H0H 0H0—when store clerks tried to get his address into their computer data bank for mail-out promotions. Though they asked him to spell the name of the street and the town, they typed in Santa's North Pole postal code without blinking an eye. Miles feared computers (he still used an old manual typewriter) and hated junk mail. All his mail went to a post office box, there was no street number on his house, and he had an unlisted telephone number. He had no credit cards and liked to write cheques for purchases, but he considered any requests for identification as the height of impertinence.

Surrounding his Pine Bud Avenue house, hiding it, in fact, was a veritable forest of patriotic pine, by which I mean the whole extended family, William Cormack's “pine tribe,” as he had rather romantically personified them in his
Narrative
of a journey across the island of Newfoundland, the only one ever performed by a European
.
But Cormack had been searching for a different tribe, the Beothucks, and by the fall of 1822, when he made his journey, they were close to extinction.

Miles had introduced me to every member of the pine tribe one warm summer evening as I was walking by his house: balsam fir, eastern larch, scruffy misshapen black and white spruce, and, towering above them all, the noble white pine, the true Newfoundland pine of the pine-clad hills that our anthem's sun-rays still gloriously crown. But the real pine-clad hills are history now, as is the country that bore them. On the lawns of our tree-ravaged new subdivisions, one is more likely to find that fashionable immigrant the Austrian pine, or ornamental Scotch pine, native to the Scottish Highlands. That infamous Scot Lord Amulree, of course, had given Miles a distaste for all things Scotch, including the drink itself (no small sacrifice on his part), and this tree was not welcome on his property.

In concluding his sad tale of the lonesome pine, Miles said that there were hardly any of the noble white pine left at all. It was the first of our trees to go, in fact; practically all the commercial stands were cut by the early 1900s. At one time, gigantic specimens, 100 to 150 feet tall, had been used for the masts of ships and the columns of churches. The pine that remained, he said, including his own, were subject to “heart rot, blister rust, and ring shake,” cracks between the rings due to the height of the trees and their exposure to high winds. From that day forward, I began to think of these ills to which the noble pine were prone as afflictions besetting the Chief of the Pine Tribe himself.

Miles claimed that his house was the oldest in Churchill Park—and built entirely of white pine, of course. It had been there long before Churchill, let alone the park and the Churchill Park Municipal Housing Development. It was a summer home that had been turned into a winter home, though it didn't in any way resemble
the
Winterholme on Rennie's Mill Road. It looked more like a jerry-rigged Expo '67 Habitat house before its time, a jumble of extensions jutting out from all sides, piled box-like on top of one another, and surrounded by so much pine that you could hardly see it, which was perhaps a good thing.

But you could see the old Newfoundland flag—the Pink, White, and Green—rising proudly above the rooftop, though at half-mast, mind you. It had been at half-mast long before April Fool's Day, 1949; since February 16, 1934, in fact, the day the country of Newfoundland had officially ceased to exist.

What had caught Anton's eye, however, walking past the house in the evenings, was not the flag, which meant nothing to him, but what he thought was the Star of David beneath the apex of the eaves. It was sometimes turned on accidentally with the porch lights, making the house visible through the trees. He discovered later on that it was only the Star of Bethlehem, Christmas lights.

What caught his eye yesterday morning, as we were on our way over to the Square for a coffee, was Miles's ancient mustard-yellow Mercedes-Benz Turbo Diesel, sans driver, idling in the driveway with the heater on full blast to melt the first November frost on the windows. As we walked by, Anton made the mistake of slipping one of his red-alert stop-sign cards, which he always carried with him, beneath the wiper blade of Miles's idling vehicle just as he was coming out the door. The card said:
Stop this car!
Global warming is drowning my country. Yours truly, Anton Aalders, Nederland.

Though Miles distrusted salesmen of any kind, he welcomed advocates, agitators, evangelicals, and idealists of every kind, from Jehovah's Witnesses to environmental activists like Anton. Fellow travellers of a sort, each with a story and a pitch, they would be listened to with great patience and equanimity and, as they sank slowly into the swamp of his sympathy, he would beguile them with a story of his own—needless to say, the same old story, but with infinite facets and folds.

He was warming up his car, Miles said, as he examined Anton's card beneath his glasses, to drive down to the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial. Though he faithfully attended this ceremony, the real Remembrance Day for him was not November 11, but July 1, Memorial Day, when, within half an hour on July 1, 1916, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment had been virtually wiped out at the battle of Beaumont-Hamel. The first of July, of course, was also Canada Day, and it galled him that these “foreign festivities,” as he referred to them, overshadowed our Memorial Day ceremonies. Newfoundlanders were expected to mourn and rejoice at the same time; it was conducive to a kind of civic schizophrenia.

He invited us to go along with him to the Remembrance Day ceremonies. Anton readily accepted, and I nodded in reluctant agreement. Anton never needed much encouragement to partake of any kind of social event, and Miles had not only turned off his car, but also, as he had time to spare, offered to leave it in the driveway and walk. He hardly ever drove the old Mercedes, anyway. He walked just about everywhere, except, of course, for his monthly excursion to Bidgood's in the Goulds to restock his pantry with his favourite provisions: salt riblets, pig's feet, pickled tongue, salt fish, smoked herring, and, in season, flippers, partridgeberries, rhubarb, bakeapples, and turnip greens. His favourite spring delicacy, dandelion greens, growing wild and free, he picked himself.

So off we went on the Historical Haunted Hike, a trek I'd been on many times before. Descending was easy. We approached the downtown obliquely, as if on some secret mission. Taking what seemed to be a wayward easterly tack, albeit at a race-walk clip, he headed down the valley to Rennie's Mill Road, then up through Bannerman Park to the House, where, depending on his frame of mind and whom he was with, you might hear a sermon, a confession, a history lesson, or some new archival revelation. Or he just might surprise you by walking right past, which was what he did this time: out through the park gates, across Military Road, and down the gentle slope of King's Road to Duckworth Street. At the northwest corner of this intersection, just across the street from the National War Memorial, is a restaurant called King's Place, on the site of the original Travers Tavern.

A stop at King's Place for a cup of tea was, of course,
de rigueur
, and the waiter, as usual, tried to interest Miles in a piece of cheesecake from the lurid display on the laminated dessert menu, a permanent fixture on the tables between the greasy green ceramic shakers and the large glass crock, as Miles called it, of sugar. His small, craggy, arthritic hands—with every knuckle hugely swollen, though he claimed that they caused no pain—found this dispenser so awkward to manipulate that enough sugar for a whole pot of tea came pouring through the opening beneath the metal flip-top. The tea in his one-cup stainless steel pot came cascading out as well, but I had never seen anyone, myself included, use this ubiquitous, but badly designed, vessel with any finesse. Anton and I had ordered coffee.

The National War Memorial was one memory site that didn't need a Remembrance Day ceremony to induce a dangerous outpouring of feeling on Miles's part. The memorial was unveiled on July 1, 1924, by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the high point of “Haig Week,” an occasion described by the
Newfoundland Quarterly
as “the largest and most spectacular of its kind in the history of the country,” and “an historic event of abiding interest.” Needless to say, it has long abided with Miles, if for different reasons, and now, dear Lord, I fear it's begun to abide with me.

Every word and movement of “the Empire's beloved war chieftain” was reported in obsessive detail by the
Quarterly
, and the Empire's not-so-beloved war critic could recall every word of this obsequious reportage. Miles's thoughts on the subject of General Haig, who he felt was personally responsible for the carnage at Beaumont-Hamel, could, as they say, fill a book—an anti-Haigiography, you might call it. In his unveiling speech, Miles said, Haig made no mention whatsoever of Beaumont-Hamel, the greatest tragedy in the country's history. “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help,” he wrote on the day before the battle.

“We washed it all down with a beer that we named after him—though it was hardly strong enough. How much Haig Ale would you need to drink to forget all that?” Miles exclaimed at the Prowse Society meeting at which he had inducted Sir Douglas Haig into the Fatherland's Hall of Shame, the equivalent of Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell in the
Inferno
, the very pit, reserved for Sins of Betrayal.
Dante's so-called great Christian allegory
The Divine Comedy
, the
Inferno
part
,
in particular, was not about forgiveness and mercy, Miles said, but justice.