The Strangers' Gallery (40 page)

For me, this place where a woman kept a lonely vigil for her seafaring husband felt more like a psychological space than a physical one, and, once again, I couldn't stay up there very long, not even sitting, before I needed to come down. But not Anton. He stayed up there for over an hour after we were supposed to check out, which was at eleven o'clock. Was he thinking of his forsaken mother? I wondered. How long had she kept her lonely vigil inside her own widow's walk?

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth fire and the home acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Or was he remembering his painful childhood: how he himself had stared across the polders and out to sea from the windows of his aunt and uncle's house, in the lowlands of Holland, watching ships that seemed to be sailing through the fields, sailing to an imagined fatherland?
So shut your eyes while Father sings of the wonderful sights that be, and you shall see the beautiful things as you rock in the misty sea.
Then off to his lonely, landlocked bed, with neither mother nor father to sing him to sleep.

We did not see even the signs of an alluvial soil.

Evening found us on a farm in Cormack. Anton had decided to have another look.

“William's place,” he informed me—one of many seemingly offhand revelations that were now to come my way—as we drove slowly down a long, rutted, grass-covered driveway off one of the many gravel roads that criss-crossed the land on both sides of Veterans Drive, the long paved road that ran straight through the town. It was not what you would ordinarily think of as a town: it had no centre that we could find; the farmhouses that remained were widely scattered, as were the few stores; and if it still had such things as a town hall, fire hall, post office, bank, library, and school, we hadn't seen them. The only public building we saw was a church.

Deep in the woods, many miles from the refreshing waters of the Humber River, the sweltering farm settlement of Cormack had been described as “a 30,000-acre swath of fly-infested wilderness.” I imagined Anton's father's and his fellow war veterans' encounter with farming in Newfoundland to be much like Mark Twain's encounter with journalism in Tennessee, unforgettably described through the eyes of a naive reporter who had gone to the South for his health and taken a job as associate editor of a small-town newspaper. He quickly concluded, however, after several violent attacks on the newspaper office by irate readers with guns, bricks, and hand-grenades, that “Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger,” and he left.

Doubtless most victims of farming in Newfoundland eventually reach the same conclusion: Newfoundland hospitality is too lavish with the farmer, including the veteran-farmers and farm-wives of Cormack. In addition to the aforementioned infestation of flies—stouts or “bulldogs,” mosquitoes, blackflies, and sandflies—“the constant devouring enemy,” as the town's namesake, William Cormack, had referred to them, there are low temperatures, not enough sun, too much rain, constant wind, deep snows, early frosts, late frosts, a short growing season, fungi such as potato wart, not found elsewhere in North America, and, last but not least, as Miles once proclaimed,
no soil,
though there had been rumours of topsoil in this part of the country.

We were sitting on the white rounded husk of an old wringer-washer lying on its side in the grass in front of one of the original, fifty-year-old land-settlement farmhouses, whose peeling clapboard displayed multicoloured flakes of paint: white, red, yellow, green, and blue. Oft painted but never scraped, it seemed, the front of the house looked like some ancient abstract fresco. The windows were boarded over and the front door was padlocked. A tangle of bushes, weeds, grass, and trees—fireweed, alder, lilac, chokecherry—formed another barrier. As it turned out, though, Anton didn't seem all that interested in getting inside.

The windows were covered with silver-grey sheets of plywood, but set in the front door were three narrow uncovered vertical panes of glass, in descending order of height from left to right. Their bases pointed like arrows toward the earth, the direction in which the dilapidated house was heading, as were all of us in the end. There were no shingles on the pitched roof, only felt, or tarpaper, and a lot of bare boards were showing through. A sheet of what looked like tarpaulin had been nailed onto the front part of the roof and hung down over the eave just above the door. A curious four-cornered crown sat atop a tall narrow chimney that looked like a piece of square pipe with a brick pattern baked on. High above the house, layers of stratus cloud were stacked like sedimentary rock.

We began walking along a narrow overgrown track toward the cleared land at the back, which was barely visible through the trees. Though the front of the house had been painted many times, and many different colours, the back and sides were unpainted and rotting away. So was the barn, which we passed en route; its wood was a silken lilac grey. Now partially hidden by trees and sunken like a saddle in the middle, both ends pitched at a forty-five-degree angle, the barn's second-storey open door was like a blank Cyclops eye scanning the sky. Farther along the track, surrounded by brush, were the rusting cabs of two pickups, one red, one green, their doors ajar, as if someone had just made a quick escape.

The track led through dense trees to much higher ground, on which new grass was rising, though it was still not tall enough to hide the traces of beds and furrows—civilian trenches. Over this palimpsest of fallow fields, encircled by a range of low dark hills, a full moon was rising. It was not blue, however, but had a gold-tone, mock-harvest hue. We walked to the highest point of land and sat facing the moon on a mossy, lichen-covered, half-buried rock that must have been too big to be removed when the land was cleared. Anton's only comments up to this point, all of which had seemed like a distraction, had been about the farm's flora, many of which, unlike our more cautious east coast specimens, were already in bloom; but before he got around to the subject of the farm's fauna, and the particular faun that I was most curious about, he surprised me with other, quite startling, news.

“You must know that Miranda is with child,” he said, as if reporting a case of immaculate conception. I wasn't sure if he meant
I'm sure you know
or
I have to tell you.

For a moment I was only able to nod in reply, though I shouldn't have been at all surprised; since Christmas he'd spent more time at her house than mine.

He began nodding, too, though he wasn't looking at me but at the moon.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

“I don't know,” he said. “When I came here the first time, I asked William for advice. I asked him about a lot of things, but he didn't have much to say.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

He turned his head and smiled at me, a weak, tired, furtive, tremulous smile, as if it were trespassing upon his face. “Gone to the Blue Mountains,” he said. “No more than a half-dozen farmers are left. The neighbour said he stopped farming long ago, long before they took him away. Ten years ago, maybe, to a nursing home in Norris Point, next to the hospital, where he passed away after a year or two. The farm was killing him, he said. He drank a lot, lost his driver's licence, then crashed his trucks into the trees. He never married, but there were stories, he said. Perhaps I have half-brothers or sisters, too, just like you. He was living with dozens of starving cats, all inbred and crazy. They climbed the walls of the house and tore the felt off the roof. They were living on birds and mice and shrews. The big toms killed rabbits and chickens, he said. The spca took them all away. He went crazy in the end, couldn't look after himself, poisoned himself with chokecherry wine…big seeds…with cyanide.”

He started to shake his head, grabbed a piece of moss and pulled it off the rock, stood up suddenly and threw it away, then started to walk back quickly toward the house. It was almost dark and I watched him disappear into the trees.

When I got back to the car, he was reclining in the driver's seat, his eyes closed, his arms folded rigidly across his chest. The hood of his jacket was tied tightly around his head, and moonlight was falling through the windshield on his moonlike face—a plaster of Paris death-mask face. He looked like some deceased or reposing monk. I got in on the passenger side, reclined my own seat, and sat wide-eyed for a long while, staring at the moon.

I wondered if Anton's father had seen the blue moon. If he had, it would have been a harvest moon—I guess there would have been a harvest by September 1950—a full moon at the fall equinox, and not orange or gold, but blue. Maybe he too would have seen it as an omen, and a welcome one, perhaps, for a serviceman-turned-farmer, with no war bride at his side, not even a complaining one. I imagined him and his abandoned lover staring at it at the same time, drawn to it by feelings they could not fathom: shifting tides of attachment, regret, and grief, a sea change of disengagement, abandonment, and loss, but on opposite sides of the Sea of Darkness.

We slept in the car overnight, very soundly, to my surprise and relief. I awoke only once, feeling completely stuffed up, needing air. We'd closed all the windows against the mosquitoes. I opened a window, closed my eyes, and didn't wake again till early morning. I heard the sound of the hatchback door creaking open. Then I watched Anton walk past my door toward the house holding a white Styrofoam cup in front of him, ghostly white in the dim light of dawn, like a priest carrying a votive candle or the sacramental Host. He made his way through the trees, bushes, weeds, and grass and up onto the rotting steps of the house, then removed the tiny cinquefoil from the cup and attached it to a piece of splintered wood in the door. When he glanced back at the car, I closed my eyes, but I watched him disappear around a corner of the house. My bladder was bursting so I got out of the car and walked into the nearest thicket to relieve myself, which I assumed was what Anton was doing as well.

On our way out Veterans Drive, just a few miles from the highway, we encountered a large pickup truck parked right across the yellow line, blocking both lanes. Two workmen with sunglasses, yellow hard hats, and orange vests were standing alongside it, and one of them raised a hand as we approached. He walked up to the driver's-side window and said with a smile, “We're having a bit of a blast up ahead, shouldn't take long.”

After ten minutes, at least a dozen vehicles were waiting in line behind us. The two men were standing with their backs to us, their arms resting on the cab of the truck, the yellow X's on their backs gleaming in the hazy early morning light. It seemed as if time were standing still. Above their heads, what looked like the same slate-grey stratus clouds that I'd seen last night were stacked in a high uneven pile, like an archive of all the long-lost years. One of the men removed his hat, revealing what the shampoo ads used to call
rebellious
red hair. Then he took a hairbrush from his jacket pocket and began to brush his hair and beard in the side-view mirror of the cab. I heard a phone ring and saw the other man put it to his ear, then turn and look back, sunglasses glinting, at the long line of drivers waiting for something to happen. He laughed, leaned back leisurely against the truck, and placed one foot against the door. He put the phone back in his breast pocket. Seconds later the air cracked violently and a shower of rock and earth rose like fireworks above the truck. It seemed to freeze there for a curiously long time, obscuring the rocklike wall of cloud, as if it too had exploded and bits of it were suspended, floating, drifting, as clouds are wont to do.

20. NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY

A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of

an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like

ivy around a wall.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

T
he proper season
had arrived in which to set off…Uncertainty of result waved over my determination.

Before beginning his journey across the Island with Joseph Sylvester, William Cormack had “tried his fidelity” by taking a brisk, warm-up hike from St. John's to Placentia and circling back to town by way of Trinity Bay and Conception Bay, a distance of about 150 miles. Then they sailed from St. John's to Bonaventure, on the west side of Trinity Bay. On his passage down Trinity Bay to Smith Sound, about 6 miles southwest of Bonaventure, Cormack witnessed an unnerving sight, which he might have read as a premonition.

“We witnessed,” he wrote, “the phenomenon of the very great transparency of the sea which it assumes here during the
time of change
of wind from West to East. The fishes and their haunts amongst the rocks and luxuriant weeds at the bottom were seen to a fearful depth.”

After the boat finally dropped them off at the end of the Sound—a long, deep reach of sea—close to what is now the community of Milton, he watched it disappear “into the gloomy gut.”

“An abyss of difficulties,” he wrote, “instantly sprang up in the imagination between the point where we stood and the civilized world we had just quitted, as well as between us and the centre of the
Terra Incognita
.”

But he quickly left these gloomy thoughts behind and, two months later, on the first of November, after crossing the fearful terrain of the unknown interior—about two hundred miles as the crow flies—and finally seeing the ocean again, from the summit of a snowy ridge, he “hailed the glance of the sea as home, and as the parent of everything dear.”

He did not stay on the west coast for very long, however. After a two-week rest he was off again, “on foot to the southward along the sea shore…in hopes, by walking and boating, to reach Fortune Bay, a distance of upwards of two hundred miles, before all the vessels for the season had sailed for Europe.” About a month later, he reached “the Bay of Despair” and stayed at the establishment of the famous fish merchants Newman and Company, where he “learnt with satisfaction that the last ship for England this season from this coast was to sail within a few days from another of their establishments in Fortune Bay.” But it was almost two weeks before he boarded his ship, the
Duck
, and set sail for England, perhaps because it was the Christmas season. In the meantime, he experienced the “delight of being restored again to society, which was enjoyed with the gentlemen and families of the mercantile establishments at the Bay of Despair and Fortune Bay.”

Not to mention the fact that other restoratives may have come into play, even for a dour Scot like Cormack. The Newman Company was more famous for port wine than fish. Cormack didn't leave Fortune until after Christmas, on the twenty-eighth of December. He arrived in Dartmouth, England, on the tenth of February, 1823, a sea voyage of six weeks in the North Atlantic at the very worst time of the year; but, strangely, the normally loquacious Cormack gives no details at all about the trip.

Sunrise announced that adieu was to be taken for a time to the routine habits of civilization…Fancy carried us swiftly across the Island.

We left St. John's early in the morning, and by midday were halfway across the Island. Anton was driving—and driving fast. He loved “the open road,” he said, though he hated cars, hated city driving. Indeed, this was the first time he'd driven a car in the whole eight months he'd been in St. John's. He missed his truck, he said, missed “the feel of the gears,” and was glad that the old Tercel was a standard. Though he was an experienced truck driver, and I had complete faith in him, he was a bit too fond of a heart-stopping manoeuvre that he called “double de-clutching”
—
or maybe he meant “de double clutching”
—
which he executed when he had to accelerate or slow down quickly, either when tearing past a string of house trailers or tractor trailers on a two-lane highway or pulling up short in the middle of an attempt and squeezing in front of an angry driver. He seldom pulled up short, however, and on a couple of occasions when overtaking on a section of four-lane highway, at the point where the inside lane ended and big white capital letters on the pavement commanded him to YIELD, he double de-clutched right on past at 145 kilometres an hour, as the car shook, rattled, and almost rolled.

Anton seemed to love the open road and the feel of the gears so much, in fact, that we'd already sped past—as the tercel flies, so to speak—the Road to the Cape and the Road to the Isles, at the ends of which was the gannet of the south and the Nightingale of the North, respectively. My mention of both the Cape St. Mary's gannetry on the Cape Shore and Madame Toulinguet's reliquary in Twillingate had elicited a double demurral, by way of de double murmur, but not a word.

We were now only a few miles from Grand Falls, in the centre of the Island. At Jumper's Brook, just before the turnoff to the south coast, we didn't jump, but hesitated, pulled in at an Irving service station and restaurant for a close look at the map, especially at the long, long road that dropped like a plumb line straight down through the dead centre of the Island, through the “mocking emptiness” of the lonely wild interior, the “monotonous sublime,” which had “bludgeoned” William Cormack's delicate sensibility more than a century and a half ago.

There was not a single town on the entire route, in fact, until you reached the head of “Bay d'Espoir,” as it's bilingually printed on the map, or Bay Despair, as we call it, a wondrously unique linguistic reversal that passed beyond mere sound and sense and probably said more about the Newfoundland psyche than most of us would care to admit. It had an ancient ring to it, the weight of a proverb, or an old story, something of the bold simplicity and persistence of “Burn your boats,” Smallwood's now proverbial exhortation. It was perhaps the more transparent
ur
-lament behind the Newfoundland proverb that had caused the Reverend Julian Moreton so much bewilderment.

A mid-nineteenth-century Church of England missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Reverend Moreton was bewildered not only by the peculiar character and strange habits of Newfoundlanders, but also by their enigmatic proverbs. One in particular caused him great consternation. In his 1863 memoir, he says: “There was a proverb more often used than any other, of which I must either believe it spoilt by misquotation or else confess myself too dull to perceive its force: ‘We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.'”

I noticed on the map that the first town on the road to Bay d'Espoir was actually called
Head
of Bay d'Espoir. I pictured a giant bowed head in a pair of large calloused hands, weeping inconsolably above the granite cliffs, salty tears draining into the despairing sea. Unexpectedly, Anton was taken with the idea of heading straight for it, and then on to Hermitage in Hermitage Bay, where it looked as if we could get a ferry to Burgeo and the Sandbanks Provincial Park, a nesting site, he said, of the piping plover. I'm ashamed to say, though, that I lacked the enthusiastic and adventurous spirit of Mr. Cormack, though we had a map, a car, and a paved road on which to drive it. So, when the waitress—Marjorie, her name tag read—arrived and informed us that not only was there no town along that entire one-hundred-mile stretch of road, but not a single service station either, and that we could “go in the back way” on a brand new road, not on our map, that went straight to Burgeo from the west coast, avoiding the boat trip as well as the more desolate road, our minds were easily made up.

Marjorie pointed the new road out to us on a new map. Coincidentally, it began at the head of St. George's Bay, where Cormack had come out of the woods, ending his arduous two-hundred-mile trek. The road ran past Silver Pond, Cormack's Lake, through the Long Range Mountains, the Annieopsquotch Mountains, the Blue Hills of Couteau, right down to the doorstep of the piping plover.

“The Blue Hills of Couteau,” Anton whispered to himself. He seemed to like the sound of that. Most of the country we had driven through on the tch was just woods and rock and water, bog and barrens—savannas, Cormack had called them. He had imagined Newfoundlanders, like some nomadic African tribesmen, herding caribou on the savannas. Anton wanted to see some mountains, real mountains. He saw Newfoundland as the mirror image of his own country, which was a big basin, more than half of it reclaimed, below sea level, ready to fill up again as the inevitable effects of global warming took their toll.

In Holland, Anton said, there were only hills, the highest being just over a thousand feet, but this, and others, were proudly called mountains. If his country had been blessed with real mountains, he said, the Germans would not have found it so easy to occupy the place. A real war of resistance, a guerilla war, could have been waged, and the enemy might have been driven out. But in one of the smallest, flattest, and most well organized countries in the world, the occupying forces had an easy time of it. One or two battalions had done the job.

It was after two o'clock, and we still hadn't had lunch. Having made our decision to continue west instead of detouring south, we relaxed and took a closer look at the menu. There were the usual burgers, fish and chips, and fried chicken, but in the “All Day Breakfast” lineup Anton spotted an item called “Turr Omelette,” something I can't remember even my old turr-mad, grad-school acquaintance, Squires, having in his repertoire. Just a playful, imaginative way to get surplus game down the throats of tourists or Hollywood film crews, perhaps, or something you might serve to Newfoundland caribou herdsmen after a hard day on the savannas.

Anton assumed that the omelette was made with seabird eggs, but the waitress, when she returned with her pad and pencil, explained with a kind smile:

“Oh no, sir. Hens' eggs, with turr meat on the inside, like a cheese omelette.”

“Ahhh,” Anton said, and I wasn't sure if he was relieved or displeased. He did have a great appetite for Newfoundland cuisine, especially fish, almost anything you laid in front of him. He decided against the turr omelette, however; he went for the safer fish and chips, and I did as well. I ordered lemon pie afterward to cut the grease. While I was eating it, Anton retrieved a newspaper that someone had left at the next table and began to skim through it in his usual fashion, from back to front, then returned to a few items his mind had filed away. I watched him over the rim of my glasses as I ate.

I am not a traveller. I'm sedentary and reclusive by temperament, lazy as well, and am most content at home with a coffee and a book—
Long Walks in France
, perhaps, or
Sailing Through China
. I could count the number of trips I've taken in my life—by car, bus, train, boat, and plane—on two hands for sure, if not on one. Every time I have set out, as sure as buds in May and frost in June, in some place not far away—sometimes even the place I'm leaving or the one I'm going to—planes are falling out of the sky, trains flying off tracks, buses plunging into mountain gorges, or boats sinking with all hands lost. And it's always the same type of
carrier,
as they call it, as the one I'm about to entrust my life to. Today, sure enough, it was a car on a highway.

“Look at this,” Anton said, pushing right under my nose the daily chronicle of travel carnage that I had vowed to avoid reading while travelling.

“Road opens up swallowing man,” said a headline under International News, adding a whole new dimension to the concept of “the open road.”

In the early morning darkness on a road in Maryland, a lone driver had plunged to his death into a twenty-foot-deep, forty-foot-wide sinkhole that opened up in the middle of a highway. The image of Cormack's vision before his trip came back to me: a great transparent sinkhole in the ocean, a vision of the fearful depths of Trinity Bay. The depths of Bay d'Espoir, if he had chanced to witness those while staying at Newman and Company, might have been even more fearful. Though it may be the smallest of our most well known bays, it is thought to be the deepest—half a mile deep.

“Sinkholes can occur,” the story said, “when rainwater dissolves limestone or marble bedrock, creating underground caves that grow until the material above collapses.”

The vehicle, with dead body, had been lifted out with a crane, the huge hole filled with rocks, the road paved over and reopened by evening, almost as if the incident had never happened.

“If you can't depend on marble bedrock,” I said to Anton, handing him back the newspaper, “what can you depend on?”

“Not even no tornadoes in Newfoundland,” he said, laughing and turning the pages of the paper, searching for something else. He had, very early on, picked up on our habit of ironically cataloguing the negative wonders of our salubrious clime, but had only recently adopted it as his stock response to the polite, oft-asked question, “So, how do you like it here?”

“I love it,” he would reply. “No tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes…” And he'd go on to add dangerous flora and fauna, real and imaginary, to the list: “No snakes, triffids, poison ivy, Cyclops, killer bees, grizzly bears, alligators…”

He pushed the paper under my nose again and tapped his finger on the table next to another traveller's tale.

“Dust devil hits car on tch,” I read under provincial news.

A man driving between Badger and Grand Falls had encountered what he described as a “miniature tornado” heading straight down the road toward his car. “It was unnerving,” he said. “A beautiful day, we were just driving along and all of a sudden, out of the blue, there was this little twister. It went right over the top of the car and the noise was deafening. I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he added, a statement that seemed right for him, but would have been the understatement of the year for the man from Maryland, had he survived.