NIGHT WALK

If a bay boy can claim a hometown, mine would be St. John’s. That was my thought while hiking up Cornwall Avenue in the city’s west end one night in December 1994. I had come to promote a new book and had just spent the evening with old friends on Craigmillar Avenue. Now I was walking to lodgings some two miles away in the east end. From there I was to sign books in local malls the next morning.

I was on foot because the previous afternoon a northeaster had buried the city, plugging streets, stranding traffic and downing trees and power lines. Whole districts were still in the dark. Heavy rain had followed, collapsing a stadium roof. Now a cold front was sweeping in, freezing the whole mess. There was a fair chance my book signings would be cancelled.

What odds, I thought. For years I’d been meaning to revisit my childhood haunts downtown. Tonight I had the time. I was going that way. Why not do it now? Certainly the old city had never looked so immaculate. O holy night. The Holy City, my poet host had called her, only half in jest.

Poets talk that way. But I knew what he meant. Nothing theological about it; more like aesthetic reverence. Neither of us had been born here; certainly no Pope had. He was a Labradorian lately come; I had merely sojourned here. Yet each of us had explored her steep streets and crazy alleys, roamed her storied waterfront, drunk her poetry.

My sojourns had never been this far west. The farthest west my family had ventured was Bennett Avenue, in 1946. Bennett lay just inside the invisible meridian dividing the propertied Upper Levels – The Quality – from the have-not Lower Levels, the tenement town where itinerant outporters clustered like puffins on a cliffside. Brazil Square, a little to the east, was its heartland.

Bennett was our first city address and our most respectable. The others, roughly one every two years for the next seven, were either rowhouse flats or rooms rented from relatives. We never owned a car, so where we lived was dictated by shank’s mare and how much we could carry. Whatever couldn’t be delivered free, we lugged on foot. For heavy bags of groceries this meant about ten blocks. Bookbags might get farther, but not if the snow was too deep. Such calculations dictated our choices. And of course the rent.

So much walking! St. John’s was a walker’s paradise. I’d tramped the older parts of New York, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, not to mention Britain’s London, Chester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The city could hold its own with them all. Her every vista was enchanting. One could hardly get lost with Signal Hill and its castle for a beacon.

So many hills! A trip down Barter’s Hill to Water Street and back was crippling for knees accustomed to gentler terrain. The first week was the worst. After that we could climb anything.

No wonder topography was on my mind that night. St. John’s scenery was more like that of Fogo, my mother’s outport birthplace, than of Gander Bay, mine. It smelled like Fogo too, especially the waterfront, which reeked of salt cod in summer and seal blubber in winter. Topology was on my mind as well, that interplay of geology and architecture and history which defines a place.

And the history! Ancient by North American standards, torched twice by French militias and razed three times by accident, then re-built on the smoking ashes in fire-trap housing that would burn again. Variously called the slum on the hill, the fishiest of modern capitals and the fifth province of Ireland, St. John’s was home to the sealing fleet, it was a longtime rendezvous for fishing fleets local and foreign, a repair depot for the government’s Alphabet Fleet, a cauldron of political and religious strife, Canada’s Little Europe.

Topography and topology and time.

Approaching the intersection on Hamilton Avenue, I emerge from a matrix of tree shadows into open moonlight – and deeper snow. Here, snot-green slush has filled the few footprints, which are rapidly gelling into ankle-wrenching craters. Now it is two steps forward and one back. Once, I go arse-over-kettle. Part of me now wants to turn around, go back to my hosts and beg a night’s lodging. Then I hit on a better gait – the bow-legged, forward-leaning lurch of a sailor on a reeling deck.

The westerly is becoming a gale. Leafless branches are clashing in the dark, showering shell ice and clots of snow onto the sidewalks. Now and then a lighted lamp or candle glimmers behind closed drapes like a campfire winking in the forest. I have a fey sense of mushing behind sled dogs through a wilderness, as my trapper father did years ago.

But this is no wilderness. Above the crunch-slosh, crunch-slosh of my boots, I hear the wind fluting and keening among telephone wires and chimney pots. The music calls to mind Peter Pan’s statue in Bowring Park a mile or so west. I should have gone to visit him; another time perhaps. It’s already past eleven o’clock. My B & B may close at midnight. So with the wind at my back, tacking from sidewalk to mid-street and back, avoiding the drifts and keeping my trim, I sail east past Cornwall Heights, Shaw Street and Symonds Avenue.

Puffing along, primed with good food and good talk and good whisky, half-wishing I lived here still, I feel grateful to St. John’s. Except for a year in Toronto in my mid-teens, no other place had so fed my youthful imagination. It was here I first heard the lovely cadence of an Irish brogue, performed my first act of vandalism, was terrorized by a street gang, read my first comic book, saw my first movie in a real theatre, climbed a square-rigger, learned some Norwegian, began seriously to draw and paint, bought my first real book, loved a girl who wasn’t a cousin. And tonight, thanks to a Twillingate doctor, a chance blizzard and my Craigmillar friends, I was home.

At LeMarchant and Hamilton, the westering moon breaks through the storm wrack, casting my crab-like shadow on the snow banks ahead. Then the cloud swallows the moon and my shadow, and I am one with the wind, the trees, the snow, the moon, the darkness, the Holy City.

I hadn’t always felt that way about St. John’s. That first winter, living on Gilbert Street, I’d hated it. Of course my parents had good reasons to move: health; schooling; steady work; but to me it seemed senseless. Why abandon a place where we had miles of pristine ice to skate on, skyfuls of clean air to breathe, and a wilderness to ramble in – for this? Bennett Avenue hadn’t been too bad, but Gilbert Street seemed pinched and sordid. My mother railed at the sooty rain that soiled her clean laundry. My eyes thirsted for river water, my feet craved landwash.

Jaywalking along, the wind at my back, I’m making good time. Bennett can’t be much farther, I think; somewhere on my left perhaps. Each step sharpens the sense of delicious familiarity. In the strobe-like play of light and shadow, long-forgotten images surface like trout in a still pond. Wasn’t there some sort of low building near the corner? A creamery perhaps? Painted pale yellow? The building seems to be gone, but there, at the corner of a street, is a sign saying Bennett Avenue. And far up Bennett, where it veers west and uphill, stands a long, grey silhouette that should be St. Michael’s Collegiate, the school I briefly attended in 1946 and where Calvin, my older brother, completed Grade 11. Midway between the school and the corner should be the house where we lived with Mr. and Mrs. Andrews that spring and summer when Mom was recovering from surgery.

Part of me wants to explore the street and school grounds, but tonight is not the time, not when I’ve forgotten to confirm my B & B reservation. I trudge on. Wasn’t there, on the same side, a blocky, two-storey structure of glass and pebbled cement? The Cornwall Theatre? With a large circular window out front? My parents took me to a movie there, my first in a real theatre.

There it is, window and all. I peek in. The ornate lobby is divided into work spaces. Where the ticket booth had been is now crowded with desks, typewriters and filing cabinets.

Several blocks ahead, a ragged lattice of lights hangs above the housetops – the Grace Maternity Hospital. They have managed to get auxiliary lighting for the middle floors. Another memory swims to the surface. Hadn’t Mom’s sister Beatrix and her husband George lived somewhere near here that spring and summer? An image of a sunlit kitchen flits across my mind. I recall breakfasting with her during my mother’s stay in the hospital. Uncle George had just got a job with the Merchant Marine. Again, no time to linger, except to glance down the curving tunnel of Pleasant Street, glimpsing the harbour in its deep tureen of hills. Pleasant Street; something about the name tugs at me, but I pass on.

A few more blocks east, on the opposite side, is another constellation of lights, another ship, slightly taller, adrift in the ocean of darkness. It is Saint Clare’s Mercy Hospital, the one where my mother had her hysterectomy. Closer to St. Clare Avenue there are people moving, breaking trail like me, company at last.

I try to picture my mother lying up there sleepless, surgery only hours away, scared that the cyst or tumour or whatever will be cancerous; dreading the knife but no more so than the foolishness she is liable to spout under ether.

People curse like troopers, you know.

Leaving the glare, I am once more immersed in gloom. Even so, the cityscape is ever more familiar. That street sloping steeply up from the southwest must be Patrick, I think, and the one angling in from the south would be Springdale, where I took Grade 5 in 1947. And, a bit farther east, on the same side, is the top of Casey Street – Casey’s Hill we called it.

Casey Street and the streets below defined my first winter in St. John’s. And despite my initial impressions, they were where I began, at last, to feel at home. This was the chimney-potted nursery where the city midwifed me out of my 19th century world of wood stoves and kerosene lamps and moose meat, and into the 20th century.

Gilbert Street isn’t visible from the top of Casey, but I can see the familiar silhouettes of chimneys and dormers stepping down, tier by tier, to the glimmering harbour and the black South Side Hills beyond. Ghostly moonlight plays richly over the angularity of snowy roofs and shadowy alleys, the accidental glinting cubism of skylights, ladders, fire escapes.

Casey Street draws me down. Reservation or no, locked out or no, I must see Gilbert Street. Maybe the house is still there. What was its number? From some deep well of memory the number forty-seven floats up. And now I recall how Pleasant Street fits in: a long walk, Mom’s youngest brother Harry, a walk that warmed my heart.

One row house looks very like another. At first I can’t find number 47. I remember the colour was foxy, like our house in Gander Bay, but how many times has it been painted since? No matter; by moonlight they all look grey anyhow. And there have been renovations: a dormer here, a doorstep there, window boxes hung. The only thing I know for sure is that it was on the harbour side, halfway between Casey and the next street – whose name I have forgotten. I settle on one, it looks possible; but I must go.

I dodge back up Casey and resign myself to walking the last mile or so to Prescott, hoping they still have a bunk for me. On the way I chuckle at my fear of the John Street gang, my consternation over school nicknames, my happy hours playing Batman after supper in these shadowy alleys. I remember Saturday matinees and reading comic books by the hour. Had my Gilbert Street friend Bobby Chafe told me back then that I’d be poking around our old haunts a half century later, I’d have said, My son, you’re cracked!

As LeMarchant merges with Freshwater Road and Parade Street, my first job comes to mind. At seventeen, newly graduated from Grade 11 in Gander Bay, I’d been hired as a checkout boy at Ayre’s Parade Street Supermarket, likely the first such store in the city. Later I’d worked in their produce department, walking every weekday from 49 Pennywell Road where we rented a flat from Mom’s cousin Mabel Cull and her husband Len.

Just past Parade, where Harvey Road takes in, I pass the old Department of Mines and Resources building where I’d spent the winter of 1953-54 colouring forestry maps before heading out to survey woodlands all summer on the Avalon Peninsula with Hans Mandøe. That winter my family had lived on Hayward Avenue to the northeast. I’d begun to paint landscapes and was winning small prizes. My most ambitious was The Last Mile, a watercolour depicting in tender detail a lone trapper mushing home with dogs and komatik over open muskeg in a turquoise dusk. It expressed my yearning for home: wind-bent tamarack; tufted marsh grasses poking through snow; the dogs’ panting weariness; snowshoes I’d watched my father make in our kitchen. It was the best thing I had yet done and it won a medal and my parents were proud, especially, I think, my father.

Suddenly, looming vast against the driven clouds, the twin spires of the Roman Catholic Basilica come into view, and, not far beyond, on the harbour side, the old Nickel Theatre with its green cupola topped with delicate wrought iron.

In my hurry to reach my B & B before midnight, I hardly notice Bannerman Park and Colonial House. In the first I’d often walked during my last summer in town, admiring the leafy trees and the girls. In Colonial House I’d had my first painting displayed a few years later in a Newfoundland Arts and Letters competition. Approaching Prescott House, I hardly give a thought to nearby Cochrane Street where I’d taken a night course at Reg and Helen Shepherd’s Newfoundland Academy of Art.

Prescott House was open. I fell into bed and, full of childhood memories, slept like a ten-year-old.

BORN!

I didn’t know much, but I knew everything I had to know.

– ALBERTO MANGUEL, After Carthage

Sometime in February 1934, in the downstairs bedroom of a weathered ochre and green frame house in the village of Clarkes Head, Gander Bay, northeast Newfoundland, my father Brett, thirty, impregnated my mother Winnifred, twenty-nine, for the second time in seven years that I know of. Seven years is a long time, but it was the Dirty Thirties and they were poor, but not careless. In a different milieu I might have had more siblings, another brother perhaps, a sister or two, a larger family constellation.

As it was, of the millions of his spermatozoa which perished that night in a vinegar douche, the whip-tailed wriggler on which my genes were riding succeeded, like a salmon surmounting a cascade, in swimming upstream through the cervix and into the waiting uterus, there to meet and pierce and lose itself in the enormous moon of that month’s ovum, which otherwise would have let go and perished in my mother’s monthly rag in the kitchen stove. Instead, it took root, grew a placenta and prospered.

And when, nearly ten months later, on the snowy night of November 23, 1935, the midwife finally eased me from my mother’s body, sticky with blood and amniotic fluid and going blue for lack of oxygen because my face was smothered in a filmy caul, I was like a pink squid washed up on an alien shore. For three dozen weeks I’d floated in a tropical sea, first plastered on the placenta, then free-floating like an astronaut on a coiling tether; suspended in pink darkness and total silence save for the muffled drumbeat of my mother’s heart somewhere above, the steady susurration of her breath, the tidal flux of fluids to and from that tether, which fed and cleansed my exploding blastula of cells.

Thus suspended, blind as a cave fish, I knew neither sunrise nor moon-set, gravity nor weather. My single outer constant was the Voices, remote and strange like the singing of whales. The way I heard best was by thrusting out my feet and arms for better purchase and pressing my spine against hers. Sometimes a high-pitched third voice joined in – my brother’s. Often I heard the erratic trumpeting of my father’s snoring. Sometimes many voices danced in counterpoint.

As my body expanded, it bumped hers more often. I could feel the thrust of a table edge as she kneaded bread, the pull and pinch of garments, the occasional, dizzying, lurching descent from the vertical when she fell and caught herself, the gradual slowing of her burdened movements as I continued to expand. The most alarming sensations came with the draining of my world, followed by irresistible spasms of compression and relaxation and the triphammer beating of her heart, thrusting me down and down and down to emerge at last into the dry, cool, bright, harsh, weightiness of my mother’s world.

Terra incognita.

I knew nothing of the bed, the room, the faded orange and green box of a house that would be my nest for the next eleven years, of the cart path that followed the winding estuary and petered out where the River lost its sweetness in the salt cold Labrador Current.

I knew even less of the saw-toothed, many-islanded triangle of rock and forest and bog to which my forebears had boated from southern England three and four generations ago: Tizzards and Watermans and Laymans on my mother’s side; Gillinghams, Porters and Saunderses on my father’s. Some of them, like migrant salmon, left their storm-lashed islands and the serfdom of merchant princes for the balsamy woods. They found these woods as rich in salmon and caribou, fur and timber, as the ocean was rich in cod and seals.

But all I knew was feeding and voiding, warmth and cold, dry and wet. Nothing else had anything to do with me, contentedly sucking my mother’s nipples day and night.

No odds to me that on February 11, 1934, the month of my conception, my country’s sovereignty had been signed away; that all Newfoundland babies born that year would have to wait fifteen years for a country to call their own. Political orphans.

Orphan or no, I did have kin. Unknown to me, blood aunts and uncles and cousins lived up and down the road. And I had a seven-year-old brother sleeping upstairs, aware of my first mewling cries. The only person I yet knew on the planet was my mother, lying exhausted and sweaty in bed beside me, forehead swathed in cold face cloths placed by her mother-in-law Mary, who was tending us now the midwife had left. Mom had weeks of recuperation ahead.

By all accounts, mine was a hard birth. "She was so big, her sister Beatty would say. We both had narrow pelvises. Although Mom’s pink complexion and solid figure – I was always chubby before the children came" – suggested vibrant health, she was anaemic and the pregnancy had taxed her. And it had not gone as planned. My brother’s birth in Buffalo had not been easy, but at least there was a doctor on call. Women’s childbed fever was a constant worry with home birthing; that and complications. She’d lost her infant sister Alma in 1919. Mary had lost her first child, Gordon, after only six days in 1902.

That was why, in her third trimester, my mother arranged to go to Fogo. Even if the town’s promised cottage hospital was a year away, at least the town had a doctor and a nurse. Moreover, her sister Frances lived there, also her younger brother Tom and his wife Carrie and her widowed father. Carrie had neither chick nor child, but Fanny and Jabez did, and would welcome her. Therefore she would have my father take her in the passenger boat, and have him fetch us home before the winter storms set in.

That was her plan.

But Fogo Island was four or five hours’ steam away, and the North Atlantic is notoriously fickle in the fall. Near the end of October, a week or so before her calculated date, they chanced it. For a woman prone to seasickness the voyage wasn’t easy. Once safely there, however, with my father heading back home, she relaxed a little.

Two weeks later I still hadn’t come. Embarrassed, fearful of being storm-bound away from home, or, worse, marooned in Fogo all winter – Mom wired for Dad to fetch her home. A week later, back in Clarkes Head, she felt the first pangs, slow but sure. I can imagine the dialogue:

Brett! Wake up! (elbowing him in the ribs). He groans and rolls toward her. Brett (she pronounces it ‘Britt’), you better get Aunt Sis. My contractions started an hour ago; they’re comin’ steady now.

Aunt Elizabeth Peckford was the nearest practising midwife. She was no relation, just one of many honourary aunts and uncles in that place and time. She lived across the bay at Harris Point, a fifteen-minute canoe trip. There was no causeway then, no cars.

You’re sure? he mutters, striking a match and squinting at the alarm clock. After midnight. Not another false alarm? There had been several.

No, she says testily, gasping as a spasm grips her. Fully awake now, he swings his feet onto the cold canvas floor. He lights the kerosene lamp, he lodges it on the sideboard and twists the knob until the flame is low, then pulls on a heavy mackinaw shirt over his long underwear. He heads for the kitchen, buttoning as he goes, breathing deeply to stay calm. Seven years since he’s done this…easy in Buffalo, just call the doctor, grab a taxi to the hospital. Still, he and his six siblings were all born at home. But according to Winnie this baby was already weeks late.

He was in the kitchen before he heard her shout: "Britt, my son. You forgot your pants. I’m not that far along." This would become a family joke. He hurries back, dons his khaki Home Guard breeches and shrugs into his suspenders. In the kitchen he grabs a lantern and lights it. A pause to haul on his thigh rubbers, another to grab his parka off its peg, another to put fresh wood in the stove, and he is out the gate. Head down in the raw east wind, he strides to his parents’ home five minutes away to rouse his mother. That done, and Mary safely in the foxy house, he grabs a blanket and tarpaulin for Mrs. Peckford and hurries down to the wharf. Reaching the wharf, he unties the canoe and, grunting with effort, launches the heavy craft, stern-first, into the choppy waters. A two-handed shove with his river pole propels it along. In one motion he replaces the pole on the thwarts, sets the aging outboard’s controls, spins the starter wheel and is on his way. Canoe and man are soon lost in the first snow squalls.

Twenty minutes later Winnifred and Mary hear the hum of his motor. In the cuddy, bundled under the tarp, sits the sleepy midwife. God willing, he thinks, things will be all right now.

It was the caul, that troublesome tatter of amniotic sac that kept me from bawling as a newborn should. Like Dickens’ David Copperfield, I was born with such an impediment, which, says the author in a footnote, [is] taken as an omen that [the child] will be lucky in life and never drowned. The trouble was, my good luck film was suffocating me until the midwife peeled it off. What followed was the strangled cry my brother heard.

Years later I would learn that Calvin came downstairs the next morning and said, Mommy, Daddy, last night I heard my lost kitten meow. Did she come back? My father had made away with the little stray after it shit in his slipper.

She’s gone, my son, he said, pulling the boy close, but come see what we’ve got for you. A baby brother.

Poor Calvin.

Instead of a furry kitten with green eyes he saw a red-faced monkey with moist black hair noisily sucking at his mother. He must have been disappointed; I would have been. Especially when our mom was so weak she lay in bed for ten days afterward, drinking nothing but tea and scarcely eating.

But there I was, his little and last brother, conceived in a lull between two disastrous world wars, born at the tail end of an economic depression into a bankrupt former colony governed by a committee, born between forest and sea into a community built on lumber, salmon, furring and guiding, whose population six years hence would still number only 324, of whom most still had one foot in the 19th century, born to a woman who loved the city and a man who loved a river.

THE FOXY HOUSE

It was just a little frame house, the house I was born in, barely a storey and a half, three rooms downstairs and two up, two windows to a side downstairs, one per gable, and a stovepipe for a chimney. It had a lean-to kitchen on its north wall, and, to the west, a tiny porch that opened onto a two-inch plank deck which, though the North Atlantic was an estuary away, we called The Bridge.

Small and makeshift though it was, it was my childhood home. And though its clapboard seemed always thirsty for paint, it was well built. It had good lines. Unlike your typical squat-roofed outport house, it had that steep Change Islands look. In fact my grandfather-to-be, Frank Saunders, who hired the carpenter, was a Change Islands man. A bookkeeper by trade, he’d arrived in Gander Bay via Twillingate and Lewisporte around 1899, seeking land and a business of his own. He married a local beauty, Mary Gillingham, and went on to become the sawmiller/shopkeeper of Clarkes Head.

But he’d never meant the house to be lived in. It had started out as one of several storage buildings – stores they called them then – more like something you’d see hunkered on a wharf than smiling behind a white picket fence. The place just happened to be empty in March 1931, when my parents and baby brother arrived home from Away.

Having lived four years in the States – Boston, New York and Buffalo – and having spent a winter near Huntsville, Ontario, they had come home to ride out the Depression. It was a harrowing journey for a young couple and a toddler: two days and a night by train to North Sydney, with changes in Montreal and Truro, Nova Scotia; thirteen hours crossing Cabot Strait in the S.S. Kyle in a 60-mph gale that sickened everyone but Captain Tavernere, his crew and Dad; stuck overnight in a snowdrift near Kittys Brook on the high and windy uplands of the Gaff Topsails of western Newfoundland, and, finally, an overnight horse and sleigh ride from Lewisporte across Dog Bay Neck to the bay. But the three of them arrived home safe at last and thankful.

And since they planned to stay, they needed something to live in, something warmer than Grandpa’s drafty summer cabin in by Clarkes Brook. Since they had no money to build new, and since Clarkes Head had nothing for rent, the warehouse got the nod. They couldn’t very well live on the wharf, but relocating was never a problem in Newfoundland. Newfoundlanders and Laradorians launched houses as casually as shifting a trunk across a room. Over land, over ice, over water – it was all the same. To them it was like launching a skiff or a schooner, just more cumbersome. It was almost a social event.

All you had to do was send out word and name your date. On the appointed day, usually in winter, dozens of men converged on the structure with stout manila ropes and long timber skids. Sometimes they brought horses; always there were children and dogs. All they asked was that the stove be cold and the flue be dismantled (brick chimneys were rare so this was seldom a problem) or at least stuffed with rags to stifle the soot; that crockery, lamps and other breakables be removed to safety and that doors and windows be closed.