The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
Authors: Wayne Johnston
Tags: General Fiction
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his words had been based on what, if anything, he knew about my father. “Friends, as we might have been had we gone to school together.”
“No harm done, I hope,” Prowse had said.
And I had told him no.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Three:
CROSSES AND MISERYES
Wynne sends back to Calvert over the next five years glowing reports of the success of the colony at Ferryland, saying they have “prospered to the admiration of all beholders.”
In April 1623, heartened by Wynne’s reports, Calvert applies for and is granted a charter to what he calls the province of Avalon, now fondly referred to as “the bog of Avalon.”
After Wynne’s return to England in 1627, Calvert, by this time so eager to see his colony he can contain himself no longer, sails to Ferryland, accompanied by his family, and spends much of the voyage reading and re-reading Vaughan’s The Golden Fleece .
Shortly after his arrival, two of his ships are seized by pirates, whose long-established habit of plundering the colony Wynne had thought too insignificant to mention in his letters. After the winter of 1628–29, which his scurvy-ridden colonists assure him is not an especially bad one, but which causes Calvert to observe that “in this part of the world crosses and miseryes is my portion,” he sails back to England.
Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing The Newlander’s Cure , a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have never been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well.
Mundy Pond
F OR YEARS, THE ONLY religious symbol in the house had been a plain wooden cross above the stove. A token wooden cross, just in case. My parents hedging their bets.
She had never insisted we go to church, so everyone but me was quite surprised when suddenly my mother became a student of religions, “reading up” on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps.
“What are you up to?” my father said, when she started bringing home catechisms, prayer books, hymn books, missals, Bibles of every denomination. They lay scattered all over the house, publications of the Church of England, the Church of England (Reformed Episcopal), the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic Church. She even read up on what she had formerly dismissed as “crank” religions, such as Christian Science and the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
She did not just read, she went to services as well, often taking me with her because, in spite of her newly awakened curiosity, she seemed to be afraid to go alone. I believe I saw the inside of atleast one church of every denomination in St. John’s. My mother sat or stood, an aloofly critical observer, listening, watching not just the ministers but the congregations. She was like some dispassionately shrewd shopper who would forgo buying altogether if she had to.
She spoke most favourably of the New World evangelical religions.
“I am looking for the real thing, Joe,” she said, “the genuine article, and I have yet to find it.”
One Sunday afternoon, she told me she had a secret that she would tell me if I promised to keep it to myself. I thought I was about to hear about the book and Mr. Mercer. I promised and she told me she had been “convicted of sin” and would soon be “saved.” She told me that she had, that past Tuesday, been converted in the Bethesda Mission of the Pentecostal faith on New Gower Street, the Ark, as it was called, and was to be, the following Sunday, one of forty baptized by immersion in a body of water on the heights of the city known as Mundy Pond.
“I don’t
“No harm done, I hope,” Prowse had said.
And I had told him no.
Fielding’s Condensed
History of Newfoundland
Chapter Three:
CROSSES AND MISERYES
Wynne sends back to Calvert over the next five years glowing reports of the success of the colony at Ferryland, saying they have “prospered to the admiration of all beholders.”
In April 1623, heartened by Wynne’s reports, Calvert applies for and is granted a charter to what he calls the province of Avalon, now fondly referred to as “the bog of Avalon.”
After Wynne’s return to England in 1627, Calvert, by this time so eager to see his colony he can contain himself no longer, sails to Ferryland, accompanied by his family, and spends much of the voyage reading and re-reading Vaughan’s The Golden Fleece .
Shortly after his arrival, two of his ships are seized by pirates, whose long-established habit of plundering the colony Wynne had thought too insignificant to mention in his letters. After the winter of 1628–29, which his scurvy-ridden colonists assure him is not an especially bad one, but which causes Calvert to observe that “in this part of the world crosses and miseryes is my portion,” he sails back to England.
Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing The Newlander’s Cure , a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have never been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well.
Mundy Pond
F OR YEARS, THE ONLY religious symbol in the house had been a plain wooden cross above the stove. A token wooden cross, just in case. My parents hedging their bets.
She had never insisted we go to church, so everyone but me was quite surprised when suddenly my mother became a student of religions, “reading up” on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps.
“What are you up to?” my father said, when she started bringing home catechisms, prayer books, hymn books, missals, Bibles of every denomination. They lay scattered all over the house, publications of the Church of England, the Church of England (Reformed Episcopal), the Presbyterian Church, the Congregational Church, the Salvation Army, the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Roman Catholic Church. She even read up on what she had formerly dismissed as “crank” religions, such as Christian Science and the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
She did not just read, she went to services as well, often taking me with her because, in spite of her newly awakened curiosity, she seemed to be afraid to go alone. I believe I saw the inside of atleast one church of every denomination in St. John’s. My mother sat or stood, an aloofly critical observer, listening, watching not just the ministers but the congregations. She was like some dispassionately shrewd shopper who would forgo buying altogether if she had to.
She spoke most favourably of the New World evangelical religions.
“I am looking for the real thing, Joe,” she said, “the genuine article, and I have yet to find it.”
One Sunday afternoon, she told me she had a secret that she would tell me if I promised to keep it to myself. I thought I was about to hear about the book and Mr. Mercer. I promised and she told me she had been “convicted of sin” and would soon be “saved.” She told me that she had, that past Tuesday, been converted in the Bethesda Mission of the Pentecostal faith on New Gower Street, the Ark, as it was called, and was to be, the following Sunday, one of forty baptized by immersion in a body of water on the heights of the city known as Mundy Pond.
“I don’t
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