The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston Page A

know what came over me, Joe,” she said. “I went to the mission just to see what all the fuss was about, everybody was talking about the Bethesda Mission and this woman, this Miss Garrigus, but something happened, Joe, something happened.”
    It must have been clear from my expression that I was frightened and did not want to hear what had happened, for she stopped speaking and turned away from me, putting her hands over her face. I wanted to keep my distance from this religious fervour for fear of coming down with it myself, losing myself to it. I was terrified of the idea that something more powerful than my own will might be moving me along, or would if I gave in to it. I could see already that she would never wholly be mine as she had been before and would never think of me as wholly hers.
    The head of the Pentecostal Church in any diocese was called the overseer and had to be a man, but up to now no suitable men had been attracted to the Ark, so Miss Garrigus was unofficiallythe overseer, with the only sacrament she could not perform being marriage. My mother hung a large portrait photograph of Miss Garrigus above the front-room fireplace. In it, Miss Garrigus wore her hair up, piled high above her head, with a cleft down the middle so that it seemed to form the letter M . She wore a black dress with a perforated-lace collar, from which there hung a cross-shaped lace doily. One hand rested on a cane, the other held open on her lap a large black Bible. She stared out from the photograph disdainfully, unnervingly. She looked as though she could size you up in half a second, as though she had heard every excuse there was for loose living, moral weakness and Godlessness ten times over and could not be fooled. My father, looking at the photograph, called her Alice in Newfoundland.
    Before Baptism Sunday, my mother took me to hear her preach. I wondered if she was hoping that I, too, might be converted.
    Miss Garrigus was an “unrivalled revivalist” — her own assessment — from New England, who that night, in a sermon of which, for fervour and soul-stirring eloquence, my mother said she had never heard the equal, told her congregation that her own conversion had occurred in a dilapidated barn in Maine.
    “Barn born I was,” she said. “I have spent the last twenty years revivalling, travelling the world, preaching, baptizing and saving souls. But recently, at the age of fifty-two, I felt the call to Newfoundland; I felt compelled by the Lord to come to Newfoundland and establish here a mission called the Ark. The shape of Newfoundland began appearing in my dreams, first a vague shape that each night grew more distinct and began to look like some sort of island, though which one I could not tell. Eventually, it was Newfoundland I saw, though I did not know it, I did not know what Newfoundland looked like. I drew the shape I saw in my dreams and showed it to a friend, who told me I had drawn a map of Newfoundland, a map that was accurate in every way.” Miss Garrigus then unscrolled the map she had drawn and showed it to the congregation and told how, upon consulting anatlas, she had her “call to Newfoundland” confirmed beyond all doubt when she saw that the capital of what was soon to be her diocese was called St. John’s, after St. John the Baptist and St. John of the Gospels, who ended the Book of Revelations and indeed the Bible as a whole with the watchword of the Pentecostal Church, “Jesus is coming soon.”
    “Newfoundlanders, you are all New Found,” she said, “foundlings on the doorstep of salvation. You are here in my mission today because you have no church, because no other church would take you in. Or should I say, because you would not be taken in by other churches.
    “There is a woman in this congregation,” she said, “who has been keeping to herself an awful secret, something she thinks no one else knows, though someone does; something she believes she will never be forgiven for, though