The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston Page B

she will. Hear me, my dear woman; hear me, sister — I will not name you, for you know who you are, and God knows, for God knows everything — God, if only you will ask Him, will forgive you.”
    This “woman” could have been almost anybody, but I could see why my mother had been so affected.
    My mother was baptized in early June, in water from which the last ice had melted but a month before. She arrived back home on Sunday morning in a cart driven by a Pentecostal couple from the Brow. She was wrapped in a blanket, her hair was matted to her head and face and her clothes clung, still dripping water, to her body.
    “I’m saved, Joe,” she said weakly, lips quivering. “I’m saved.”
    “Take care of your mother, boy,” the man said gruffly. “Bless you, Mrs. Smallwood,” the woman said as they drove off. Their ragged old horse clopped slowly down the hill.
    I took my mother into the kitchen, where she sat shivering, arms folded, looking like someone who had been saved, not from damnation, but from drowning and had been hustled home beforeshe caught pneumonia. My sisters urged her to go upstairs with them and change into something dry, but she looked as if she hadn’t heard them. Her eyes seemed focused inward, as though on some vision she had had and was forbidden to reveal.
    I don’t know what happened to my mother that day on the shore of Mundy Pond, but something did, something that altered her forever. I vowed that if God Himself appeared to me, I would assure Him that I would rather save myself than have Him do it.

Fielding’s Condensed
       History of Newfoundland
    Chapter Four:
    QUODLIBETS
    Robert Hayman, who flees Cupids and helps start up and govern a colony called Bristol’s Hope, from which he soon returns to England, writes a book called Quodlibets , a miscellany of odds and ends, a corrective to the nonsense that Vaughan is churning out, which unfortunately never appears in its original form but is amended, bowdlerized by Vaughan before publication. (Prowse, in his History , mistaking Vaughan’s edition as authoritative, dismisses Quodlibets as “a curious medley.” Prowse was completely taken in by Vaughan, to the point of believing that Vaughan travelled to Newfoundland and began a colony at Trepassey, when in fact he never in his life sailed far enough from England to lose sight of shore.)
    We are in possession of one of the rare copies of the original Quodlibets . In the Vaughan edition, the following poem appears:
The aire in Newfoundland is wholesome, good,
The fire as sweet as any made of wood,
The waters very rich, both salt and fresh,
The earth more rich, you know it is no lesse.
Where all are good, fire, water, earth and air,
What man made of these would not live there?
    Here is the poem as it appears in Hayman’s notebooks:
The aire in Newfoundland unwholesome is, not goode,
One cannot goe outside without a hoode.
The Waters, salt and fresh, they are like ice.
All who fall in perish in a trice.
Fire is rare there is so little woode,
For growing ought the earth it is no goode.
Against life do all the elements conspire.
Man made of water, earth, aire and fire,
Hearken not to William Vaughan, he is a liar.

Harold Dexter
    T HOUGH I LEFT Bishop Feild voluntarily, I would forever feel that I had failed there, and it would be the presiding failure of my life, the first in a list that, for a long time, seemed as if it would never end. When, in the last quarter of the century, I came to oversee the writing of my encyclopedia of Newfoundland, I would see to it that under the entry for Bishop Feild, no mention was made of me. The explanation I would give for this was that I did not deserve mention among those who, after graduating from Bishop Feild, went on to be Rhodes Scholars or otherwise distinguished themselves. The real reason was that I did not want Bishop Feild getting any credit for what I went on to do.
    In 1915, I had what today would amount to a grade nine education. I