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By Root 8006 0

because he was a Home boy, jeered and made his life hell. In the end they cheated him of his little wage and finally turned him adrift in the Ontario winter when he was thirteen. He went on to another farmer who was worse, if can be. Never, never once in the years he worked on the farms—and he slaved at it because he didn’t know anything else until he was killed in an accident when he was barely twenty—never once did anyone say a kind word to him since he got off the ship in Montreal. He wrote to my father that only his letters kept him from taking his life. He had to steal the paper he wrote on. He planned to come out to Newfoundland but he died before he could.

“The other two had a miserable time of it as well. Oh I remember our dad lying on the daybed and stretching out his feet [170] and telling us about those poor lonely boys, slaves to the cruel Canadian farmers. He’d say, ‘Count your blessings that you’re in a snug harbor.’

“My father taught all his children to read and write. In the winter when the fishing was over and the storms wrapped Gaze Island, my father would hold school right down there in the kitchen of the old house. Yes, every child on this island learned to read very well and write a fine hand. And if he got a bit of money he’d order books for us. I’ll never forget one time, I was twelve years old and it was November, 1933. Couple of years before he died of TB. Hard, hard times. You can’t imagine. The fall mail boat brought a big wooden box for my father. Nailed shut. Cruel heavy. He would not open it, saved it for Christmas. We could hardly sleep nights for thinking of that box and what it might hold. We named everything in the world except what was there. On Christmas Day we dragged that box over to the church and everybody craned their necks and gawked to see what was in it. Dad pried it open with a screech of nails and there it was, just packed with books. There must have been a hundred books there, picture books for children, a big red book on volcanoes that gripped everybody’s mind the whole winter—it was a geological study, you see, and there was plenty of meat in it. The last chapter in the book was about ancient volcanic activity in Newfoundland. That was the first time anybody had ever seen the word Newfoundland in a book. It just about set us on fire—an intellectual revolution. That this place was in a book. See, we thought we was all alone in the world. The only dud was a cookbook. There was not one single recipe in that book that could be made with what we had in our cupboards.

“I never knew how he paid for those books or if they were a present, or what. One of the three boys he wrote to on the farms moved to Toronto when he grew up and became an elevator operator. He was the one who picked the books out and sent them. Perhaps he paid for them, too. I’ll never know.”

The new paint gleamed on the wood, the fresh letters black and sharp.

“Well, I wonder if I’ll make it out here again upright or lying down. I’d better have my stone carved deep because there’s nobody [171] to paint me up every few years except some nephews and nieces down in St. John’s.”

Quoyle wondering about William Ankle. “What did it mean, what your father said about the tall, quiet woman. You said it about Wavey Prowse. Something your father used to say. A poem or a saying.”

“Ar, that? Let’s see. Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. It was just a thing he said. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where he got it.”

“You were never married Billy?”

“Between you and me, I had a personal affliction and didn’t want anybody to know.”

Quoyle’s hand to his chin.

“Half that stuff,” said Billy, “that sex stuff Nutbeem and Tert Card spews out, I don’t know what they mean. What there could be in it.” What he knew was that women were shaped like leaves and men fell.

He pointed down the slope, away from the sea.

“Another cemetery there. An old cemetery.” A plot lower down enclosed with beach rubble. They walked