The Big Why Read Online Free PDF Page A

stiff muscle.
    Lift your legs high, sir, Tom Dobie said again. They were having a good laugh at my struggle.
    We made it into Brigus that afternoon and Stan and Tony kept marching — they were on their way to the north end of the harbour. The train, said Tom Dobie, will be along shortly. We had been hearing it through the morning, straining in the distance.
    We sat there at the station with our snowshoes. I took out my pencil and sketchbook.
    I accept inertia and I can live within it for a long time. Travelling is pleasant because you can assuage any guilt at inactivity with the excuse that you are moving. As though you had anything to do with the forward progress of a train. Well, this is the whole pleasure of capitalism, to pay for the efforts of others. To jockey yourself into position to make your skill prized and worth the attention of others.
    The train hauled itself out of the hills. Pried through the mat of spruce up by Thunderbolt Hill and curled and sunk away. A few townspeople were walking up to the station. I knew their names, for Tom Dobie was there to tell me. Jim Hearn a pharmacist. Bud Chafe he’s got a shop.
    The train sounded and then it was seen and heard sandwiched together. The horror of its brakes, the joints freezing up, the panic and patience of its Clydesdale stance and exhaust. The freezing breeze caught up with the train like a cloud shadow. The canvas mail was thrown off and crates marked CHAFE rapidly traded for the crates Chafe sent back. I found my bags. Men climbed down the perforated steps clogged with dirty snow, snow jammed into the works and yet the works still working.
    I thought, What the hell. What the hell am I doing. Where the hell is this and what is a place like this all about. Several times a day I checked myself. What are you doing, my son. What’s it all about. If I were to offer anyone advice, it would be to ask yourself that question. Or never ask. If you dont want to inspect the creak in your soul that’s okay. Go ahead and die unaware. I’m not being facetious.
    My yellow suitcase in the flat snow. I took out a small map that Bob Bartlett had given me. As I said, it was because of Bartlett that I was here. Because I happened to meet this ship captain at a lecture five years before and mention my interest in Newfoundland, because of that spur I was in his hometown. Life’s occurrences arrive both through determination and through chance. I looked at the map. Then up. Tom Dobie was at the suitcase.
    Sir, he said.
    I was concentrating on becoming the man I wished to present. I wanted to look focused and not self-conscious. I had held an abstract of the land in my mind and was stepping, it seemed, for the first time into its geography.
    Sir I knows where you wants to be going.
    Call me Kent.
    Okay, Kent. You be wanting the Bartletts I reckon.
    I want to go to that Georgian house that your father was going to show me. It’s marked here on this map.
    Kent, she’s all stove in.
    I’d like to see it. And to myself: He underestimates my endurance.
    We followed the postman who had come on his old pony to collect the four-oclock mail. Swift, they called the pony. With the toe of each seaboot Tom Dobie smudged the wheel tracings in the snow. All the houses had ladders on their roofs.
    We walked to the Pinch. We came upon the Georgian house that Bob Bartlett said I could have. The house he hadnt seen in two years.
    The roof had broken from the snow. The windows and the spine of it had all gone. She had exhausted herself.
    Well that is very welcoming.
    You’d have to be as foolish as Bud Chafe’s dog to live in that house.
    So I guess.
    I was disheartened.
    Like I was saying, Rupert Bartlett he’s just over there.
    He pointed to a very bright, merry house billowing with woodsmoke. So much for endurance.
10
    Rupert Bartlett: So youre the painter.
    I am the man.
    It was not the right thing to say to me, but I understood this is what is thought of me. It wasnt that I was embarrassed