As the old folks would say Page 6

  The big man continued, interpreting the younger man’s lack of response as a display of weakness.

  “Catches lots of codfish, I s’pose?”

  There was a visible gleam in the editor-in-chief’s eye as he mimicked the way he once heard an outport Newfoundlander talk.

  Taunting Newfoundlanders about codfish was the editor-in-chief’s accomplished way of demeaning them. He enjoyed their embarrassment. The tone was biting, intended to provoke, but the young man didn’t react. He was peering intently into his coffee cup, as if there were something at the bottom he had forgotten to examine.

  The editor-in-chief continued uninterrupted. He was a beast of prey toying with his kill, and he took malicious delight in tormenting the young, inexperienced writers, especially if they came from some obscure place in the Maritimes.

  After all, the young writers were entirely within his power. And wasn’t that what they were here for? Wasn’t he Joshua P. Mackenzie, the editor-in-chief of one of Toronto’s leading publishing houses? Didn’t he have the power of life and death, so to speak, over every young writer’s manuscript, over this young writer’s manuscript? And, where this young writer was from Newfoundland, well . . .

  True, he had read all the material that came across his desk, including this young writer’s novel. Whatever the flaws of his bullying character, he was a good editor, and he had read the manuscript. It wasn’t a bad novel for a beginner, and he had already made up his mind to recommend it for publication. But that could wait until tomorrow.

  Right now, it was time for fun, and the young Newfoundlander, in the editor’s scheme of things, had displayed all the right attributes of weak prey. He was friendly and open and had talked freely and trustingly about Newfoundland and his friends and family back home, to the delight of Mr. MacKenzie, who gleefully encouraged him for his own perverse purposes. Now that the young writer had been softened up with light conversation over a three-course dinner in one of the finest restaurants in Toronto, the games could begin. This was going to be easy: too easy, too one-sided, no challenge.

  “Mr. Mackenzie . . . !” His secretary’s tone was entreating, pleading.

  She wanted her superior to stop the baiting before it began. She was from a small town in Nova Scotia and had experienced it herself: the witty insults, the undeserved embarrassment, the sense of powerlessness. Being sensitive by nature, she empathized with these young, beginning writers, but she knew she could not help. The editor-in-chief was simply too overpowering—and he was her boss. Anyway, she knew that once the tormenting began it would not end until the potential victim had been reduced to a state of total humiliation.

  She exchanged helpless glances with the assistant editor in the gold-rimmed glasses, but the latter simply shrugged and slouched back helplessly. In spite of his accomplished—and superior—intellect, and the fact that he, like the editor-in-chief, was from Toronto, he knew he was no match for his brutish boss at this level of confrontation. He could only offer silent emotional support.

  “They gives honorary doctorates to the ones who cuts open the most codfish, I s’pose,” the editor-in-chief continued in his mimicking tone, winking in the direction of the assistant editor. He was alluding to the granting of that prestigious honour to the first premier of Newfoundland. The assistant editor did not acknowledge the wink. The young writer still didn’t respond. He was studiously turning the coffee cup from back to front, totally engrossed in its movement.

  The two assistants looked imploringly at Mr. Mackenzie, but he ignored them. He had the young writer where he wanted him, to where he had reduced so many before, to that state of abject confusion, where they were too intimidated, too destroyed, to reply.

  “I heard you haves to work with lots of fish guts in your university there, what’s its name . . . oh, yes, Memorial . . . before you gets your degree.”

  The editor-in-chief knew enough about the culture to frame the insult. He wasn’t unintelligent. The tone was more gleeful. Disposing of the fish entrails, the guts and sound bones, was considered by him as working in dirt, subhuman, degrading. It was intended to hurt.

  He had moved his body so that he was leaning directly forward, his thick torso and bushy head with its apelike eyebrows dominating the little group. This position was his most imposing, his most formidable, his most dangerous, as he continued the mocking tone.

  “What I can’t understand is how you gets the smell of fish off the degree before you hangs it on the wall; but I s’pose the kinds of houses you hangs it in, it don’t make no difference.”

  With this taunt, the badgering seemed to have worked. The Newfoundlander repositioned himself and looked around the table. Astonishingly, his air was surprisingly casual, unperturbed. He had set the coffee cup gently in the saucer and was resting his arm on the table, where his finger traced some unintelligible pattern on the serviette. His other arm rested loosely on his leg. In the slouching position he had assumed, he looked totally nonplussed.

  The two assistants sat with their eyes downcast. The young Newfoundlander inhaled deeply and made a peculiar movement with his jaw, clicking his teeth as if he were trying hard to remember something. He looked directly into the eyes of his tormentor before he finally spoke, in a subdued, even tone.

  “As a matter of fact, I never caught a fish in my life.”

  He didn’t say “codfish.” He just said “fish,” like Newfound-landers do.

  “A Newfoundlander who never caught a fish! You’re putting me on.”

  The editor-in-chief guffawed. He seemed genuinely incredulous.

  “Never caught a fish!” he repeated, studying the young writer with amusement. “So what did you do for money . . . for all that university?”

  Here he leaned back, nodding his head in mock understanding.

  “Oh, I know. Our unemployment insurance. All the money we send you from Ottawa. You gets your stamps . . .”

  The editor-in-chief’s voice trailed off, delighted with his response. The secretary and the assistant editor winced. The taunting had become too excessive, too belligerent, but the editor continued, his face bland of emotion, his demeaning tone cloaked in a feigned sincerity, as if he were truly interested.

  “So, with all that squalor and welfare, how did you do it? Get through university, I mean? All those degrees you have . . .”

  He rested his thick elbows on the table, relaxing in the knowledge of his superiority.

  “They’re not honorary, are they? Of course they wouldn’t be, would they? You’d have to be a little prime minister with a big bow tie to get the honorary ones, wouldn’t you?”

  It was another derisive reference to Newfoundland’s first prime minister. This man was a master. He was in control, pushing, probing, exploring the terrain, looking for a weakness.

  “You must have worked at something,” he insisted, his expression one of mock exasperation. You fellows never have any money, do you . . . except what you get from us, of course?”

  His eyes were gleaming again. This writer had to break soon. None of them held out this long. The young Newfoundlander continued to look straight at his tormentor. Nothing about him had changed. When he spoke he seemed unaffected by the harassment. The taunting, the debasing tone, seemed never to have happened. His response continued to be even, controlled.

  “Yes, I did work, no question about that. I had to, like a lot of others from the outports.”

  He used the traditional Newfoundland word for the many tiny villages that clung precariously to the rocks around the Newfoundland coastline.

  “None of us had very much, like you say. Although we weren’t as bad off as you’re making us out to be, like you read about in those other countries. Still, if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to work hard.”

  He sat straight up, warming to his own defence, but he was still casual, almost nonchalant in hi
s tone.

  “We were never hungry, though, just the same . . . we had lots of rough grub . . . and we were always warm. But we didn’t have much money, cash money . . . I’ve got to agree with you there.”

  He stopped, as if finished with his defence, seemingly satisfied with his explanation. He reached for his wineglass, which was still full, and raised it to his lips, going through the motion of sipping, though no wine left the glass. His eyes had taken on a peculiar cast, as if he were seeing again what he had left behind, and was proud of the memory.

  The editor-in-chief paused, unable to comprehend a new turn of mood which had somehow come to dominate the table, although he didn’t immediately show it. Something about this young writer was beginning to unnerve him, as if he were becoming aware for the first time of some impenetrable shield that encased the young man’s presence, a shield that defied every one of his satiric barbs, a shield that hid something deep and cautioning.

  This writer wasn’t responding like the others. He should have been broken by this time. His position as editor-in-chief, his control over any attempt at publication, his intimidatory presence should have forced the writer to cow to his sadistic game playing, to succumb to his indefatigable bullying. It should have been over by now, but it was like it hadn’t even begun.

  This Newfoundlander was perplexing him. Worse, it was disturbing him. He had seemed so easy to figure out in the beginning—youthful, naive, gullible, easy to manipulate—but he was now displaying a mysterious strength, and the game was not unfolding the way the editor had planned. Something in the tone of the young writer’s replies just didn’t fit. Something hard and flintlike was forming behind those eager, open eyes; something hard and flintlike that could only be noticed if the observer were very astute; something hard and flintlike that warned of danger to any who came too close, who tried to penetrate the shield too deeply.

  The secretary and the assistant had noticed something, too, and they both turned to study the young writer, but they still didn’t understand. They too were puzzled by his failure to break.

  “No, I didn’t fish at all,” the young writer repeated. “In fact, none of my family fished. They were all ironworkers. My father, my uncles, my brothers, all my cousins—just about everybody where I come from—all worked at the steel, putting up those big buildings . . .”

  He continued to look at the editor-in-chief as he absent-mindedly toyed with the full glass of wine that now rested on the table.

  “. . . New York, Boston, Philadelphia, places like that. Oh, we might have caught a fish or two in the fall of the year, enough for the winter, if you know what I mean, but we wouldn’t call ourselves fishermen. We weren’t fishermen, like them fellas in Englee and Bonavista . . . and them places.”

  He was slipping into his outport way of speaking, with which he seemed more at ease. He stopped to raise the wineglass to his lips but he still didn’t take any wine, and he didn’t continue. The editor sat back uneasily. The others waited. The assistant editor spoke for the first time, relieved by the new turn in the conversation.

  “So you were an ironworker? That’s how you put yourself through.”

  The assistant editor was always sincerely interested in the young writers, and they liked him. He was easy with them, and he had character. The young Newfoundlander turned toward him, his eyes softening. When he spoke, his voice was tinged with laughter.

  “Me, an ironworker? No way. I couldn’t climb for beans. I mean, have you ever seen those fellows climb steel—eighty, ninety, a hundred stories up, walking on steel beams inches wide . . . ? No sir, you’d never get me up there in a month of Sundays. Me for good old solid ground. If I’m going to fall, it’s going to be from right here.”

  He nodded his head downwards as he indicated a distance from the floor with the palm of his hand.

  “So, what did you do?” asked the secretary, following his movement with interest.

  “Like you said, you didn’t have much, and you put yourself through all those years of university. You have a couple of degrees, don’t you?”

  The young man nodded in the affirmative.

  “So, how did you earn money?” she continued.

  It was a sincere question, in a respectful tone. The young writer perused her before answering, his eyes resting softly upon the openness and honesty in her expression. Then he shifted his position to look directly at the editor-in-chief, responding with a casualness that seemed out of place with the words, words that seemed paced for effect.

  “I was, what they call in New York . . .” and here he hesitated, pronouncing the words almost with disinterest, “. . . a street-fighter.”

  He raised the wineglass again to his lips, holding the glass in that position for a long time, although he still didn’t sip any wine. He rotated the glass slowly in the light before setting it back on the table.

  The assistant editor and the secretary exchanged surprised glances, unable to reconcile the implications of the statement with the quiet personality they had come to know, even in such a short time. The editor-in-chief sat immobile, the look on his face hovering between scorn and incredulity, but the colour of his face changed slightly, and a tinge that looked like fear flickered momentarily in his eyes.

  The tinge, however, just as rapidly disappeared, as he fell back into his bullying disposition, acutely aware of the contrast between the words and the person who had uttered them. The words that conjured up images of viciousness and savagery simply did not match the inoffensive-looking person who sat across from him. It was too much to accept. Still, he didn’t sound quite as sure of himself as before, even as he snorted a contemptuous response.

  “You, a street-fighter! I’ve seen street-fighters. They’re as hard as they look. You look like a cream puff. They’d eat you for breakfast.”

  He was trying to snarl but it didn’t quite come off. He had become inexplicably wary, apprehensive. His arrogance had waned and his eyes were troubled. His physical size and the overpowering strength of his position had never been challenged before, and this young writer was challenging him: quietly, subtly, and it continued to unnerve him, rendering him more and more uncomfortable. Like all insecure, bullying people, he could only equate strength with size.

  He would have liked to dismiss the person across from him as puny, weak, inconsequential, to dismiss him with a contemptuous wave of his huge bearlike hand, but something in the young writer’s tone, something in the way he was now controlling the conversation, was inducing a tightness in the editor-in-chief’s stomach. When their eyes met, he involuntarily swallowed as if a lump were in his throat.

  He had picked up the hard flint in the writer’s eyes again.

  “You, a street-fighter,” echoed the secretary, her voice resounding in the silent interval. Reared in a quiet country town in Nova Scotia, she had never witnessed any kind of a physical confrontation in her life, but she had watched Mafia movies with her boyfriend, and she knew what a tough guy was supposed to look like.

  “Aren’t they tough-looking and all scarred up?”

  She shook her head in disbelief, contrasting him with the movie image. In her mind, he just didn’t stack up at all.

  “You’re putting us on,” enjoined the assistant editor, studying the young writer intently. A wry smile was slowly forming on his face.

  “You . . . well . . . you just don’t look the part.”

  He emphasized “look,” as his eyes appraised the slight build of the man who was the focus of his attention.

  The young writer ignored their looks as he gazed intently at the full wineglass which he still held in his hand, seemingly unaffected by the surprise and disbelief which had greeted his announcement, as if it were exactly the kind of response he should have expected.

  When he raised his eyes to speak, his tone was assuring.

  “Well, you can believ
e it,” he said. “For all those years I attended university I paid my way as a street-fighter. Of course, they didn’t call it that in Newfoundland,” he said, looking quickly from one to the other of his small audience. “They didn’t have any streets then.”

  Here he stopped and smiled in the direction of Mr. Mackenzie. His tone had resumed its buoyancy, his eyes were again light and cheery.

  “So, where did you fight?” The assistant editor was curious. “I mean, if you didn’t fight on the street, and I don’t mean to infer . . .”

  He coloured a little when he thought of the hidden meaning of his question, which was unintended. The writer continued on, taking no notice of the assistant editor’s look of embarrassment.

  “You’re right, we didn’t fight on the street—or on the road, for that matter. As far as the old people were concerned, only the ‘rals’ did that. I mean, the punks, the real thugs. Any Newfoundlander who was a gentleman would challenge you to the public wharf and you’d have it out in fair play, shake hands when it was over, and go back to whatever you were doing—win, lose, or draw. That’s the way the old people fought.”

  A sense of pride was evident in his voice. He was talking about his people. He leaned forward to pick up the serviette but seemed to change his mind.

  “Anyway, by the time I was getting old enough to do that stuff, we were in Confederation and it was called creating a disturbance, disturbing the peace, or whatever, and you could get arrested by the RCMP, the new police force.”

  “But, you must have fought somewhere. Where did you fight?” the exasperation was evident in the secretary’s voice.

  “Well, I told you I came from an ironworker background. I just chased the job sites. Mostly across the Gulf . . . the big cities . . . wherever the buildings were going up, wherever there were ironworkers,” he replied in her direction. “That’s where I’d head. Any job site was good for business. These ironworkers were hard as nails. There weren’t many who didn’t like a good scrap—or watch one—and it wasn’t hard to line up somebody for a good fight. You could always count on a couple of fights even on the smallest job.”