Read Online The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston - Free Book Online

to see if I shared his view that Cluney Aylward, whom I had never heard of, was a representative Newfoundlander. “He was a great man,” the judge said. “A learned man, of course, foremost in his field, a scholar, but a man of the people, too, a leader the likes of which we’ll never see again. I would follow him around and write down everything he said and did and everything other people said about him.”
    “Joe and I had better be going, Grandpa,” Prowse said, and again the judge looked confused, shook off his confusion, grinned indulgently. “Remember, boy,” he said. “The question is, What has made us what we are and what will be our fate? That is the question I wrestle with every day, here at this desk.” Then he bade us goodbye.
    “Who’s Cluney Aylward?” I said when we were downstairs. “There is no Cluney Aylward,” Prowse said, grinning broadly. Then he explained that the judge, because of a stroke his family believed had been brought on by his exhaustive labours on his book, thought he was back working on the first edition of A History of Newfoundland , a delusion that not even showing him a copy of the first edition inscribed with his own name could shake for long. It was years since he had done any real work on the revised edition, though he went every day to his study and wrote page after page of illegible scrawl that his family had long since stopped trying to decipher. He had filled hundreds, thousands of pages with this scrawl. It was as if the judge were writing in some language that no one else could understand, a language of his own invention, the only one in which he could properly complete his book; as if he had advanced in his art to the point of inscrutability and now was writing for no one but himself. He did not know he suffered from this agraphia but rather believed he could still write and was writing as he moved the pen across the page.
    As for Cluney Aylward, though the judge, humoured by his family, would go on for hours about his accomplishments, his stature as a Newfoundlander, there was no record anywhere of a man by that name. He was apparently a stroke-inspired fiction.
    “And you know when you said ‘my father,’ ” Prowse said, “and he said ‘that rascal’? He thought you meant my father. He thought you were me. I don’t know who he thought I was today.”
    I was angry with Prowse for playing such a trick on me and on his grandfather, but mostly I was in a panic as to what to tell my father. I thanked God he had declined to come and tried not to think of the scene that might have taken place if he had. I opened the book to the title page. Here was my father’s History , defaced by the author himself.
    “I can’t bring it back to him like this,” I said. “You can’t make out a word of this, not even a letter, what will I do?” The signature, though illegible, was signature-shaped at least and, appearing below
    “D. W. Prowse” on the title page, could, Prowse supposed, pass for a signature, but the rest, he contritely admitted, was a problem for which he was to blame. He’d ask his father to help, he said, though that would mean letting his father know he had done something he wasn’t supposed to do, namely, bring people to the house to see the judge, his condition being something they were trying, not very successfully, to keep secret. Luckily, it was still several days before Sunday, and Prowse told me to leave the book with him and he would figure out what to do with it. I reluctantly went back to Bishop Feild without the book, leaving it in Prowse’s hands and wringing a promise from him that he would do no further damage to it.
    Two days later, on Friday, he brought it back to school with him and gave it to me. There was a “translation” beneath the judge’s scrawl that read: “For Charlie Smallwood. I was glad to hear from your son that you enjoyed my book so much. He and my grandson are great friends at Bishop Feild, as you and I might