Wayne Johnston - Jennies Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood

Jennie and Dad worked in town, where we had lived for a while, but we could not afford to live there anymore, so we were going back to where we came from with our tails between our legs.

My parents would have to go back to riding a yellow bus to work because two men had come and taken our car, which, because of something Dad had done, we couldnt afford anymore. The men had come in their own car, but one man got out and climbed into our car, and then they drove both cars off while the neighbours watched from the windows of the house across the street. A shameful sight that Jennie said no one would ever forget.

We were gathered in the kitchen just as we had gathered in many other kitchens before wed had to leave a house for good because Dad had spent the rent. I may as well tell you the truth straight out, Jennie said, as if she had managed to keep the truth from us until now, but shed be damned if she would gild the lily yet again for a man like Dad.

Dad had spent the rent in some bar that was close to where we lived. It was bad enough that hed spent the rent, Jennie said, but to do it right under our noses was an all-time low. Wed barely been in St. Johns long enough to afford to get a phone installed, and wed have to pay for it for the next month, but we wouldnt be there to hear it ring or use it to ring someone else. She hadnt even memorized the number yet.

Dad said it was just a phone, not a family heirloom. But then he admitted he was guilty for what the rest of us would soon have to endure because of him. We might as well convict him in advance. He was no good and never had been and never would be, he insisted, and his wife deserved a better husband, and his four boys a better father. He insisted on it as if he saw more clearly than Jennie ever could the disappointment to her that he was. Dad continued to expound on his utter worthlessness, as if he was giving someone else the dressing-down they long had coming to them until, at last, Jennie relented and told him he was being too hard on himself. Soon, they were both heaping contempt on some nebulous, sinister enemy who didnt know a good man when they saw one, some universal agency of opposition that was forever thwarting the modest plans of decent men like Art Johnston.

Dad said he would be shamefully on display throughout the journey tomorrow from St. Johns back to the would-be hamlet we had abandoned just three months earlier. Our old neighbours would say that Art Johnston had found out the hard way that he was no better than anyone else in the place whose very name he so disliked that he refused to use it.

But then he went back to insisting that it was all his fault, and this time the four of us boysKen, Craig, me, and my little brother, Brianjoined Jennie in defending him from himself, contradicting him when he said we would never have a decent home as long as we were stuck with him.

Youre being too hard on yourself, honey, Jennie said, and the four of us said that she was right, that it wasnt his fault that the world was full of bad men who took advantage of the good, that there was no lower you could go than to be a landlord who cared about nothing but the rent. A landlord was a man who lorded it over others.

Dad shifted sides again and told us of the landlords he had known, heartless men who turned families out on the street in the middle of winter. He had been under the thumb of dozens of them, he said, but never ceased to be amazed by their ruthlessness and trickery. But the day was coming, he promised us, a better day, when nothing we owned would be seized by landlords because we couldnt pay the rent.

That day might be just around the corner, Jennie said, and we all nodded and huddled around Dad and told him you never knew when good times were coming, when your luck was bound to change. It wasnt as if he had it easy. Raising four boys was hard enough, but when one of those boys was more trouble than the other three combined, it might as well be seven or eight that he was taking care of. He looked at me and I tried to smile.

Its not Waynes fault, either, Dad said. If truth be told, it was only because of bad luck that the deck was stacked against us, not because of him and me. Soon the others were all conceding that it wasnt my fault. It wasnt his fault. It wasnt the fault of his wife or the rest of his children. None of us could help how we were born.

Still, by this time, everyone was huddled around me, and I was crying and promising to do my best with what I had. I couldnt be blamed for all the things that were wrong with me, nor could Jennie, any more than Jennies mother could be blamed for having a daughter whod had a boy like me.

I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. Johns. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I dont remember a lot of them, but most of them were scattered along a couple of roads in a place called the Goulds, about an hour away from town. It wasnt much of a place, not even a village, but it was where Jennie was born and where her parents, Lucy and Ned, still lived, on Petty Harbour Road.