Come-From-Away

By Niko Silvester

One January day, I'm walking down the main street of downtown St. John's, Newfoundland, where I go to graduate school. It's called Water Street, but despite its name, all of the buildings on the seaward side face in, turning their backs on the harbour. It's the kind of contradiction I've noticed a lot since moving here. Life depends on the sea, yet people try to forget it exists; tradition is valued, but old handcrafted furniture rots in backyard sheds or is sold to tourists.

So I'm walking along, hands stuffed in the pockets of my oversized black oilskin coat, because I've forgotten my gloves. It's winter, but a mild one, so it isn't as cold as it could be. The damp just seems to let the chill penetrate deeper is all. Water Street and its late 1800s architecture are all I'm seeing. That and a few hurrying people, a stray dog, a brown and white pigeon. I see what everyone sees. No mysteries, no nightmares, no magic.

It's not the first time I've seen the old man, but it's the first time I really notice him. He gives me no choice.

"When you walks out at night," he says, waving his hand around the top of his head, as if to shoo away an insect, "always keep to th' middle of th' street." He has a thick Newfie accent, something of a rarity in the city where the accents tend to be slight, but he pronounces every word carefully so I have no trouble understanding him. He is dressed in a tattered grey overcoat and brown corduroy pants. There are twigs and leaves in his tangled beard and, despite the snow and the six inches of icy water running anywhere it can find a channel, his feet are bare.

Embarrassed and ashamed I look away as I approach, but not before he focuses foggy hazel eyes on me.

"Th' left side is for th' little fellas." He waves his hand over the top of his head again, and mutters "Or th' bleedin' air itself."

"I'm sorry," I mumble, and walk faster.

To my relief, he remains seated in the recessed shop doorway, but he says after me, "It takes all kinds to make a world; this world and t' other." And then he begins to laugh.

Absolutely off the deep end, I think, hurrying on. But that laugh, wild, merry and only half-mad, follows me down the block.

When you've lived in Newfoundland for a little while, you begin to realize how place-oriented the people are. Newfoundlanders don't speak of which town or community they're from, they speak of where they "belong to." A person born in Newfoundland will remain a Newfoundlander all their lives, no matter where they go or how long it is since they moved away. If you were born somewhere else you can never be a Newfoundlander. Even if you live here so long you can't remember living anywhere else, you'll always be a come-from-away. I've tried to explain this to my friend Jennet, who lives in B.C., but she can't understand why it matters.

A few days later I'm back downtown, wandering the slippery winter streets from used bookstore to second-hand record store to thrift shop. Even if I could afford to buy everything new, I would still shop in these places. You never know what you might find, although it's best not to expect much. Newfoundland is a poor province, and St. John's is a poor city.

I get lucky this time. In the thrift store, my attention is attracted to the words on a cracked and battered book spine, wedged into a ten-cent bin with romance novels from the 1970s and copies of the Bible in every conceivable size and colour. Keough's Folklore of Newfoundland. I pull it out of the bin and flip through it. A familiar name flashes by as I skim the pages, so I stop and go back. The Devil's Chair. I know that place. It's a throne-shaped chunk of rock jutting out of the cliffs near Signal Hill, that small tower-topped mountain that overlooks the entrance to St. John's Harbour. I read on.

The Devil's Chair; an older name is Puck's Chair, or the Pooka's Chair. The folklore is similar to many other such "Chair" formations, found largely in Western Europe. It is said that anyone who sits in it will see wondrous visions and will either go instantly mad, or become a poet. Other accounts specify that an entire night must be spent in the chair, from sunset in the evening until sunrise the next morning.

I dig out the ten cents and take the book home with me. It's funny that the rock has associations with an Irish fairy. Most such places in Newfoundland are named only for the devil.

Maybe it's just curiosity or maybe something more, but evening the next day finds me standing before the Devil's Chair, Puck's Chair, panting from the long, steep climb up Signal Hill. My back is to the sea, and the sky is clear, so I can see the sun dropping slowly towards the lower hills inland.

I huddle deeper into my big coat, then turn and climb into the Chair, half expecting a sudden change. After all, the book says one may "go instantly mad." Nothing happens. I suppose I might be a poet, but I can't tell. Does it feel any different to be a poet than a non-poet? The old rhyme about being a poet, but you don't know it goes through my head, and I think if I'm going to be a poet, it hasn't happened yet. And would I know if I had instantly gone mad? I settle as comfortably as I can on the stone seat, grateful for the small amount of moss that grew on it in warmer weather. The sun is almost down, I'll see it balanced just above the hills if I turn around. Instead I watch its vague pink reflection on the sea below. Being winter the night will be long, and the cold and damp will make it seem far longer.

The rising sun turns the insides of my eyelids a glaring red, and I am amazed to discover that I have been asleep. A moment later and I am amazed to realize that I haven't frozen to death. I stretch and yawn before thinking, I don't feel mad. I don't feel like a poet either. I'm not even achy or numb from sleeping on an angular, barely moss-covered rock on a cliff overlooking the sea, in the middle of winter. Other than the oddity of being quite refreshed, I don't feel the least bit different from when I arrived here last night. I stand up to stretch some more, and have a look at the hill in early morning.

And then I really begin to see.

All around me are nightmares. Suddenly breathing feels like drowning and I struggle to fill my lungs. A dead tree picks itself up off the ground, twigs and branches become arms and legs, an old bird nest is hair overhanging a bulge in the trunk that can barely be called a head, except it has eyes. Bright leaf green eyes that would be pretty on a girl blink and turn toward me. All I see is menace.

I hear a sound to my left and turn a little, trying to see what's there without taking my eyes off the dead tree thing. This one looks like a small person, vaguely female, with cracking bark for skin and that lichen known as "old man's beard" growing all over, but longest at head and crotch. The eyes, this time, are brown but no less menacing. It reaches a hand toward me.

I still can't breathe right. All I can think is that I have to catch my breath so I can run. I step back from the lichen-y thing, and hear a wet crunch as something breaks under my foot. There is a hiss of pain and hate and I stop breathing altogether. The one part of my mind that is somehow still able to think clearly can only produce the thought: So this is what being immobilized by fear feels like. Then: I should probably be pissing myself about now. But I can't even do that.

Twiggy fingers grab the hem of my coat and tug. A creaky voice says something I can't understand, then another tug at my coat from a different direction and my breath returns with a sudden rush. One more grasping hand and I can move again. There is no fight, only flight. I leap for the Devil's Chair, scramble over, away, and run headlong down Signal Hill, slipping on wet moss, wet snow, slush, six inches of icy water running anywhere it can find a channel.

The whole way down I see nothing but nightmare creatures, reaching to tangle their sticklike, clawlike, pawlike hands in my hair like dry fir branches in a too-close forest. Gabbling at me in their dry-wind rattle, wet-leaf slap, cold hard hot scratching voices.

Whatever power kept me from freezing to death on the Devil's Chair must still be working, because I get to the bottom of the hill without breaking my neck. I hardly notice that the few people out on the winter streets give me odd looks and lots of room as I shy away from small shadows in doorways that have eyes like dying embers.

A potted tree in front of one store almost sends me running again, but I realize it really is a tree. I stop and stare at it, in a kind of dazed relief, and notice that the things crowding into my peripheral and not-so-peripheral vision have backed off a little. I look more closely at the tree, noting the orange-red berries still hanging from the branches. Dogberry, it's called in Newfoundland. It stirs a memory and I try to concentrate on it and ignore the fact that, while the nightmares aren't any closer, there are more of them. Rowan, I think. In Europe it's called rowan, and it's a charm against witches and black magic. It's nice to know my grad studies in Folklore aren't totally useless.

I break off a twig with a cluster of berries attached, and whirl around to brandish it at the things gathered behind me. They keep at a distance, some fading away entirely, and some moving out of my line of sight to the edges of my vision. I take a deep breath, trying to hang on to the calm I've achieved, and begin to walk again. As I go I turn my head one way, then another. With space between me and the creatures, I try to get a better look at some of them. After a couple of blocks, most of the crowd following me has gone, though there are others on all sides. They hardly glance at me as I walk by.

One small female creature dressed in ragged green looks up into my face from her perch on the back of a marmalade tabby cat. Her eyes are amber, and beautiful. She smiles, then turns back to picking a burr out of the cat's fur.

I take to carrying the rowan twig with me wherever I go. I even burn some of the berries in my apartment, like incense, and nail bundles of twigs tied with red thread over all my doors and windows. The creatures stay out of my house, and when I leave it they keep away, but look at me as I pass. Some stare with hostility but others, I notice, with curiosity. It's when I see one that looks like a skinny, long-limbed hedgehog chase a cat away from a dish of cream left on someone's front step that I realize what they are. Not nightmares, but fairies.

I think back to a seminar I took on Folk Belief, and remember the professor talking about giving offerings to the fairies as a kind of contract. You give them something, like milk or cakes, and in return the fairies are helpful, or at least not harmful. So I start putting milk out at night, and when I walk past them now, almost none of the fairies have malice in their eyes.

One day, I see the old man on his doorstep, pouring milk from a small cardboard carton into little hollows he's made in the snow. The fairies are clustered around him like pigeons around an old lady with a bag of bread crumbs. They perch on his shoulders, peer out from under his beard, and tend the fairy fire between his feet. When the milk carton is empty he sits without moving, listening to them. There is no expression on his face as I walk up to him and sit down on his step, but he turns his eyes to meet mine and there is warmth in them. His eyes no longer look foggy to me, but sharp. And enigmatic. There are shifting green flecks in the light brown irises, like leaves blowing against a background of tree trunks.

The wee folk eddy away as I sit down, but they begin to return when I hesitantly set my rowan twig aside. The old man grins at that, and pushes it farther away with his foot. Some of the folk sing wordlessly in voices that range from wind over dry sand to the patter of rain on the snowy-slush that lines the city's streets in ploughed-aside banks. A fairy covered only in his own gull-gray feathers gets bold enough to climb into my lap. He settles there and begins to preen like a bird, and I feel like weeping.

The old man smiles again and says in his thick, lovely voice, "Dogberry's for witches m'love. Won't do a whit of good for keepin' off th' little fellas."

"I thought it was good against evil."

"Sure, human evil. So is it a madwoman, or a poet, then?" he asks and I start a little and wonder how he can know I spent a night in Puck's Chair. "Them as touch t' other world," he continues, stroking the hair of a small nut-brown fairy man leaning against his knee, "'tis said they goes mad or turns to poetry because human folks weren't meant to see such things." He laughs the same wild laugh as last time I saw him. "I'm thinking you'll be a poet, m'love, but then you are a come-from-away, so it could be madness."

It's my turn to laugh, but it sounds clipped. "I'm mad, I think, though I've heard insane people don't know they're insane."

After a while of sitting and watching the passers-by, wondering if any of them can see what I see, I get up and say a quiet farewell to the old man and his entourage. I've only gone a few steps when I turn back.

"Which are you?" I ask. "Madman or poet?"

He smiles. "I haven't the foggiest notion." And then he laughs again.

The gull-fairy follows me until I reach the bottom of Signal Hill, then he flits off to join a bunch of fey-folk perched on top of a dormer window that peers out of one of the old mansard-roofed houses that cling to the side of the hill. I climb back up the steep winding road and sit, breathing hard, on the wall at the edge of the seaward side of the cliff. I can't see Puck's Chair from here, but I am acutely aware of its location not far off.

This time there are fewer fairies up here than down in the city, but I can see a few below me, wheeling in the wind above the ocean, trying to find updrafts to catch under their wings. I could almost pretend that they are just birds or large insects from up here. Almost, except for the strange ones that defy any description but that they are roughly humanoid and have some sort of wings. Almost, except for the wingless trio capering in the wet snow of the empty parking lot, one like a monkey, brown-furred; one like a bundle of twigs tied hastily together; and one like I-don't-know-what. Except for them I could almost forget the nightmares that chased me into the city, could almost forget that I have the sight. Madwoman or poet?

So I'm sitting with the old man again, his name is Alfred, and we are listening to the fairies sing. There is one strange creature that reminds me of a salt-fish with twiggy arms and legs. It has the most beautiful voice I've ever heard. When it stops singing, I lean back and close my eyes.

"This seeing, " I say. "It's like being alone in the woods for the first time. At first you're too scared by everything around you, but once you get used to it, it's so beautiful you can't be afraid anymore. Even if you should be."

Alfred chuckles. "So it's a poet is it?"

I do my best faux-Newfie accent. "I haven't the foggiest notion, bye. Not the foggiest." But I've decided what I'm going to write my Master's thesis on, at least.

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