An Innocent in Newfoundland: Even More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters by David McFadden

Author:David McFadden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2016-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

FIRST MOOSE IN NEWFOUNDLAND

Burnt Berry • Coffee Cove • Springdale • Howley

Thursday, May 31. Why would a driver leave his truck running in front of the Burnt Berry while he goes in to play the slots all morning? Surely any money he would possibly win would be eaten up by the fuel he’s lost, at a dollar a litre. “Oh, they just don’t know any better,” says Al Payne. “They’re in such a hurry they haven’t got time to switch off the ignition, and they don’t want to take the time to switch it back on when they go back out.”

Al Payne is a sweet guy and has a charmingly simple ambition in life. He has a bar-restaurant-motel, a wife who’s there for him all the time, a boat for taking tourists out to visit whales and icebergs, a log house he’s building – and when he has his bills all paid off, his biggest ambition in life is to take his boat and sail all the way around Newfoundland. Just like the Beothuk boy in Beothuk Saga, by the late Bernard Assiniwi, a francophone Cree novelist/anthropologist. In the idyllic days prior to European contact, which brought about the destruction of the Beothuk culture and the extinction of the Beothuk, the boy canoes all the way around the island to prove his theory that the island is in fact an island, as Columbus proved the world was round. Al Payne hadn’t read Assiniwi’s book or even heard of it. But such ideas spring eternal.

Al says his boat was built in 1958, though from the picture it looked like the twenties to me. It was all wood, but he’s put three layers of fibreglass on it. He also said he couldn’t figure out how I could have missed his boat yesterday. It could be seen clearly from the causeway….

Al rakes in a lot of money from his little bank of slot machines, but he is no propagandist for their use. It’s true, he said, that sometimes, occasionally, someone will come in with a loonie, play for two minutes, and leave with twenty dollars. One time a woman came in with $350, played the slots for four hours, and managed to leave with $275. But she told everyone, including herself, that she had actually won the $275. He said if people were more forthright about how much they lost, pretty soon the slots would lose their appeal.

—

Last night at the bar my favourite, besides bartender Al Payne, was Donna Boyles (rhymes with “dials”), close to six feet, with big fuzzy hair and a long, slender face. She has a son fourteen and a little girl two, and she was shooting pool and playing all the Rolling Stones songs on the jukebox. She had just split up with her husband who, over their fifteen-year marriage, repeatedly – I repeat, repeatedly – tried to strangle her, and even came close to killing her a few times. And only by her own strength and size was she successful each time in fending him off.

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