Baltimore's Mansion (7 page)

The Pink, White and Green was a merging of the Pink and the Green that had taken place in 1843. The Pink, a pink flag with a green fir tree, was the flag of a group of well-established Roman Catholics in St. John's who referred to themselves as “natives” because they were born in Newfoundland and to differentiate themselves from newly arrived Irish immigrant Roman Catholics like my ancestors, whom they referred to as “The Bush-borns” and who flew a green flag with the harp of Brian Boru to represent their group.

There was a great deal of animosity between the two
groups, especially after the “natives” formed the Native Society and excluded from its membership anyone not born in Newfoundland. In February of 1843, a wood-hauling contest between these two groups ended in a brawl in which, as one newspaper reported, “a good many heads were broken.” The cause of the brawl was their failure to agree on which group had hauled the bigger pile of wood.

Peace between the natives and the Bush-borns was brought about by the archbishop who advised the two groups to join the Pink and Green together to form one flag, half pink, half green. They could not quite bring themselves to do that, but instead inserted a bolt of neutral white between the two colours.

As Harold did not know the music, he could only recite “Fling Out the Flag” as a poem. Glass in one hand, cigar in the other, face flushed, he launched into it without warning, and all conversation stopped.

“The Pink, the Rose of England shows,
The Green St. Patrick's emblem, bright,
While in between, the spotless sheen
Of St. Andrew's Cross displays the white.
Then hail the pink, the white, the green.
Our patriot flag long may it stand.
Our sirelands twine, their emblems trine,
To form the flag of Newfoundland!
Fling out the flag, o'er creek and cragg,
Pink, white and green, so fair, so grand.
Long may it sway o'er bight and bay,
Around the shores of Newfoundland!
Whate'er betide our ‘Ocean Bride'
That nestles 'midst Atlantic's foam,
Still far and wide, we'll raise with pride
Our native flag, o'er hearth and home.
Should e'er the hand of fate demand
Some future change in our career,
We ne'er will yield, on flood or field
The Flag we honour and revere!
Fling out the flag o'er creek and cragg,
Pink, white and green, so fair, so grand.
Long may it sway o'er bight and bay,
Around the shores of Newfoundland.”

“Fling Out the Flag” was greeted with applause, which had not died down when Harold launched into “The Lament for Newfoundland,” published in the St. John's
Daily News
on April 1, 1949. Teary-eyed before he even started, he declaimed:

“On this day of parting, sad nostalgic thoughts arise,

Thoughts to bring the hot tears surging to the Newfoundlanders eyes,

Thoughts that bring to mind the story of the struggles of the past,

Of the men who built our island, nailed its colours to our mast.

Those who lost the fight for freedom have the greater pride this day,

Though their country's independence lies the victim of the fray.

They have kept THEIR faith untarnished, they have left THEIR honour high,

They can face the course of history with a clear and steadfast eye.”

By the time Harold was finished, tears were streaming down his face. Likewise the rest of them, my father, Uncle Jim, my mother, Aunt Eva, Marg, all enjoying themselves immensely, it seemed to me.

“Well spoken, Harold, my son,” my father said, his tone more consoling than laudatory. Uncle Dennis cried but was consoled by no one but his wife.

Then we sang “The Ode to Newfoundland,” which most Catholics, in spite of their affection for “Fling Out the Flag,” were quite fond of, for the only mention in it of religion was a non-denominational God.

“We'll have ‘The Ode' now, Harold, if you please,” my father said. Harold sat at the piano, and while he played, we sang.

“‘As loved our fathers, so we love/Where once they stood we stand.'”

Next came a toast to Charlie and Nan, proposed by Harold. “To Charlie and Nan,” they said.

My father raised his glass but did not drink. A few minutes later he put down his glass, slipped away from the party and went out to the back porch, closing the door behind him. I thought no one else had noticed until Uncle Harold, as if in mimicry of my father, took the same path through the guests as he had and went out to the porch. Looking out the kitchen window, I saw them go down the steps and walk halfway across the yard.

I went out to the porch, eased open the storm door. I watched them from behind a wooden column on the steps. My
father leaned over, his hands on his thighs as if he had been sick or was about to be. Harold put one hand on my father's back and looked off into the darkness as though embarrassed. My father, I saw, was not sick but crying silently, as if something inside him had brimmed over without warning. His shoulders heaved, tears fell unchecked from his eyes onto the pavement. He shook his head from side as if he could not account for his inability to stop either of these developments. I heard him say something, heard the words “never” and “too late” and presumed that it was still the referendum that was on his mind.

“I know, my son,” Uncle Harold said, “I know.” “My son,” he called his brother, and my father often called him that.

“You
don't
know,” my father said. “Something happened. On the beach. The day I left for college. Something happened.” My father said something else but I could not make it out.

“I don't think so,” Harold said.

My father spoke, again inaudibly, his tone insistent as if he were repeating what he had said last and this time Harold, as if chastised, did not reply.

“Never mind,” my father said. “Never mind, my son. I've had too much to drink, that's all.” Across the road from Harold's house was a small lake that we called the Pond. I could not see it, but when a breeze came up, I smelled the mint weed on the shore and heard the faint lapping of the water. It was a warm summer night. I had not been up this late before, let alone outdoors at such an hour. It seemed to me that this must be the stuff of night, furtive exchanges like this between adults about things whose existence they could not acknowledge in the light of day.

I was sure that my father's sorrow did not proceed from politics. Never. Too late. I could think of nothing that would never happen, nothing for which it would forever be too late.

Finally my father straightened up and rubbed his eyes with the back of his arm, exhaled loudly, cleared his throat. He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky as if to signal by the scrutiny of distant stars that his thoughts had once again turned outward.

“I can't go back in now,” he said. “I'll walk home.”

Our house was just up the road from Harold's. Harold watched him for a while as he went down the driveway and began to make his way up the road. When Harold turned to come back, I went inside.

“T
HEY MIGHT BE
phasing out the train,” my father said, looking up from his paper one night in the fall of 1968. After Confederation, the railway had been taken over by Canadian National Railways, CNR, and now they were considering replacing the train with a less expensive fleet of buses.

Buses were an option because the first trans-island paved road had been completed in 1965. My father said the only reason people used the road was to see what pavement felt like and they would soon grow tired of it.

My father was one of many people who tried to save the train.

It was decided there would be a “trial period” from December of 1968 to May of 1969 during which both buses and trains would run across the island in a competition to see which would draw more patrons.

It was as if some feeble ghost of the referendum of 1948 had been revived. There was once again to be a kind of referendum. Patriotism would tackle pragmatism, the old Newfoundland the new Newfoundland, one last time. You could vote for the former by buying a train ticket, for the latter by
buying a bus ticket. A Save the Train association was formed. There was talk it would be led by Peter Cashin. It was not.

The patriots soon had a slogan: Ride the Rails and Beat the Bus. Ads exhorting Newfoundlanders to do just that soon appeared in all the papers. The CNR countered that the price and duration of a cross-island bus ride were less than half those of the train.

My father told me that the train invoked pre-Confederate Newfoundland as nothing else could. The journey itself was as important, if not more so, than the destination. The train was designed to be lived in, not just ridden. You could not walk about on a bus as you could on a train. There was no bar on a bus. There were no tables spread with impeccably white and creased linen, no silver cutlery or crystal glasses, no one at your beck and call, happy to attend to your most eccentric needs.

The train was a reminder for my father of his first trip off the island in September of 1948. Each journey on it was a recapitulation of that one, when he had seen Newfoundland for the first time, just prior to leaving it for the first time. That trip had been for him a strange hybrid of arrival and departure, discovery and abandonment. He for some reason often brought it up when we were driving home from Ferryland, but when I asked him why, he would not tell me.

There was the circadian length of the trip. The island, as measured by the train, was almost exactly one day wide, twenty-four hours from coast to coast. One single Newfoundland-encompassing day. You departed and arrived at the same hour of the morning or the same hour of the evening. Or you did except when there were blockages along the line, when huge
snowdrifts arced across the tracks and the train was stalled for days, as happened regularly on a northwest section of the line called the Gaff Topsails where, as the Pragmatists pointed out, it was not unusual for a passenger-filled train to be stranded for days, twenty unwalkable miles from the nearest settlement. The length of one memorable train trip had been more lunar than circadian, a group of travellers stalled in a train on the Gaff Topsails for twenty-six days. About a hundred times as many Newfoundlanders as it was possible for the train to hold claimed to have been on that run.

On the train you travelled by night, and the night always found you in the “core,” as my father called it, in the wild, unsettled middle of the island as far inland as you could go except on foot. The train was a moving hotel and the whole of Newfoundland went by outside your window; it was a restaurant on wheels with an ever-changing view, one kind of landscape giving way to another as if the island were composed of many countries. The dining and sleeping accommodations were, as trains go, luxurious.

What percentage of the train supporters had voted against Confederation in 1948 is impossible to say, but my father said that a large majority had. Unfortunately for them, it was announced before the “trial period” even started that according to a poll, Newfoundlanders preferred the bus to the train by five to one. Before the campaign to save it got off the ground, the train was doomed. The faster, cheaper buses that were setting out from St. John's each morning were packed, while whole train cars that left from Riverhead Station were empty, pulled pointlessly along behind the few that were occupied. The loss of the train would be yet another of the foul fruits of
Confederation. But father and the others clung to the notion that as soon as the novelty of the bus wore off, and as soon as the weather softened in the spring and there was no longer any possibility of being stranded on the tracks, the train would make up the gap. Or, as a compromise, the government would decide to run the train only from May to November.

There was talk for a while that all the Johnstons and the Everards would book passage on a final Christmas run the day after Boxing Day, from St. John's to Port aux Basques and back. My father and Harold pitched it to the others, and there was talk of a grand expedition. But interest in the trip soon fell off when it was discovered how expensive it would be. The only such group trip across the island that we could have afforded would have been by bus. My older brothers were of an age when to travel with one's parents was no longer an adventure. If not all of us were going, my mother could not go. Eva and Jim bowed out. Marg would not go unless my mother did. The Everards had never been that interested. The number of travellers dwindled gradually until there were just my father and me and Harold left, and then Harold had to cancel out because of work. That left only ten-year-old me and my father.

We started out from St. John's just after sunrise on December 27, 1968. There was no snow on the east coast. The new highway roughly shadowed the railway tracks except for taking the short and easy way around most obstacles, and except for the elevated Gaff Topsails stretch, which the highway avoided altogether, instead forking up to Springdale on the coast, then down southwest again, more or less meeting up with the train tracks at Deer Lake.

We were sometimes able to see the highway from the train, and once, not far outside of St. John's, we ran all but side by side with one of the Roadcruiser buses. I had been surprised at Riverhead Station to see how small the buses were. It was hard to imagine them posing any threat to the train, which stretched as far as I could see, the initials CNR repeated on each car until they became an indecipherable white blur.

But I found myself now treacherously rooting for that single silver bus. I was impressed by how much faster it was moving than we were. The bus looked like a sleek, wingless plane and, in comparison with the many-sectioned train, seemed so heroically singular, so self-sufficient. The highway itself seemed a marvel to me, its sides clear-cut of trees and bush, as did the strange sight of pavement in the woods, with those reassuringly artificial white lines down the middle that somehow made the wilderness less desolate. The weathered, wooden train, the wooden, black tarred ties, the rusting rails, the ancient railway bed along which trees had grown to full height since the line went through in 1898, the once-pink granite gravel now washed grey with age all seemed to blend in with the landscape, an unobtrusiveness that to some was one of its merits, though it did not seem so to me.

We remained side by side with the bus only because of the train's length. People, my father not among them, crowded one side of the train to see it. Children stuck out their tongues at it, though what effect this had on its driver or its occupants we couldn't tell, for its windows were tinted.

The railway and the road diverged, and the bus passed from view for several minutes, then was distantly visible, far ahead and to the right of us, turning sharply away from the
railway track as if it were headed across a different island than we were, a more modern, train-excluding island. After it next passed from view, we did not see that bus again, though we came to within yards of the highway many times.

It was on this train trip that I finally crossed the Isthmus of Avalon. For a time on the isthmus, as when we drove in the car until forced back by the fog, we could see the ocean on either side. Then we plunged into the river of fog, and I was awed by the certainty that this time we would not turn round but would come out the other side, as if the train could do what our little car could not. We rumbled through the fog. I pressed my face to the window, just able to make out vague shapes and colours.

And then suddenly we hurtled out of Avalon into the mundane world. I imagined the view of someone watching from trackside as more and more of the train emerged from the tunnel of fog, some of it out, some of it still inside, my imaginary spectator wondering if the train would ever end, then seeing the car with me inside, my face pressed to the glass, looking for the first time on this the origin of grievous wounds.

It looked exactly like Avalon, but I had expected it would, had prepared myself for this illusion and was almost able to convince myself that we were now sub-Avalon, pre-Avalon, post-Avalon, lapsed in some way all the more sinister for being imperceptible. We were in the land of the baymen now, the land of the bush-borns.

For a while we travelled parallel to the highway again. Cars overtook us with embarrassing ease. Then a Roadcruiser bus.

“Look,” my father said, loud enough for the whole car to hear, “it's that bloody bus again.”

“Not the same one,” a man sitting several seats ahead of us said, remaining face forward so that all we could see of him was the back of his head, a starched shirt collar, the shoulders of an impeccable new black suit. “That one left Riverhead two hours after we did. Caught up with us already.”

“It looks like a lunch bucket on wheels,” my father said, and many people let out snorts of derision.

“It may not look like much,” the man said, “but it gets you where you want to go faster than this train does.”

“Does it, now?” my father said. “Well, what are you doing on the train if you love the bus so much?”

“Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, still not turning round. “But we might as well face facts —”

A collective groan cut the man short. The need to “face facts” was the pro-bus argument, and they had heard it all before. My father asked the man again what he was doing on the train if he loved the bus so much.

“Never said I loved the bus,” the man said, as if he was implacably determined not to have words put in his mouth. “Taking one last ride for old times' sake, like everybody else. We might just as well face facts —”

The woman beside him, whom I presumed was his wife, gave him a now-don't-go-starting-something nudge with her shoulder. The man straightened up as if in silent defiance of her warning.

“Why might we just as well face facts?” my father said. “Could you tell me that? Why might we just as well face facts? If we all faced facts, there'd be no one left in Newfoundland. There's nothing in the facts to keep us here.”

I knew from his tone of voice and his expression that he
was one provocation away from launching into an attack on Joey Smallwood, the fixed referendum and Confederation. I half-hoped, half-dreaded, that the man would say something else. There was a nervous silence in the car.

“We're a country of fact-facing bus-boomers,” my father said, grinning, looking out the window.

“A province,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. “We're a province now, not a country. Never were a country, really. If you know your history.” I heard in his voice a politeness that was meant to be transparently insincere, patronizing, the tone of someone who held in reserve a trump card he need never play. I could just see it. A riot on the train fought over a matter decided twenty years ago.

“I know
my
history,” my father said. “A province of progress, is that what we are?” “A province of progress” was one of Joey's latest slogans.

“Better than a backward country,” the fact-facing bus-boomer said. It was all there now, just beneath the surface. His continuing to face forward while he spoke, showing us nothing but the back of his head was clearly getting to my father. He had no idea what my father looked like, nor did he care to know, the back of his head seemed to say.

“Is this what we'll have to listen to, from here to Port aux Basques,” my father said, “a fact-facing, bus-booming, arse-kissing civil servant?” My father all but spat out the last two words as if thereby expressing his distaste for his own occupation with the federal Fisheries department and ridding himself of the self-contempt he had to live with every day.

“One last look for old times' sake,” my father said. “Tell me, if your mother was going under for the third time, would
you take one last look for old times' sake? What am I saying — of course you would.”

I was sure the man would turn around now, but he didn't. A purser whose CNR uniform lent him an authority that belied his skinny, almost puny frame and who must have heard my father came halfway up the stairs of the observation car, just to show himself, a tacit reminder that no troublemaking would be tolerated.

My father looked at the man across the aisle from us and both of them smiled and looked at the fact-facing bus-boomer, the back of whose neck was now a livid red. His wife was gripping his upper arm with both her hands, her head bobbing emphatically as if she were urgently whispering to him.

It was probably no coincidence that just before the train stopped at Gambo, the birthplace of Joey Smallwood, the bus-boomer and his wife got up and left the observation car, which they were able to do without turning round to face my father, the stairway that led down below being several rows in front of them. We only saw them briefly in profile as they went quickly down the steps. All I remember of them is that both were blushing so that they looked as if through years of marriage they had developed perfectly compatible complexions.

“We might as well face facts.” That was not just the argument for the bus. It had been the argument for Confederation. The confederates hadn't argued for Canada per se because most Newfoundlanders knew nothing more about Canada than what little they had heard from Canadian servicemen stationed in St. John's throughout the war. There had been far more Americans stationed there, a friendly occupation force that had poured money into Newfoundland, building military installations that
had yet to be shut down. Wartime was looked back on by Newfoundlanders as the American era, years when they saw firsthand the swaggering largesse of the country to which thousands of their relatives had gone in search of jobs.