Baltimore's Mansion (6 page)

“Now,” my father said, “of those who voted for Confederation, of how many can it be said that they did so out of love for Canada?” At this, Uncle Harold and Uncle Jim pursed their lips doubtfully.

“The numbers tell the tale,” my father said.

“Indeed they do,” said Aunt Marg.

“Confederation seventy-eight thousand,” my father said, “Responsible Government seventy-one thousand. A mere seven-thousand-vote difference. Now, if only thirty-five hundred, and it was surely ten times that, but if only thirty-five hundred who voted for Confederation did so, not because they ceased
believing in Newfoundland, but, shall we say, for economic reasons. That is to say, if they voted —” he paused for effect — “reluctantly” — Uncle Harold and Uncle Jim nodded — “regretfully” — they nodded again — “half-heartedly, even self-ashamedly —” He all but spat out this last word. My uncles nodded more emphatically than ever.

“Do you see what I'm getting at?” my father said. “If the answer is as few as thirty-five hundred, and it is surely ten times that, we are left with the conclusion that in their heart of hearts, a vast majority of Newfoundlanders still believe in Newfoundland.”

There was an emphatic murmur of assent.

“How many Newfoundlanders, if they thought they had nothing to gain financially from joining Canada, would have voted to join? What would they be voting for? Who knew anything about Canada in 1949? It was patriotism versus pragmatism. And God help us, ladies and gentlemen, pragmatism won.”

“Patriotism versus pragmatism,” said Uncle Harold, nodding, then shaking his head as if to say, You have put into words as I myself could not have done the very essence of my thinking on the matter.

“Patriotism versus pragmatism,” said Uncle Jim, as if it was hard to believe that because of those two words we lost it all.

My father moved on to what he called the closet confederates. There were many people, he was convinced, who had outwardly opposed Confederation and, indeed, opposed it in their heart of hearts but in the secrecy of the ballot box had voted for it.

“Imagine,” my father said, “having to go your entire life living with a lie. Pretending to your wife or your father or your sister or your best friend that you were on their side, that you had voted with them, and knowing, knowing in your heart of hearts that in that voting booth, when no one else was looking, you betrayed them.”

“Oh yes, my God yes, the closet confederates,” Uncle Harold said, as if he had forgotten about them, as if, now that he had been reminded of them, a flood of memory had been released and it was as if he was back there, in the wake of defeat, in a world full of closet confederates and brokenhearted patriots. He shook his head, eyes downcast, as if no worse fate could be imagined than to be a member of that phantom faction. Everyone denounced the closet confederates in some manner. You had to, I suppose, and fervently, or else be suspected of being one. It was somehow comforting, reassuring to them, the impossible-to-verify idea that there existed this group of tortured, self-betraying souls.

“Don't go on about them now, Arthur,” Aunt Eva said. “I can't even stand to think about them, the poor things, the hell, the living hell their lives must be.”

“You're right, my dear,” my father said. “The less said about that crowd the better.”

“They made their beds, now let them lie,” said Uncle Dennis. No one endorsed this remark. He looked as if he was beginning to realize what he had let himself in for by coming back to Newfoundland.

“And the Terms of Union that Smallwood negotiated with Canada…” my father continued. He explained that under these terms, Newfoundland was forbidden to market
its yellow margarine in Canada, where the sale of it was against the law.

“What does that tell us about Canadians, Art?” Uncle Harold said, as he often did whenever Canada was mentioned.

My father gave the answer he always gave: “If inquired into, Harold, it might tell us much about Canadians, but one's time would more usefully be spent cataloguing in Latin every species of fly that has ever pitched on or sought entrance to the arsehole of a cow.”

They laughed, then fell silent for a while.

“I'll tell you one thing I would love to know,” my father said. “And that is, what was in Brown's Document?”

“Wouldn't we all?” Aunt Eva said, as if a fierce desire to know the contents of Brown's document was universal. I had never heard of Brown's Document before.

“Oh yes, my God yes, Brown's Document,” Uncle Harold said. “Yes, I remember that now, Brown's Document. What was that all about now, Art?”

Brown was Kenneth Brown, an ardent anti-confederate and elected member of the National Convention, the delegate for Bonavista South. Delegates to the National Convention sat in alphabetical order according to the names of their constituencies, so Brown sat next to Gordon Bradley, member for Bonavista East, the Convention chairman and a confederate, and next to Bradley sat Joe Smallwood, member for Bonavista Centre.

At a crucial point in the Convention, Brown rose and, while making a passionate speech opposing Small wood's motion to send a delegation to Ottawa to find out what Canada would offer a confederated Newfoundland, took from his pocket a
“document” and, waving it about, declared that if he were to reveal its contents, not a single delegate or Newfoundlander would vote for Confederation. Just on the verge of revealing the contents of the document, Brown collapsed, all six feet four of him, onto the floor in front of his desk. He had a massive stroke. In the confusion that followed, as delegates rushed to his aid and ambulance attendants arrived, Brown's Document somehow disappeared.

“No trace of it was ever found,” my father said, adding that Brown never did recover from his stroke to the point that he could think or speak clearly enough to make anyone understand what was in the document.

My father seemed to think the disappearance of the document was no mystery, given that Smallwood and Bradley were sitting closest to Brown when he collapsed. But what
was
the document? What information did it contain? What could have had the effect that Brown predicted, could have caused all Newfoundlanders, even declared confederates like Smallwood, to turn their backs on Confederation? They speculated endlessly about it. The Home Office. Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Britain's man in Newfoundland, Governor MacDonald. The “Commissioners Three,” as my father called the three British members of the Commission of Government appointed to rule Newfoundland after the country's brush with bankruptcy in 1934. Joe Smallwood. All these names came up in their speculations. The document might have been part of some conspiracy-revealing correspondence between some or all of these.

And there was the stroke itself, so eerily timed to cut Brown short just when he was on the brink of revelation. One
could hardly blame the confederates for his stroke, but still… My father shook his head and everyone lapsed into silence as if in wonderment at what might have been had Brown not had his stroke and Brown's Document not disappeared. I could just see the great figure of Brown falling with a kind of tragic grace, splendidly laid out on the floor still clutching the document that might have saved us, the document whose contents he alone was privy to and that somehow in the next few seconds disappeared.

There were many possible explanations, of course, which they begrudgingly proposed and then discounted. Brown had merely been exaggerating for effect — the document was probably inconsequential. But Brown was not known for stooping to such tactics. And he was no fool. He would have known better than to discredit himself in such a manner. Was it possible, then, that just seconds from a massive stroke, Brown was experiencing some sort of pre-stroke delusion, his brain already suffering its effects? But he had been, however animated, quite lucid while making his speech, and had correctly followed parliamentary procedure when he rose to speak against Small wood's motion.

Perhaps in the certainty of being assured that she was wrong, Aunt Eva wondered if the whole thing might have have been an act of divine intervention, if God had stepped in to save the confederates just when their cause was about to be destroyed. It was the consensus that while it was impossible to say what God's purpose was in striking down poor Brown, it had most certainly not been to advance the cause of Joey Smallwood. Then, in a contradiction of this assertion that went unnoticed or ignored, it was observed that Brown's stroke, the loss of the referendum, Confederation were the acts of a God
whose ways were inscrutable to man, apparent injustices that in fact were part of some divine plan so grand in its benignity and scope that for mere men to inquire into it was pointless. Why could God not have given Brown a few more minutes? We would no more know the answer to that question than we would know what was in the document.

The fact was that Brown's Document had divine intervention written all over it, if one believed in such a thing. They did, or were at least capable of suspending their disbelief in it from time to time. And so Brown's Document was a problem. It stood on the one hand for the nagging, never-to-be-spoken-aloud notion that their side was in the wrong, that Brown's stroke was a sign of God's disfavour with the cause of independence. On the other hand, it perfectly embodied their abiding sense of grievance, of having been hard done by, cheated for all time out of what was rightfully theirs by unseen human hands.

“Brown's Document” was a phrase that invoked for me the world view of Malory's
Morte d'Arthur,
that the true king was always in exile while some pretender held the throne, that the honourable, by virtue of their being honourable, must always lose. Brown lay on the floor, his long journey to the vale of Avilion begun, having suffered, like King Arthur, a grievous head wound from which he could not recover.

It was not Malory my father was thinking of, but another poet. My father, as in the years to come he would often do when the two of us talked about such things, quoted Yeats's poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” which Lady Gregory told Yeats was her favourite poem and that she pitied the poor “friend” mentioned in the
title. After Lady Gregory's death, Yeats revealed she was this friend. My father recited it as a tribute to the Major: “For how can you compete,/Being honour bred, with one/Who, were it proved he lies,/Were neither shamed in his own/Nor in his neighbour's eyes?”

As the party wore on, they moved from one referendum story to another. They got a lot of mileage out of Newfoundland's having become a part of Canada on April Fools' Day and would not suffer anyone to argue that induction day was in fact March 31. The induction ceremonies were originally set for April Fools' Day 1949, it having occurred to no one at the federal level that this might not be the most appropriate of dates until Joey Smallwood brought it to their attention. The date was then, at the eleventh hour, “changed.” In fact, it was too late to really change it, since all sorts of ceremonies had already been set for April 1 on Parliament Hill, but Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent amended the Terms of Union by which Newfoundland joined Canada to read that Newfoundland would join the Dominion not immediately after midnight but “immediately before the expiration of March 31, 1949.” Thus were Newfoundlanders robbed of an infinitesimal fraction of a second of independence and by that same infinitesimal fraction of a second supposedly spared the humiliation of having to commemorate their joining the Dominion on April Fools' Day. All the ceremonies in Newfoundland and Ottawa took place on April 1, however, and many people, especially those descended from anti-confederates, still consider April 1 to be induction day.

Neither at home nor at school was anything made of either
of the rivals for the title of “anniversary of Confederation.” Far from knowing what day the anniversary fell on, I didn't know there was such a thing. The day had no name, as far as I can remember. The government did not officially proclaim it “Confederation Day” or something similar, as you might expect, though it was called that by confederates. Anti-confederates, when forced to refer to it, called it “induction day.” The difference was that confederates saw Confederation as something we had done, while the anti-confederates saw it as something that had been done to us.

When it was getting late, after a lot of drinking had been done, and most of the children had taken up vantage points in the front room to watch the ever more entertaining grown-ups, the time came for performances. Inhibition and the ability to relate or follow such arguments as my father had been making had each declined at about the same rate. The grown-ups started shouting names of people present, nominating them, until a consensus was reached as to who should take the first turn.

Someone shouted “Art and Wayne,” which was the call for a catechism, and everyone applauded. I had to be coaxed from under the piano, where I was lying on the floor beside my brothers.

My father sat on the couch, I stood facing him and he began. I had only the vaguest understanding of what followed, having memorized it more or less phonetically.

HIM: How would you assess Joey Smallwood's record since Confederation?

ME: I would demur, unless at my throat a knife was held, or at my head a gun.

HIM: Assuming one or both of these conditions to be met?

ME: I would enumerate his blunders one by one until the intervention of senility or death.

HIM: A thumbnail sketch might be extracted at less cost?

ME: The cost, though less, would still be dear.

HIM: Could you do him justice in a single sentence?

ME: Death by hanging.

When we finished, there was loud applause. After several others took their turns singing songs, it was deemed to be time for Uncle Harold to recite “Fling Out the Flag.”

The Union Jack and, after 1965, the Canadian flag, stood in the corner of the school lobby, though never unfurled, as though in token, minimal observance of some provincial regulation. The only unfurled flag was Newfoundland's Pink, White and Green. It hung from the wall above the lobby doors, and it was about this flag that “Fling Out the Flag,” the unofficial anthem of Newfoundland, was written in 1888 by Archbishop Howley, eighteen years before Sir Cavendish Boyle wrote his more famous “Ode to Newfoundland,” which eventually became the official anthem.