Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  BY 1963, IT was estimated that expatriate Newfoundlanders and their descendants numbered two million, or four times the population of the province. “A country’s worth” of Newfoundlanders lived abroad, my father said.

  During the war, thousands of Newfoundland women married and went back to the States with American servicemen. All but one of my mother’s five aunts scattered to the Boston States.

  My grandfather received news of his sister May’s death after not having seen or heard from her for fifty years, though there had been no falling-out between them. He was sixty years old at the time. It was summer. My mother and I went to see him after my grandmother called, but I was six, so my mother told me nothing. My grandmother was in the kitchen when we got there. I wandered off down the hallway. The door of my grandparents’ bedroom was open, and my grandfather was sitting on his bed, hands resting on the edge of the mattress, shoulders slumped. I was shocked to see him indoors on a weekday afternoon. Sunshine poured into the room, illuminating dust motes and a patch of ancient rug.

  “Hello, Wayne,” he said.

  “How come you’re in here?” I said.

  “Just thinking about May,” he replied. I thought he meant the month of May. I was about to ask for an explanation when my mother found me and brought me back to the kitchen.

  It was an unprecedented lapse for any grown-up that I knew, but especially for one as notoriously “hard” as he was, to admit what he had to a child. He had been ten when May left home. She had been a girl of seventeen, which must have been how he remembered her. He had got the news less than an hour before, had been called in from the fields by my grandmother when she came back from the post office with a letter addressed to him from Boston. She must have known its contents. It was just a question of which of his sisters had died.

  Half an hour after I saw him sitting on the bed, he came out through the kitchen, went to the fridge, filled a bottle with ice-cold water from a jug, stoppered the bottle and went back to work.

  None of my great-aunts ever came back home. It was as if they had gone to a place from which Newfoundland seemed so other-worldly they had stopped believing it was real. Home, when they left it, had ceased to exist.

  For my part, I did not believe in them, these great-aunts whom I had never seen and who had supposedly lived longer in the Goulds than I had lived so far. It seemed to me they must have been only shadowy presences who had faded so slowly away that their final departure had been barely noticed.

  Realizing that Newfoundland’s greatest tourism potential lay in enticing expatriates back home to the island, Premier Joey Smallwood designated 1966 as Come Home Year. It was a kind of amnesty, as if, on behalf of their relatives who could not bring themselves to do it, the government had declared to prodigal sons and daughters who had gone to the mainland to find work that all was forgiven, there were no hard feelings.

  A campaign to induce homesickness in expatriates was launched. The time was right for it. A new kind of music that had been invented by homesick Newfoundlanders was forever playing on the radio. My father called it “the green-arsed baymen blues.” It spoke, he said, to the homesick, city-sick, pal-pining, mother-missing, sweetheart-yearning, mainland-stranded baymen.

  Come Home Year licence plates were issued. Ads were run in newspapers in Toronto, Boston, New York and even London, England, where a lot of Newfoundlanders lived who had not been home since the end of the Second World War.

  It was because the first paved cross-province highway was completed in 1966 that that year was designated Come Home Year. It was the showcase accomplishment of provincial-federal co-operation, for one thing, and for another allowed people who could not afford to fly their families home to make the trip by car and ferry.

  In the summer of 1966, Newfoundlanders from all over the world came home for the province-wide reunion. It seemed there was at least one long-lost this or that in everybody’s house, the place crawling with nostalgia-ridden, reminiscence-mad expatriates with mainland accents introducing their mainland-born children to their grandparents for the first time. Everywhere people were making up with one another and pledging never to have a falling-out again and that from now on they would keep in touch. There was a kind of surprise reunion craze that summer, and along with it a kind of reunion paranoia, everyone, even those who were themselves planning something, suspecting that something was being planned for them. The slightest deviation from the norm aroused suspicion. It got so that anyone who had relatives who had moved to the mainland was afraid to open a door for fear of finding them behind it. I remember a boy in our neighbourhood telling us there was an epidemic of heart attacks brought on by reunions, that Newfoundlanders all over were dropping dead from sheer surprise.

  These Newfoundlanders had been told by relatives or had read in ads placed in mainland newspapers that they were coming home to a new Newfoundland, the post-Confederation Newfoundland so different from the one they had left that they would hardly recognize it. They were told that once they saw that Newfoundland no longer lagged behind the rest of the world, they would want to stay for good.

  Some Newfoundlanders did come back for good during the summer of Come Home Year, among them my uncle Dennis, my mother’s brother, who had left for Toronto just after we joined Confederation in 1949 and had not been home since.

  There was a welcome home party for Dennis at my uncle Harold’s. (Harold was my father’s younger brother; his wife, Marg, was my mother’s sister.) He met a horde of nieces and nephews he had never seen before and introduced to us his Ontario-born wife and daughter. Dennis, after seventeen years of working on a loading dock in Toronto, came back to join his father and his brother Gerald on the family farm. He was forever describing to us children the wonders of Toronto but ignored us when we brazenly asked him why, if Toronto was so wonderful, he had come back home.

  All the Johnstons and the Everards and their spouses and children were at the Come Home Year Party. My father’s sister, Eva, and her husband, Jim, were there. They were famous among the family for walking out whenever “O Canada” was played. Eva lived in St. John’s, so I myself had never witnessed one of these walkouts, but each time she and Jim staged one I heard about it.

  The grown-ups gathered in the front room while we children were relegated to the kitchen. I stood in the doorway between the two rooms and watched them, sensing a momentousness that had to do with more than just Come Home Year. This was the largest gathering of my relatives that I had ever seen. I was eight and knew from past experience that when more than four or five of them gathered in one place, it was inevitable that they would get going about Confederation.

  Almost anything could get my father going about it at almost any time. He would start off complaining about having the flu or about how awful the weather was and somehow wind up on the subject, though it was eighteen years since our side had been defeated in the referendum, since Newfoundlanders had renounced independence by a heartbreakingly small margin.

  He held forth at the party in ruefully aggrieved, reverential tones about Peter Cashin, whom he said was one of the greatest public speakers who ever lived, a man who, when it came to making speeches, “put Joey Smallwood to shame.” There hung on our wall, facing you in the porch as you entered, a black-and-white portrait of Cashin, the closest thing to a leader the factious anti-confederates had had.

  My grandfather Charlie had been a friend and supporter of Major Cashin’s, one of many lieutenants who worked with him in the referendum. Charlie had witnessed the confrontation that had brought the young Cashin local fame, a fight with a nun named Sister Joseph, who was so large she could not pass through doors except sideways. No one who had not seen them square off at the start would have known whom she was fighting with, so quickly did they wind up on the ground and so rarely and fleetingly did Cashin appear from among the manifold layers of her habit. It looked as if she had thrown a fit and with all the strength that God could spare her for the purpose was trying to subdue some devil with w
hom she was invisibly possessed. You could have made, from what she wore, a hundred pairs of pants for the Major, Charlie said, as if by that to estimate how badly he was overmatched. It ended suddenly, audibly, with a thud and Sister Joseph splayed supine, on her face a look of stern bewilderment, Cashin somewhere beneath her. When she got up, the young Cashin did not. Her breastplate of celluloid was in two places broken and her wooden cross hung down her back. Her nose was bleeding, her chin and cheekbones bruised, while Cashin, nun-pummelled, unconscious, was unmarked.

  My father described how, just before making a speech, Cashin would roll up his shirtsleeves and smash his fist on the table or desk in front of him. This was easy to believe from his portrait, which appeared to have been taken by a photographer the breaking of whose neck Cashin had postponed just long enough to let him take his picture. The stocky, fierce-looking Major, a hero of the First World War, stared from the photograph as if daring you to say the word “Confederation.”

  Harold’s wife, Marg, described how in her haste to get home and hear Cashin speaking on the radio, she’d tripped and broken her leg. That was the kind of loyalty, the kind of fervour the Major inspired.

  My father quoted, in denunciation of Smallwood, the observation made by Parnell in his famous speech at Cork, Ireland, in 1885: “No man has the right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country, thus far shalt thou go and no further.”

  They all saw Cashin as a Parnell-like figure, after whose defeat by some conspiracy that, though “common knowledge,” was impossible to prove, everything went bad.

  “Who was Parnell?” I asked.

  “A great leader for Irish independence,” my father said. “Hounded to his death by priests because he had a fling with a married woman named Kitty O’Shea.”

  “What’s a fling?”

  “A sinfully delicious piece of pastry,” Uncle Harold said.

  “We ruled ourselves for eighty years,” my father said. “From 1855 to 1934. And then that bloody British Commission of Government was set up. To save us, they said. To save Newfoundland from going bankrupt.”

  And then he got on to Joey Smallwood, who was leader of the confederates at the National Convention from 1946 to 1948. The National Convention was an assembly elected to decide what forms of government should be offered to the people of Newfoundland in a referendum. The Convention voted not to include Confederation with Canada on the ballot, but Whitehall ruled that it should be included anyway.

  “Everybody knows the referendum was rigged,” my father said. England, supposed to be neutral on the issue, had been in cahoots with Canada, and Canada had been in cahoots with Joey; all of them, in some way that my father deemed to be past my understanding, had rigged the referendum.

  I watched my father and noted how the grown-ups watched him, hanging on his every word as Cashin’s followers must have hung on his in the 1940s. He seemed to me no less a leader than his namesake, King Arthur, or Parnell or Cashin, all the more impressive for being, as each of them had been, the patron of a lost, just cause.

  “Even with it rigged, they barely won,” he said scornfully, as if the nearness of the vote somehow proved that it was rigged. “I can tell you this much — if Newfoundland had stayed a country and Peter Cashin had become prime minister —”

  “He would have done away with fog and drizzle,” Uncle Dennis said. I thought this was pretty funny, but the silence that followed this remark was so censorious Dennis didn’t speak another word for hours. He had gone away to Canada — as the Canadian mainland was still referred to by members of my family, though we had been Canadians for twenty years — and it had taken him seventeen years to see the error of his ways. Not many remarks of this kind would have been tolerated from anyone, but especially not from him.

  As I regarded them, it seemed possible, even inevitable, that Confederation would somehow be undone. How could anything stand when so many grown-ups were against it? They were still able to summon up some scorn, some indignation, still able to suspend their disbelief in the reversibility of Confederation and act as if they would no longer put up with having had their country taken from them.

  “One thing is certain,” my father said, “and that is this: all who voted for Newfoundland did so out of love for Newfoundland. Are we agreed on that point?” They all gave their vigorous assent, nodding their heads, Uncle Dennis, trying to make amends for his gaffe of a moment ago, Uncle Harold and Uncle Jim flanking my father, their eyes averted from his as if to indicate how intently they were listening. They wound up in a close circle around him, holding their glasses, smoking, Harold and Jim rising up ever so slightly on their toes from time to time in a way that was somehow linked to the rhythm of my father’s voice, as though they were urging him on, as though he was rolling now. Whenever my father made some point, Aunt Marg looked at my mother as if to say, There now, there it is — at last someone has said it. My father began speaking as though someone present was opposing him, though no one was.

  “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.