Free Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston

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 Godwhose 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.
    â€œBrown’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 thetitle. 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