Free Baltimore's Mansion by Wayne Johnston Page A

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 eitherof 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.
    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 twogroups, 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