It seems I always knew that. I knew it before I started school.
He was a barely personified agency of opposition, the “thwart,” my father called him, the nebulous something that we Johnstons were against. He existed only on movie screens, or in the television set, which was turned off the instant he appeared. About the nature of his threat to us I was never certain. We would have changed the channel, except the only other one we could get was the CBC, and the utter worthlessness of anything Canadian was for us an article of faith.
So the instant we saw Joey’s face, someone ran to the set and turned it off. “Joey!” the first of us to see him would shout, alerting the one nearest to the set, sounding the alarm. Even when our parents weren’t watching, we children did it. About their aversion to Joey they were so sincere that to avoid him seemed to us the grown-up thing to do.
To us, he was a bow-tie wearing despot, who by the time I started school had been ruling Newfoundland for fifteen years. He was regarded with a mixture of terror and scornful amusement. He was the only premier Newfoundland had had since Confederation. Confederation had entered the world with Joey; he had led Newfoundlanders to it and tempted them to partake of it as surely as the serpent had led Eve to the apple. And we had thereby fallen from a state of grace that could never be recovered, been banished forever from the paradise of independence.
He won elections by landslides, despite an almost unbroken record of spectacular failures, treasury-draining economic development schemes, the hope of whose improbable success he clung to long after it was certain even to his closest friends that they were doomed.
No matter what the implications might be for us as Newfoundlanders, we delighted in the failures of Joey’s debt-defying schemes. He was like a tightrope walker who never managed a single successful walk but kept raising the rope higher and higher, in the end trying to perform from the greatest height while wrapped from head to toe in bandages and with every limb encumbered by a cast.
During the first fifteen years of Joey’s reign, Newfoundland went from the solvency of a $45 million surplus to a several-billion-dollar debt. It was an epic debt, ludicrously huge in proportion to our population of less than half a million.
It was vindication of sorts. Confederation might be here to stay, though no one ever said so in so many words, but it had all backfired on Joey in a manner that was no less gratifying for bringing with it the complete ruination of Newfoundland.
During the last of Joey’s days in office, the Johnstons refused to risk heartbreak by even considering the possibility that they would finally be rid of him.
“He’ll worm his way out of this one yet, you just watch,” my uncle Harold said. “This one” was the deadlocked election of October 1971. Strange things happened in Newfoundland politics during the next six months. Politicians who were offered cabinet posts to do so switched parties, crossing the House of Assembly from both sides, the balance of power teetering back and forth. Joey’s government at one point had fewer members than the opposition, but he somehow managed to forestall a vote of non-confidence and stayed in power.
“It’s the referendum all over again,” Aunt Eva declared. “The whole thing is fixed.”
But Joey announced his resignation on January 13, 1972, at four o’clock in the afternoon, as it was getting dark. I was fourteen and just home from high school in St. John’s. His speech, which he delivered from his office, was carried live on TV and radio. Life in Newfoundland came to a standstill. In many homes throughout the province that night, people wept and swore bitterly at the ungratefulness of those Newfoundlanders who had voted against him. As in the referendum of 1948, about half of them had. A quarter of a century later, the country was once again split down the middle.
There was neither weeping nor swearing in our house. Harold and Marg and Eva and Jim came by in the evening.
“It’s a happy night in heaven,” Eva said.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” my father said.
They all said it was a shame that Nan Johnston and Mr. Charlie and Freda could not have lived to see this day.
For a while they were silent. It sounded as if a coup were under way outside, so many shotguns were being fired off in celebration, in mocking mimicry of what the confederates had done on referendum night twenty-four years earlier. Joey had not only given us the satisfaction of defeating him but had bowed out about as ungracefully as it was possible to do, prolonging his reign long past the point where everyone but him knew he was finished. Eva, sipping on a drink, swore the suspense had been such that she had foresworn TV, radio and newspapers for weeks. “My God,” she said, putting her hand on her chest, “I thought that man would never go.”
They decided to call the Ferryland Johnstons, Gordon and Kitty and Millie. As each of them took a turn on the phone, their voices changed instantly, as if they had placed a call to the past, as if they were looking out the kitchen window of the old house at the lighthouse on the Head, looking out across the Downs, which at night were always a shade darker than the water.
Ferryland, Gordon told them, was going wild. Fireworks. Bands of merrymakers going by on the road below the house, motorcades of cars honking. Guns going off. Though it was a clear night, the foghorn in the lighthouse had been sounding since four o’clock. Gordon doubted that anyone in Ferryland would get to sleep that night. It was as if Confederation had been undone.
But they spoke not with rancour or with vehemence or even, after a while, with vindictive glee, but wistfully. Something had ended, something more than just Joey’s reign as premier. It was hard to say just what, but something had. And harder still to imagine what would take its place.
However things might have been in Ferryland, the celebration in the Goulds did not go on all night or even until midnight. In our house, by ten o’clock, the Johnstons were subdued, reflective.
“We’re still stuck with Confederation, but at least we’ve seen the last of Joey Smallwood,” Eva said. The others murmured their assent.
They must have thought that with Joey gone, they could at last, if not reconcile themselves to Confederation, then forget about it, not be daily reminded by his face and his voice and his name in the paper of their father’s Old Lost Land.
It had not occurred to them that they might miss this last link with the battle, that they had in part defined themselves by their opposition to Joey, that to rail against him was a way of sustaining the illusion that Confederation might still somehow be undone.
They had all been in their twenties when the fight for Newfoundland was lost, young men and women. Defeat came as an intervention. They had lost not something they had merely hoped would last but something they had had no reason to think they would ever lose.
Now, in their early fifties, they were no less bewildered than they had been back then. They had followed the river of what should have been, knowing it led nowhere.