WE LEFT THE house under cover of darkness, unseen, as far as we knew, by neighbours, hustled the luggage to the car, whispering as if we were making some sort of getaway and if discovered would be forced to stay. It was still solid night when we took our last look at the house. We could barely make it out. Already it appeared to belong to someone else. My mother did not even try to take a last glance at her father’s house, now lived in by people from the city. She could not have seen the farm behind it if she had tried.

We drove into St. John’s along the south-side arterial road that was built into the Brow and from which the sunrise view of the old city was so spectacular it was like an admonition. The variously coloured clapboard houses on whose fronts the sun shone as it only ever did at this time of day and time of year seemed illuminated from within, all the different colours tinged with early-morning orange.

The Johnstons, driving in the shadow of the Brow where the street lamps were still burning, could not see the sun, only its light reflected on the houses and on the granite cliff face of the Battery at the foot of Signal Hill. My father had planned to take the newer, north-side arterial and skirt the city altogether. But he had from habit taken the route he had followed to work for thirty years.

We descended into the city, headed east, facing straight into the sun and were blinded by it. At Rawlin’s Cross my father turned right instead of left, onto Military Road. We were, as if not meant to make a clean getaway, in the city, so he might as well, he said, do what he had sworn for months he would not do. He drove down Military Road until we reached the old Colonial Building, across from which he parked the car.

It had been the site of the Newfoundland legislature from 1850 to 1960, not the first, which had been a tavern, or the second, which had been an orphanage, but the third. It was now the provincial archives, repository of the past, the past put out to pasture.

My sister was by this time asleep in the back seat. My mother stared straight ahead, praying that my father would not, at this last second, change his mind. My father, the car idling, rolled down his window and stared across the courtyard, at the six Ionic columns and the ten steps that led up to them. “The whole thing was a sham,” my father muttered.

“It was forty years ago,” my mother said.

I wondered if the question I had asked my father the night before and the one I had almost asked had provoked him into taking this last look. If there had been no one in the car but him and me, if not for my sister and my mother being there, I might have tried again.

My father had not given the Colonial Building this long a look for decades. The ghost history of Newfoundland. The Colonial Building. Cashin as prime minister. The Pink, White and Green as the national flag. In that ghost history, the independents had won the referendum, the members of the national parliament of Newfoundland had been meeting since 1949, and it was Joey’s and not Cashin’s name whom no one under forty could remember.

My father drove on towards the airport.

The last structure of any size that we passed along the way was the cathedral-like Confederation Building, set on the highest point of land in the city. Built in 1960, it consisted of a centre tower that for years had been the tallest building in the province, and two massive wings on either side. For twelve years, it had been Joey’s secular basilica, from the top floor of which his west-facing office overlooked the city of St. John’s.

There are two runways, from either one of which, depending on the wind and visibility, a plane bound for the mainland may take off from the airport at St. John’s.

One runway faces almost due west and is the one used when the prevailing wind is blowing. A plane that uses this runway does not change direction after takeoff. The other faces almost due east and is most often used when the wind blows strong from that direction, as it does just before and during storms, as it was the morning the Johnstons left—there was an onshore gale heralding a storm that was still a good way off.

Our plane took off into the wind and headed out to sea as if our destination was the Old World. We crossed over Signal Hill and made a slow turn that brought us even with Cape Spear, the sunshine revolving through the cabin like the light of an accelerated day. The plane banked steeply, then straightened out. We again passed over Signal Hill, again over the airport, gaining altitude, heading west.

Soon we were crossing over a part of Newfoundland more cratered than the moon, round blue ponds that might have been tidal pools, for next we saw and flew over open water.

For a time we flew within sight of the south coast, across the boot of the Burin Peninsula, between the Baie d’Espoir peninsula and the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

“The Belle Bay run,” I said.

My father nodded. But he was not looking out the window. He was staring at his hands, at his fingers that were so tightly entwined their tips were bright red and the rest of them was bloodless.

And then we were clear of the land altogether and below us there was nothing but the water of the Gulf.