NINE VOTES FOR Newfoundland!” he shouts as, with his family, he walks into the hall. The referendum is so close it might not be decided until the returns come in from Labrador.

He thinks of Nan the night before, making calculations on a slate to see if their lead on the island was large enough to hold up in spite of Labrador. She has never been to Labrador. She has never travelled more than forty miles from Ferryland, never seen the Isthmus of Avalon except on maps.

Not until he pulls the curtain closed behind him does the possibility occur to him. He looks around, at the chair and the little table, at the makeshift plywood ceiling. Why a voting booth should need a ceiling—the whole thing reminds him of confession.

He cannot help feeling that behind the curtain some priest sits in profile, face resting on his hand, waiting patiently for him to speak. This is even more private than confession.

“Bless me, Father.”

In one hand he holds a pencil, in the other a piece of paper on which two boxes have been drawn, an inch apart. It is easy to imagine, looking at the paper and the simple diagram, that the whole matter is his to decide.

“Choose one,” the paper reads.

There were no arguments in his house about Confederation, nor, as far as he knew, in any other house in Ferryland.

Elsewhere, lifelong friends were at each other’s throat about it. Houses were literally divided, a confederate wife sticking to one half of a house, an independent husband to the other. He has heard of a man who broke off his engagement when his fiancée spoke up for independence. And of a family that each night eats dinner in silence, one half wearing on their pockets or lapels badges that proclaim their position on “the question” or bear brazenly the image of the man the other half regards as the anti-Christ.

He has neither heard nor read the arguments in favour of Confederation except when they were set up as straw men to be knocked down by Independents, and is therefore unable to weigh one side against the other.

A solitary impulse makes him choose.

He does not sit down. He knows he must not linger, they will be suspicious if he does.

He lays the paper on the table and keeps it in place with his left hand while with his right he scrawls an X. He will wonder later if his hand was God guided to do what to him seemed and always will seem wrong, if others were likewise moved to go against what they believed, perhaps more than half as many as the margin of defeat.

His heart, when he leaves the booth, is pounding. His hands shake so badly he has to use both of them to fit the piece of paper in the slot.

As they make their way back home along the road below the Gaze, a man, frantic, embarrassed, runs past them, headed for the parish hall. Someone tells him that should he not make it in time and should independence lose by just one vote, he will be strung up.

The words “one vote” linger in his mind.

He stops and, turning his back to the Gaze, looks out across the Pool. His house, like all the others, faces the sea. His evening prospect, all his life, has been the sea.

He wonders if they have counted his vote yet.

“To reach St. John’s from North America,” the Major said, “you have to travel a quarter of the way to England. The Azores are closer than Toronto to St. John’s. Our island is farther from its mainland than Ceylon or Madagascar are from theirs.”

He had no idea where the Azores or any of those other places were except Toronto, which he doubted he would ever see. This was in a church hall in Cape Broyle. He wondered what the Major was getting at.

“We are neither there,” the Major said, pointing one way, “nor there,” pointing the other.

He stood with his arms outstretched, one pointing east, one pointing west.

“We are here!“ the Major roared, bringing both hands together palm to palm, then entwining his fingers to make a single, massive fist, which he brought down on the table with such force that people jumped.

He turns in at their laneway with the others and walks up to his house.

He notes from the kitchen window the sudden change in the colour of the water near the shore as the sun sinks below the Gaze, watches the shadow move east across the Pool until, with the real sunset, it moves too fast for him to follow and the light, without his having seen it leave, is gone.

When they lose, when the voice on the radio says that “in our great but troubled history a strange new chapter has begun,” he cries like all the others.

“My poor little country, gone,” he says.

They do not know. None of them will ever know.

The moon, a sliver, yellow crescent, can be seen above the Gaze.