HIS COUNTRY AND his father gone, my father came back home in May of 1949, crossing Newfoundland by train from west to east, soon to visit his father’s grave for the first time, and soon to see his family, his brothers, his sisters and his mother for the first time since before his father’s death.

He rode coach, as he always did, unable to afford a berth, though on this occasion it didn’t matter, for there was no chance that he would have slept. There were only a few differences. A sign at the dock in Port aux Basques read “WELCOME TO NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR, TENTH PROVINCE OF CANADA.”

The train itself no longer bore on its boxcars THE NEWFOUNDLAND RAILWAY, but instead Canadian National Railway or CNR. The stewards, the bursers, the waiters, die conductor, the engineer and fireman all wore the uniform of the new management. The table cloths and napkins and towels and face cloths were monogrammed CNR.

My father travelled with friends who, like him, were returning home from college. Anti-confederates all, they were getting their first glimpse of the new Newfoundland and gleefully observed that “aside from a few letters,” it still looked the same, as if the Confederates had predicted that if they won every inch of it would be transformed.

Reaching Riverhead Station in St. John’s, my father was met by an uncle with whom he drove the forty miles of unpaved road along the Southern Shore to Ferryland. It reminded him of the time he and Charlie brought back the anvil from the foundry in St. John’s. His uncle stopped the car on the road below the house and helped my father get his suitcase from the trunk. Then he drove off.

It must have seemed impossible to my father that so much could have happened in a year, that to go back in time but one year would have been to go back before they lost the referendum, before he went fishing for the last time, before he left home, before his father died, before Newfoundland the country ceased to be, back to when there was still a fire in the forge and when, after dark in the fall, behind the windows fogged up from the heat, he saw the fire surge and fade, surge and fade as his father worked the bellows, back to when it had been twenty years since his grandfather died and the forge had gone unlit so long that the chimney bed was cold. How could all that have happened in one year? How could so much have ended and so much else begun?

There were still hoofprints on the path that led up to the forge, along which people led their horses by the bridle to have them shod, prints left there since last fall and persisting because the ground had not yet thawed.

He was shocked, looking up the hill towards the house, to see how lifeless the forge looked. It had never looked its age before, but now it did, the age that the fire within, the ring of the anvil, the smoke and sparks from the chimney and the light at the windows had belied. It looked not only old, but as if it had been in disuse for years.

The only things unchanged were the rusted scrap heap of iron out back, his father’s rough stock of iron, for which he and his children had foraged the Shore on weekends, the ancient mound of yellow ash and the flame-shaped streaks of soot on the rust red chimney bricks. The forge, like a piece of cooled, once-molten metal, had achieved its final form.

It seemed to my father, looking about, that all of Ferryland had achieved its final form, been heated, hammered, doused in the tub, tempered in brine and hardened into fact that would endure like rock. He noticed the silence, what had previously been the silence only of night and early morning and of Sunday afternoons. It was mid-week, mid-afternoon and there came from the forge a discordant silence. All of Newfoundland had been resettled in his absence, its destiny as profoundly changed as if it had been floated on a raft across the Gulf.

After seeing his mother and the rest of his family, he walked alone down the road to the Church of the Most Holy Trinity. He stopped to look at an early iceberg that had made its way into the harbour and run aground and turned the whole Pool cloudy green and left a scum of slush on the surface so that now, after high tide, there was a strand of ice along the shore. The base of the iceberg stretched like a pedestal beneath the water, which was a deep blue-green at the sunken edges. Above the water it was faintly like a house except for one spire of ice that was still attached to the rest, though the intervening part was well submerged. Unless it was dynamited, there would be no capelin in June, and even larger fish like the cod would keep their distance, so that to catch them fishermen would have to travel twice as far as usual. But such considerations were behind him now. He had not come back to Ferryland to live.

He climbed the hill behind the church to the cemetery on the Gaze. Following his mother’s directions, he found his father’s grave, read the headstone, stood beside it. He turned and faced the water, looked down at the beach where he had last seen his father alive.

“Be a good boy.”

It had rained the night before, and though the wind had gone round and was now blowing from the west, storm clouds were still racing overhead. A west wind in Ferryland was offshore, so there was no fog.

My father could see the whole length of the Downs and, at the end, Ferryland Head and the lighthouse, whose keeper must have had a busy, sleepless night.

The beacon of the lighthouse, as if the keeper was testing it, flashed once. And though it was the middle of the day, my father could see its brief illumination of the water and the land, a single revolution of super-illuminating light, like the opposite of an eclipse. Then it was ordinary day again.

He remembered the echo of the hammer on the anvil. He looked down at the Head and the islands, Bois and Gosse, the points of land that caused the echo, that sent up between them and the Gaze the ceaseless din, the sound of the hammer on the anvil as it travelled back and forth across the water. Before the echoes from one blow had faded, another one was struck. There must have been a final blow that ricocheted from hill to hill, the echoes subsiding like those of a rifle shot.

On referendum night, Charlie could not have been more devastated if his side had just been declared the losers in a winner-take-all war, if it had just surrendered to a regime to exist honourably under which would be impossible and there was therefore nothing left for him to do but shoot himself.

When the last returns from Labrador came in, confirming the anti-confederate defeat, Nan sat beside him and tried to console him at the kitchen table. His upper body was sprawled across it as he cried with his face between his arms, his forehead on the tablecloth.

Just before midnight he went out and fired up the forge. He did not work or even burn anything in the furnace, just kept the fire roaring all night long, piling on the coal, cranking the bellows to sustain that conflagration of protest, impotence and grief. He drank rum and fed the fire, stared into it, stabbed it with a poker, tears and drops of sweat streaking his soot-stained face as he ignored Nan’s pleas to come back to the house.

But the next day, word went round in Ferryland that the Major, Peter Cashin, had vowed that despite the outcome of the vote, he would stop Confederation. All of Ferryland had been ready to march to St. John’s as soon as Cashin said the word. But no word from Cashin came.

Once it became clear that not even the Major could salvage the cause, many anti-confederates in Ferryland got obliteratingly drunk and stayed that way for days. Charlie went on a binge that lasted for weeks. Never a man to be mistaken for a stoic, Charlie alternated between rage and grief, sitting slumped at his kitchen table while work went undone, fish went uncaught, crops untended, and customers looking to have their horses shod were turned away. Charlie was incredulous that anyone could think that with the referendum lost, there was any point in putting shoes on horses.

Finally Charlie did get down to work. But he pounded away on the anvil more vigorously than usual in the months after the referendum, spoiling more shoes and nails than he had since he apprenticed with his father. The din from the forge was such that Nan wondered if he was doing anything but striking the anvil.

It had been a longer-than-usual cessation of hammering that sent Nan out to the forge, where she found that her husband had as suddenly and inexplicably given out as his legendary anvil had, one second solid, the next shattered as if he had reached some predetermined limit measured out by hammer strokes.

Charlie lay on the floor of the forge, all his tools scattered about him. She was able to tell how long he had been lying by how low the fire had burned down. In the part of the forge reserved for just-finished pieces there was nothing; nor were there any works-in-progress on the floor or in the vat.

My father turned around again and faced the forge and, for an instant, was convinced that since that final blow, no time had passed, that if he looked in through the window he would see his father and it would still not be too late to say goodbye.