The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  Michael Quirke, at the age of twenty-eight, had returned to his hometown, St. Lawrence, for a job at Black Duck after working on a deep-sea diving tender for several years. The contrast between work at sea, in the fresh air, and the conditions he encountered in the mine—and the eventual toll those conditions would take on his health—convinced him early on that he’d do everything he could to create a better future for his son, Peter, who was two years old. He’d make sure of that—Peter would be spared the ordeal of working underground.10

  It was the dream of many of the St. Lawrence miners—work hard and sacrifice to make a better life for the next generation. But for most of them, it was futile—the destiny of that next generation, including little Peter Quirke and Ed Stapleton’s boy, also named Edward, was already being carved in stone.

  Pat Tarrant became a miner at Black Duck at the age of thirty. In 1933, he had six kids and another on the way. It was the work that mattered—the hardships he encountered in the workplace were of transient significance, the peculiarity of working for a promise rather than a paycheque was mitigated by the sense of hope that Black Duck offered. A stable livelihood, a future for his kids and their kids. He, like everybody else there, had grown up with a sense of the inevitability of sacrifice. This was just another phase in a long history of hardship. But this time, there seemed to be a real possibility of progress and improvement.

  WALTER Seibert had tapped into a tradition that he might not have known about had he not met Aubrey Farrell and learned a bit of local history. His formula for starting up his mining business was not unlike a long-standing practice in the fishing sector.

  For Pat Rennie, who had moved to the area from Lord’s Cove after his livelihood and four members of his family had been wiped out by the tsunami, it had always been, more or less, like this. It was how the business of the fishery had always functioned. Like it or not, the fisherman was in a cooperative venture with the merchants and the buyers. All the while he lived on credit, some years never seeing cash.

  The system worked. But the problem in the fishery was that neither the fisherman nor the merchant ever quite knew what the bottom line was going to look like when the final tally was completed. With this new mining venture, you at least knew what your hours were worth. Fifteen cents an hour was a joke, even in 1933. They all knew that. But $1.20 a day was an improvement over dole—which was just $1.80 a month.

  Nobody knew for sure when they’d actually see the money they were now theoretically earning. It would not have crossed their minds that compensation would be less straightforward than they’d been promised—that as always was the case, their wages would depend on distant market factors and the priorities of distant strangers.

  23.

  AUBREY Farrell was only twenty-six years old when he met Walter Seibert for the first time. It was mostly out of courtesy and at the urging of his younger brother, Howard, that he agreed to meet the New Yorker at all. But they hit it off. They were about the same age. The Farrells, Aubrey and Howard, who still lived at home with their siblings and their widowed mother, enjoyed the company of interesting strangers, and they gladly housed and entertained the Seibert party when Walter came to town in the summer of 1931.11

  Aubrey’s father, Aloysius Farrell, who had died seven years earlier, had been interested in the mineral potential of the area. He’d loved wandering the barrens and prospecting, at which he became an enthusiastic amateur. Aubrey never shared his father’s passion for the rocks. But he was quick to recognize a business opportunity. Seibert’s plan was, potentially, a lifeline for a struggling community. And he was impressed and intrigued by this likeable young accountant who came straight from the heartland of sophistication and high finance, Manhattan.

  For the first year of their relationship, Aubrey had no reason to doubt his instincts about the deal and about the man. But now, three years into what the townsfolk had been calling the cooperation, Farrell was beginning to have misgivings. He had delivered an able-bodied willing workforce, as he had promised. He cringed, at times, when he saw how hard the men had to work, the primitive conditions they had to work in. He was already hearing stories about men with breathing problems. The equipment they were using was appalling. He was only too familiar with their poverty.

  The remuneration was ridiculous. It was as if the Americans had never heard of cash. And they seemed to have forgotten that the original arrangement—to withhold wages until the Seibert company was earning money—was supposed to be temporary. By 1935, the Farrells’ business, a general store, was having an awkward time financially itself, largely because of Walter Seibert’s cavalier approach to paying bills.

  Aubrey Farrell and other merchants in St. Lawrence were depending on the patience of their suppliers to maintain their inventories; their bankers seemed to understand that the St. Lawrence merchants required a little extra flexibility because of Seibert’s management of money, a juggling act that was showing little sign of ending. Bankers are not famous for patience with potential deadbeats, or elasticity in their accounting. But knowing what was at stake in St. Lawrence, bankers in Burin and suppliers in St. John’s seemed to have been exhibiting a surprising tolerance. Even customs officers became cooperative, waving through an essential item (or covering the duty from their own pockets) when Smith or Poynter pleaded temporary poverty.12

  Donald Poynter, instructed by Louis Etchegary, with whom by then he had a warm friendship, would sometimes have to smuggle crucial items—equipment, explosives—from St. Pierre, and sometimes he’d bring products that weren’t quite so essential to the job but were vital for the quality of life (alcohol, cigarettes, cigars and chocolate). It was widely suspected locally that Father Thorne, another ally, would lend Donald Poynter his clerical garb to wear on smuggling runs—presuming, accurately, that a conspicuous priest on board a boat would deflect the curiosity of customs cutters.

  Seibert’s seemingly perpetual financial crunch meant paydays often had to be postponed when Walter decided that some other monetary obligation was more important than a miner’s wages or compensation to a local merchant.

  Aubrey Farrell had concluded, even before the end of 1934, that being Walter Seibert’s business partner was grating on his nerves. It was challenging enough to keep a small family business afloat during the Depression—especially with the collapse of Newfoundland’s staple industry, the fishery—without also having to worry about Walter and his fiduciary eccentricities.

  There could be no more excuses for the missed paydays, the rubber cheques, the exasperated bankers in Burin. Walter, after all, was an accountant by profession. He knew what he was doing.

  A MINER’S paycheque, once normal paydays started, typically came to $7.20 a week. But the company would pay only $5.00, the balance being withheld as “back time.”13 Nobody, including Aubrey, was sure what this was all about, but it was a problem for the miner because, by payday, he’d have run up a bill at Aubrey’s store for most of what he’d earned. Being arbitrarily docked about 30 percent of his wages made a problem for both him and Aubrey.

  The cheques were supposed to be certified but never were, and the merchant knew from past experience with Walter that more often than not, the corporation (most locals had ceased calling it the cooperation) had insufficient funds to cover them. Aubrey honoured the corporation paper anyway. When a miner showed up at the store on payday with a dodgy corporation paycheque, Farrell would accept it at face value, even knowing that he might have to wait months before the cheques would clear the bank. At least the miner and his family could eat. And if there was a balance owing to the miner, Aubrey would issue him an IOU that the store would subsequently take back as cash.

  By late 1935, St. Lawrence was virtually an economic subsystem in Newfoundland with a peculiar unofficial currency—IOUs, sometimes handwritten on scraps of wrapping paper. Aubrey Farrell was fed up with it, and he informed Seibert bluntly that, thenceforth, their relationship would have to be along the lines of accepted business practice.<
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  Both Poynter and Doc Smith would have been aware of Aubrey Farrell’s frustration, and would no doubt have sympathized. They had their own complaints—Smith wasn’t getting paid at all, and Poynter had learned that he couldn’t rely on Seibert to pay him when he was supposed to or to deliver on raises that he had promised.

  BY mid-1935, there were rumours circulating that both bosses were about to leave. Smith was running out of patience with Seibert’s shoestring operation, but Poynter’s situation was more personal. His wife, Urla, had returned to the United States late in 1934 to give birth. And in December, she and Donald had become parents of a little girl they named Barbara.

  But mother and child weren’t long back in St. Lawrence when it became apparent that Urla wasn’t well. She had persistent headaches and they’d been getting worse. Tuberculosis was epidemic throughout Newfoundland, but she showed none of the familiar symptoms.14

  The headaches became more severe. At times, her mind seemed to wander. There were signs of meningitis, perhaps a rare variety caused by tuberculosis. By early summer in 1935, Poynter was coming under pressure from Urla’s family back in New Jersey to bring or send her home for proper medical attention.

  The family’s concerns were understandable, given that there were no medical facilities at all in St. Lawrence. There was a small hospital in Grand Bank, more than fifty miles away on a bad road. But the fate of someone living in St. Lawrence, suffering from injury or illness, was dependent on his or her own physical resources and the healing skills of neighbours.

  After living among the Newfoundlanders for more than a year and half, Donald Poynter would have known enough about the island’s political and economic circumstances not to expect improvement in the quality of life at any time in the near future. In July 1935, he had to make a hard choice between career and family.

  24.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  TUESDAY, JULY 23, 1935

  AUBREY Farrell, in a state of apprehension and relief, watched the visitors climb into Father Thorne’s black sedan and head off up the hill towards the Lawn road that sunny summer morning.

  The priest had the only car in the parish, and he had generously volunteered to drive the elderly couple as far as Lamaline. He wanted them to see the south coast communities that had been devastated by the tidal wave of 1929—an event they were obviously unaware of.

  It had been a brief visit, an evening and overnight, but Sir John Hope Simpson, the commissioner of natural resources in the new administration, was interested in the Black Duck mining project. He’d actually insisted on seeing the place and being briefed on progress. It was a clear summer evening. He’d seemed unusually well informed. He’d mentioned Seibert. Spoke knowledgeably about the challenges. To read between the lines, he was unimpressed by the American. He was noncommittal on the mine itself.15

  Did Aubrey know, as he watched them go, that it was Sir John’s sixty-seventh birthday? Probably. Sir John’s chatty wife, Lady Mary Jane, also known as Quita, would have let that slip in the context of describing her husband’s commitment to his task in Newfoundland, and the amazing vigour he displayed in what had turned out to be a physically demanding schedule on their south coast tour.

  She might have explained that very early on the previous day, they had started out in Marystown and driven across the peninsula to the community of Garnish—only about twelve miles away, but it took an hour to get there. They had been terribly impressed with Garnish, the people proud and apparently self-sufficient. No dole in Garnish. Ladies in hats with parasols. Garnish looked “so Somerset,” Sir John had noted.16 If Aubrey were sensitive, he’d have taken the high praise for Garnish as evidence of a less-than-positive impression of St. Lawrence. But no matter.

  After Garnish they went on to Burin, where they seem to have participated in a brief but significant meeting that would soon result in establishing a little hospital there. Not good news for St. Lawrence. With a nascent mining industry, the town needed doctors and nurses and, ideally, a hospital facility. But there was already a small hospital in Grand Bank, and now that the commissioners were approving a hospital for Burin, St. Lawrence wasn’t going to be on their agenda for improved health care any time in the near future.

  In Burin, the commissioner and Lady Quita had boarded the SS Malakoff for the voyage to St. Lawrence. It was significant that even after a busy day and a late arrival, Sir John seemed eager to visit the Black Duck project. That was more important than parasols and hats. Sir John was probably the most influential of all six commissioners now controlling the lives and destinies of Newfoundlanders. He seemed to be aware that Black Duck needed the support of government.

  The pit was already so deep you couldn’t see the bottom, and Sir John had commented on the rickety arrangement of ladders and platforms that vanished in the gloom. This was how the men got to and from the workplace? It looked dangerous. He was reassured that it wasn’t, that the men were happy with the climb up and down.

  Overall the project looked untidy, improvised. Ditches and dirt piles; shacks for storage; equipment that seemed worn out, although the place was new—all the signs of a struggling operation. But it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for Sir John to see the place in such a helter-skelter state. It was evidence of need but also of initiative, the hard work going into making the mine a success, the kind of resolute commitment that Englishmen admired and, hopefully, rewarded.

  Surely he would see the worthiness and know the significance of this mining venture in a country that was desperate for new economic growth, in a rocky place with vast untapped mineral resources. Sir John seemed to know what fluorspar was used for—that it was a staple in production of steel, aluminum, chemicals and ceramics—and that was definitely something in their favour.

  The car was hardly out of sight—on its way to Lamaline for another busy day there and up the bay in Fortune and Grand Bank—when the sky darkened. Late that day, the Hope Simpsons would rejoin the Malakoff and, they hoped, head for Port aux Basques. Sir John was looking forward to a leisurely voyage and some salmon fishing on the way—a small concession to the traditional felicity of a birthday, even if it was a reminder of advancing age.

  But Aubrey would have recognized the beginning of a change in weather. It had been gloriously warm and calm and sunny for the past ten days. Now the clouds were gathering. He could feel the breeze, the subtle coolness that always warned of rain. A sudden gust of wind foretold a rough evening on the water. The Malakoff would not be going far that night, or maybe even the next day.

  Sir John’s sixty-seventh birthday would be memorable for discomfort, if nothing else. It took two and a half bone-rattling hours to cover the twenty-seven miles to Lamaline. It was another day of dreary meetings and tiresome tours, modest public buildings, mediocre public people, dilapidated public works—all needing public money.

  By early afternoon, the rain was lashing down in horizontal sheets. Definitely not a day when he would or could have toured Black Duck, even if he’d wanted to. And clearly not a day for salmon fishing. Thank the good Lord that Sir John’s visit had fallen on the Monday, when the weather was salubrious, and not on his birthday, when it wasn’t. At least St. Lawrence had lucked out with the weather.

  The sudden change in weather on that day, on the other hand, might later have been interpreted as symbolic of larger changes in the wind, of black metaphors—storm clouds gathering on the horizon, an approaching stretch of turbulence.

  IT MIGHT have been a bit depressing for Aubrey Farrell and Doc Smith, who presumably had led the little party on the tour of Black Duck mine on that July evening in 1935, if they’d known more about the inner workings of Sir John Hope Simpson’s mind.

  Smith and Farrell had probably hoped that Sir John’s brief visit to St. Lawrence would provide an important boost for the local project where it mattered most—in St. John’s—and that the commissioner for natural resources would become an advocate for fluorspar development. But if they had been priv
y to the commissioner’s frank opinions, which, by the time he was back in the capital, he was already shaping into a lengthy memorandum, they might have found a lot that, while they would agree with most of it, left them deeply disappointed.17

  Before he visited St. Lawrence, Sir John had been fully briefed, in writing, by Doc Smith about Black Duck and other fluorspar mining prospects around the town. He had available to him the advice of a couple of first-rate geologists, one of them a bright young Newfoundlander named Claude K. Howse. And on top of all that, he had actually met face to face with Walter Seibert, talked to him at length and sized him up.

  Sir John seemed to have been much impressed by Seibert’s man, Doc Smith, for his professional commitment and expertise, not to mention his principled decision to work without a salary. Young Howse was knowledgeable and unafraid to speak his mind. The commissioner admired that. Walter was another matter altogether. The commissioner of natural resources wasn’t quite so taken with Seibert. And this fact, while not explicit, would be a lingering challenge for St. Lawrence.

  MONTHS before he visited St. Lawrence, Sir John had what he called “a long interview” with Walter Seibert. By the end of that meeting, the commissioner was convinced that Seibert was flying by the seat of his pants and, because of his fecklessness, was actually jeopardizing a potentially valuable resource.