August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  The photograph is one of three that I receive in an e-mail from my father. In the electronic note, he does not comment or share his opinion about the pictures; he simply passes them along with a message from Jerome Walsh, my father’s second cousin who lives in Marystown, a relative we will meet when we travel to Newfoundland in a few weeks.

  The former mayor of Marystown and a genealogy buff, Jerome has researched the family back to the early 1700s, accumulating hundreds of photographs, including these three he has sent my father. The first picture I pull up on my computer screen is a black-and-white image of my grandfather; he stands between his two brothers, Leo and Ernest. All three men are smiling, their arms wrapped around each other. The youngest of the brothers, Ambrose’s hair is jet-black though bits of gray peek from his sideburns and his mustache. His head is cocked slightly to the right; his smile is natural, confident. He appears happy to be among his brothers.

  He wears a T-shirt that shows his muscled and trim physique. He is strikingly handsome, his features reminiscent of Clark Gable. His older brothers appear to be in their seventies and eighties; Ambrose is perhaps in his late sixties.

  While Leo and Ernest are light-skinned, pale, Ambrose’s face is tanned from the warm Californian climate of his home. His gaze meets the camera straight on, and I magnify the photo several times, until Ambrose’s eyes and his thick brows fill my screen. I search for guilt, remorse, recognition of wronging his first two sons, and his wife Patricia. But there is no malevolence or sorrow, only softness, an impish glint in his brown eyes, eyes that remind me of my father.

  The second picture portrays Ambrose many years earlier. He and his brother Leo stand in a garden in front of Leo’s Staten Island home. The summer flowers are in bloom; carnations and petunias frame the picket fence that rises up behind the two men. In his thirties, Ambrose wears a short-sleeve, buttoned-down shirt, trousers, and a tie that is loosened around his neck. While Leo smiles and stares at whoever is taking the photograph, Ambrose’s gaze is unfocused, haunted as if he had just learned of some terrible news. His left hand is clenched, ready to strike something or someone. His shoulders slump forward, his mouth remains slightly ajar, like he had been suddenly sucker punched. I wonder what troubles my grandfather in this frozen moment of time. Was the photograph taken in August 1935? Snapped days or weeks after Ambrose had learned about the August Gale that tore up Newfoundland’s coast? Was it the killer hurricane that preoccupied my grandfather?

  Except for the wedding band on my grandfather’s left hand, there is no hint of my Nana in the photograph. Was she standing in front of Ambrose and Leo? Did she take the picture? Or was she inside her home, cradling her newborn son, Ronnie, holding a warm milk bottle to his mouth.

  Unlike the other picture in which my grandfather poses for the camera lens and flashes an easy smile, this image captures him unguarded, off kilter. He is vulnerable, lost, and I wish I could step into the photograph, step back in time to learn what has disturbed him, left him with the punch-drunk gaze.

  I open up the third and final picture of my grandfather and a wave of anger washes over me. In this snapshot, Ambrose is in his late sixties or early seventies. He and his second wife, Arlene, sit at a table. Their heads tilt toward each other, touching. Arlene’s honey-colored hair is swept back in a chignon. She wears a dress and a dark cardigan; her thin lips blush with color and press together with a hint of a smile. Her eyes are almond-shaped, her cheekbones high, chiseled; she is a beautiful woman.

  Ambrose rests his forearm on the table, his mouth is open, forming a word, as if he were telling the photographer: “Hurry up and take the goddamn picture!”—a phrase my father often utters when anyone takes too long to snap the shutter button.

  There are white crumbs scattered on the table before Ambrose and Arlene and the edge of what looks like a sheet cake on the photograph’s border. Were they celebrating an anniversary? Marking the decades they had been together? They seem comfortable, at ease with one another and their opposite personalities—my grandfather: blustery, full of himself, a charismatic character; Arlene: reserved, shy, and unsure.

  Just as I never imagined my grandfather’s face, I never considered Arlene’s likeness. Scrutinizing her portrait, I realize that I do not have any strong feelings against her. Oddly, I do not harbor anger for this woman who allowed my Nana to care for her firstborn, who shared tea with my grandmother in a small San Francisco apartment, and who ultimately won Ambrose back. My hostility is reserved for my grandfather, the married man who strayed with a woman ten years his junior.

  I shut off the computer, erasing Ambrose and Arlene’s faces from my screen. Still, the image of my grandfather lingers in my mind, resurrecting my father’s stories about San Francisco and the difficult years that followed. These photographs give form and flesh to my grandfather. He is suddenly real to me, no longer faceless, vague, undefined. My memory now can conjure Ambrose’s eyes, his muscular build, and thick forearms—characteristics that live on in my father.

  From my own scrapbook, I pull photographs of my grandmother. There are three sepia-colored prints. Two of them depict my Nana when she is seven or eight. In one image, she stands with four younger children, her half brothers and sisters from her father’s second wife. My Nana, Patricia Mary O’Connell, wears a white dress with a sailor’s collar accentuated with a broad dark tie. Her blonde hair is cut in a pageboy, and several strands are pulled back in a bow. There is a smile, pure and innocent, on her face. She is pretty, and at this moment, the future of the successful Irish builder’s daughter holds only promise and prosperity.

  A picture taken ten years later shows my Nana sitting on the front steps of her Staten Island home, her arm wrapped around Eleanor’s back. There is another younger girl, perhaps another sister, in the photograph, too. Nana and Eleanor both wear dresses, nylons. While Eleanor wears high heels, her older sister Patricia presses flat, laced, commonsense shoes against the stair riser. The summer sun is bright, casting dark shadows on the large window shutters that fill the corners of the porch. A vine creeps up one side of the house, and bushes rise up the other.

  Patricia is perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She is tall, big-boned, and her hair is now cut in a bob. She is a striking young girl, who stares at the camera with only a hint of a smile. Had she met Ambrose yet, I wonder? Has the son of Newfoundland fishermen asked her out? Has she fallen for the dark-eyed young man whom she will forever love?

  The last image in my scrapbook shows Nana again with her older sister, Ruth McCormack. Ruth and her family had taken in my Nana, dad, and uncle when they returned from San Francisco and had nowhere else to live. In the picture, the two of them stand by a 1940s car. The passenger door is open. Ruth rests a white-gloved hand on the back door. She is dressed fashionably with a long skirt and matching bolero coat. Nana wears a long, dark skirt and a white short-sleeve blouse adorned with a flower corsage. Perhaps it is Easter Sunday, and they are either coming or going to church. While Ruth gazes toward the inside of the car, her younger sister glances down toward the sidewalk. Nana’s brow is furrowed. Her lips are pressed together. Her arms hang limply by her sides, and she appears sad, worn.

  Triple-decker homes line the streets in the background. How soon after the California trip was the picture taken, I wonder? How many years have passed since she arrived in Dorchester and Watertown, penniless and shamed, forced to ask her sisters and brother for help?

  Another photograph shows my father and Uncle Bill with one of Ruth’s sons, their cousin David McCormack. The picture was taken, I presume, on the same Easter day. My father and uncle wear suits and pose in the McCormacks’ backyard. Handsome in his Sunday clothes, my dad’s stance is nonchalant, cocky, as if nothing or no one could faze him. He is fifteen or sixteen, a few years away from joining the Navy, a young man who has washed his hands of his father and looks, instead toward his own future, pushing away the past like a bad dream.

  CHAPTER 11

  A PREMONITION AND A DARK CLOUD—M
ARYSTOWN, AUGUST 1935

  Lillian placed the teakettle on the cookstove and rubbed her palms together for warmth. She pulled her shawl tighter and peered out the window. The sky to the east was clear, the wind still. A good omen, she thought. There were no signs of gales, no dark clouds.

  Paddy and her sons would be off in a few hours, their schooners sailing in the blackest part of night. The thought of it—all of them—leaving together, stirred a chill deep inside her bones. They would sail forty miles southeast to Cape St. Mary’s, then on to Cape Pine. Sure now, there were plenty of sunkers, jagged rocks there in the capes, but Lillian took comfort knowing her sons would not journey as far as the Grand Banks or near the treacherous Sable Island. Paddy promised her they would sail no farther than five miles from shore. There the shoal water measured twenty and thirty fathoms deep—not deep enough for a body to disappear. What could happen so close to land, so close to safe harbors? Things will be fine, Lillian whispered. Please the Lord, things will be fine.

  The kettle rattled on the stove drawing her thoughts back inside. Steam rose from the spout, prompting Lillian to shake her head at the memory of Paddy weeks past, coming home hungry after having one too many jars of rum. “Where’s me dinner?” he shouted to the maid after he stumbled through the kitchen door.

  “’Tis not ready yet, sir,” the young woman replied, her voice quavering. “But your food will be on the table shortly now.”

  Not happy with her response, Paddy pounded the kettle with his fist, slamming the spout clean into its metal innards. Shouting and muttering to himself, he retreated to the kitchen settee, put his head down, and took a nap, his hand no worse for the smashing he had given the teapot. Did not seem to hurt him a’tall, Lillian thought. He was tougher than a rock and just as thick. She wished she had a penny for every time he had broken up a piece of furniture in a fit of rage or drunken foolishness.

  But then there was the gentler side of Paddy, the side few but Lillian and her children witnessed. She cherished those moments: The proud look in his eyes when he read the school report cards of his sons and daughters, and his long, hearty whistle over the high marks that each of them had earned. The faraway sound to his voice when he took in the sight of his seven children, walking along the footpath to Sunday Mass. “We are some lucky,” he told her. “Grand kids they are, every one of them.” The smile on his lips when he boasted of James at the helm. “Aye, ye should have seen him, Lil. A right smart skipper he is. Plotting the course to the Banks, like he’d been doing it all his life. Me son will make a fair captain, he will.”

  The back door swung open, and Paddy’s heavy leather jackboots slapped the floor. Lillian straightened herself, preparing for the ritual that was inevitable as the rising sun. He had said good-bye to her and the children hundreds of times, yet her nagging fear, her relentless angst never wavered. Forcing her tears aside, she pulled two cups and the tin of tea from the cupboard.

  “Fine evening, Lil,” he told her, his voice booming across the kitchen.

  Before she could answer, footsteps echoed down the stairs, growing louder as they raced through the hall and into the kitchen.

  “Da!” their youngest daughter, Little Lillian squealed as she ran to her father. “Da, why can’t I go along with ye and the boys?”

  “Ah, Lillian, you’re a bit young yet for these journeys, and ye do know that the dorymen are a superstitious lot. A woman on a boat is bad luck to them now, me girl.”

  Lillian frowned and tugged on the sleeve of her dress. Seven years old, she took to fishing like a cat to milk, more at ease with a rod and hooks than the dolls and books that lined her bedroom shelves. “Why is it ye won’t take me on yur sails?” she often asked. “I don’t want to be left behind, Da.”

  To console her wounded feelings, Paddy frequently took his daughter fishing by the small creek near their home. The two of them had spent many hours there with their rods, hauling trout from the cold waters.

  “I’ll take ye fishin’ when I return. We’ll pack a picnic and hike into the woods for our own adventure.”

  Lillian hugged her father and kissed his cheek.

  “I’ll miss ye, Da,” she told him.

  Paddy watched his daughter turn on her heels and run from the kitchen. He knew Lillian’s tears would be streaming down her face before she cloistered herself in her bedroom, angry and hurt. How he cursed these good-byes. He despised the lot of it: the weeping, the worried faces, the look in his family’s eyes, the unspoken question: What if we never see ye again?

  The smell of tea brewing pulled Paddy’s gaze to the table, where his wife sat. She spoke to him softly, her voice distracted, “Come and have a cup of tea now, Paddy.”

  He pushed the kitchen chair aside and sat down. Lillian’s gaze focused out the window, toward the darkening sky. Paddy studied her profile, her lips pressed tightly together. After twenty-three years of marriage, he knew her thoughts as well as his own, the fearsome images she conjured in her mind: the rough seas, sudden winds, and mountainous waves.

  “C’am waters this evening, Lil,” he told her. “Still and steady.”

  “Yes, but the weather can turn can’t it, Paddy? Turn quicker than a flash of lightning.”

  “I’ve always come home, haven’t I, Lil?”

  She nodded and turned away at the sound of small feet shuffling along the wooden floor.

  “Here’s me boy,” Paddy called to his son, Paddy Junior.

  The four-year-old climbed up on his father’s lap, his small fingers tugging on his Paddy’s hand. “Play, Dada?”

  “Not tonight, lad. When I come home, there will be plenty of time to play. Plenty of time.”

  Intrigued by the family cat, the boy slid off his father’s lap to chase the pet as it ran into the parlor.

  “Where are me girls, Lottie and Tessie?” Paddy asked of his older daughters.

  “Tessie is off saying good-bye to Billy Reid, and Lottie is putting in extra hours tending the till at the store,” Lillian explained. “They’ll find you before you go. They know your plans to leave at midnight.”

  Paddy knew Tessie, like her mother, was none too happy about this journey. She was engaged to Billy Reid, a member of James’s crew on the Mary Bernice. A schoolteacher, Tessie doted on her students as if they were her own. The girl pined for a wedding and children she could coddle from morn to night. Paddy remembered how Lillian had wanted the same. A thin wisp of a woman, Lillian Ducey had lived on the north side of Marystown. One look at her and Paddy had been smitten, drawn in by the sight of her dark hair, bright eyes, and the way she carried herself, regal and proper like she was the Queen of England.

  They courted for a few years, and Paddy proposed to Lillian in the fall of 1911. The two of them were married when Paddy was sure to be on land and not at sea. As the winter wind tore across the bay and the January snows fell, the couple stood before a priest and received the sacrament of matrimony on a Saturday in 1912. Over the next four years, Lillian birthed James, Loretta, and Theresa, guarding each of the babies against the rampant diseases that tore through the small outport. The three children thrived, and Lillian’s prayers and good fortune held until she birthed Cornelius in 1917; the infant died of pneumonia three months later. A year after his death, Lillian held another newborn, Mary Bernice in her arms, only to lose the girl five months later to the same wretched illness that claimed Cornelius.

  How Paddy had cursed the Lord then, cursed God Almighty for taking their two infants. Paddy could still hear Lillian’s wails, the sobs that tormented their home for months on end. He had worried his wife would never recover from her grief, but then their luck turned. Lillian birthed four more children who thrived and filled their home with a constant laughter. Still, Lillian never forgot the loss, the two infants buried in the ground. She fretted over each of her surviving sons and daughters, fearful of their ragged coughs, their fevered brows. She lived in dread of burying another child, losing them to disease or the cold, deep sea.

&nbs
p; Paddy took in the sight of her now as she peered out the window, her gaze focused on the hills of Little Bay and the water that led to the fishing grounds.

  Lillian turned to meet her husband’s eyes, “Paddy,” she started, the beginning of a plea, but before the words tumbled from her lips, a sudden gust of wind silenced her. A queer breeze had stirred up the meadow outside, pelting sand and grass against the window.

  “Dear Lord!” Lillian screamed. Startled, her eyes scanned the horizon for an oncoming storm. “Where did such a wind come from on such a still night?”

  Paddy shook his head and reached across the table for his wife’s hand.

  “It’s just a whirlwind, m’dear. Nothing to worry yurself over.”

  Paddy stood and placed his cap on his head.

  “I’ve delayed it long enough, Lil. I best be off ’n have another look on board the schooner before we set out.”

  Lillian followed her husband through the hall, her long skirt dragging along the pine boards beneath her. The smell of salt-water and freshly cut hay drifted into the parlor as Paddy pushed open the front door. Lillian stepped outside onto the porch and turned to the sky. In the east, a single cloud, black as tar, loomed in the otherwise clear night.

  Lillian shook off a chill and remembered the date: August 20, the day her daughter Mary Bernice died of pneumonia. Dread and fear struck her heart. Surely, the sudden whirlwind, the dark cloud portended death, disaster. And in just a few hours, her eldest son, James, would sail off on Mary Bernice, trailing Paddy’s schooner.

  “Paddy, please do not sail tonight,” she begged, pointing to the large, ominous cloud.

  Paddy looked into his wife’s eyes, saddened by her sudden fit of terror. He pulled her close and tucked her head against his shoulder.