August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  “The Reids lived there on Shoal Point, just before Little Bay,” he says, pointing to a knoll a short distance up the road. “Reid Hill it used to be called.”

  George Reid, Tom Reid, John Reid, and Joe Reid built their homes side by side.

  Other fishermen who crewed for Paddy lived a stone’s throw from Tom Reid’s dwelling. At sea, they shared dories and bunks. On land, their homes neighbored one another in a row along the bay. The families of Charles Hanrahan, George Mitchell, Dominic Walsh, and John Brinton grew up within shouting distance of one another. Their children played in each other’s meadows. Their wives and mothers waved to one another across fences and comforted each other over cups of tea, hushing away bad dreams and premonitions.

  “They had a tough old life,” Reid tells us of his ancestors, “But the fishermen were tough, too; they had no fear a’tall.”

  “What about Paddy Walsh?” my father asks.

  Reid smiles and shakes his head.

  “Paddy was vicious. He’d go out to sea in anything; it didn’t matter what storm was coming. He wasn’t afraid of nothin’. He thought he was grander than God.”

  His grandfather, Reid tells us, also had a fierce nature. Like Paddy, Reid had no use for fear, the rules, or the law. In the woods behind Reid’s home, he and the skipper made moonshine. Under the cover of night, they boiled molasses and yeast in stills, contraptions which occasionally blew up due to carelessness or too much consumption.

  “They were big drinkers,” Reid says, “and the best of buddies—until they fought. Paddy was a tough Irishman and my grandfather was rough Scotsman. They’d fight each other over anything.

  “Hard men, they were. But they trusted each other. They knew they could count on one another at sea.”

  I imagine Reid strolling down the dirt path from Reid Hill, a duffle over his shoulder and a song on his lips. He is eager to sail, to make a good catch before the winter cold sets in. On his way to Paddy’s wharf, he stops by to reassure Lillian. “I’ll look after Frankie, and Paddy will keep an eye on Jerome,” he tells her before boarding the Annie Anita.

  Did Paddy ask Reid to stop by, to utter those encouraging words to calm his fretting wife’s nerves? There was no one Paddy trusted more than Reid, his second hand. On that August evening, when the ocean tide ran like a river and the wind started to blow, the skipper knew Reid would do his best to keep Frankie from harm. But how do you keep such a promise when the seas grow higher than a schooner’s mast and the sky turns black as coal?

  Wishing us good luck with our gale research, Reid shakes our hands.

  “I’ll be glad to help ye in any way I can,” he says, sharing his phone number and a hearty wave before disappearing up the road toward Reid Hill.

  Tom Reid is not the only one in town aware of our visit. It seems we are well-known and much talked about. As we travel in our blue rental car along the back roads of Marystown and Little Bay, strangers wave to us like we are long-lost family. They know we hail from the States, and in the local coffee shop they swap details about our arrival.

  “Did ye hear? Paddy and Ambrose Walsh’s relations are here. They’re wanting to know about the gale, the August Gale of ’35.”

  It seems we are connected to most of the town. Our expansive Newfoundland family tree makes my head spin. Not only are we related to the numerous Walshes, we are kin to the Reids, the Clinches, and the Brintons. My father is either a first or second cousin to nearly everyone we meet. Several of the relations are quick to note that my father reminds them of Ambrose. They watch him wave his hands in the air as he speaks, and in their minds, they see Paddy’s younger brother, the charming young man who sought adventure and a new life in the Boston States.

  “You bear a strong resemblance to him,” they say.

  As Tom Reid explained when he took in the sight of my dad’s dark eyes and hair, “I could tell you were a pure Walsh.”

  Reid’s words echo in my thoughts as we drive along the water, looking for the home of Jim “Pad” Kelly, a doryman caught out in the August Gale. We know little about Kelly before we step foot into his home, but we will later learn he is a bit of a legend in Marystown. Stories are told and retold in kitchens throughout the small town about his courage and might.

  As most of the men who fished from the small dories, Kelly often found himself separated from the schooner, blinded by curtains of relentless fog. On two of those occasions, Kelly rowed more than a hundred miles home from the Grand Banks fishing grounds. For seven days, he pulled the oars, sustaining himself with little more than hardtack and sips of water. During one of the journeys, the winter wind blew and the cold numbed the doryman’s hands. After rowing five days, Kelly’s dorymate dropped the oars in exhaustion.

  “I can’t go on,” the younger man cried.

  “Well then give me yur damn mitts!” shouted Kelly, who had lost his own. “Because I’m not ready to die.”

  We find Kelly’s house at the end of a dead-end road. Expecting our visit, Mrs. Kelly invites us into their kitchen where her husband waits. Eighty-five years old, Kelly’s chest is still broad from years of rowing dories at sea. His hair, once thick and dark, is now white and thinned with age. His hands are large, palms that gripped dory oars for more than four decades.

  Kelly was seventeen in 1935. He is one of the few survivors who can offer a firsthand account of the gale, and though his memories of the storm are vivid, his hearing is limited. On this June afternoon, my father, Joanie, and I are mesmerized by the fisherman’s voice as he recounts the night the August Gale struck the southeastern coast of Newfoundland.

  “You need to talk loud,” his wife whispers to us. “He can’t hear very well.”

  My father and I find ourselves hollering, trying to pull details from the doryman’s memory to recreate the night the “devil” descended.

  “It was my first year fishing,” he tells us. “That was a bad old night. We were out on the Hilda G. Reeves. She was a schooner with three dories.”

  Kelly knew Paddy and James Walsh were out in their vessels, too.

  “James was behind us in Placentia Bay, and Paddy was over by Cape Pine.”

  Kelly and his dorymate Bill Hanrahan had set their trawl west of Cape St. Mary’s in Placentia Bay. Hanrahan, an eighteen-year-old man from Little Bay, was a greenhorn, too. He had never been to sea before.

  “We set the lines, and our buoys got pulled with the tide. Not long after she breezed up, our boat busted an anchor cable. It was time to get out of there.”

  Kelly had never felt such a force.

  “We had some job,” he says, “getting back to the schooner. If we’d a’waited any longer, I don’t think we would ’ave made it.”

  For the next two hours, the two men struggled to row back to their vessel. Neither spoke as they pulled the oars. They had a mile to row, and it seemed like twenty.

  “When we got back to the schooner, all hands were on board. We pulled anchor and ran before the wind. We come right down the middle of Placentia Bay.”

  Kelly would never forget the walls of water and the shrieking wind when the brunt of the gale hit sometime after midnight. “If ye were on deck, ye had to have a rope around ye. The waves, they were going over the mast.”

  His hands carving an imaginary crest in the air in front of him, Kelly explains, “The schooner she’d go up ’em, then come down and pop out over the waves.”

  “Did you see the Perfect Storm?” my father hollers to Kelly, referring to the movie about the 1991 hurricane that killed several Gloucester fishermen off Newfoundland’s coast.

  Kelly nods.

  “Were the waves as big as in that movie?”

  Kelly nods again, this time with a grin. At one point, he tells us, a monstrous wave rolled toward the sixty-foot vessel. Kelly shouted to his dorymate, Hanrahan, who was also tied to the rigging. Hanrahan’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the giant comber thundering toward them.

  “He nearly had a heart attack,” Kelly says. “T
he water rushed in at us, mountains of water. We were some lucky to get in that night.”

  Shaking his head, Kelly adds, “A lot of the crowd didn’t get in. It was a rough old night. Plenty has been said of them that got in out of the gale. Ye didn’t have no equipment. All ye had was a big sail and the weatherglass. Ye didn’t have much of a chance. Not a’tall.”

  Kelly falls silent, his blue eyes focused on something we cannot see.

  “No,” Kelly whispers, “a lot of the men, they never was seen no more.”

  CHAPTER 19

  PRAYERS AND APPARITIONS—MARYSTOWN, AUGUST, 1935

  Thunder rumbled, and lightning lit up the bay outside the Sacred Heart Presbytery. From his parlor window, Father McGettigan eyed the whitecaps and the waves that pounded the shore. The sea surge pushed past the fish wharves, tearing dories and schooners from their anchors. The priest sipped rum from his glass and shuddered. If the gale was this fierce inland, eight miles from the sea, McGettigan could only imagine the hellish conditions offshore.

  Though it was well after midnight, lamps burned in the homes along the northern and southern shores of Marystown. Few would sleep on a night such as this. McGettigan knew that the fishermen’s families—every mother, child, and wife—were on their knees. Clutching their Rosary beads, they’d be asking for miracles, beseeching the Lord and the Blessed Mother to protect their men at sea. And ’twould surely take a miracle to bring the fishermen home, to see them through a gale that would show them no mercy, no respite.

  For much of the night, the priest had paced the parlor floor, uttering his own pleas for Paddy and his crew. Again and again, he recited the fisherman’s prayer, his hands folded, his eyes closed in concentration: Heavenly Father, We pray to You for those on the perilous ocean that You will embrace them with your mighty protection. Grant them grace in the hour of danger to commit their souls into Your hands. Oh Lord Jesus Christ, who can rebuke the storm and bring it to silence, and lay the roaring waves to rest, show them who call to You out of the deep that You hear their prayer and will save them.

  McGettigan pictured the Annie Anita riding the wind, her planks pounded by unrelenting waves. Would the Lord grant Paddy another chance to conquer the sea, or would He pull him into the deep, claiming the captain’s soul? And James, dear God, his first voyage as skipper. Would the Heavenly Father offer the young captain grace, guiding him and his crew safe ashore, or would he, too, vanish beneath the blue-black waters? Between the Annie Anita and Mary Bernice, ten of Marystown’s men and two lads were in the Lord’s hands. Two other of the crew hailed from Little Bay and Fox Cove. How many would return? How many would sail onto these shores again?

  McGettigan reached for another glass of the amber liquor to quiet his nerves.

  “May the Heavenly Father be with you all,” he whispered. The priest drew the parlor curtains aside and gazed at Paddy’s house across the bay. The lights blazed on each of the home’s three floors. Lillian would be out of her mind with worry, and there would be no calming the woman until telegrams or fishermen offered word of her husband and sons’ fates. Beyond the priest’s meadow, the hurricane tore hundred-year-old trees from their roots; it smashed windowpanes and ripped roofs from housetops. Rain pelted windows like nails tossed from buckets. Deep into the night, the gale would rage, and in between the desperate prayers, dreams would haunt and visions would appear, tokens of spirits, sailors who breathed no more.

  On Reid Hill, Shoal Point, in Marystown, Fox Cove, and Little Bay, families gathered beneath the lamplight. The Reids, Mitchells, Hanrahans, Farrells, Clarkes, Walshes, Longs, and Brintons knelt on kitchen and bedroom floors. “Pray for yur poor Da,” their mothers urged. “Pray to the Lord to save his soul.”

  Ernestine Walsh winced at the thunderclap and the lightning flash that lit up the kitchen. The girl of nine closed her eyes, praying for the noises to cease, for the wind to calm, and for the bad things to stop. Rain pounded their roof and leaked in torrents onto the kitchen floor; gusts off the bay had blown out their kitchen window, sending shards of glass flying across the room. They had all screamed in the middle of their prayers at the sudden crash. Mother had nailed a quilt over the jagged opening, but the wind still found its way inside, shrieking like a wounded animal.

  The remaining kitchen window rattled, and Ernestine searched out the glass pane, looking for her father Ernest’s schooner. Like her Uncle Paddy, her da had set sail a week before the storm. Please come home, Da! Don’t let the gale take you. Ernestine worried, too, for her cousins, Frankie, Jerome, and James, and of course, for Uncle Paddy. Out of father’s five brothers, Paddy was her favorite. He could be a devil, drinking and carrying on, but he always looked after her and her family when Da was away. If one of them fell ill, Uncle Paddy was there to make sure they had enough food, enough medicine, and wood for the fire.

  Out on the bay, small globes of light caught the girl’s eye. Ernestine spied two schooners sailing through the whitecaps. Lights fastened to the rigging, illuminating the boats’ bow and stern. Ernestine shouted, recognizing the vessels.

  “Mom! Uncle Paddy is back. And there’s James behind him!”

  The schooners veered to the north side of Marystown, near the presbytery.

  “Why are they on the north side, Mother? Why aren’t they coming up to the southern shore by Uncle Paddy’s wharf?

  Her mother shook her head and did not speak. Ernestine turned back to the window for another look at the vessels, but the boats were gone.

  Beyond Reid Hill farther east in Little Bay, Richard Hanrahan’s small home shuddered against the wind gusts. Bride Hanrahan hid beneath her bedcovers as the sky crackled and lightning burst like balls of fire. From the kitchen, Bride could hear her mother sobbing as she murmured the Rosary. Earlier in the night, Bride and her four siblings had knelt by their mother’s chair, chanting Hail Marys for their father. When the clock tolled two in the morning, their mother had put them to bed, urging them to rest, but Bride feared sleep and her dreams. When she dozed, the images came to her. She saw her father thrashing in the sea. His mouth was open in a scream, but the roar of the wind silenced his cries. Weighted down with his oilskins, the waves crashed over his head, dragging him under; and then there was nothing but walls of black water, cresting, crashing. In the foaming sea, a flash of yellow appeared, her father’s jacket sleeve. He shouted her name, his hand reached for her, for anything to hold on to. Hollering against the wind, she shouted to him. “Here, Da! I’m here!” Her small hand searched for her father’s palm. But his body had vanished. There was only the sea, the mad, wild sea. She could hear his cries no more.

  Lucy Walsh stifled her own screams as labor pains tore through her abdomen. It seemed the storm had brought on the young woman’s contractions, and now, at the height of the gale, her pains grew more rapid, more fierce. Selena Gaulton held her daughter’s hand trying to calm the soon-to-be mother. A midwife, Gaulton had delivered hundreds of babies in Little Bay, Marystown, and the surrounding outports. But this birth would bring its own complications. The thunder, lightning, and roaring wind had whipped Lucy into a fit of hysteria. She was beside herself with worry for her husband James.

  “He’ll never see the baby now, never!” she cried.

  “Hush now, James and his crew will be fine,” Gaulton told her daughter, though the older woman did not believe the fishermen stood a chance. She had never seen a storm this vicious in all her years. Gaulton could only imagine the horror James and his crew faced at sea.

  “Ye’ve got to focus on yur baby now, m’dear,” Gaulton told her. “Yur child will be here soon.”

  Overhead, the rafters groaned, and Gaulton prayed the roof would hold. Lord spare us from difficulties with this birth tonight. The doctor would never make it across the bay in conditions this rough. Sterilizing cloths for the birth, Gaulton uttered more prayers. As she headed back upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom, she struggled to return to Lucy’s side. Invisible forces, shapes stood in front of her, spiri
ts who wanted to be present, to witness the birth of Lucy’s child. Gaulton made the sign of the cross over her forehead, fearing James and his crew had passed on. Dear God, James is just a young man, and his wife, barely turned twenty herself. Married only three months they were. Lucy’s heart would surely break in two if he never returned.

  The midwife pushed the dark thoughts from her mind and focused on her daughter and the baby that was coming fast. “Push Lucy, you’re close, now.”

  Pink and robust, the child emerged without complications and oblivious to the gale that roared outside. “It’s a girl,” Gaulton announced, handing the infant to her daughter. The child, Lucy quickly decided, would be named Jamie after her father. Swaddled and searching for her mother’s milk, the infant wailed, and Gaulton sensed a presence behind her. She turned to the sea chest that rested by her daughter’s bed. There sat James, a vision in the dark. The midwife gasped at the sight and then the realization struck: My dear Lucy, ye’ve become a mother and a widow on the same eve. Yur husband is gone now, girl. May the Lord watch over ye and yur new babe. The shock of it, Gaulton knew, would not leave Lucy for a good, long while. She only hoped that her daughter would not look upon Little Jamie as a reminder of death and loss.

  Across the bay, Father McGettigan tried to settle himself beneath layers of quilts and blankets. Though he had finished several glasses of rum this evening, the liquor offered little solace. Concern for Paddy, James, and their crews gnawed at his every thought. Cursing the wind that continued to shriek like a banshee, the priest blew the flame from the kerosene lamp and recited another prayer. Mary, Mother of God, guide them through the dark and roaring sea. Offer them your blessings, your benevolence, and your protection. Amen.