August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  From the third-floor attic, he could hear the maid, the young girl, Lizzie, shifting in her bed. Sleep will not come for any of us tonight, the priest thought. Moments later, McGettigan heard an odd pounding. The knocking continued and grew louder before he realized someone was at the door. Who could be out at such an hour on such a wretched night? Relighting the lamp, McGettigan made his way downstairs and opened the Presbytery door. There on the stoop, stood Paddy and his crew. Dressed in their oilskins, the men remained silent, solemn. Before the priest could speak, before he could embrace Paddy and praise the Lord for a miracle, the fishermen disappeared, leaving McGettigan alone in the blinding rain.

  “What is it, sir?” Lizzie asked from the stairs.

  McGettigan turned to her, his face white as chalk.

  “They’re gone; they’re all gone. We’ll never see, nor hear of them again.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “MY POOR DADDY WAS LOST”—MARYSTOWN, 2003

  We travel east, following the course Paddy last sailed on that August morning when skies were clear, the wind calm. The sky on this June afternoon is also cloudless, a brilliant blue. As our car crests Reid Hill, we glimpse views of the water below, vistas where children and wives long looked for a familiar sail, a returning vessel.

  Here from the southern shores of Marystown, the children of the gale waited and watched, praying that their fathers would survive the storm. I imagine the strange happenings that night, the terrifying sounds, the unexplained omens. Ernestine Walsh, her face pressed to the windowpane, her eyes wide, envisioning Paddy and James returning in their schooners, kerosene lights guiding the phantom boats through a tempest of roaring wind and lashing rain. The baby, Jamie, a wailing infant born amidst a howling gale as her father’s spirit stirred in the room. Bride Hanrahan’s dream, the images of her dad, his frantic hand reaching for her as he disappeared beneath the angry sea.

  Of the dozens of children who prayed that night, forty-two would never see their fathers again. Some would remember their last farewell, their father’s kiss, the touch of his calloused hand. Others would hold on to the image of their dads’ broad backs, sea bags slung over shoulders, dories drifting away in the dark. I imagine my father’s memories of Ambrose vanishing, disappearing in the night. On the dark streets of Brooklyn, Ambrose closes a door, softly stepping into the cold November air. And in the morning, a boy of eleven learns, “Your father’s gone.”

  Like the children of the gale, my father carries memories: how he was never far from Ambrose’s side, following him to the Staten Island playgrounds and to the ship-rigging lofts of Brooklyn; how Ambrose’s strong hands wrestled him to the living room floor or braced his wobbling bicycle; how the two of them took car rides alone, father and son, Ambrose at the wheel and his boy Ronnie standing on the seat beside him, his small arm wrapped securely around the shoulder of a man who kept him safe, held him close.

  How many times did my father wish for Ambrose’s return, pray that his family would be whole again? How many times did he wonder: Why did my father leave us?

  For decades the children of the gale have asked those same questions. Despite the passing of sixty-eight years, their sorrow lingers. On this June afternoon we seek the gale children, men and women who are now in their seventies and eighties and live in Marystown or nearby. Paddy’s niece, Gertrude Walsh, has agreed to share her stories with us. The eldest daughter of Ernest Walsh’s seven children, Gertrude was fourteen in 1935. With a few hastily scratched directions to her house, my father, Joanie, and I venture east along Marine Drive, the road that leads from Marystown to Little Bay and the sea. There are few markers in the small village of 160 people, and naturally we get lost—several times. Short on patience, my father utters a “Jesus Christ, where the hell is this place?” moments before we find Gertrude’s driveway.

  Eighty-two-year-old Gertrude and her daughter invite us into their kitchen. Gertrude sits in her rocking chair and leans forward to hear our conversation. Her daughter has warned us that her mother tires easily and may have difficulty talking with us. But when Gertrude speaks, her voice is strong and clear. She has no trouble recalling the storm and shakes her head at the memory of that August night.

  “Gales, gales, gales,” she says closing her eyes. “The wind howled! Oh, it was awful. Mother lit the candles as the wind came through the windows.

  “It was a terrible night. We gathered by Mother’s feet and said the Rosary with her. We prayed for Father and we prayed for Uncle Paddy. The rain and the wind lashed down, and the water poured in through the roof. We never had a leak like that before.”

  Like many of the fishermen’s children, Gertrude dreamt of her dad. In her mind, she saw his hand on the helm of the J.R. Rodgers, his back bent to the wind as he sailed into the harbor.

  “I dreamt my daddy came in and anchored his boat. But when we got up the next morning, he wasn’t there. Uncle Paddy hadn’t returned either. We were worried sick for them both.”

  “Can you tell us some stories about Paddy?” I ask.

  My request stirs a grin and a glimpse of a girl who admired her uncle’s rambunctious nature. As with her memory of the gale, her stories of “Uncle Paddy” are vivid. Crossing two fingers, she presses them to her chest and explains, “My dad and Uncle Paddy were just like that. Close as could be. Uncle Paddy was my favorite. Oh, he was a character. I loved him.

  “He was a good man but tough, the worst of all the brothers. He could argue about anything, but when he was fighting, all you had to do is put your arms around him and say, ‘Uncle Paddy, be quiet now.’”

  Paddy, Gertrude tells us, enjoyed music and song, but he could not carry a note. “I think I was his favorite because I used to sing dirty songs for him. He’d give me a quarter when I was done. ‘Go get candy,’ he’d say.

  “After the gale,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I never sang those songs again.”

  Gertrude closes her eyes, and her daughter nods to us, worried that her mother has worn herself out. Thanking her for her memories, I reach for Gertrude and hug her good-bye. We let ourselves out the door, and I wonder if Gertrude has any stories of my grandfather. Over the past few days, at kitchen tables, on living room sofas, and even in the local funeral parlor (where we stopped to pay our respects to Winnie Walsh, Ambrose’s sister-in-law), we have heard several tales about Ambrose. His nieces, nephews, and old neighbors spoke about his charm, his ability to talk easily and convincingly at length on any subject, his knack for putting people at ease within minutes of meeting them.

  “Your dad was a good man,” these relatives told my father. “Everyone loved Ambrose. He had a great personality.”

  Sometimes my dad did not reply. Other times he shared his ill feelings, the memories that still haunt. “He deserted us,” he explained. “I don’t hate him. But I cannot forgive him for what he did to my mother.”

  Not fond of sympathy, my father also wants his relatives to know he has lived a good life, that his dreams of owning his own home, raising a family, have been fulfilled. “I am the luckiest guy in the world,” he explains. “I have six beautiful daughters and a wonderful wife.”

  My father smiled beneath his Navy baseball cap when he spoke those words, and though I knew he truly believed that he is the luckiest man in the world (a sentiment he had shared numerous times when offering a toast at birthday, Christmas, and anniversary celebrations), I also understood these conversations with his Newfoundland family were not easy. In his heart, my father cannot call Ambrose a “good man.” He cannot forget the past. He cannot erase what happened in Brooklyn or San Francisco.

  “It’s like they want me to forgive him or something,” he tells Joanie and me in the car after one encounter. “They sure seemed to like him. They all thought he was wonderful.”

  As we drive along the quiet and curvy roads from Gertrude’s Little Bay home back to Marystown, I replay the comments about Ambrose in my mind. Are our relatives saying kind words about my grandfather to ma
ke us feel welcomed? Like my father’s half sisters, Donnie and Kathy, our Newfoundland kin saw the good in my grandfather; he was well loved, well liked. Would I have liked him? Would I have found him charming, enjoyed his stories? Would I have forgiven him for deserting my dad?

  Winding past the cluster of houses along Reid Hill, we look for the home of Michael Farrell, whose father crewed for James Walsh on the Mary Bernice. A short distance from Paddy’s home, we spot the small white house that sits along the bay. A bachelor who lives alone, Farrell has been waiting for our arrival. A thin, dark-haired man, he welcomes us from his doorstep. “God Bless ye. Come in,” he hollers.

  Cats, nearly a dozen of them, roam the yard. A few scurry inside the house. Not fond of felines, Joanie heads back to the car, explaining that she will pick us up later. My father and I follow Farrell inside where he pulls kitchen chairs out for us. In the dimly lit room, Farrell begins to talk. The words tumble from his mouth quickly. He is excited to share his stories, but his Newfoundland accent is thick, almost incomprehensible. I glance at my father’s eyes and I know he is thinking, “Oh, brother.” Still, Farrell has something to say, and we want to understand him.

  Our conversation evolves into an odd charade. Farrell speaks a few sentences, and my father and I try to select words that we recognize and repeat them back. This goes on for ten minutes before we figure out that Farrell was a year old at the time of the storm, he had three older siblings, and his mother’s name was Victoria. Farrell begins to talk about the night of the gale, and my father and I lean forward.

  “The wind,” Farrell tells us, repeating the word again before we have the chance to do so. “The wind was fierce that night. My gosh. The old people thought the roof was going to blow off.”

  Farrell says something about his mother, explaining that she saw a token. “Token?” my father and I ask, unfamiliar with this word that we will later learn means a vision, a portent of death. Ignoring our question, Farrell continues his story and we discern the words “hallway” and “boots.” We utter the words back to him and Farrell patiently tells us the story again, this time slowly. The night of the gale, his mother heard noises in her second-floor hallway.

  “Me mother could hear someone walking in the hall,” he tells us. “She got up from her bed and saw me father in his oilskins and boots. He was walking back and forth in the hall.”

  “Your mother saw his spirit?” I ask.

  Farrell nods.

  “She kept shouting his name, but he would not answer. He just kept pacing the floorboards. She knew then, my poor daddy was lost.”

  Barely a toddler at the time of the gale, Farrell has no memory of the father he was named after. He cannot recall his father’s voice, his face, his dad’s large calloused hands. “All I knew when I was a boy was that my poor daddy was lost. Drowned. Gone forever. I used to feel terrible about it. I wished I knew what happened. How he went.”

  Farrell falls silent, and my father and I are quiet, too. From the window, I see Joanie pull into the driveway. Knowing we have garnered as much as possible from Farrell, I stand telling him, “Thanks for talking with us. I am sorry about your father.”

  He shakes our hands, appreciative that we listened to his stories. As we head out the door, he bids us another, “God bless ye.” I smile at Farrell and return his blessing.

  My father, who, like Joanie, is not fond of cats, walks quickly to the car. Farrell continues to wave good-bye, and I sense his sadness, a son lonely for his father. Sixty-eight years after the gale, his sorrow lingers. His words echo in my head, “All I knew was that me poor daddy was lost.”

  I follow my father’s footsteps, taking in the sight of his back, the broad shoulders that have carried his own loss for much of his life. As he slips into the passenger seat, I wonder which is worse: To have no memories of your dad before he vanishes in a roiling sea, or to be deserted on a cold November night by a father who was your hero, your idol for the first eleven years of your life?

  CHAPTER 21

  SHIPWRECKED SCHOONERS AND BODIES SWALLOWED BY THE SEA—NEWFOUNDLAND, 1935

  Swamped with water and stripped of her masts, the schooner drifted off Cape Pine. From the shore, fishermen watched the forsaken vessel pitch and roll. As the waves continued to pound the schooner, she struggled to stay afloat. There would be no survivors, the men knew; the crew was most certainly drowned, victims of a gale that showed no mercy and heard no prayers.

  “Yis b’y, ’tis certain to be all hands lost,” a gray-haired doryman murmured. “There be many that won’t come home from this dirty weather. No, the sea, she’ll be keeping plenty of souls, she will.”

  The fishermen nodded and rubbed the religious medals in their pockets, knowing this August gale would be forever remembered and long mourned. There would be stories told, songs penned, and homes where grieving would carry on until widows turned gray and old.

  In the days following the hurricane, as the winds calmed and the waves grew smaller, the counting of the dead and missing began. It seemed no vessel, big or small, had escaped the hurricane’s wrath. The schooner floating off Cape Pine was but one of several derelicts that littered the sea. The phantom boats drifted, devoid of life, their decks robbed of dories, masts, sails, and spars. Scores of other schooners were reported missing or wrecked, smashed to pieces on sunkers and jagged cliffs. Hatch covers, spars, and planks from broken-up vessels washed ashore or floated on the sea.

  Captains and crew who returned spoke of a gale fiercer than anything their eyes had ever seen. ’Tis like the divil rose up from the sea. The water, she boiled up, and crashed upon us like mountains. The wind she was blowing wicked to the world. ’Twas nothing to do but lash yurself to the rigging or go down below and pray. Yis, b’ys, ’twas the most vicious gale I’ve ever been through in all me years. When we got ashore, I never felt so lucky in me life. And a lot of souls, they weren’t so lucky. No, they’ll never be seen no more.

  On land and along the coast, the gale wrought thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. Hundreds of dories, schooners, and motorboats were ripped from their moorings and sunk or smashed. Gale winds of fifty-nine miles an hour with ferocious gusts tore telephone poles from the ground, ripped one-hundred-year old trees from their roots, and blew roofs from houses and barns. The hurricane’s violent winds, and waves stirred even the dead—the bodies of two fishermen and a young lad drowned several months past—rose from the ocean floor. Barely identifiable, their corpses washed up along three different shores, remains that would, to their families’ relief, now receive a proper grave, a final place to rest.

  In small outports and villages, the mourning and prayers would begin anew for sons and fathers, men whose bodies had vanished in the gale, victims whose final fate would remain a secret of the sea. Throughout Newfoundland, constables and parish priests received reports of doomed vessels and lost crews: Schooner Walter L. plunged to the bottom of Trepassey Bay, Captain Butcher, his three brothers, and a fifth crew member suspected washed overboard or gone down with the vessel. Elsie J. wrecked in Placentia Bay, Captain John Gallet and crew of five presumed lost with all hands. Annie Young wrecked on Fox Island, crew of eight feared dead.

  Norman Wareham wrecked in Fortune Bay, crew safe ashore. Lizzie E. B. wrecked in Indian Harbour; Eureka destroyed in Herring Neck. Helen Healy missing, no trace of crew. Wreckage of the Carrie Evelyn picked up, no sign of her five men. Schooner Reginald Anstey believed lost with all hands, board bearing the vessel’s name picked up at Baie Verte. Phyllis West dashed on the rocks, crew abandoned vessel and took to their dories.

  Like dozens of other vessels, the fate of the three Walsh schooners from Marystown and their crew remained uncertain. Annie Anita and its skipper, Paddy Walsh, and crew unaccounted for. Schooner Mary Bernice believed to be floating bottom up near Virgin Rocks in Placentia Bay; no sign of Captain James Walsh or the other four fishermen. The J.R. Rodgers reported missing, no word from Captain Ernest Walsh or his crew.

  The fort
unate schooners that survived the gale limped ashore, battered and barely afloat, their sails torn to ribbons, anchor chains ripped from bows. The Nova Scotia schooner Beatrice Beck arrived in harbor reporting a crew member swept overboard along with four dories and everything else moveable on deck. The Senora Dosandi, a Portuguese schooner sailing from Greenland to Newfoundland, shared a similar tale; a giant comber plucked one of its dorymen into the sea and critically injured two others.

  Newspapers in London, New York, and the Maritime Provinces chronicled the death and destruction. NEWFOUNDLAND COAST LASHED BY FIERCE STORM. AUGUST GALE KILLS MORE THAN 40 NEWFOUNDLAND FISHERMEN; FEARED LOSS OF LIFE MAY EXCEED HALF HUNDRED.

  On August 26, the day after the gale swept across Newfoundland, the Canadian government dispatched the S.S. Argyle and S.S. Malakoff to look for bodies and survivors. Monday evening and Tuesday morning, the steamers searched Placentia, Trepassey, and St. Mary’s Bays with little luck. Their only find: a waterlogged dory marked with its schooner’s name—the Annie Anita. Later that day, the fishermen of a small village sighted another casualty of the gale. The tides had carried the derelict schooner from Cape Pine west to Hazel Cove. Standing on the headlands above the inlet, three fishermen from St. Shotts spied the vessel as the waves drove the craft ashore. Like their ancestors before them, the men were accustomed to wrecks and bodies drifting onto their beaches. With its severe tides and ragged cliffs, St. Shotts was known among sailors as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

  Set between the cliffs of Cape St. Mary’s and Cape Pine, hundreds of schooners fished the waters surrounding the small village. At night, the sea glittered like a city with scores of lights reflecting on the water. And when the fog rolled in, thick and black, the schooner horns wailed like banshees as captains called out to their stray dories. The sunkers and cliffs were deadly then, hidden by curtains of fog. Scarcely a season passed without a vessel wrecking on the reefs or rocks. There weren’t more than a hundred people living in St. Shotts, but each had seen their share of sorrow and death, and on this day, Alonzo Finlay feared they would see more.