August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  A group of local women nudged their way into the store, ushering the men from the room. “Hush now, and don’t be daft with ye nonsense! We’ve work to do!”

  The women blessed themselves and the bodies before they began preparations for the wake. As they removed the clothing, they noticed queer things. The initials notched in Paddy’s belt buckle read T. R. His knitted wool socks and his underwear also bore the same letters. “Surely Paddy wouldn’t be a wearin’ Tom Reid’s clothes, now would he?” they asked one another. The women weren’t alone with their questions. One by one, men who had learned of Billy Mitchell’s accusation entered the fish store to view the body themselves. They picked through the discarded clothes and stared at the face of a man they knew well: “Aye, b’y, ’tis Tom Reid,” they declared.

  Despite their suspicions, no one dared challenge Father McGettigan. They had witnessed the priest’s wrath on Sunday mornings, the old boy pounding the pulpit asking for more money or chastising some fellow for cheating on his wife. And surely now, didn’t McGettigan have special powers? They hadn’t forgotten about the only man in Marystown who had refused to help the priest build St. Gabriel’s Hall. The poor lad later lost his home in a sudden fire. It could have been a queer coincidence or it could have been an act of God, they reckoned. And there was a lot more that the Lord’s servant could do, couldn’t he? McGettigan, more than a few of them believed, could turn you into a goat if he so wanted. Ye dared not cross the priest. No, they weren’t going down that path a’tall.

  Pushing their doubts aside, the women continued their task, gently washing the bodies that were now cold and heavy. They cringed when they touched Frankie’s bruised limbs. “Aye, the poor lad. His thin little bones took a battering. God bless ye child.”

  Outside in the fields and along the wharves, the rumors about Paddy’s mismatched body circulated like seeds in the wind. And inside the house on the hill, the small boy listened to his mother’s cries. Paddy Jr. sat in the corner of the kitchen, quietly watching his sisters and the maid scurry from one room to the next, preparing for the wake. The boy didn’t understand what a “wake” meant, and the sudden transformation of his home bewildered the child. Dark pieces of cloth covered the mirrors; the clocks had been stilled, the window shades drawn tight. Darkness shrouded each of the three floors, shutting out the daylight and further frightening him. Paddy searched for the housemaid and the comfort of her worn apron. “Where are you, ma’am?”

  From the water below, fishermen shook off reluctant shudders as they sailed past Paddy’s home. It was as if the building had taken on a human quality of grieving; its eyes closed, shuttering in on itself. As darkness cloaked the village, the fishermen carried the coffins up the hill and into Paddy’s parlor. Lillian’s screams echoed from the hall as the men placed the boxes side by side on wooden chairs. Lanterns cast shadows onto the flower-papered walls and the bodies that were now dressed in their Sunday suits. A small Bible rested on Frankie’s chest. The boy’s fingerprint impressions marked the book’s pages, evidence, his mother believed, of her child’s terror in his dying moments. Lillian would not separate the boy from the Bible he had clutched so fervently as the gale raged around him. “I want him buried with it,” she told the priest.

  Dazed with exhaustion and shock, Lillian stood before the bodies in the room where she had served tea on silver platters, the parlor where she and Paddy had entertained guests, their laughter echoing off the mahogany ceilings. In the nearby dining room, mourners spoke in hushed voices. They did not want to upset Miss Lil; they knew she wasn’t in her right mind. A circle of mothers eyed Lillian, careful to keep their words to themselves. “No, she doesn’t even seem like she knows where she is, poor woman. Her eyes look right past ye. Losing three sons and a husband. Ye’d never stop thinking about it, would ye? It’d be a hard chore to accept it.”

  The lights had blazed throughout the night since McGettigan delivered the shocking news to Lillian. The neighbors heard her wail like she herself were dying. “My babies,” she cried relentlessly. “They can’t be gone.” Now she stood before her son, Frankie, her shy, sweet boy, unnaturally still. She bent to kiss his forehead, like she had done a hundred times before as he drifted off to sleep. Could he be sleeping now, she wondered? “Wake up, boy!” she begged. “Please wake up, Frankie!”

  Lillian herself had not slept since the priest came to her door. When she closed her eyes, the images appeared. Monstrous waves, walls of water crashing, sea foam spraying wildly. Schooners, dories overturned, rolling in the sea. And she saw their faces, Frankie and Jerome, their wide eyes and mouths open in screams. She imagined their terror as cold water swamped their vessels. She knew Frankie had died in the bottom of his father’s schooner, but what had become of Jerome? Was he tossed from the Annie Anita? Drowned after capsizing from a dory? And her eldest son, James, caught in the gale on his first journey as a skipper. Where was his body? Did he try to stay with the Mary Bernice, captaining her till his last breath? And his first child, his own baby girl, born the night of his death. This can’t be real, Lillian told herself again and again. I’ll wake soon and ’twill all be over, a tormenting dream.

  Lillian turned to her husband’s coffin. He had always made it home through storms, shipwrecks, and schooners trapped in ice. He had scared her plenty on his voyages, and she had counted him dead many times. But he always came home. He had tried to reassure her before he set sail. “Don’t worry, Lil, if I do die, and there’s a way to come back to ye, I’ll find it.”

  She waited now for a sign, a voice in the night, a token that he was there. Paddy had never broken his word to her. If she wanted something, he got it for her, no matter what the price. He knew she liked fine things: fancy shoes and big houses with plush drapes and imported settees. When she had admired the grand house on the hill, one of the largest homes in Marystown, Paddy saved enough money to make it hers. She remembered the day he took her by the arm to the old Molloy Hotel with its stained-glass transom, mahogany ceilings, and scrolled banister. “Do ye like it, Lil?”

  “Yes, of course, Paddy,” she told him.

  “Well, good,” he answered, “Because I just bought it for ye.”

  Now this giant of man was laid out before her. Could this really be Paddy? Lillian had heard the whispers, the rumors about the body favoring Tom Reid’s looks more than her husband’s. But surely now, it was hard to tell the two of them apart in life, never mind in death. Cousins by blood, they had the same build. You could barely identify the two of them if they had their backs to you. And even their faces looked alike, with receding hairlines and wide foreheads. Lil studied her husband’s body. Five days had passed since the gale tore up the sea and broke Paddy’s schooner in two. His face had been battered by the ship’s boards as he and Frankie sought refuge belowdecks in their final hours. Death had also darkened Paddy’s skin, mottling his cheeks black.

  Lil eyed Paddy’s chest, thick from years of rowing dories off Newfoundland’s shores. She turned to his hands. Paddy had always kept his fingers clean, manicured. But the hands in the coffin were rough, the fingernails caked with dirt. And Paddy’s wedding ring, the ring that wasn’t gone off his finger since the day he was married, was missing. Lillian stepped back from the corpse. “’Tis not Paddy! This is not my husband!”

  McGettigan’s black robes rustled against the wooden floor as he coaxed Lillian from the parlor. He could see that she wasn’t right; her vacant eyes, reminded McGettigan of a glass-eyed doll. The doctor’s pills had calmed Lillian’s nerves for a short time, but the priest knew that no amount of tranquilizers would make her forget this wretched loss. He spoke to her in a soft voice: “Meself and Paddy have been friends for years, Lil. Surely I’d know Paddy any time.”

  “You’re wrong,” Lillian replied, her eyes focused on something only she could see.

  Over the next two days, hundreds of mourners journeyed on foot or horse and cart to pay their respects to Skipper Paddy. They came from Marystown and its surr
ounding villages: Little Bay, Mooring Cove, Salt Pond, Fox Cove, and Beau Bois. One by one, they knelt and stood before the coffins. Many of them had heard the gossip, and they inspected the body to form their own opinion.

  They each had their own memories of Captain Paddy. Bernard Butler had grown up hearing stories about the famed skipper. Fishermen measured their own catch against Mr. Paddy’s. “By Gad, he’s got so much fish,” they’d lament. “Funny thing, why can’t other men share his luck?” Paddy lived for sailing schooners and fishing from one end of the year to the other. Aye, Bernard thought, he was a real fish-killer. Bernard had tipped his cap many a time to Paddy out of respect and fear. He knew you didn’t mess with Skipper Paddy. No, you didn’t trod on Paddy’s shoes. No sir.

  Still, Paddy had a soft side. He never minded when Bernard and Paddy’s sons boarded his schooners, climbing to the top of the rigging. No, Bernard recalled, he never minded that a’tall. The sight of Skipper Paddy dead before him now unnerved the young man. It had seemed that Mr. Paddy was immortal and now all this talk about the body being Tom Reid. Maybe, Capt’n Paddy was still alive? Bernard searched Paddy’s cheeks, knowing they would tell him the truth. Like other skippers, Paddy often anchored his ship in Golden Bay to collect water and trap birds that flocked to Cape St. Mary’s cliffs. Thousands of birds nested on the Cape’s rocky crevices, and fishermen often brought home baby gulls to their children. During one of Paddy’s journeys, he encountered a bird that had no intention of becoming a tamed pet. The large gannet pecked Paddy’s face, leaving a scar on his right cheek.

  Bernard studied the body’s face. He eyed both cheeks. ’Tis not there! The scar is missing! Bernard eased himself out of the room as Paddy’s nieces, Ernestine and Gertrude, stood in line, waiting to pay their respects. Gertrude could barely stand from the shock of her favorite uncle’s death. She couldn’t imagine seeing Uncle Paddy with all the life and fight drained out of him. Gertrude also feared that her family might soon be preparing their own wake. Her father, Ernest, and his crew had still not been heard from. In the darkened parlor, Gertrude knelt before her cousin Frankie, offering prayers for the young boy and his two older brothers, Jerome and James. She turned to the larger body and gazed at the face, noticing that it was thinner than Paddy’s and the hairline was a bit off. She gasped and answered her sister’s wide eyes with a whisper: “That’s not Uncle Paddy!”

  Beyond the captain’s doors, a crowd of mourners collected in the meadow surrounding Paddy’s home. Men sipped rum from the flasks they’d hidden in their coat pockets and swapped stories about who they believed rested in the coffin. “Be Jaysus, ’tis not Paddy. No b’y. And Father McGettigan himself saying so. Surely the Missus would know her own husband, now wouldn’t she? ’Tis the queerest wake I’ve seen. Aye, b’y.”

  The men lowered their voices as they watched Tom Reid’s sons, Billy and Emile, slip inside Paddy’s home. The boys had heard the rumors about the mismatched bodies, and they were not eager to set their eyes on their father’s corpse. They nudged their way past the mourners and fixed their sights on the large man lying in the coffin. They recognized his ruddy cheeks, the thick arms that had rowed dories and hauled quintals of cod. Emile couldn’t speak the words that bubbled from his older brother’s lips: “That’s Da!”

  The reality of losing their father hit them in the face like the cold Labrador Current. No more would they stand on the hill beside their home, waiting for a sight of their da on board Paddy’s ship. The boys remembered how their father always hugged and kissed his six children before he left for sea. “Take care of yurselves now,” he’d tell them, their mother standing in the doorway, the worry spreading across her brow like a fever. Like many of Marystown’s fishermen, Tom Reid had tried to ease his wife’s fear. “The Blessed Mother will protect me,” he told her. Their da never boarded the schooner without the Miraculous Medal around his neck. Billy and Emile took one last look at their father’s face before blessing themselves. Silently they prayed that the Blessed Virgin had watched over their da in his final moments.

  Uncertain of what to do next, they searched the faces of the mourners, their eyes pleading for guidance. Is everyone daft? Doesn’t anyone know this is our da? The boys backed away from the coffins, looking for someone they could talk to. Still, they knew it would do little good. Who would believe them? Billy was barely eighteen, Emile, fifteen. Who would heed such an outlandish story from the sons of a penniless fisherman? Shaken and bewildered, the boys trudged down Paddy’s hill, not eager to head back home, where their mother waited.

  Other mourners weren’t as solemn as they strolled out Paddy’s door. Several couldn’t help sharing a laugh at the irony of a poor doryman laid out in the King of Marystown’s parlor. “Aye,” they agreed, “Tom Reid’s getting a fine farewell for himself.”

  The laughter drew the scorn of the women who had collected in the field. They shook their heads and rubbed their Rosary beads as they shared their own opinions. “There’s not a thing to be joking about now, is there? The whole town’s gone mad with all this talk of switched bodies. What’s the difference when there are forty-two children left fatherless? How do they carry on now, with barely anything to eat and the long, cold winter ahead?”

  Out of respect or grief, nearly every home on Marystown’s southern shores had pulled its shades, mourning a son, a father, a brother, cousin, or uncle lost on the Annie Anita and Mary Bernice. Really now, the women agreed, wasn’t Paddy’s farewell a wake for them all? No matter whose body rested in the coffin, ’twas the only man the sea had returned.

  CHAPTER 26

  AMBROSE CONTINUES TO HAUNT—MARYSTOWN, 2003

  Fine china and crystal decorate the dining table. We feast on silver capelin, potatoes, and prime rib, raising our wineglasses to toast our first journey “home.”

  A few nights before we are to leave Marystown, Alan Brenton has invited us to dinner. We sit—my sister, father, and I—in between Alan and Jack’s family. Conversation spills from four corners of the table, and there is much laughter as stories are swapped about our respective families and lives.

  Throughout our week, we have felt welcomed and indeed, as if we were “home.” The Brentons have done everything possible to make our stay comfortable and help us connect with families who lost their kin to the August Gale. “They treated us,” my father will later say, “like royalty.”

  Sufficiently satiated after cake and coffee, we settle into Alan’s living room where Jack suggests we watch a video of Ambrose’s eightieth birthday celebration in Marystown. Knowing that Joanie and I have never met our grandfather, Jack offers the film as a way for us to glimpse Ambrose, to get a sense of his personality. The impromptu suggestion catches my father by surprise. He is not eager to view the video, but he does not want to offend. Standing in the corner of the room, he is quiet, steeling himself for an unwanted visit with Ambrose. Joanie and I sit on the couch, curious about what the movie will reveal and concerned about how it will stir our father’s emotions.

  The video opens with a couple dozen people gathered around Alan’s family room bar. Ambrose stands in the center of the crowd. At eighty, my grandfather is strikingly handsome, muscled and fit. His black hair is still thick and black with flecks of gray. Traditional Newfoundland music plays in the background, and Ambrose is surrounded by his family and friends. His dark eyes flash as he grins, savoring the attention. As Ambrose begins to dance, twirling a woman around the room, Joanie whispers to me, “This is bizarre.”

  I nod, mesmerized by the image of our grandfather, who is so alive, so vibrant; it is as if a ghost, an apparition has walked into the room. I glance up at my father knowing he is confronting his own phantoms. His lips are pressed tightly together, and he rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. He considers leaving the room but forces himself to stay, to watch. A cake with numerous candles is presented to Ambrose, and he blows the tiny flames out amid cheers and clapping. “This is quite an honor and a surprise,” Ambrose says, his
laughter echoing in the room.

  You son of a bitch, my father silently curses.

  He has not seen Ambrose for fifty-five years. The last time was in 1948 before Ambrose stepped into a San Francisco bookie shop to bet on the horses. While my grandfather gambled, my grandmother lay in a hotel bed, threatening to jump out a window. I stare at my father’s eyes. They are wide and dark with rage. I can only imagine his resentment, the contrasting memories that flicker through his mind. The images of his mother devastated, shamed, heartbroken and now the pictures of Ambrose jubilant, charismatic—the cherished hometown boy.

  The room is suddenly too small. I hear Joanie’s breathing, her sighs as she exhales her own confused emotions. This is too much, she tells herself, feeling guilty for asking our father to come to Newfoundland to relive a past he would rather forget. I shouldn’t have pushed Dad to come here. The film ends showing Ambrose on another day walking around Alan’s pool with his grandson. Ambrose holds the child’s hand. The boy is five or six, and I think of my father, once a young boy of the same age, his palm locked inside Ambrose’s hand, safe, secure.

  The screen dissolves to black, and someone shuts off the television. The Brentons realize the film has upset my father, and they apologize. “It’s okay,” he tells them, knowing they were trying to share a celebrated milestone in Ambrose’s life. It is late, and we thank the Brentons for dinner and head outside to our car. My father’s sneakers kick up stones from the gravel driveway, and the sound seems unnaturally loud in the still night air.

  In the distance, Paddy’s house is silhouetted in the dark. I consider my great uncle’s wake, the contested and curious gathering to bid the skipper farewell. No matter whose body lay in the casket, friends and family gathered to pray, to mourn, to accept the death of a fearless and famed captain and his crew.