August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  The memory ends there. My father wipes tears that we have never seen before.

  “I’m sorry all this happened to you, Dad,” Janice says. She, too, is now crying.

  The room is still. My sisters and I are beginning to realize how much hurt lingers. My mother sits quietly, by my side. She, more than any of us, knows how long my father has buried his feelings. For most of my parent’s marriage, my father refused to talk about Ambrose or his childhood memories. “It has affected him his whole life,” she has told me. When she met my father in 1956, she was a raven-haired striking young woman, working as a secretary at the Raytheon Company in Bedford, Massachusetts. One of her jobs was collecting time cards, and the dark-eyed young man who stocked the shelves immediately caught her eye. “We just looked at each other, and it was love at first sight.”

  Just out of the Navy, my father’s confidence and good looks enamored the young woman from Lowell, Massachusetts; my mother’s laughter and bright eyes captivated my father. Within a year they were married, in February 1957, at a wedding in which the guests were told Ambrose was dead. “I don’t want to talk about him,” my father explained to my mother. “I don’t want to hear his name.”

  For the next forty-nine years of their marriage, my mother respected her husband’s request, and now on this fall evening, she is keenly aware of how far my father has come in sharing, relieving the burden he has carried for decades.

  The following morning is cold, brisk, and the October breeze swirls leaves into the air as we walk along Brooklyn’s Sixty-ninth Street. My father searches for the street door that tripped him and prompted the deadly brawl. “I want to show you where the fight was,” he says.

  Hands stuffed into his khakis, he looks for the familiar details of his childhood. Much is different now. He does not recognize the apartments built over the years. Tall buildings replace the vacant lots where boys tossed balls. The stores and restaurants have changed hands and names. Yet, there are two crimson metal doors. My father walks to them, trying to remember. He stops to stare at the two sheets of metal pressed into the sidewalk. Could this be the street vault he tripped over as a small boy?

  Inside the nearby deli, a young man in a baseball cap pours coffee. A middle-aged man stands behind the counter. “Excuse me,” my father says. “I used to live here more than sixty years ago. Do you know if a Greek restaurant used to be here back in the 1940s?”

  The two men cannot help my father recreate his past. They do not know if this deli was a Greek restaurant years ago. Still, there are the crimson metal doors outside. We step back outside and stare at them again. I see my father, a small boy running down this street, two milk bottles in his hands. I hear glass shattering and the sound of a boy’s surprised cry as he eyes the blood running down his palm.

  “This must be it,” my father says, staring at the doors, lost in his reverie of the past.

  As we drive away from the street with the crimson gates, away from the water, I consider my father’s scar, a symbol of his lesson learned as a child. The tender palm of a boy stitched together with a needle, large and shaped like a fishhook. Ambrose knew that his son had to endure, to accept pain. He had witnessed many a Newfoundland fisherman, his own brother Paddy, suffer through festering fishhook wounds, wrists swollen and blistered from the salty sea. Pain is being lost in your dory on the Grand Banks with nothing to eat and your hands bleeding from pulling on the oars day and night in the cold curtains of fog. Pain is drowning in the sea, with a gale roaring overhead, a gale that you know will take you and your three sons to a watery grave. Pain is part of life, boy.

  At sea, Ambrose knew there were no doctors, no quick cures for infection. The Newfoundland fishermen had their own ways of dealing with pain. Afflicted with a fishhook in their hand, the superstitious and religious dorymen often pressed the hook three times into their wound, three times in honor of the Holy Trinity, three times to heal. Unknowingly, my father carries out his own ritual. Often, he presses his fingers into his palm, absentmindedly rubbing the scar, touching the wound to remember. It taught me a great lesson. It toughened me up, taught me how to tolerate pain. Ironically, the man who taught him the lesson would later provoke the deepest hurt.

  The afternoon sun loses its warmth, and the light fades behind the tall buildings as we hunt for one more church, one more apartment, and the last place my father lived in Brooklyn. After getting lost for two hours, which exasperates all of us and stirs several “Jesus Christs!” from my father, we park alongside the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Red Hook. The church and its presbytery are mammoth, intimidating gray Gothic buildings that span the block. The steeple and bell tower loom over the treetops and a nearby park, an icon that once drew the families of Irish and Italian fishermen to Mass.

  My father climbs the twenty steps to the rectory and rings the buzzer. From the sidewalk, he appears small, dwarfed by the towering church walls, the large double doors of glass and wood. A priest answers on the intercom.

  “Hello, Father, I was an altar boy here sixty years ago. I’d like to talk to somebody and see the church.”

  Minutes later, the priest answers the door with a smile and welcomes us inside. Father Carlos Valencia is slim, dark-haired, and young. He is eager to help, and he offers us a tour before the Saturday evening Mass begins. The church was built by Irish fishermen, he tells us, the cavernous ceiling constructed to resemble the hull of Noah’s Ark. I eye the church’s ceiling and think of wooden schooners, of Paddy Walsh and the August Gale. My Nana sat in one of the oak pews here, Rosary beads in her hand, a beret on her head. She came here often to pray and watch her son perform his duties on the altar. My grandfather did not join her.

  “He came here once to see me,” my father remembers, his voice soft and low.

  At the front of the church, to the left and right of the altar, small red votive candles flicker. Nana often took my sisters and me inside churches to light these candles. She slipped quarters inside the metal boxes and lit the tiny flames, praying silently for her sons, her grandchildren, and for Ambrose.

  A statue of the Blessed Mary hovers near the candles. A blue cloth cloaks her head, her face radiates peace, forgiveness. I think of Nana’s soft cheeks, her kind blue eyes. She forgave Ambrose. After all his hurt, horrible choices, and betrayals, she forgave him. She prayed for him, wrote him letters and kept him informed about his sons, his grandchildren. She forgave.

  Sunlight filters from the stained-glass windows illuminating a row of pews. I sit down in one of them and close my eyes. I make a mental list of the good in my grandfather: the years he supervised fifty men at the ship-rigging loft during the war, the afternoons he played catch with my father and taught him how to ride a bike. The years that he provided for his family, was a loving father, a loyal husband. I will never understand what you did, but you are my family. My grandfather. You are my father’s father. A part of him and a part of me.

  At the back of the church, I hear my father’s voice. He is talking to a few older women who were born in Red Hook and have belonged to the church since they were small girls. My father tells them he served as an altar boy in the church on Sundays and lived on Columbia Avenue in a three-story apartment building. A synagogue occupied half of the building’s first floor. The women nod, remembering.

  My father doesn’t tell them that this is the home where Ambrose abandoned him, the apartment where he remembers eating onion sandwiches for dinner, where rats scrambled in the stairways, and the Mafia ruled the poverty-riddled streets. The women give my father directions to his old apartment, and we step out into the street. Birds swoop in the trees as my father strolls past the park where he played baseball many years ago. His head is bent against the wind as he walks along the brick sidewalk that leads to Columbia Avenue. Hip-hop music blares from a parked car as he crosses the street. Tattered chairs lean against a sidewalk bar. He eyes the deli on the corner and remembers a store where his mother sent him for groceries. Many times he paid with
food vouchers, charity from the church.

  He remembers the Italian parades that wound their way along this street and the Italian kids who dominated the neighborhood. Here, he had his share of fights. The Italian kids called him “Irish.” Somewhere on this street, my uncle, a toddler at the time, tossed my father’s new shoes onto the sidewalk from their window. They were stolen by the time my father ran down the two flights of stairs to fetch them. Continuing to the end of Columbia Street, my father shakes his head. The apartment building he once lived in is gone.

  “It must have been torn down,” he says, disappointed, still looking for something familiar, a street corner, a store.

  I envision my grandfather carefully closing an apartment door, a shadow in the dark. Quietly he slips into his sister-in-law’s car and drives away, stealing the car and $800 in cash, advance money for a paint job he would never do. Inside, his two sons and his wife sleep. The streets are quiet as Ambrose leaves, the car disappearing, turning away from Columbia Avenue.

  Now on this October afternoon, I am glad we cannot find this home. I do not like to think of my father alone here, an eleven-year-old left to look after his mother and year-old brother. A boy left to wonder where his father went and why. Like the bulldozer that tore down my father’s old home, I wish I could destroy these memories, the ill-fated trip to San Francisco and the night Ambrose disappeared from this street. But as with the August Gale children, the past remains present for my father. It is his to keep, his to remember, his to forgive or forget.

  Not long after we return home, my father reflects on why he kept his childhood memories buried, concealed from me, my sisters, and mother. On the phone, he apologizes to me one evening.

  “I kept this all inside me in the form of bitterness. I was wrong to keep it from you all. I just wanted to push those memories out of my life. I guess I was selfish. I dunno. I didn’t want to burden you kids or your mother with this stuff. I didn’t want you to think I wanted any sympathy or anything.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell my father. “We know the stories now.”

  My father sighs and falls quiet.

  “I love you, Dad,” I tell him, my voice cracking with the weight of my words.

  “I love you, too,” he says.

  Months after our journey to Staten Island and Brooklyn, I find a picture taken during one of my father’s birthdays. My father, uncle, and Nana gather around our backyard picnic table. A birthday cake with strawberries and whipped cream rests before them. My uncle sits in the middle, and his arms are wrapped around the shoulders of his mother and brother. He is a father himself now, with a son and a daughter, a loyal wife, and successful job overseeing a mental health agency in Michigan. He grins into the camera, and it is clear he is so happy to be among his family. Happy Birthday, big brother. You were always looking after me, steering me in the right direction. And Ma, you sure took care of us through thick and thin. We were blessed to have your love and strength.

  Nana is in her early seventies, confident in who she is: a mother, a grandmother, a woman well-loved by her grandchildren and sons. She gazes toward the camera lens with a hint of a smile, and there is resoluteness in her blue eyes. These are my boys, Ronnie and Billy. They turned out pretty good. We all came out pretty good.

  On the other end of the table, my father’s arm rests against his younger brother’s back. His lips are pressed together in a smile and his brown eyes shine. I have seen this expression many times before when he has attended the honor roll dinners, award ceremonies, and college graduations of his six daughters. Pride and love well up in his face on this summer afternoon. My mother is something else. She worked so hard and went through tough times to keep us together, to raise us right. We each could have taken some bad turns, but we stuck together, and that made all the difference.

  I consider the turmoil, the internal storms they each weathered, how this picture, their lives might have turned out differently. Both my father and uncle could have taken darker, destructive paths, but my Nana held them close and they watched out for each other. Ten years younger than his older brother, my uncle looked to my dad for advice and support, once even giving him a Father’s Day gift to show his appreciation.

  “Your dad was the male role model in my life,” my uncle tells me. “He taught me how to be a good father.”

  Throughout my childhood, my father espoused many rules and offered many pieces of advice to my sisters and me. But there is one saying that resonates. Whenever my sisters and I battled or we strayed too far from home in our travels or jobs, he would tell us, “Always remember that blood is thicker than water.”

  There was nothing more vital—even after his father twice abandoned him—than family. His mother and brother remained the center, the heart of his young life. Years later, my sisters, mother, and I would further cement his belief that there is “nothing, nothing more important than your family.”

  For as long as I can remember, my father has encouraged, cheered, and guided us all. Through the bad dreams, the disappointments, the milestones, the baptisms, the weddings, and the bumps in the road, he has always been there for his family, for me, for my sisters, and for my mother. His strong arms have always held us close, and I have always known that he would never, ever let us go.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Like my Great-Uncle Paddy who gathered a strong and seasoned crew for the Annie Anita and Mary Bernice, I was fortunate to have my own team of friends, family, and experts to guide and encourage me through to the completion of August Gale.

  To Con Fitzpatrick, a volunteer at the Marystown Heritage Museum and coauthor of A History of Marystown, Mortier Bay, who eagerly shared his knowledge of his town, its history and its seafaring culture.

  To dorymen—Jim “Pad” Kelly, Bill Hanrahan, Jerome Walsh, Tom Roff, Richard Barry, and schooner Captains Hayward Hodder, Anthony Kelly, and Matthew Mitchell—thank you for sharing your adventures and perils at sea.

  Extraordinary thanks to Ralph Getson, curator of education at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia for his patience, wisdom, and kindness over the past year while he taught a landlubber about schooners, dories, and the salt cod fishery. His lessons (a schooner is not a ship, it’s a line not a rope, and it’s a tub not a bucket!) were invaluable.

  To Captains Alex Green and George Pike, savvy and skilled Newfoundland and Nova Scotia fishermen, who taught me how to row a dory (despite the fact I had “dogfish strokes”) and offered crucial insight into the mind-set of skippers and dorymen. They ensured that my details about hauling trawl, sailing the sea, and battling gales were accurate and true.

  To Chris Fogarty, Canada Hurricane Centre forecaster and program manager, who helped me track and recreate the 1935 August Gale and instructed me on trapped fetches, extra-tropical transitions, and hurricane winds and waves.

  To the men and women, sons and daughters of the Marystown fishermen, who shared their memories about the tragedy that forever changed their lives and their small rural outport. Scores of Marystown citizens and people from other Newfoundland communities also offered their recollections of the 1935 storm, and I could not have written this book without their assistance. This is by no means a complete list, and if I have forgotten anyone, I apologize. A heartfelt thanks to: Jamie Walsh, Jerome Walsh, Bernard Butler, Bride Hanrahan, Aloysius Brenton, Sybil Turpin, Mary Brinton Mallay, Lizzie Drake Pittman, Margaret Mitchell Lundrigan, Mary Pittman Hodder, Adele Hanrahan Fulford, Gertrude Walsh, Mary Brennan, Narcissus Walsh, Elsie Walsh, Evelyn and Tom Reid, Charles Walsh, Michael Farrell, Vincent Clarke, Emily Long Roff, Alonzo and Marie Finlay, Sadie Brinton Kelley, Adele and Bill Pittman, Frances Hanrahan Mitchell, Val Morrissey, Ernestine and Loretta Walsh, Bride Coady, and Georgina Mitchell Kilfoy. Special thanks to Paddy Walsh Jr. who offered poignant and detailed stories about his father, Captain Paddy Walsh, and his mother, Lillian.

  To the Newfoundland band Great Big Sea, whose song “Safe Upon the Shore” inspired me while I wrote a
bout the centuries-old tradition of fishermen’s wives worrying and waiting for their husbands to return from the cold, cold sea.

  Much gratitude to my writing group: Pat Hager, Susan Casey, Nancy Brown, Gro Flatebo, Rick Wile, Steve Lauder, and Jean Peck, whose suggestions, critiques, and advice made this book infinitely better. Thanks also to Newfoundland authors Maura Hanrahan and Paul Butler for giving me a place to stay in their St. John’s home and introducing me to several of their country’s talented writers.

  To my dear friends who read and reread August Gale and never wavered in their enthusiasm and encouragement: MaryEllen Tracy, Janice Borghoff, Nanie Barnes, Mary Tippet, Becca Nazar, Kathy Gillis-Soltan, Diane Lade, Jean Kirpatrick, Kyle Chapman, Abby Philbrook, Victoria Brett, Jean Preis, Shane-Malcolm Billings, and Alan White.

  To my wonderful literary agent, the unflappable Diane Freed, who guided me with a steady hand from the dreaded book proposal process to the book-selling adventure, and to my editor Erin Turner, whose devotion and talent made my first book-publishing experience an absolute joy.

  And finally to my family:

  To my relatives and the friends of my grandfather, who helped me to understand and come to know Ambrose Walsh, Thomas and Morris O’Connell, Raymond and Hilary Walsh, and especially my Aunt Eleanor Sumner who recounted stories about her beloved sister, Patricia O’Connell Walsh, and much appreciation to Donnie Walsh and Kathy Walsh Pope, who answered endless questions about their father—and my grandfather—with honesty, grace, and compassion.

  Many hugs to my sisters—Diane Walsh Clancy, Jacqueline Walsh Coffey, Laura Walsh Upton, and Janice and Joan Walsh—for their support, love, and willingness to pop champagne and plan book-celebrating parties before I had even completed a chapter.

  To my Newfoundland family, the Brentons—Alan, Jack, Jeanita, James, Diane, and Alan Jr. and James—who treated my father, sister, and me like royalty during our stay in Marystown and welcomed us “home” in every way possible.