Tsunami

by Maura Hanrahan

  His wife, Lydia, nodded, though she frowned a little at her husband’s circumspect tone. She had never heard him talk in this manner before; he sounded like an old man.

  “My birthday is a good time to do it,” he said.

  “It is,” Lydia smiled. “It’s a grand time.”

  Thomas Hillier was a fish oil inspector for the government of Newfoundland. Fish oil was an important export and Hillier’s work required him to travel all over the country, ensuring that outgoing products were of high quality. Caroline often missed him when he was gone; so did Lydia, a native of Grand Bank who had moved to Point au Gaul upon her marriage and was now expecting another child in a couple of months.

  Besides her little brother, Ben, Caroline had two older halfsiblings, Harold, nineteen, and Georgina, twenty, children from her father’s first marriage, making for a full household. Like Nan Hillier who fretted for her children back home, Harold and Georgina had gone to the Orange Lodge supper meeting in Lamaline. The Hillier siblings walked to Lamaline with their friends, David and Jessie Hipditch, the parents of three small children who they’d left in the care of Jessie’s parents back in Point au Gaul. When Jessie Hipditch felt the tremor, she saw her eight month old daughter Elizabeth in front of her face, waving at her. Then the child disappeared. It was the oddest sensation, but it was hard to pay it any mind with the blue skies and the windless air.

  4

  Five-year-old Pearl Brushett yawned as she sat on the edge of her bed. She slowly pulled her socks off, forgetfully throwing them on the floor. When the left one gently flopped on the softwood, she threw herself back on her bed and sighed gratefully. She wasn’t used to school, this was her first year, and it was tiring her out. It was a long walk to the schoolhouse, she had to struggle to keep up with her big brother, Fred, who was ten. And it seemed so long until dinner every day. In the classroom she often found herself staring out the window thinking of her doll, Annie, and wishing she was home, tucking Annie in and telling her a story.

  “Miss Brushett!” the teacher called those times. Pearl could never relax. That was what was wearing her out.

  She remembered her sock on the floor. She rose from the bed, then leaned down and picked it up, taking the other in her hand as well. She carried them to the brin bag her mother kept in a closet in the hallway. It was full of dirty clothes, it always was; there were seven of them in the Brushett family and it seemed Carrie, Pearl’s mother, could never get to the bottom of the brin bag no matter how hard she tried.

  Pearl smoothed her flannelette nightie and pulled back her bed clothes. She puffed up her pillow, turned around, and sank onto her bed. Her seven-year-old sister, Lillian, already lay in bed, white-faced with an earache. Their mother, Carrie, had warmed up a plate and wrapped it in a blanket; Lillian lay with it under her head now trying to derive some comfort from it. Poor Lillian, Pearl thought, as she shimmied into bed. Pearl’s other sister, Lottie, who was eight, would be in soon, too. Between the two of them, the bed would be all warmed up for her.

  “Mommy!” she called. She could not go to sleep without her mother’s good night kiss.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Carrie answered. “I’m just tucking in your little brother.”

  Pearl was already floating toward sleep when she felt her mother’s soft lips on her forehead.

  “You’re my good girl, aren’t you?” Carrie said softly.

  Pearl nodded sleepily, smiling. How she loved the sound of her mother’s voice.

  “Here, make sure Annie is tucked in there with you,” Carrie said, pulling the covers tight around her daughter. “Good night now. Sweet dreams always.”

  “Always,” Pearl whispered.

  Pearl’s home was in Kelly’s Cove on Great Burin Island, the site of two other villages, Shalloway, and Great Burin. With other settlements on the peninsula nearby, including Whale Cove, Kirby’s Cove, Burin Bay, Collin’s Cove, Ship Cove, and Path End, Kelly’s Cove was part of Burin. A rocky area of sheltered coves, Burin may be named for an engraving tool, burine in French; according to legend, a French sailor was on deck holding a burine when he noticed how it resembled the harbour.

  The European presence here came early. Basque fishermen frequented Buria Audia (Great Burin) and Buria Chumea (Little Burin) as early as 1650. In 1662, the parliament of Brittany, France, allotted forty fishermen to Great Burin. The English did not come until 1718, when Christopher Spurrier of Poole, England, established his shipbuilding enterprise at Ship Cove (thus giving it its name presumably). By 1740, 130 English men, women, and children over-wintered, becoming the first permanent European settlers. They were later joined by substantial numbers of Jersey fishermen. Burin received imports of salt meat, rum, molasses, and salt, and became the capital of the bay.

  Like most of the men on Great Burin Island, Pearl’s father, William, was a fisherman. William was in the shore fishery and had a good season in 1929. He’d had several good years, in fact, as had most of his neighbours. The people of Burin knew about the Bank Crash in New York and the Depression that was beginning to sink economies all over the western world but they were not too worried about themselves. They had put a bit away during their good years. They had learned to be prudent over the years, to take absolutely nothing for granted. William Brushett was out of debt now and he intended to stay that way. When he talked about the Bank Crash with his neighbours they spoke of their pity for urban dwellers.

  “At least we got our pantries full of food,” William would say. “Salt cod, herring, a bit of salmon and smoked caplin. Root crops. Things we can hunt. We’ll never starve to death, but I don’t know what will happen to those people in the cities with this Bank Crash and the money worth nothing.”

  William had thought of these things as he walked into the woods on the fine, clear morning of November 18, 1929, his axe in his hand. He drank in the cool autumn air and enjoyed the sounds of chickadees and juncos. He took long strides, his belly contented with the scrambled eggs and bacon Carrie had prepared for his breakfast. The tea she made, too, it was always wonderful; somehow, she always made the best tea.

  William was on his way to get the family’s winter supply of wood. He’d gone in the bay, away from rocky Burin, and later when the snow came, he would bring his horse back to fetch his cords of wood. It was a beautiful day for a journey of any kind and he imagined that Carrie would have made good use of the kind weather to wash and dry clothes. You almost couldn’t believe winter was at hand.

  Someone was shaking Pearl. Was it that strange rumbling again? She hoped not; she hadn’t liked that at all. She just wanted to sleep. But her mother wouldn’t let her.

  “Wake them up, Mommy!” she thought she heard Lottie say.

  “Pearl, get up,” Carrie said. Pearl heard the firmness in her voice.

  “Mommy, I’m tired,” Pearl mumbled. “I’m too tired to go to school.”

  “Pearl, get up now,” Carried insisted. Pearl sat up in bed at once. “Get up and put this on.”

  Her mother tossed her winter coat at her. Pearl rubbed her eyes. She was surprised to see her older brother, Fred, standing in her room, all dressed in his winter clothes. Her mother held little James, also wearing his winter coat. The bed was empty beside her, and Lottie was standing next to their brothers shivering. The room was dark; it must be night still, Pearl thought. What was going on?

  The little girl jumped out of bed and wrapped her winter coat around her. She stared at her mother who was peeping out through the curtains which she had drawn tightly together. Pearl leaned over to look, but Carrie tightened the curtains in her hand.

  “Keep away from the window!” she ordered.

  But Pearl had already seen crushed stages and flakes and the debris-filled harbour. But she knew it wasn’t Kelly’s Cove.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” she asked. She looked at her mother whose face was tight in a frown. Carrie said nothing. Pearl looked at her brother Fred. As he opened his mouth, he caught his mother’s eye and
clamped shut. Pearl raised huge eyes to her mother’s face. Then she noticed that the floor underneath her seemed unsteady.

  “Hold onto the bedpost, children!” Carrie said. The baby in her arms began to wail. Carrie’s knuckles went white as she continued to peer out through the sliver of an opening in the curtains.

  Then the house seemed as if it were flying. The older children clung to the bedpost even as the bed slid across the floor. Carrie clutched James and stood with her back flat against the wall at a right angle to the window. Somehow she stayed upright.

  “Mommy!” the children cried in unison.

  Then the house stopped flying and everything seemed to stop.

  “It’s still,” Pearl cried. “Mommy, where are we?”

  Carrie drew back the curtain slightly and let out a great gasp.

  “Oh God, my God, thank God” she said. “We’re back home.”

  She laid the baby and her toddler on Pearl’s bed and picked up her daughter’s chair. She hurled it through the window.

  “Help!” she cried. “Help us!”

  Pearl’s mouth hung open as blood ran down her mother’s wrist but Carrie ignored it. Then she rushed to the window and watched her chair fly to the ground. My father built that chair, she thought, pout-faced.

  “Help us!” her mother cried again.

  “We can go downstairs,” said Pearl’s brother Fred. “We can get out that way.”

  “Good boy,” said Carrie. “See if you can do that.”

  The boy left Pearl’s bedroom and hurried down the narrow hallway to the stairs. But he stopped at the top; the stairway was covered in frigid seawater. Below him chairs, table legs, and his mother’s knitting floated eerily. He screamed.

  “Mommy! We can’t go down there!” he howled. “The stairs are full of water.”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Carrie said, though her breathing came rapidly. “Ben and Beatrice Hollett are down there. See? They see us. They’re going to get us.” She took her son’s hand and led him toward the broken window.

  Pearl was shivering now. But she couldn’t stop thinking about her broken chair. She still didn’t know what had happened. How could the stairs be full of water? Was she dreaming? Perhaps she was being visited by the old hag? None of this made any sense…

  With little James perched on her hip, Carrie ran back to the top of the stairs. She exhaled in relief when she saw that the water was low enough that they could walk downstairs.

  “Come on, children!” she cried. “Everyone follow me.”

  Fred, Lottie, Lillian who had retrieved her still warm plate for her ear, and Pearl trailed after their mother down the stairs through icy water. They let out shrieks as the coldness pierced their bones. They looked from the sea water to the parlour window as they heard the shattering of glass.

  Then Pearl felt her mother’s arms around her and she was being passed to someone on a ladder. He carried her to the beach. It was freezing. Her little brother James was crying. Her mother was still in the house with her big brother. “We went all the way to Bartlett’s Island!” Carrie cried. Really? Pearl wondered. Then they were all on the beach. She blanched at the crimson that was spreading across her mother’s arm.

  “She needs a bandage,” Beatrice Hollett said.

  “Get to higher ground!” someone called. Maybe it was Mr. Hollett. They ran as fast as they could to Humpess Head, Pearl holding Carrie’s hand. Something was chasing them. As they ran, Pearl glanced behind to see that it was a wall of ice water and it took their house again and carried it away where they could no longer see it. On the hill where they finally found safety, Carrie Brushett pulled her five children to her and sobbed from the deepest part of her belly.

  When William Brushett rowed into Kelly’s Cove on Great Burin Island two days later, his heart was thumping. He had felt the rumbling, heard the thunder, and watched the walls of water steal houses and take lives. The night before he reached Kelly’s Cove he paced a friend’s floor in the village of Stepaside, worrying for Carrie and his children. Now, as snow fell on his shoulders while he rowed, the cove was chock-a-block with debris, mostly wood from dories, schooners, and buildings. William was afraid he would see a body.

  When he hauled his boat up, he met Ben Hollett, who called, “yes, they’re safe,” before William could even ask. William’s tears flowed in rivers and he let out a great sob that filled the harbour. He glanced up at the village and saw Pearl come round the corner of a neighbour’s house. “My chair is gone, Daddy!” she cried. “The one you made for me.” He ran toward her and pulled her off the ground into his big fisherman’s arm. He held her tight as he faced the harbour and surveyed the damage the tsunami had caused.

  William could see right away that his house was gone. So were his flake and his stage. The Brushetts lost the three barrels of potatoes and two barrels of turnips that would have seen them through the winter. Their five hens were drowned. They’d also lost the four gallons of molasses they’d bought. Gone also was their two tons of coal and two cords of firewood, their means of staying warm from now until spring would break months later. The long wild ride to Bartlett’s Island had cost William and Carrie Brushett possessions worth $1,493—everything they owned. All they had left was the forty dollars in William’s pocket. But Fred, Lottie, Lillian, Pearl, and James were alive and they only had cuts and bruises.

  5

  The village of Lawn rises out of a lush valley on the southern end of the Burin Peninsula. According to the local families, the first Europeans to over-winter there were Irish and they enjoyed one of the best fishing harbours on the South Coast. The people fished cod, caplin, salmon, herring, and lobster, which they processed in a factory that employed eight people in 1891. They also ran a seal fishery.

  As six-year-old Anna Tarrant lay frozen with fear on the kitchen day bed in her Lawn home, her mother came rushing in from the root cellar, the family tabby behind her. Hilda Murphy Tarrant, a native of St. John’s who had married a local man, dropped her carrots and blue potatoes with a great thud. Beneath her the ground shook.

  “Mommy!” Anna cried, in spite of her sore throat. Anna’s little sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Charles, only two, toddled in. Baby Joe was upstairs in the crib his father had made long ago for the Tarrants’ first child. Elizabeth and Charles were too young to be scared of the rumbling itself but they caught sight of the whitening of their mother’s face.

  “Where’s Isadore?” Hilda asked of her oldest child.

  Anna shrugged. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She had been sick all day, drifting in and out of sleep, and hadn’t paid too much attention to the comings and goings of her sister and brothers.

  Hilda put her hand to her mouth.

  “Where’s your father?” she cried, looking around the kitchen, seemingly oblivious to the shaking stacks of dishes.

  As soon as the rumbling stopped, Pat Tarrant appeared. At forty-three, he was ten years older than his wife. He had been in the Royal Navy as a young man and had witnessed an earthquake in the crystal waters of the Indian Ocean.

  “Hilda, get the children in warm clothes and get them to high ground,” he ordered. “There’s a tidal wave on the way.”

  “I’m sick, Daddy,” Anna said feebly.

  “I know, child,” her father answered, bending down so that he was face to face with her. “But you have to be brave now. You have to get dressed and put on your winter coat. Then you have to go up the hill with Mommy because there’s going to be a big wave come in.”

  “Pat, what do you mean?” Hilda said. “Will it come all the way in to the houses?”

  “It might, maid,” her husband answered. “We have to be prepared. I’ve seen it happen when I was overseas.”

  Hilda shuddered. Anna hiccupped in fear.

  “We have to find Isadore,” Hilda said, shoving a fingernail between her teeth.

  “Don’t worry,” Pat said. “I’ll get him. I’m going to alert the neighbours anyway. You bundle
up the children and take them to the top of the hill as quickly as you can.”

  In a flash he was gone. Then, as Anna was getting out of her pajamas and into a dress Hilda had fetched from upstairs, her father rushed back into the house. Holding his hand was ten-yearold Isadore, ashen-faced.

  “Mommy!” he said, running to Hilda and wrapping his arms around her.

  “He was just next door at Victoria and Nick’s,” Pat said. “He was too afraid to move with the tremors.” He turned to his eldest. “You’re safe now. Just do what your mother says and help her with the other children.” Then he was gone again.

  Pat Tarrant went from one house to another on the low land that ringed the harbour, banging on doors and shouting, “There’s a tidal wave coming! Get to high ground!” Men and women came out of their houses and watched him knock on their neighbours’ doors

  “Do you think so, Pat?” they called.

  “I do!” he replied, still walking. “I do, I saw it in the Indian Ocean.”

  He was a respected man and they believed him. They raced back into their houses and pulled babies out of cribs, toddlers out of beds, and wrapped their children in their winter coats. They slammed their doors shut and fixed their eyes on the high land as they made for it as quickly as they could, ignoring the stillness of the water below. There was no wind in the air but Pat Tarrant’s words held sway.

  With everyone except Kate and Tom Tarrant, an old couple who refused to leave their home which abutted the beach. Distant relatives of Pat’s, they did not believe their house was in any danger.

  “It’s a clear night,” sixty-seven-year-old Tom told Anna’s father. “I think everything’s all right.”

  “That rumbling is all over now,” his sixty-three-year-old wife echoed him. “Everything’s fine now.”