He went to the porch to fetch his children’s winter clothes.
Then he turned back to his mother.
“Is Henry all right?” he asked. “Did Henry get swept away too?”
“Well, that’s the only bit of good news,” came the reply. “He was at the Temperance meeting so he’s alive.”
Herbert nodded, though his heart was no lighter.
“Herbert,” his mother said. “There’s more, though.”
Herbert tilted his head in her direction. What else could there possibly be after the disaster of all disasters that had befallen Jessie and David?
“Young Irene is dead, too,” his mother said. “She was down visiting her grandmother, as you know, and she got swept away with her little cousins.”
“Good God,” said Herbert as he envisioned another of Nan’s nieces, the daughter of her other sister, Jemima. “How old was she again?”
“She was eleven,” his mother answered. “Jemima will go mad. Irene was her only daughter with all those boys. Point au Gaul will never be the same after this, Herbert.”
“No,” Herbert said as his children put on their boots. “No.”
Ruby sniffled as she thought of Irene drowning. Irene used to sit behind her in school. The girl was her favourite cousin.
“We’d best get home,” her father said, placing his hand on her shoulder.
“Good night, children,” their only living grandmother called. “God bless you.”
Nan’s grip on her tea cup was tight while she waited for the children. Chesley paced the living room. He knew something of the deaths and destruction that had visited Point au Gaul that night but he didn’t want to be the one to tell Nan; he thought that duty should fall to her husband. He thought also that the family should be together when she was informed of the many likely deaths among her kin. Silence hung heavy as they waited.
Suddenly the door burst open and Nan’s brother, Tom, ran in, his face covered in red patches.
Nan ran out to the porch to meet him.
“What’s wrong, Tom?” she asked, her heart thumping loudly again.
He pulled her to him and sobbed.
“Don’t you know Mother is gone?” he cried. “Father’s home is gone, too!”
Nan drew in air and let it out in a great cry.
“Oh no!” she sobbed. “Oh no!” The tears poured down her face as she and Tom hugged each other like survivors on a raft.
Then Tom told her that their sister Jessie’s children had all been swept away.
Nan howled at the news and fell into a chair. Jemima’s daughter, Irene, was gone as well, he said. She rocked back and forth, her arms folded across her chest.
Then Jessie and David opened the door and came in. Jessie’s clothes were drenched, even her long dark hair was dripping cold water.
“I want my baby,” she said. “My children are gone. I want to know what happened to Thomas and Henry. I’m nursing Elizabeth…”
David stood like a fencepost, his eyes sunken and blank.
“She keeps talking like that,” he said. “And I can’t keep her indoors.”
Nan took Jessie in her arms and for ten long minutes both sisters cried from deep in their bellies. Afterwards it seemed that Jessie’s babbling had ceased. But then she said that she had to nurse Elizabeth. Nan took her upstairs and began to undress her and dry her off.
Downstairs, the men stood in the living room, saying nothing. Before long they heard Jessie scream about her lost children. She demanded to know what had happened to them and why they weren’t safe. When there were silences they knew Nan was talking softly to her. Then Jessie shouted again, wanting to know every detail of how they had been torn from their grandmother’s home and why. David put his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes.
“Sit down, David,” Tom said gently.
Upstairs, Nan begged Jessie to quieten down.
By now, Herbert had returned home with his and Nan’s four children. They sat on the day bed in the kitchen, like ducks in a row, too afraid to move or say anything. Herbert sent Tom to fetch Nan’s father, Henry, so that the old man could be with his daughters and son in his grief.
Soon Henry was sitting in Nan’s kitchen with his grandchildren, listening to Jessie’s mournful cries. After awhile, Ruby went upstairs and sat outside Nan’s room where her Aunt Jessie lay. She crouched down and prayed for her dead cousins but mostly for Aunt Jessie. Now Ruby knew what they meant by the phrase “hell on earth.”
Herbert and Tom settled David in the Hillier kitchen with cups of tea and lassie bread. As he spread the molasses on the bread, Herbert felt guilty that his wife’s kitchen was untouched, that his floors were dry. But there was little time for emotional indulgences. He and Tom quickly went to the porch and put their rubber boots on. They had decided to go out and see what could be done. By now, Herbert deeply regretted going to the Orange Lodge supper in Lamaline when he might have been of some assistance to his own village. There was no way of predicting what would befall Point au Gaul, he knew, but perhaps he shouldn’t have dismissed the earth tremor as he did. It was obvious now that it had something to do with the great waves that had swept houses, fishing rooms, and women and children away.
As he and Tom picked their way through the wreckage that was strewn through Point au Gaul, Tom told him what had happened in his absence. The first wave had rolled in on the flat land of the village and lifted houses and stores off their foundations, smashing them to bits. It swept the entire waterfront clean, carrying virtually everything there out to sea. It was the first wave that had taken Henry and Lizzie Hillier’s house out to sea and with it, Lizzie, and her four grandchildren.
On the opposite end of the beach on a neck of land, the first wave—the one that young Ruby Hillier mistook for sheep—splintered an old two-storey house. Two women, eighty-five-year-old Mary Ann Walsh and sixty-year-old Elizabeth Walsh lived there together. One of the women was killed in the initial crash while the other was pulled out to sea.
“They say Thomas Hillier is missing, too,” Tom said of his neighbour with the same name, the fish oil inspector.
Herbert shook his head.
“He wasn’t even supposed to be home,” Tom continued. “He wanted to come home for his birthday and have a party. It was the first time in his life he ever wanted one, well, since he was a child anyway. Young Caroline was running around earlier talking of how they were making two cakes. She was so excited about it. Now they’re out looking for him. He went out to haul his boat up before the first wave came.”
“How’s Lydia?” Herbert asked of Thomas’ wife.
“Well,” Tom answered, his brow knitted, “she has another baby due soon.”
Herbert shook his head again.
“I’m very sorry for your mother,” he said suddenly.
Tom nodded.
By now they had reached a group of men who were looking for bodies. It was a difficult task given the amount of debris clogging the beach and harbour. They broke into small groups and assigned each other sections of ground to cover. They were confident by now that the erratic tidal action was over and the bright moonlight was helpful to them as they went about their grim task.
Two of the men found Thomas Hillier’s body at ten o’clock. Water-logged and leaden, it took four of them to carry the body to the hall.
“Right where his boat would have been,” said Herbert. “It’s the strangest thing. Was he dragged out and brought back in? Or hit on the head by a piece of wood?”
“There wasn’t a mark on him,” Tom answered. “He obviously stayed out too long. He tried too hard to get his boat to safety.”
“He wasn’t a fisherman,” Herbert muttered. “He wasn’t around the water as much as the rest of us. Perhaps he wasn’t as afraid of it as we are…”
At the hall, pregnant Lydia cried over the body of her husband. She pushed her large tummy to the side and lay her chest and head on him as he reclined lifeless on the table. She could not hear the sobs that rippled thr
ough the hall for her and her fatherless unborn child. At her side, her daughter, Caroline, sniffled for the birthday party that would never happen. She kept thinking of an incident from earlier that night. Before supper, her high-spirited father had thrown a stone into a pool of water and splashed mud on his jacket. At home, as the family’s potatoes boiled on the stove top, Caroline had asked him, “Father, may I brush the mud off your jacket?” Thomas had turned to his daughter and answered quietly, “Yes dear, you do that as you may never get the chance again.”
Not long afterwards the men came across the body of Nan’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Lizzie. She was not far along the beach from Thomas Hillier, making the villagers think that she might have died from injuries sustained in the initial crash of the first wave, although there were none visible to the naked eye. Very soon afterwards, Herbert and the other men found the little bodies of Jessie’s three children, Thomas, Henry, and baby Elizabeth. Three-year-old Henry, clad in his pajamas, was lying in the house of a motorized dory trapped in the landwash. His hands were curled around the rails as if he were trying to save himself; it was obvious he had survived the impact of the first wave and was trying his best to live. The men who found him buried their faces in their hands and tried to stifle the sounds of their grief.
After finding the children and bringing them to the hall, the men gave up searching for the night. They knew young Irene Hillier was still out there, and so were the Walsh women, but they were too tired and grief-stricken to continue. They simply could not take anymore.
8
As the awful day of November 18, 1929 ended, the people of Point au Gaul counted their dead. They began to wonder, too, how many had died in the neighbouring villages and towns along the coast. Many of them had friends and relatives in nearby Lamaline, where Nan and Herbert Hillier and Jessie and David Hipditch had journeyed for their aborted supper at the Loyal Orange Lodge. Mayhem had broken out when Lamaline harbour had emptied of water. Further panic had ensued when the harbour and the lower parts of the village itself had bulged with sea water, the result of a great crush of a wave and then another wave.
Lamaline first appeared in French maps in 1620 as Cap de la Meline. The French name La Maligne, directly translated as “evil” or “wicked,” likely refers to the difficulty of landing a boat in the harbour there because of the many shoals and the low-lying, flat, almost swampy land. In 1763 Captain Cook charted the South Coast of Newfoundland, looking for suitable sites for fishing settlements; one of those chosen was Lamaline.
Despite the early French connection, the first European settlers came from England and Ireland. Lamaline had a significant population by the early 1800s; in 1807, Reverend John Harries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel baptized seventy-five souls, one-third of whom were adults and “many very old.” Harries was the first clergyman in Lamaline and the only one most of the livyers had ever seen.
Conflict with the French was ongoing. In 1827 the residents of Lamaline appealed to Newfoundland Governor Thomas Cochrane for help, claiming “the French constantly fish on our shore on Sundays (presumably the Newfoundlanders’ day of rest) with boats from sixty to a hundred in number—have taken our dry fish from the beach—have lately burned a boat belonging to one of us and stolen his wharf posts…” Their petition was successful in winning the sympathy of the governor. He immediately dispatched the British naval vessel HMS Manly to patrol the coast. The people of Lamaline sent Cochrane a gift of fish in thanks.
While they portrayed the French as their enemies in this instance, in reality the ties between the two groups were far more complicated than that. Lamaline fishermen sold caplin to the French in contravention of the law. Some tension arose when Captain Alexander Milne of HMS Crocodile discovered the illegal sales as well as considerable smuggling of liquor from St. Pierre to Newfoundland. The French tried to convince him with a taste test that the Newfoundland caplin tasted much better than their own—they failed. All hands breathed sighs of relief when Milne decided not to arrest anyone, but to issue warnings instead. The Loyal Orange Lodge, perched on a hill overlooking Lamaline, was at the centre of social life. Catholics of the town were welcome there, too—in small communities dominated by a harsh North Atlantic environment sectarianism was a luxury they could not indulge. As Jessie, David, Nan, and Herbert fled the hall, they left behind people as dumbfounded and fear-filled as they were. Most of the Lamaline people who had been in the hall left their dinners uneaten and rushed to their homes, heading straight to their children’s bedrooms. They plucked their children from sleep and scurried to higher ground with them.
Twenty-six-year-old Melinda Hillier held her three children close to her as her husband, Frederick, kept a watch on the ocean, waiting for the next wave. Melinda herself could not bear to look. Her ribs rocked as her heart pounded in her chest. Wilomena Emberley, the same age as Melinda, escaped with her brood of five. Like quite a few Lamaline men, Wilomena’s husband, Henry, was in Corner Brook, working on the giant mill and townsite under construction there. It was a great chance to put a few dollars in his pocket. But now, alone with the children, Wilomena ached for him as she watched the first wave batter their house. She knew from the whipping sound the wave made as it hit the dwelling that they wouldn’t sleep there that night and that repairing it would be a real job. As she pushed down her own sob, her youngest started to cry and Wilomena pulled the child to her breast. “Shhh,” she said. “It’ll be all over soon. You’re safe.” Then she bit her own lip so hard it bled.
Jane Hillier’s husband was also at Corner Brook. She had two boys, Fred and Cyril, who fished with their father now, and four younger children. Jane had been terror-struck to see the harbour run dry from her station outside the Hall with her friends and neighbours, who also stood mesmerized. Down below, her oldest sons rushed their younger siblings out of the house, realizing that it was dangerously near the beach and acting on instinct. As their toddler brother, Stanley, ambled out, Fred picked him up under his arm, despite the child’s protests, and pushed each of the other children from behind, trying to hurry them to higher ground. By now, Jane was running toward them.
“Go back up the hill, Mother!” Cyril called. “We’re coming!”
When they reached the top of the hill where Jane stood waiting, glassy-eyed, for her children, the first wave drove in and smashed their house to pieces. Jane let out a wail. When the wave hauled back, Fred saw the fence fall down, the family’s fishing store flow out with the sea, and their trawls and rope unfurl in the water. The cash their father was earning would come in handy, he thought. They would lose just about everything, he knew, including his quintal of Madeira fish. Jane was thinking of the twenty pounds of pork she had stored away and the coal that was meant to keep them warm the winter.
Not far away, on the grasses of the hill, young bride Gertrude Caines felt her face grow hot with tears. She was twenty-one and not long married to Leslie Caines, a thirty-year-old fisherman, who had grievously injured his hand. Leslie was no longer able to fish and Gertrude was wasting away with worry. They had five dollars a week from Public Charities but it was not enough and moreover, it was not what Leslie wanted and certainly not what she wanted. Gertrude spent the entire summer bent over the dark earth, coaxing potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, and cabbage out of the soil. As the July fog hung, she spread caplin on her garden, having gathered the little fish from the beaches herself. As September approached, she went among her burgeoning crops in the dusk and prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, on the night of November 18, 1929, Gertrude knew, all her vegetables were gone.
9
Two waves had reached into Point au Gaul on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, swamping the village and taking the lives of Jessie and David’s three young children, Jessie’s mother, Lizzie, the two Walsh women, Thomas Hillier, and young Irene Hillier.
The men of Point au Gaul had recovered most of the bodies under brilliant moonlight the night of the tsunami but some were still missing
the next day, including Irene Hillier and Mary Ann Walsh. That same strange night, a horse that had been swept out to sea swam back and walked onto dry land with no ill effects.
On November 19, 1929, the day after the tidal wave, a southeast wind came up. It churned the sea higher and higher, whipping up another panic in the village. The whitecaps brought wreckage back to the beach and right up to the remaining houses. The wind and waves also carried Mary Ann’s body to a small island on the other side of the neck of land on which her house had been situated.
The men and boys scoured the beaches of Point au Gaul but they could not find Irene’s body. Every family prayed that it would be delivered. Irene’s mother, Jemima, could not sleep; night after night she sat up at her bedroom window, listening to the waves and the wind. “It’s awfully cold for Irene out there,” she said repeatedly of her only daughter. Her husband, Joshua, who went to look for Irene at dawn every morning, tried to cajole his wife into bed but she would not rest. “I can’t sleep till she’s found,” Jemima said between her tears.
The bodies were all laid out in the hall, ironically built on high ground. Nan Hillier did not go to see her mother’s body. She did not see Jessie’s children either. “You’ll want to remember them as they are,” Herbert told her. “It’ll be too upsetting to see them any other way.” Besides, Nan was too busy tending to Jessie who still babbled and veered into hysteria.
Now homeless, David and Jessie moved in with Nan and Herbert. David’s dory was swept away, as was his stage and fishing gear. He would have to start his fishing enterprise from scratch. The Hipditches had lost most of their winter provisions as well, but that meant nothing, compared to the loss of their children.
The village held a joint funeral for Lizzie and her four grandchildren, including the missing Irene. But Jemima could find no comfort in the ritual, nor in the constant expressions of sympathy that came from her neighbours in Point au Gaul—not as long as Irene was out there somewhere.
Tsunami Page 5
