August Gale (21 page)

A man of twenty, Finlay had heard the stories about vessels that had wrecked and souls who had been lost. Steamers, mail boats, schooners, cargo ships—they had all met their doom in the waters here. Some of the old fellas spoke of the hundreds of victims they had buried, their bodies carried one by one up over the headlands. Whenever possible, the dead had been sent home for burial, but several of the foreign crews, fishermen from Portugal, Holland, and Britain, had been laid to rest in the soil of St. Shotts.

One of the more sorrowful tales Finlay could recall was that of the HMS
Harpooner
, a ship filled with British troops and their families. Traveling from Quebec City to England, the vessel, which was transporting many crippled or injured veterans back home from the War of 1812, struck a reef of rocks. Half of the 411 passengers—women, children, and soldiers—drowned in the frigid breakers as the ship sank. But then there were those who had been rescued, too, off St. Shotts's shores by the local lads who had risked their own lives ferrying the victims to land. In the past, fishermen had taken to their boats to save livestock: a cargo ship in June of 1894 wrecked on the rocks, and one thousand sheep had been driven up the village cliffs to safety. Finlay had listened to many a yarn from his ancestors who had been well fed by cows, hens, and sheep that had been plucked from a sinking ship. And there was no denying that nearly every home in St. Shotts, Finlay's included, had been built from the planks of a doomed vessel.

Some of the villagers, Finlay knew, believed the waters off St. Shotts were haunted. On storm-tossed nights, they saw ghost ships, sunken vessels sailing and then disappearing in sheets of fog. They heard the screams of dying fishermen, spirits still looking to be rescued, resurrected from the blue-green waters. Far too many coffins had been built on these shores, and Finlay hoped that this August day would not bring more despair and death. Slowly, he and the other two men made their way down the cliffs to scavenge planks from the wreckage. Nearing the beach sand, Finlay saw that the schooner was battered and broke in two. Her spars and masts had been ripped away. Looking to the stern, he noted the vessel's name: the
Annie Anita
.

The fishermen shook their heads at the sight of the ruined vessel and boarded her splintered deck. Finlay climbed down below to the cabin. In the darkened wreck, he found broken boards, rocks, and piles of sand—sand that had been dredged by waves striking the sea's bottom. Finlay had begun collecting wood when a flash of yellow caught his eye. He dug through the wreckage and glimpsed a face. A man in his yellow oilskins lay on his side. “Paddy!” Finlay shouted to his brother-in-law. “There's a body below.”

Finlay and the fishermen carried the corpse from the cabin. The body was heavy and big, nearly six feet tall. They laid the dead sailor on the grass and returned to the vessel. Unable to move through the cabin filled with debris, the fishermen cut a hole in the deck. Crawling down below, one of the men hollered, “I see a rubber boot!”

Finlay reached between the boards and felt the boot. Inside was the foot of a young boy. Clearing more wreckage, the fishermen discovered a small hand protruding through the rubble, as if it were reaching for help, for someone to hold on to. Finlay gently uncovered the body and found a lad dressed in his Sunday suit, prepared to meet God. Near the child's corpse, lay a small Bible with the boy's fingerprints embedded in the pages. “Jaysus,” whispered one of the men. “The poor fella must have been terrified.”

The fishermen carried the lifeless boy from the schooner and laid him on the grass next to the sailor's body. On the child's chest, they placed the Bible he had clutched in the moments before his death. Covering the corpses with a shroud of torn canvas, the men uttered silent prayers. Noting the grim discovery from the village above, a crowd of fishermen soon joined them at the beach.

“Aye, 'tis John McNeil's old boat,” hollered one of the men.

The vessel had once belonged to Capt'n John McNeil of Trepassey who had named the boat after his two daughters, Annie and Anita. McNeil, the fishermen knew, had sailed the schooner for a few years before selling it to Capt'n Paddy Walsh of Marystown. Pulling the canvas from the bodies, the men examined the large sailor that laid still and silent on the grass. “Aye, that's Capt'n Paddy,” noted one of the fishermen. “Big and blocky he was. Jaysus, he was a fine skipper. Some gale it 'twas to kill 'im.”

Within the hour, news of the tragedy traveled up the cliffs and along the headlands, across fences and onto doorsteps. One by one, the local women gathered as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them, to tend to the bodies. “The two of 'em washed up from the gale,” the women explained to one another. “A father and son they are. Aye, at least they'll be buried together, a proper farewell for their families, so.”

By afternoon, a horse and cart had carried the two corpses along the dirt path to the local church. There, in Our Lady of Fatima, a small sanctuary overlooking the sea, the skipper and his son were laid on wooden pews. As the sky darkened, the women lit candles and knelt before the cold bodies. They pulled Rosary beads from their pockets and began to pray for the departed souls. Outside, the men began their own ritual of gathering wood for the coffins and the local constable put the tragic words to paper. In a telegram to Marystown he informed Father John McGettigan: Annie Anita
wrecked at Hazel Cove. Bodies of Capt'n Paddy Walsh and his son have been recovered. Remaining crew missing
.

Not long after McGettigan received the grim news from St. Shotts, two motorboats towed another derelict schooner to shore. The vessel had been found bottom up near the Virgin Rocks. Their motors straining, the boats dragged the
Mary Bernice
toward Haystack Harbor, a small inlet in the northeast corner of Placentia Bay. There, a crowd of fishermen pulled the schooner onto the beach and righted it from its beam-ends. Unlike the
Annie Anita
, no bodies, no sign of Captain James Walsh or his crew were found in the waterlogged cabin. The local lawman penned another telegram destined for Father McGettigan:
Vessel
Mary Bernice
towed to Haystack. All hands feared lost
.

M
ary Brennan eyes the field of buttercups separating her doorstep from the deserted home with the peeling paint and crumbling chimneys.

Through thick glasses, her brown eyes gaze past the tall grass. “Three steps up and three steps down,” she says, remembering the wooden step ladder that helped them across the fence separating her family's land from Lillian and Paddy Walsh's property.

“Their home was lovely, and they were wonderful neighbors to us,” Mary explains. “Lil was an angel, soft-spoken, kind. Mr. Paddy was a fine-looking man but a rough man, a sea person. When his boat would dock, you would hear him. He had a loud voice. You'd know he was back in town.”

Standing at the doorstep of the home where she has lived since she was a small girl, Mary conjures memories more than six decades past when the house across the field was freshly painted and filled with furnishings from around the world.

“There were lots of good times,” she says. “They really enjoyed living, Paddy and Lil did.”

The daughter of Albert and Elizabeth Brennan, Mary was nine years old when the 1935 hurricane rattled her roof and kept her father from crossing the bay. Known as the local ferry master, Albert Brennan operated a small motorboat that transported customers across Marystown's harbor. He often took Skipper Paddy over to Baird's store or to call on Father McGettigan.

“Paddy and my father were good neighbors and good friends. It was a terrible thing when the news came about the
Annie Anita
and
Mary Bernice
.”

Of the forty Newfoundland victims to die in the storm, fourteen were from Marystown and its two neighboring villages. Rimmed in black and bearing death notices, the two telegrams from St. Shotts and Placentia Bay forever altered a town that relied on the Blessed Mary and good fortune to bring their sailors safe ashore.

“I remember Father McGettigan coming around, all in black, going door to door. Almost every home on the south side of Marystown had someone lost. The whole town just stumbled into shock.”

Forty-two children on the south side of Marystown were suddenly fatherless. The news of fishermen's deaths crippled the community of three hundred. Widows collapsed on doorsteps, screams echoed across the water, toddlers clutched their mothers' skirts, and the whole town shuttered itself in grief.

“On the south side of Marystown, every house was affected,” Mary tells us with a sigh. “Most everyone lost someone. If their son or husband didn't die, they lost an uncle, a cousin. It was an awful time. There were no maybes; the August Gale was the worst thing to hit Marystown.”

And there was no one more stricken than Lillian Walsh. Mary shakes her head at the thought of her neighbor's misfortune.

“Miss Lil, she lost half her family. She lost her husband and three sons. It was heartbreaking.”

Good friends and close neighbors, Mary's parents did what they could for Lillian; they crossed the field at all hours of the day and night to offer comfort to Paddy's widow. Three steps up the ladder, three steps down, over the fence and back, they wore a path in the grass. Now sixty-eight years later, Mary eyes the field where she can still see her father retreating in the night to sit by Lillian's side. Hours passed before he would return, his face ashen, his own eyes red with grief.

“My mother and father spent many nights with Lillian for I don't know how long. She'd be crying hysterically. My father would come home, and he'd look so worn. He would have a drink of brandy and talk about her screams.”

The screams, Mary tells us, the suffering of the Marystown widows continued long past the summer of 1935, but there was little time for grief. The women worked dawn till dusk trying to provide for their fatherless children. They raked hay, planted vegetables, washed fish, and fed their families what they could. The government Marine Disaster Fund provided $115 annually to the widows. The $2.21 a week was barely enough to keep a family of six or seven from starving. Several mothers reluctantly packed up their youngest sons and daughters and sent them to live in the orphanages in St. John's.

“The women worked like dogs,” Mary says, “and there was little help for them or their children. They had to make some awful hard choices.”

I imagine the widows trying to stifle their own sobs and hush the cries of their children. A stanza from a Newfoundland song, its author unknown, replays in my head. The lyrics have haunted me since I read them months before our trip.

So many fishermen, so many fathers cradled in the ocean blue. Thousands of ships—some ten thousand vessels—are estimated to have foundered, sunk, or disappeared in Newfoundland's waters over the past four centuries. The mourning, the anguish of untold wives, mothers, sons, and daughters is unimaginable.

Decades after the gale, Mary would come to understand such sorrow. She had only been married a year when she lost her husband, William Power, to the sea. On a fog-shrouded October night, a vessel collided with Power's schooner, killing him as he lay sleeping in his bunk. Days later, his battered body washed ashore.

“We lost him near the French Island of St. Pierre,” she tells us. “My son, William, had just been born. He was a month old when his father died.”

As with the August Gale widows, Mary worked many long hours to provide for her son. She planted vegetables, tended gardens, and put in a full day behind the counter at her family's general store.

“You just did your best and went along,” she tells us. “There was nothing else you could do.”

Before we leave Mary's doorstep, I ask to take her picture. She readily obliges and moves closer to my father. My dad places his arm around Mary, and they both smile into the camera. I stare into the viewfinder and a wave of recognition washes over me. Mary's wavy white hair, her gentle voice, and pragmatic nature remind me of my Nana. Paralyzed and in shock after the San Francisco trip and Ambrose's second betrayal, my grandmother did what was necessary to provide for her two sons. A down-on-her-luck single mother, she scrubbed pots, pans, and dishes in the local restaurant to earn a paycheck and dinners for her sons. With little money to buy her boys winter clothing, she often stayed up through the night knitting sweaters, mittens, and hats.