The Doryman

by Maura Hanrahan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As details of the disaster trickled into Oderin, Richard and the Mannings readied the Tancook for an unexpected winter voyage. It was bitterly cold, with intermittent snow squalls and a stubborn wind coming from the southeast. A sense of helplessness pervaded the air as they heard sad tales of dead women and children trapped in houses swept out to sea. Despite the weather, the Banks fishermen felt the need to render whatever assistance they could to the stricken people of the peninsula, so they hauled the heavy sails out of storage. They worked almost around the clock to hoist them and get the standard rigging in place. They took two of the dories out of storage and put them back on the schooner in case they were needed. They nearly froze as they did these things, but they wanted to do what they could.

  Richard had sent word to Little Bay via another Oderin western boat that he was fine, that he had been on the island when the “tidal wave,” as they called it, struck. He felt bad that Angela had fretted over him. She had worried for almost two days, until she’d heard he was fine. It was the same for his sisters Rachel and Mary Jane, and their husbands, too, and would be for young Annie when she married. He knew that Little Bay had been largely spared. But he also knew that friends in Burin and Lawn and Lamaline were destitute and homeless.

  They sailed out of Oderin Harbour into a squall, worrying not about themselves but the survivors of the disaster. They said little, but each man thought of the horrors of little children drowning in their own homes. As they drew near to the Burin Peninsula they saw eerie signs of the tsunami. Wreckage floated by them: a window frame from someone’s house, part of the lace curtain still attached, pickets from a fence, the stouts that had once held a stage in place. They didn’t know if they should pick these things up or not. There was no protocol for such events in this country.

  Farther along they saw smashed-up dories and part of the sloped roof of a house, a chest of drawers still intact, chair legs. It was the pieces of houses that caught in their throats, that quickened in their stomachs. The sights were horrific, but they could not help but watch. Most of all they feared seeing bodies, but the search for bodies was partly why they were out here. So few of them had been recovered, a fact that had added to the incalculable grief the survivors felt.

  “Burin would have got some of the worst of it,” Richard said to John, who was at the wheel.

  “Yes. Rock Harbour maybe, where it’s built exposed like that,” John answered. “And Port au Bras.”

  “Some of those houses in Port au Bras are awfully close to the breakwater,” Richard said. “Might not have been a good thing the other night.”

  John nodded, recalling that many in the community had died during the quake.

  “All right, let’s head to Port au Bras, then,” he said.

  Then Richard spotted a large white object floating in the water to the south. John pointed the Tancook right at it.

  It was a house, a two-storey with all its windows broken out. It was battered, to be sure. But it looked sturdy, and it was still floating quite well all this time after the quake. They moved closer to it, tentatively since they didn’t know how movable it was in the water. Although they didn’t realize it, they were afraid, too, afraid that they might find the body of a child or its mother.

  “The roof looks like it’s in good shape,” Val said. He had joined his brother and brother-in-law at the wheel.

  “Come on, we’ll row out to it,” Richard said, getting excited.

  Before long, he and Val had lowered one of the dories into the water, ignoring the choppiness of the waves in their eagerness to help. Then they rowed ferociously and came right up to the house.

  “Be careful, lads!” John called out. But they couldn’t hear him with the wind.

  Richard and Val could see that the house still had some furniture inside. In the top storey there were beds and chest of drawers that slid here and there with the swell of the sea. They decided they should tow it back to Burin, where the local people would know what to do with it.

  They rowed back to the Tancook to fetch ropes, which the other men threw down into the dories. With the rest of the crew, Richard and Val spent the next two hours tying the house to the ship. It was a tedious and dangerous task, lest the house topple over on top of the dorymen. But it did not, and they sailed for Burin. As they slowly began the tow, Richard stood at the Tancook’s stern, deep in thought. Then he went up to John at the wheel.

  “John, b’y,” he said. “That house belongs to Port au Bras. It’s one of those houses that was by the breakwater, and I believe a fellow by the name of Fudge owns it.”

  “You sure?” John answered, glancing at him. God, it’s cold, John was thinking. What a time for a disaster like this one.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Richard answered. “I thought a lot about it when we were rigging her up.”

  “All right, that’s good enough for me, Dick,” the Captain answered. “Your memory never failed you yet as far as I know.”

  He changed course and pointed the schooner towards Port au Bras.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Port au Bras was one of the communities hardest hit by the underwater quake. Eleven houses had been swept away. So had fish, provisions, stages, flakes, outbuildings, and small boats. The worst of it, though, was the loss of seven lives, including three little girls, all sisters, with only four bodies recovered.

  Whenever a schooner or western boat came into port, local people came rushing out to meet it. Children appeared on the shoreline, running about in excitement. Their mothers gathered and chatted, waiting for the ship to dock and expel its dories and dorymen. This time, as the Tancook pulled into Port au Bras, there was only a sorrowful silence. No one came to meet them. No one stared in wonder at the odd sight of a schooner towing a house.

  When they were moored, the men gathered around Captain Dalton of the relief ship SS Daisy, who told them of the losses in great detail. The Daisy had towed one house to Burin and salvaged four schooners, which she brought back to Port au Bras. The Captain planned to fetch others, which he knew were on the bottom of the bay, when the weather improved, though it was late November now. He complimented the Tancook for the retrieval of the Port au Bras house.

  “You’ll find the people here are in deep shock,” he said to sombre nods all round. “It’s the same all along the coast. Some of them just sit and stare. They can’t even speak. They can’t believe what happened. It was so fast, so unexpected.”

  “What do the doctors and nurses say about their prospects?” Jack asked.

  “Well, it’ll take time,” the Captain answered, not really sure what to say. “Shock is a hard thing.” Then he returned to a topic with which he was more familiar. “There’s lots of rebuilding to be done.”

  “It had to be winter,” Richard muttered.

  “Those people are really suffering without their own homes,” Captain Dalton added. “They’ll be without them till late spring at the very earliest.”

  “Well, we’ll be off to find the owner of this house,” John said, suddenly anxious to do something, anything.

  “It’s one of the Fudges, I’m sure of it,” Richard said.

  They doffed their caps at Captain Dalton, who boarded the Daisy. He was set to return to Lamaline and St. Lawrence, where the weather had prevented his earlier attempts to land.

  The men of the Tancook bent into the wind and headed into the village. They knocked on the door of the first house they saw, and entered.

  “We’re sorry for your trouble,” John began quietly. Dozens of eyes looked blankly at him. “Ah, we found a house, ah, at sea,” he continued. “And we towed it back here.”

  “It was one of the ones on the breakwater, belongs to a Fudge,” Richard said, sounding more confident than his brother-in-law.

  “That’s mine or my brother’s,” a hollow-eyed man
said quietly. “If it’s his, he won’t want it. His wife and three little girls are all dead. They died in that house.”

  The men of the Tancook felt shivers travel down their spines. They hadn’t considered such a scenario. The man who spoke showed no more interest in their find.

  The room was filled with silence.

  Richard looked around the little kitchen. There were people everywhere, some standing, some sitting, others leaning against walls. A jumble of people were crammed on the daybed. There were tired old men and women, sombre people in their middle years, and quiet children and youths. No one said anything. Most of them looked at the floor. There was a hint of shame in their way. But there was a strain of anger, too, threatening and bubbling just beneath the surface.

  There was a cloud of sickness about the place. People coughed and sneezed. Then it dawned on Richard that most of them were homeless, their homes having been carried off to sea by the waves and now they were crowded in here, one of the few buildings left standing in Port au Bras. His heart sank way into his belly.

  They looked cold. Some of them shuddered and shivered. Then he realized it was almost as cold in here as it was outside. They had no wood; they had lost that, too. Of course, he thought. They had lost everything. And the main window in the kitchen had been blown out. They had patched it over with sailcloth, but a fierce draft blew in. Some of the children had bluish lips. Mucus dripped from their little nostrils, but even the older ones made no effort to wipe it clean.

  Richard suddenly remembered the bedclothes, sweaters, sweater coat, mittens, and caps the Manning and Jarvis women of Oderin had piled onto the bunks of the Tancook for the stricken people. “We’ve got some warm clothes aboard the boat,” he said. “I’ll go and carry them up.”

  He hoped to see their faces brighten at this news, but they didn’t. Captain Dalton had said that the doctors on the relief vessels had left drugs for the people, but there seemed to be no cure for what ailed them.

  In the forecastle of the Tancook, Richard grabbed a big canvas bag and stuffed it with whatever he could find: tea, bottles of molasses, twine, small nails. Then he ripped his holy medal off his neck – the one his mother had given him long ago – and threw it into the bag. It never occurred to him that the people of Port au Bras were not Catholic.

  PART 3

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  He often laughed to himself at the irony of it. But other times it made him rueful. He had never wanted to go to sea. But what else were you going to do? But now he was getting offers from skippers all over the place. He was known as a hard worker, very responsible, diligent, and a top-quality salter. Salting was a real art, everyone knew, and not everyone could do it right.

  Captain Hollett in Burin wanted Richard to come fishing with him. A skipper in Spaniard’s Bay, all the way over in Conception Bay, made him an offer. Captains in Fortune Bay, Petite Forte, and St. Lawrence wanted him to join their crews. Once, he took the Warehams of Harbour Buffett up on their offer.

  Being in demand didn’t make him rich, though. Far from it. It made him less poor, he often joked with Angela. That was as much as a Banks fisherman could hope for in this country in this day and age. It was the Depression, too, and Newfoundland was as hard hit as anywhere else. The price of fish was low, and fishermen had to work harder to make the same money they’d made before the Crash of 1929.

  He’d always wanted to live in the city. He associated the city, its busyness and great variety, with learning, something he also hankered after. But he could never see a way to it. How could a Banks fishermen, a doryman, set himself and his wife and seven children up in St. John’s, after all? The older girls, Lucy and Monnie, would be in service in St. John’s in a couple of years. Maybe they’d marry city men and their children would be city people, educated people with books all around them. But somehow he doubted it. Fate had played too big a role in his life.

  He was forty-six now and the rest of the children were half-reared. Only Patrick was too young for school; he was only five.

  Well, if he couldn’t ever realize his dream of living in the city, he could perhaps achieve his ambition of having a shore job. His encounter with Peter Moulton in Burin after his first spring trip had put this idea into his head long ago. But that had been a bitter experience, he recalled. It wasn’t possible then, not in that time, not with Old Steve breathing down his neck until the day the Lord finally carried him off.

  But it might be now. He was his own man now. Even better, he had a wife who trusted him and supported his decisions. Whenever he’d changed schooners, even when he’d stopped fishing on the Tancook with her brothers to go with the Warehams, she’d thought it was the right thing to do. Angela was never afraid of change. She took life as it came, and her easy way had allowed him to relax somewhat over the years. Even during the hungry month of March in the Depression years, when they had to scrape the bottom of the flour barrel, he no longer paced the floor and bit his fingernails until they hurt.

  When she said, “What’s done is done,” he nodded. Somehow they always got through even the worst of times.

  Life as a Banks fisherman, a doryman, was a hard one and it would not have been his first choice. But over the years, he had even grown to like “pieces of it”; he often served as cook and delighted in making fish and brewis and tasty chowders for the men, and he took pride in being such a good salter, something he rightfully regarded as a craft. Frequently he was first mate, and many captains relied on his skills in taking soundings and reading the signs of the weather. Richard took pleasure in all this.

  But the monotony, the constant hauling, and the sheer impossibility of ever getting ahead all made him weary. And his chest still tightened with the dread of the sea swell he had first felt when the ferryman took him to St. Pierre Bank thirty years before. His head still swished with the threat of sickness, which he always kept at bay, somehow, since it had been battered out of him a lifetime ago. He detested the salt air, the drizzle, the fog, the ice columns, and rain pellets that tortured the men as they hauled trawl. He detested the water pups that formed on his wrists and the pains that crept up his back, pains he had to ignore if his family were to eat that winter. At times, his innards twisted with the fear of snow squalls and August gales.

  Worse, he hated the feeling that real life lay elsewhere. The life beyond his reach was of land, grass, paths, houses, wives, children, his harmonica, the church. He felt like a visitor to this real life, someone who was destined to spend most of his time in a watery purgatory. He had only occasional, fleeting leaves to the world. In a way, he felt like someone who was only alive part-time, when he was on land. He didn’t tell anyone these things, not even Angela. He didn’t have to, for she understood him.

  Chapter Thirty

  In 1933 and ’34, Richard fished with Jim Joe Farrell, his neighbour in Little Bay. Jim Joe captained the Ronald W, a forty-ton schooner that was old and that Richard never quite trusted. His brother Jack had joined him on the Ronald W, and they’d fished foggy Cape St. Mary’s and the St. Pierre Bank, where the dark spirit of their father seemed to overhang everything. That year the fishing had been poor; catches were low, and to make matters worse, prices had dropped even further. All over the world, the pain of the Great Depression was continuing to make itself felt.

  Much taller than Richard and darkly handsome, Jack was in his mid-thirties but had not yet married. One romance had faltered because of his intended’s disapproving mother, who had regarded Jack as too handsome for his own good. Now, however, Jack was engaged again to a girl from Spanish Room. He was building a little house on the bottom of the hill on the south side of Little Bay, just below Rachel’s and Richard’s homes.

  The brothers were stowing the Ronald W’s gear for the winter, hauling the mainsail to Farrell’s stores, when Richard confided in Jack.

  “I’ve got a mind not to go to sea next year,” he said somewhat tent
atively.

  “What are you going to do instead?” Jack answered, laughing. “Become a gentleman farmer? A squire or something?”

  Richard frowned. “I’ve got an idea. It just might work.”

  Jack let go of the sail. His brother had adopted that real serious way he had. He nodded to let Richard know he was listening.

  “Well,” Richard began slowly. “Look at John Power’s place over there.” He pitched his head in the direction of Power’s premises, where the flakes jutted out into the harbour. “And Paddy Hanrahan’s, and Leonard Hanrahan’s.”

  Jack considered what his brother was saying. The three men Richard had mentioned had gone into business for themselves. Schooner captains brought their catches to them, where they washed and dried them, then had their women employees make them. Afterwards, the captains returned to collect it. John, Paddy, and Leonard worked for themselves, no one else. They were able to stay onshore year-round. Both of these things appealed immensely to Richard, as he explained to his brother.

  Another alternative was to manage a premises for one of the larger fish companies. In Little Bay, Philly Walsh did just this for A.H. Murray.

  “Maybe I can start out that way,” Richard said.

  “You’re the best salter in the bay,” Jack said firmly. “There’s no disagreement on that. You could learn the women and young men how to salt right.” Then he paused. “So why should you work for anyone else? You should go right into business for yourself.”

  “That might be hard to do right off the bat, though,” Richard said. “I might need some money. Where in hell does a man get his hands on some money around here?”