Jack bit his lip and said nothing. His brother had a point about that. He was torn. These were hard times, very hard times. But he knew Richard was sick of the water and hated fishing. There had to be a way for this thing to work.
*
“Here it is,” Jack announced, as he burst into Richard and Angela’s kitchen a few days later. “I’ve got the answer.”
“The answer to what?” Angela said. “You figured out how to stop winter from coming?”
He flashed a grin at his petite sister-in-law and jumped out of his boots, rushing over to Richard at the table having a mid-morning mug-up.
“What is it, Jack b’y?” Richard asked expectantly, laying his cup down.
“Here. ‘Men wanted at Corner Brook building site’,” he read from a newspaper clipping. “They’re still hiring over there, even though they got the mill built. They’re putting up houses.”
“Where did you get that?” Richard asked, taking the scrap of paper and turning it over. He seemed more interested in the news stories on the other side than in the ad itself. He began to read aloud, “The Italian government – ”
“Never mind that, Dick,” Jack said impatiently. “Here’s a way we can get some money.”
A look of realization crossed Richard’s face, and he nodded, at first slowly, and then more excitedly.
“Yes, b’y, that’s what we’ll do,” he said.
“You’re just home, and now you’re off again,” Angela said.
“Can I go, Dad?” young Vince asked. He had wandered into the kitchen after hearing the commotion.
“No, son,” Richard told the ten-year-old. “When you’re a bit older, you and me will work together. We’ll go working onshore somewhere.”
Angela smiled. She knew how Richard’s father had beaten the seasickness out of him. She knew he would slowly and gently introduce his own sons to the world of work.
“Well, I suppose I better get the two of you ready,” she said, referring to Richard and Jack. “You’ll have to get on one of the coastal boats. I suppose they got somewhere over there for the men to stay. And I hope they got decent food.”
“Corner Brook is being all built up, Angela,” Richard said. “There’s a mill there now. It’s a big town. There’s bound to be everything there.”
“There’s men going to Corner Brook from all over the island,” Jack said. “There’s plenty of work there.”
“Maybe it’ll rival St. John’s one day for industry and such,” Richard said.
A thought crossed his mind. Maybe, if it was a nice place and there was work there, he could move his family there. He glanced at Angela. Would she leave the bay? Yes, he thought, she would. He looked back at the table.
She sat down beside him. She glanced at him. Maybe they’d go live there, she thought, if it’d get him off the water. He could see what it was like there. There must be lots of families moving there if their men were going to work in the mill.
Richard brought his thoughts back to the money he and Jack would earn at the Corner Brook construction sites.
Angela spent the next couple of days darning their socks and woollen gloves and packing their clothes. Then she made piles of saltbeef sandwiches that would sustain them on their long journey along the South Coast of the island.
As the coastal boat carried them across Fortune Bay, then past Hermitage, the mouth of Bay d’Espoir, Grey River, LaPoile, and Isle aux Morts, Richard dared to hope that maybe he had left the Banks fishery behind as well.
Chapter Thirty-one
Through the winter and spring of 1934, Richard and Jack and hundreds of other men from around Newfoundland laboured in the cold to expand the new town of Corner Brook. The company owned the townsite, as it was called, and it was responsible for building all the houses and roads there. This gave Richard a bad feeling. It was another variation of the merchant controlling everything, he thought. At least we have our own house back home, he thought, and no one could take Angela’s kitchen garden away from her. If they wanted to, the company could kick people out of their homes here, at least in theory.
The town was growing so fast that construction of the townsite hadn’t been able to keep pace. The homes there couldn’t accommodate everyone who came. Plus, many Newfoundlanders with Richard’s mindset didn’t want to live there; they preferred to build their own houses outside the townsite. As a result, little homes sprung up haphazardly on the hills that surrounded Corner Brook and made it so picturesque. There was raw sewage in the pathways, though, and disease spread quickly: flu, fevers, tuberculosis, even typhoid. Richard decided that he would not take his family here. Maybe one day in the future, when the problems that inevitably resulted in a new town were sorted out. But that would be a long way off. Jack told him he was cracked for even thinking of moving here.
“You got your money now,” he told his brother on the way home. “That’s what we came for, not to become refugees.”
“Jack, she’s not much now,” Richard said. “But mark my words, one day Corner Brook will be really something, a beautiful place. I can see it in the making now.”
They had missed the spring trip with Jim Joe and the Ronald W but they didn’t mind, for they had money in their pockets, a rare thing in their lives, and in the middle of the Depression, too. It was another thing with Jim Joe, but he would live with their decision. He was glad to get Dick Hanrahan, master salter, for the rest of the year. He considered himself lucky. He knew other captains, some of them on bigger vessels, had gone after Dick and made him offers. He was glad they were both from Little Bay; he had a feeling that Dick was loyal to men from his own community.
He was glad to have Jack, too. Jack’s height seemed to give him extra strength and speed, which served him well on the Banks. He was able to row, pitch fish, and lift heavy sails with ease. The other men enjoyed his companionship, his energy, and his humour. Jim Joe knew that every bit of brightness counted out there in the dampness and fog that was their ever-present companion.
But their first trip to the Cape – and, Richard hoped, the beginning of his last year fishing – had not gone as expected. Jack was uncharacteristically slow emerging from his bunk, and then moving about the deck. In Dory Number 1, which he shared with Richard, he was listless and quiet. He got worse each day, so much so that Richard ceased counting fish the way their father had taught him, and instead obsessed with his brother’s health.
When the Ronald W sailed into Little Bay loaded down, Jim Joe and Richard bundled Jack into Dory Number 1 and rowed him to the bottom of the hill. Then they carried him up to Rachel’s house, where they knew she could doctor him. He was so tired, and his skin had a yellowish cast when they brought him in.
“It’s TB,” Rachel said after only a quick look at him. “He’s got TB. Probably got it in Corner Brook.” She looked down at him on her daybed, remembering her daughter Margaret, lost to the disease not long before. She glanced at Jim, Margaret’s twin, standing next to his uncle and Jim Joe. His face was sombre. What could she do for Jack when she could do nothing for her own child?
Down below the hill, the other dories were reaching the beaches of Little Bay, where the dorymen would dump fish and the women would spread it in the sun to dry. Richard and Jim Joe walked solemnly back to the dory and then rowed out to the schooner and began loading her with fish. All Richard could think of was Jack. He didn’t give a damn about all this hard work and slimy fish. He was sick to death of it. He wanted Jack to be part of the enterprise he planned. Jack, a young man who was going to be married next winter, had already built his house and was making furniture whenever he got a chance. Tuberculosis. Every bloody thing that could just had to go wrong.
He felt like a cork bobbing about on the sea, being pushed this way and that by a swell that just wouldn’t stop. All around him were other corks: Jack, Angela, Rachel, his children.
Chapter Thirty-two
Within a month, Jack’s body lay in the dark earth in the shadow of the little church in Beau Bois. Rachel had stood tall and silent at her brother’s funeral Mass, refusing to cry. She had cried floods for her daughter Margaret, and she would do it no more; she had learned that no good came of it. By her side was twelve-year-old Jim, equally stoic, and his little brothers and sisters, then Angela and her brood. At their side, Richard was quiet, too, seemingly stunned that the man with whom he’d climbed scaffolds just a few months before now lay flat and shrunken in a pine box. Jack’s fiancée, Selena, however, sobbed pitifully, as if her life was over. She clung to her mother like a little girl. Jack’s younger sisters, Mary Jane and Annie, cried too. Richard glanced at them across the aisle, numbly thinking that they’d do less of that as the years pass and life shows them what’s what.
Although Jack was dead, the men of Little Bay and the Burin Peninsula continued to board their schooners, climb into their bunks, rise before dawn, gobble their breakfasts, and row out to their spots on Mizzen Bank or off Cape St. Mary’s. There, while Jack lay in sacred ground, they let out their baited trawls and hauled them in, filling their little boats to the gunwales with fish. Then they rowed back to their schooners and unloaded their catch, counting every last fish, then washing, cutting, and dressing them, tossing their livers into the butts so that their captains could render oil. Jack was dead, but they kept doing these things. It seemed ludicrous to Richard, whose heart was full of a grief that would not lift. They kept on doing these things as if nothing had changed, as if Jack were still alive, as if his jokes and laughter could still be heard through the dripping fog that hung over the Banks. It could not be real. But somehow it was.
Back in Little Bay, Rachel plunged her long thick hands into the earth that surrounded her house. She laid down dried capelin in the hopes that it would help coax bigger turnips and cabbages out of the ground. She sent her sons to the beaches to fetch the shiny little fish when it rolled in the dusks of late June. Then she spread it carefully across the garden, showing her daughters just how it was done.
She got her daughters to make the bread now, as she spent more time in her kitchen garden. This was the only place she felt a lifting of some of the grief that dogged her every step since Jack died. It seemed her family were being picked off: her brother Jimmy, her little twins, her parents, then her daughter Margaret, and now Jack. It made her feel helpless, a feeling she was in no way at home with. Here in the garden she felt something of Elizabeth’s presence. In the texture of the soil, she felt her mother’s warm hands; in the graininess of plant roots, she recalled her strength. Longing for Jack the way she did, she summoned it now.
She checked on her trees. The plums would be juicy and fruity, she knew. Even the apricots would yield tasty flesh and medicine that might protect them from the awful diseases that kept carrying them off. Again she thought of her mother, wishing she were still here to see her daughter’s garden grow, to see her children grow.
One morning, Rachel looked out her kitchen window to see Richard and Angela’s boys running about in her garden. Young Jack and Patrick were chasing each other in the rows of cabbages and potatoes she’d been working so hard on. They were her family’s winter provisions, she reminded herself, their insurance against the hungry months.
She balled her large hands into a fist and felt anger rising in her chest.
“What is it, Mom?” Rachel’s eldest daughter had joined her at the window. “Oh!” she added as she saw her cousins weave in and out of the plants. They seemed to be taking as much care as little boys could, but not as much as was necessary in a vegetable patch.
Rachel heaved a sigh of disgust.
She tore her apron off and rushed toward the door.
“Get out of that!” she shouted at the children from her doorway. By now young Patrick had sliced through a cabbage with his boots. Rachel saw this and began to chase him.
“Get out of here!” she cried. “Go on home! And don’t ever do that again!”
Jack and Patrick were afraid now, and they ran away as quickly as they could. Then Rachel stood in the middle of her garden, her hands on her hips, surveying the damage. After a minute her daughter joined her.
“It doesn’t look too bad, Mom,” the girl offered.
“I know, I know,” Rachel answered. “That one cabbage is ruined. I think Patrick fell onto it. Maybe I can use it tonight. It wasn’t just the cabbage. It’s ...”
Rachel didn’t continue, and her daughter took her hand. Then the two of them bent over and began straightening out the damage the boys had done.
As they were finishing up, Rachel saw Richard coming by on his way down the hill. She hadn’t realized he was ashore. The Ronald W must be in.
“Dick!” she called out. When he came over, she blurted out, “Your two youngest tore up my kitchen garden this morning. They were in here running around, tearing up my cabbage. Can’t they play somewhere else on this hill?”
Richard was quiet. Rachel had noticed how withdrawn he’d been lately, since Jack died. Then he said, “Rachel, they won’t even be on the hill next year.” And he walked away, leaving his sister and her daughter mystified. He was baffled himself. He had heard the words come out of his mouth, but he had no idea what they meant or where they had come from.
Chapter Thirty-three
Richard had no intention of going to sea in 1935. This was the year he would start his shore enterprise. He figured if the other local men could make a go of it, so could he. Angela supported his idea and urged him to give it a try. She liked the idea of having him at home more often. She thought it would be good for the boys in particular. They were all at an age when they needed their father around them more now. The two of them knew it was the middle of a Depression, but they banished such thoughts from their minds and tried to cling to optimism.
Young Vince, eleven now, was still in the habit of going everywhere he could with his father. He was with Richard in front of the premises Philly Walsh ran for A.H. Murray when a man called his father over and asked him if he’d like to skipper the Josephine Walsh, a fifty-three-ton schooner, that year. The vessel was brand new, having been built just that year.
“No,” Richard answered. “No, I’m staying ashore this year.” He smiled. It was the first time he hadn’t gone fishing since he was nine years old.
A few days later, when they were getting ready for the spring trip, the Farrells asked him if he would captain the Ronald W, the schooner he’d fished from with his brother Jack for the past few years. It seemed that he had better choices now than he’d ever had, if he wanted to go to sea. But he didn’t, and he told the Farrells no.
When he told Angela this, she was surprised at his determination.
“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” she asked. “Lots of fellows would want to be skipper. You’d get a better take.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I thought about it. I knew I’d get offers like that this year. I had one or two before. But my mind is made up. I want to go into business for myself.”
“All right,” Angela said. “Then do it.”
Richard smiled at her.
“If it doesn’t work out, I’ll take the Farrells up another year, or somebody else with a better offer,” he said. “But I want to give this a try.”
“I know you do,” Angela said. “Go on then, see what happens.”
That night at the supper table, Richard looked around at the faces of his children as they ate their bread, potatoes, and fish. It had been another long, hard winter. Fish prices were low, very low, the worst in his memory, and the Depression dragged on. He’d had to catch more fish just to get half the money he’d made before hard times hit, and that was impossible to do in 1934 when catches on the South Coast were low.
Lucy and Monnie were in service in St. John’s now, Angela
having secured good placements for them. The remaining children were pale, with dark circles framing their eyes. On his right was Bride, who suffered badly from asthma. She was going to spend the spring and summer in Oderin helping her grandmother Manning and uncles. Young Lizzie, the face and eyes of his own mother, would likely join her there next summer when she was a little older. She was soft and sensitive, and he felt a special protectiveness towards her. On the other side of the table sat Vince, energetic, always ready for the next adventure, and young Jack, who would be a great student if Richard could somehow give him the chance to stay at his learning. Then little Patrick, not even six years old yet, and all skin and bones. He’ll probably be tall and skinny, Richard thought. The lad could sure use a little meat on him. Richard recalled that the only hunger he ever experienced as a child was a result of seasickness, not lack of food.
Things had never been this precarious in Newfoundland before the Depression. The island had lost its independence and was being ruled from Britain again, and not for the better, from what Richard could see. Now he wondered what would become of their little country.
They said little as they ate; they all seemed to be concentrating on their food. The last few weeks had been particularly hard. They had run out of vegetables; all that was left now was some potatoes. Angela had been forced to send the children to school on lassie bread, which they’d also had for dinner and their mug-up at night. It was the same with every house in the harbour. People were still dying from tuberculosis, but they hardly talked about this now. As February turned into March, food seemed to become more and more important to them, to the point of obsession.
True to his word, Richard stayed ashore through the spring and much of the summer, trying to make a go of his premises. He attracted customers, some of the local skippers, but it was slow going. He was indeed the best salter in the bay, but word had to get out that he was in business. Besides, most captains already had arrangements made with other salters, or the wives of the dorymen would cure their catch. Another problem was that the weather was poor for drying fish; there were many damp days in 1935, and few that were optimal for making fish.
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