August Gale

by Walsh, Barbara

  McGettigan sympathized with the young woman’s concern; the priest had his own worries. What would become of the widows? They had six, seven, and some of them, eight mouths to feed. With cod prices cut in half, the families barely survived when their husbands came home with their schooners filled with fish. How in the name of Jesus would they make it now? There would be little wood or coal for their stoves this winter, and in their cold kitchens, the cupboards would be bare. Dinner would be nothing more than a crust of bread, a few potatoes, and a kettle of hot water. It would not be long before the cemetery would claim the children, one by one. The thought of more death, more sorrow, in this small village stirred a chill deep inside McGettigan’s bones.

  The priest offered a blessing and a prayer for Alice Brinton and her three children before moving on to the neighboring home of Margaret Walsh. “I’ve got poor news,” McGettigan told Mrs. Walsh. “The Annie Anita was found broke in two. All hands were lost. Your son Dominic is gone.” Margaret Walsh dropped into the kitchen chair. Both she and her son had shared ill feelings about the August journey. Dominic had paced the floors the night before he boarded the schooner. Margaret had begged him not to go. The poor lad was just twenty-two years of age, building a home for his bride and planning to be married upon his return. How she wished she had held him fast, forbidden him to sail. She had dreamt of Dominic the night of the gale, seen the mountainous waves crashing against his dory. “He’s not coming back,” she had told her other children that next morning. They had scoffed at their mother’s dream until McGettigan knocked at their door.

  Just after noon, the priest walked along the path to Isabel Mitchell’s home. Her husband, George, had been on board the Annie Anita. From her kitchen window, she saw McGettigan and the constable veering to her gate. Her four children gathered around her as the priest spoke. “I’m sorry, me’ dear, I have tragic news. The Annie Anita wrecked at St. Shotts. The bodies of Capt’n Paddy and one of his sons were found in the cabin. I’m afraid your husband, George, was lost with the rest of the crew.”

  Isabel did not speak, nor did she cry out; she would save her grief for later. McGettigan blessed the children and their mother and quickly stepped from the home. He could barely comprehend the words he spoke. Capt’n Paddy’s body found. The Annie Anita and the Marie Bernice all hands lost. They’re all gone. Husbands. Sons. Gone. How am I to impart this wretched news when I can scarcely believe it myself? The priest shook off his misgivings and climbed the hill leading to the home of Charles Hanrahan, George Mitchell’s dorymate. He had notified four widows and he had another five more to inform. The Fox Cove pastor would console Dennis Long’s family, and mercifully, Lucy’s mother had agreed to tell her daughter of James Walsh’s death. McGettigan could not face the young woman with a newborn in her arms, a child born the night her father died. No, the Lord had given him enough already.

  McGettigan paused to light a cigarette and calm his nerves. He drew in the smell of the sea and conjured the pleasant memories of his youth, his seminary years at All Hallows in Ireland. With his love for Shakespeare, poetry, and song, the seminary choir director had tried to convince McGettigan to pursue a vocation on stage, to perfect his brilliant tenor voice. “Why, I’ll make ye as famous as the Irish singer, Johnny McCormack,” the director boasted. McGettigan had been flattered by the praise, but he quickly declined. His three sisters had taken their vows becoming brides of Christ, and so, too, would he serve the Lord. But he was naïve and innocent then, unaware of August gales and drowned fishermen, unaccustomed to despair and death.

  Grinding his cigarette stub into the ground, McGettigan stepped toward Charles Hanrahan’s door. He rapped softly, knowing Hanrahan’s wife was waiting for him. He had seen her eyes upon him through the window, the fear tightening her face. He did not speak but a few words before Mary Hanrahan began to scream. Five months pregnant, the woman collapsed onto the floor and drew her young daughter and son into her lap. “Yur poor daddy’s gone,” she sobbed. The children pressed their faces to their mother’s breast. Her wails terrified them, and they did not understand where their da had gone to. His voice unsteady and barely above a whisper, the young boy turned to the priest to ask, “When will my father be coming back?”

  McGettigan reached for the child’s hand and marked the sign of the cross over his forehead. The priest closed his eyes and recited a prayer, “May they sense Your presence in this hour of need. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” The constable followed McGettigan out the door and placed a hand on the priest’s slumped shoulder. “We’re near halfway done, Father.”

  McGettigan nodded. The thought of more stunned widows soured his stomach and brought on a queasiness that left him unsteady on his feet, dizzy as if he’d been struck too many times in the head. He heard his father’s advice to him as a young man, his dad shouting as McGettigan sparred in the ring with his older brother, a boxer for the British Royal Navy. Keep yur feet moving, yur hands up, and keep breathing. Breathe, John. Breathe! A loud buzz filled his head now, as if his brother had landed a blow to his brow. McGettigan inhaled deeply, heeding his father’s words.

  From Reid Hill, several of Tom Reid’s children spied the priest and the peculiar look on his face. McGettigan stood alongside the dirt path as if in a trance. “Why does Father McGettigan have such a queer look on his face?” they asked their mother. Jessie Reid gathered her children close. Held in a tight circle, they followed the priest’s movements as McGettigan stopped at the bottom of the knoll and knocked at their aunt’s door. Jessie pressed her hand to her heart, believing her sister’s adopted son had died in the gale. But then McGettigan and her sister started up the hill together. The priest, Jessie realized, had wanted her sister to come share the grim news.

  “Dear Lord, children!” Jessie Reid screamed. “It’s yur da that’s gone! My poor Tom!”

  As dusk settled over the town, McGettigan stood before the door of the last home, the dwelling of Edward Clarke, a doryman for the Annie Anita. McGettigan waited in the dark on the doorstep. From the lamplight inside, he could see Clarke’s family, his five children and their mother seated around the dinner table. There were sparse bits of potato, cabbage, and carrots on their plates, hot water in their mugs. Through the windowpane, the priest met the gaze of a ten-year-old boy he knew as Vincent. The child stared at McGettigan with eyes that did not yet recognize his loss. The priest waited for the boy to inform his mother of his arrival. McGettigan could not knock on another door, nor could he face another weeping child. He had no more comfort to give.

  CHAPTER 24

  A FINAL VOYAGE—MARYSTOWN, 2003

  I learn of my grandfather’s dying wish as the sun sets over the blue waters of Mortimer Bay. My father’s cousin, Alan Brenton, shares the story as our car crests a hill overlooking the north side of Marystown.

  “He called to tell me he wanted one last ride in my boat,” Alan says. “‘But this time,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in a vase. I want my ashes scattered over Tides Cove.’”

  At the time, in the spring of 1990, my grandfather was dying of colon cancer and had but a few months to live. He had chosen his final resting place in the inlet nearest the sea, the headlands where a lighthouse beacon had welcomed his brother Paddy home after hundreds of journeys and sails. I imagine my grandfather lying in his hospital bed, taking comfort in knowing his remains would drift in the waters where his older brother had often shouted to his crew, “We’re home, boys!”

  My grandfather had other sentimental ties to the cove. The inlet harbored a patch of land called Big Head, a rocky crop of turf where Ambrose’s great-grandfather, John Walsh, first arrived after emigrating from County Wexford. Here in these waters, where the schooners of his grandfather and brother took refuge from the sea and a long sail, Ambrose’s ashes, his physical essence, would remain. And as with his family and the Marystown fishermen who drowned in the August Gale, my grandfather would forever abide in the sea.

  Along with desiring an ocean burial, Ambrose had anoth
er request: “Play ‘When You and I Were Young, Maggie,’” he told Alan “while my ashes are thrown overboard.” Written in the late 1800s, the song had been Paddy’s favorite. The skipper often sang the lyrics (off-key and loudly) at parties or alongside the family piano. The ballad told of a tragic love story between a Canadian schoolteacher and his pupil, Maggie. The two fell in love and became engaged, but Maggie contracted tuberculosis. The couple was married a year before Maggie died in 1865. Their brief time together reminds me of the short time Ambrose spent with my Nana, the decade during which he fathered his first two sons. Did the song stir memories of their years together in Staten Island and Brooklyn? Of his youth when he fell in love with the shy, blue-eyed girl, Patricia O’Connell?

  In his later years, when he returned to Marystown, Ambrose played the song repeatedly during his stay. “I’d come home from work and that tape was playing all the time,” Alan tells us. “I don’t know what it meant to him. He was always listening to it.”

  I imagine my grandfather, alone in Alan’s home, the somber lyrics wafting through the parlor with Ambrose on the couch, reflecting upon the years gone by.

  Life’s trials and challenges had not yet touched my grandfather when he left Marystown as a young man of eighteen, his hair thick and black, his face unwrinkled by time and choices that would weigh heavily on his conscience. He would not return to his birthplace for nearly five decades. His absence remained a mystery to his friends and family, who thought he had vanished from the earth. His mother, Cecilia, prayed nightly for him, fearing that her youngest son had gotten into some terrible trouble or was dead. And in the years after she lost Paddy to the August Gale, Cecilia continued to pray that Ambrose was safe, that some terrible fate had not claimed him, too. “She died not knowing if Ambrose was alive,” Alan tells us, shaking his head. “Shocking that he never wrote his own mother, aye?”

  For decades, Ambrose had no contact with Marystown; he wrote no letters and made no calls—until he needed help. He phoned his sister Donalda in 1974 to ask her if she would allow Ambrose’s son Michael to live with her in Marystown to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Donalda agreed to take her nephew in, but only after she hollered long and loud at her brother for disappearing without a word to his family.

  “My mother was furious with him,” Alan says of Donalda. “For all those years, she had seen Granny Walsh suffer not knowing where her boy Ambrose was to.”

  After his lengthy absence, Ambrose accompanied his son to Marystown. It was the first of several trips he would make to his birthplace, where he would reconnect with his family and childhood friends, reminiscing about the dories he rowed, the rigging he climbed, and the journeys he sailed with his brother Paddy.

  “Ye can take the boy out of the bay, but you can’t take the bay out of the boy,” Alan’s son Jack would later tell me. “Where did he want to be buried? Where did he want his ashes spread? All those years after he left Marystown, he never talked Staten Island or Brooklyn or San Francisco. He talked about Marystown and what it was like before he left. This was always his home.”

  Marystown offered my grandfather a safe harbor, a haven with few complications, few memories, to remind him of his devastating decisions. Still, he carried the guilt and regrets with him. He rarely talked about leaving his first two sons and his wife Patricia, but he once confided to Brenton’s wife, “Take it from my experience, people always think the grass is greener on the other side, but it isn’t.”

  In the years before his death, Ambrose found work painting hospital offices. While on the job, he met a psychiatrist with whom he shared stories about his life, the family he had abandoned. The doctor offered my grandfather some free advice: “It would be good for you to talk to your sons to resolve your feelings.”

  Surprised at the sudden contact, my father reddened with anger when Ambrose explained, “A psychiatrist said it would be good for me to call.”

  My father’s voice rose in disbelief. “But what about us? What about Billy, Ma, and me?”

  Ambrose fell silent. He had no words to say.

  On an August afternoon in 1990, my grandfather’s last wish was fulfilled. Ambrose’s daughters cast his remains into the sea while the melancholy song “Maggie” blared from Alan Brenton’s boat. Kathy and Donnie wept as the familiar lyrics bade their father a final good-bye:

  “There wasn’t a dry eye on board the boat,” Alan remembers. “Geez, it was some sad.”

  My grandfather was a month shy of his eighty-second birthday when he died in a California hospital in June 1990. Thousands of miles away, my father and uncle were unaware of Ambrose’s illness or his death. No one had thought to inform them of their father’s passing. Weeks after Ambrose’s ashes were tossed into the cold Newfoundland waters, my father received a phone call from Ambrose’s brother, Leo, with the belated news. His father—the man whom he had worshipped as a child and resented as an adult—was gone. There would be no chance for final words, no chance to mourn, to reconcile.

  As he hung up the phone, my dad shed his own tears, stung by a final abandonment: “My father died and no one told me.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “’TIS THE QUEEREST WAKE”—MARYSTOWN, 1935

  The boy knew the bodies were coming home.

  Word spread quickly throughout the town, as if there were an invisible cord that connected them all. From the fishing wharves, to the kitchens, to the hayfields, to the shops, the news passed from mouth to mouth. “B’y Gad, Skipper Paddy and his son Frankie are coming home.”

  The talk had found its way to the small ears of the boy, and the words terrified Paddy Walsh Jr. His father and brother were not only returning to Marystown, they were coming home to the boy’s house. They were going to be laid out in his family’s parlor, and the thought of all this, the idea of bodies in his home, frightened the child. In his four-year-old mind, bodies meant no heads, no arms, no legs. He didn’t want to see his father and older brother Frankie this way.

  In the days since Father McGettigan had delivered the death notices, his mother’s constant keening had shaken young Paddy, leaving the child nervous and uncertain. The priest had explained that his father and three brothers were gone, but the boy couldn’t grasp the finality of what “gone” meant. He wanted his dad home, singing alongside the piano, his loud voice filling the room. He longed for the laughter of his older brothers, Frankie, Jerome, and James. But their bedrooms were empty and still now, and all this talk about bodies further confused Paddy. Seeking comfort, the boy ran into the kitchen hoping to find the woman who cleaned their home and tended the garden. “Please, ma’am,” Paddy pleaded, grabbing hold of the maid’s dress, “look after me.”

  Outside, dusk settled over the bay, stealing the last remnants of light from the summer sky. A few miles east, a schooner ferried Capt’n Paddy Walsh on his final voyage. The vessel sailed past the sights Paddy had eyed hundreds of times: the red lantern at Tides Point, the rocky coves of Beau Bois, and the green hills of Little Bay. As the schooner glided into Marystown’s harbor, men, women, and children along the bay’s southern and northern shores viewed the vessel as if it were an apparition. Women made the sign of the cross, whispering silent prayers. Fishermen removed their caps, still trying to reckon with the notion that Captain Paddy was dead. B’ye Gad Almighty. Paddy Walsh. He had no fear of nothin’. He could find fish better than any of ’em. Yis b’y.

  A crowd of men gathered at Paddy’s wharf, waiting to carry the coffined bodies from the schooner. Another group huddled at the wooden gate leading to the skipper’s home. Billy Mitchell stood among them. One of Marystown’s heftiest residents, Mitchell’s face flushed red with the exertion of walking. His fondness for salt pork and beef “will be putting ye in an early grave,” Mitchell’s doctor had threatened. But the doctor’s warning didn’t concern Mitchell; not much did.

  Unlike most of the men in Marystown, Mitchell didn’t fish; he couldn’t boast about how much salt cod he killed or how far he could row a dory. Mitchel
l earned his keep making barrels at the local mill, and his passion was spinning stories. He collected details like bits of string, saving them until he settled in at a neighbor’s kitchen table, where he could entertain and be rewarded in food and drink. There were few better storytellers along Newfoundland’s southern shores, and Mitchell wasn’t about to miss out on one of the biggest yarns of his lifetime. He knew Paddy Walsh as well as the next fellow and was determined to see for himself if the notorious skipper was really dead.

  As the men carried the coffins along Paddy’s wharf, Mitchell angled his way toward the larger box. Before anyone could stop him, he opened the lid. Mitchell eyed the blackened and bruised cheeks, the face bloated by death and sea. “’Tis not Paddy Walsh!” Mitchell hollered.

  Father McGettigan squared his shoulders and glared at Mitchell. The priest wasn’t in the mood for the storyteller’s theatrics. He had listened to widows and children wail and screech over the past three days. More difficulties he did not need. He turned to Mitchell and spoke louder than he wanted: “Don’t be stirring up trouble, Mitchell! Mrs. Walsh has it hard enough without you creating stories.”

  “You can say what you like,” Mitchell answered. “But the body ’tis Tom Reid. You’re taking him to the wrong home, ye are.”

  McGettigan shot Mitchell a final warning before he ushered the men to Paddy’s fish store, the wooden shed where the skipper stored and repaired his gear. Pushing aside the nets and fish tubs, the fishermen removed the bodies from the coffins and laid them on workbenches. They took in the sight of the blocky captain and the small boy. “Jaysus, ye think Mitchell is right? ’Tis it Paddy or Tom Reid?”