Lillian’s younger brother Paddy Jr. struggled with his own sorrow and confusion over the tragedy that claimed his father and three brothers. He grew up in Marystown shadowed by his dad’s legacy. The young boy became accustomed to fishermen’s voices trailing his footsteps. “Aye, that’s Captain Paddy Walsh’s son. Only Walsh male not taken by the sea.” Out of respect for his father, Paddy Jr. received special treatment from captains, who allowed him to board their vessels and climb the masts. Still, the boy longed for his dad and three older brothers. Surrounded by women in his home, he was lonely and bereft of male companionship. In a photograph taken soon after the gale, Paddy sits on a fence post in the corner of his yard. His hair is curled in ringlets that obscure his face. His gaze is cast downward, forlorn. Facing east toward the ocean, his small body is framed by the bay as it reflects the summer light.
For two years after the storm, he woke at night screaming, unsure of where he was or what terrified him. Unable to cure the young boy, the local doctor suggested his mother Lillian ask the priest for help. Reverend John Fleming, who would replace Father McGettigan, stopped Paddy on his way to school one morning. He rested his hands on top of the boy’s head and uttered several prayers.
“You will be fine now, Paddy,” the priest explained.
Paddy never had another bout of nightmares or hysteria. In the years that followed, he dreamt about captaining a schooner like his father, but Paddy never pursued a life on the sea because he knew such a decision would break his mother’s heart. Instead, he continued to row the family dory across the bay to attend the Catholic school located on Marystown’s northern shore. There in the five-room school run by the Sisters of Mercy, Paddy earned his high school diploma. Eventually, he left Marystown and settled in Calgary, where he became a stockbroker, married, and had three daughters of his own.
In 2001, sixty-six years after the August Gale, Paddy’s eldest daughter decided Marystown would provide a fitting backdrop for her father’s seventieth birthday. With the approval of Alan Brenton, who owned Captain Paddy’s former house, and the local mayor Jerome Walsh, a party was planned in the meadow where the skipper’s cows and sheep once grazed. On a warm August afternoon, scores of relatives—grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews, and other gray-haired men and women who had lost their fathers to the 1935 hurricane—gathered to celebrate Paddy Jr.’s birthday and to remember the gale that forever changed their small community. Tables and tents were set up in Skipper Paddy’s old field. Music played, memories were shared, and the legendary doryman Jim “Pad” Kelly sang sea shanties and told stories about the “devil” that danced on the water that summer so long ago.
When the local newspaper reporter asked Paddy how it felt to be “home,” he explained: “When you leave a place you love, you can take a little bit of it with you, and you leave a little bit of it behind, but it will always be home.”
Among the seventy people attending the reunion was Jamie Walsh, the baby born the night of the gale. Like Paddy, Jamie relished the opportunity to be among family, to remember the town where she had lived as a young girl. Birthed the night her father Captain James Walsh drowned, Jamie never recovered from losing both parents at an early age. After her mother Lucy abandoned her at the age of six months, Jamie was raised by her grandparents in Little Bay. Seven years passed before Jamie’s mother returned to Marystown.
“That was the first time I had ever seen her,” Jamie recalled. “Then she left again for the States. My grandparents could not have been any better raising me, but I always had an insecure feeling, like someone would always be leaving me.”
Jamie would wait another eight years before her mother remarried and could afford to take her to California. Fifteen and used to living in a small outport of eight hundred, Jamie was overwhelmed with the cars, crowds, and the noise in her new home. She also felt like an unwelcome stranger in her mother’s company. Her mother Lucy could not look past the cruel irony: As her daughter drew her first breath, her husband took his last.
“She always resented me for it,” Jamie remembered.
While her mother refused to talk about Marystown, her deceased husband, or anything connected to the sea, Jamie collected model schooners, lighthouses, and pictures of sea captains and sailors, and she always wondered: What if my daddy had lived? Would he have held me and sung to me? Taken me fishing on his schooner?
Three weeks after Paddy Jr.’s party, Jamie and several other August Gale children gathered for a memorial service on August 25, the anniversary of the storm. Doryman John Brinton’s daughters, Mary, Sadie, and Theresa, and fisherman Michael Farrell’s son Michael Jr. sat in the front pew of the Sacred Heart Church with Jamie to remember their fathers. The gray-haired men and women held each other and wept as the service concluded. “None of us ever forgot the loss,” Jamie said. “Ever.”
Like her granddaughter, Lillian Walsh carried the memories of the August Gale close to her heart for the remainder of her life. She also chose to remain single. “I’ll never find another man like Paddy,” she told relatives. “So, I’m not going to bother trying.”
For the first five years following the gale, she continued to wear black and spent much of her time isolated in her home. After countless hours staring at the bay watching for Paddy’s returning sails, she could no longer bear to view the water. She moved the parlor couch and chairs away from the windows, turning her back on the tides, the rhythm of the sea that she had grown to know so well. Rarely did she venture outside, preferring to remain in her darkened rooms, sewing and conjuring memories of the past.
“For a long time, she didn’t know if she was in this world or the other,” her son-in-law Gerald Hoffe recalled.
Her two eldest girls, Lottie and Tessie, watched over their mother and tried to pull Lillian from her stupor. The summer after the storm, the three of them sat on a wooden bench outside their home. Flanked by her daughters, Lillian wore a black dress, stockings, and a large, dark bow around her neck. Her mournful attire is stark against the white picket fence and her daughters’ light-colored dresses. I imagine that someone had coaxed Lillian outside for some fresh air, sunshine, and a family portrait, but it is clear that she was there reluctantly. In the picture, her lips are pressed together tightly, her white hands folded in her lap. Lillian’s daughters wrap their arms around their mother’s shoulders, holding her close, trying to boost her spirits.
“Don’t ever believe that you can die from a broken heart,” Lillian often told her family and friends. “Because if it were true, I’d be dead.”
In 1950, she sold the home on the hill, the old Molloy Hotel that Paddy had bought as a surprise for her. She lived with her daughter Lillian for several years in Chapel’s Cove, and she told stories about the August Gale over and over to anyone who would listen. She recounted her premonitions the night before her husband sailed, the terrible deaths that befell her three sons and husband, and the misidentified body that led to Tom Reid being buried in Paddy’s grave. When her husband’s youngest brother Ambrose finally returned to Newfoundland in 1975, he visited Lillian.
“The two of them sat at the table telling stories till the air turned blue,” Gerald remembered. “They were both fond of talking of the past. Neither one of them got over losing Paddy. He was Ambrose’s hero and Lillian’s one and only love.”
Two weeks before she celebrated her ninetieth birthday, Lillian died of cancer. Her body was returned to Marystown, where she was buried next to her son Frankie’s grave.
Not immune to the sorrow that gripped his community, Father McGettigan found himself caught up in his own grief following the gale. He continued to hear odd noises in the church, a rustling like the sound of oilskins. His parishioners noticed the dark circles beneath the priest’s eyes and his haunted gaze. McGettigan could barely look at Paddy’s empty, abandoned wharf. The priest knew there would be no more shouting, cursing, and singing from the skipper as he set sail or returned home. Paddy’s voice, like the voices of the other August Gal
e fishermen, was silent, still now.
Soon after the first anniversary of Marystown’s tragedy, McGettigan received orders to serve in St. Mary’s Bay, along the southern coast of the Avalon Peninsula where the Annie Anita had washed ashore. Several in the Marystown congregation were eager to see the gruff priest depart, while others mourned his exodus. Before he left, he stopped to say good-bye and offer a prayer for Paddy’s widow, who he knew would struggle for a good long while. Picking up Paddy Jr. in his arms, McGettigan encouraged the five-year-old boy to behave as best he could. “Be good to your mother, son.”
Though he desired to put the sorrow of the August Gale behind him, misfortune and poor luck followed the priest. The second anniversary of the August Gale had barely passed when a storm struck St. Mary’s Bay. McGettigan’s young maid, Lizzie, who had moved with the priest, stood outside the presbytery admiring the last summer roses as the sky darkened. Suddenly, she heard a loud crack and saw a flash of light. A thunderbolt struck the rectory. The lightning shattered the chandeliers and blasted the bedroom where Father McGettigan brushed his hair, preparing for Mass. The bolt blackened the priest’s bronze bed and knocked McGettigan face-first to the floor. Outside, the lightning burned a ribbon of grass down to the bay. Shaken and temporarily stunned, the priest recovered, but he became especially wary of dark skies and summer storms.
Before his retirement, McGettigan served in two more parishes, and he found himself delivering several more death notices to widows who lost their men to the sea. Yet he never faced another catastrophe like the August Gale. In the years before he died, McGettigan returned to live in St. John’s where he enjoyed the city’s fine restaurants and plays. In his quiet hours, alone before the parlor fire, he sipped his rum and reminisced about his time in Marystown and his surly and fearless friend, Captain Paddy. When the memories of the gale overwhelmed him, the priest sought solace from the books that lined his walls. Often, he read works from the British poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. One poem in particular captured his emotions and sorrowful recollections of the storm. He read the words so often he could recite them by heart:
The Marystown fishermen’s voices had been stilled, their hands forever vanished in the sea. Yet one voice still resonated in McGettigan’s mind, one image still held strong. The priest saw Captain Paddy, his hand on the helm; he heard the skipper’s shouts commanding the crew, “Heave up the anchor! Hoist the sails! We’re away again, lads!”
Fair seas to you, Paddy, the priest whispered. Rest in peace, in the waters that you loved.
CHAPTER 32
ONE LAST JOURNEY—BROOKLYN AND STATEN ISLAND, OCTOBER 2006
My father walks along the Brooklyn pier. The October wind is brisk off the New York Harbor; whitecaps dance on the gray-green water. Decades past, a wooden wharf stood here, the pier where my grandfather awaited the Staten Island ferry on an August afternoon in 1935.
Somewhere nearby, in the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Ambrose sat on a bench, eating his lunch as a breeze carried a newspaper to his feet. I imagine the terror that gripped my grandfather as he read the New York newspaper headline: AUGUST GALE KILLS MORE THAN 40 NEWFOUNDLAND FISHERMEN.
Scanning the story further, he found the words that caused him to cry out:
The hurricane that roared across Newfoundland over the weekend swept away forty lives. Tragedy concentrated in some cases on individual families. Captain Patrick Walsh and his son were found dead aboard the Annie Anita when she drifted into Hazel Cove on her beam ends. Six other men and another of Walsh’s sons were listed in her crew and they were almost surely drowned.
That was only part of the Walsh family tragedy, however. Captain Walsh’s eldest son was skipper of the schooner Mary Bernice. Today, the vessel was found drifting bottom up in Placentia Bay, her crew missing.
Along this gritty waterfront, my grandfather sat alone, collapsed in grief, sobbing for the death of his hero, Paddy, and his three nephews, James, Jerome, and Frankie. Distraught, he made his way here to the Sixty-ninth Street wharf to await the ferry home to his wife, Patricia, and his newborn son, Ronald. The news of the tragedy broke something deep inside my grandfather. “He went beserk,” a relative told me. “Screaming and shouting. He totally lost it.”
Five years have passed since my father shared the story of the August Gale with me. Here on this pier, a sudden and persistent breeze carried the prophetic newspaper to my grandfather’s feet. What if that story had not been remembered, retold decades later by my father, voiced to me on winter night? Would my grandfather have remained a stranger, my father’s childhood a mystery?
On the horizon, the Statue of Liberty rises up toward the blue October sky.
My father gazes across the bay to Staten Island. His story began here too. His memories, the good and the bad, resonate here.
Surprisingly, it was my father’s idea to visit the homes, neighborhoods, and churches of his childhood. “I thought it might be good for you to see them,” he tells me. My two younger sisters, the twins Janice and Joan, and my mother decide to accompany us; they realize this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they do not want to miss it.
Yet this sojourn, like our Newfoundland journey, has triggered yet a new round of emotions in each of us. The night before we drive to New York, my dad reminisces about his younger years. The story of Ambrose’s deadly street fight in Bay Ridge stands out in his mind. Ironically, it is one of my father’s good memories.
At the time, in 1942, my Nana, father, and Ambrose lived in Bay Ridge, in one of the many apartments they rented during the post-Depression years. On the day of the fight, my father is seven years old and sent to buy milk at the local market. The dark-haired boy runs along Sixty-ninth Street. The grocery is a couple of blocks away from his family’s home. He eyes the candy shelves as he enters the store, wishing he had a few spare pennies. He grabs the milk and pays for his purchase. Sprinting from the store, he races down the sidewalk. Up ahead, the entry to a Greek restaurant’s cellar storage is open. The boy doesn’t see the metal door, and his foot catches its edge causing him to trip. The milk bottles shatter, scattering dozens of shards. He falls, his hands splayed out in front of him. Before he gets up, he worries about the milk that pools on the sidewalk, and then he notices the blood that runs down his left hand like a little river.
“He needs seven stitches,” the doctor later tells Ambrose. “You need to take him to the hospital for ether.”
“He doesn’t need ether,” Ambrose says. “Stitch him up here.”
The boy winces but says nothing. He knows his father doesn’t like crying or weak men. In Newfoundland, Ambrose grew up without painkillers or hospitals. Ronnie falls quiet as he watches the doctor thread a large needle that reminds the boy of a fishhook. The doctor pulls the needle in and out of the boy’s hand, six times. The child has never felt pain like this. But he sighs now, thinking it is over. The doctor eyes his work.
“We need one more,” he says.
This stitch would hurt more than the first six. Still, he does not cry. Later, Ambrose takes his son home and leaves to confront the Greek restaurant owner whose open sidewalk vault caused the accident. “You hurt my son!” he yells at the owner. “You need to pay for his doctor’s bill.”
Affronted over the accusation and this brazen dark-eyed man, the owner hollers, “Get out!”
When Ambrose refuses to leave, the owner grabs a butcher knife and chases him into the street. There is shouting, screaming; strangers stop to stare at the man who shakes the silver knife in the afternoon air. Ambrose eyes the blade; he could outrun this man, but he does not. During the Depression, he fought as a middleweight to earn extra money, and like his brother Paddy, he refuses to back down from a challenge. He punches the restaurant owner in the head as the knife is raised. The man falls to the street, and his skull strikes the curb with a loud crack.
The wail of ambulance and police sirens grow closer, and soon the dead body and Ambrose are taken away. Days later, a judge frees Am
brose, ruling that the lethal punch was thrown in self-defense.
As my father retells this story, the details that linger in his memory are not the fight or a man’s death, but the seven stitches and Ambrose’s pride.
“He was so proud I didn’t cry,” my father tells us.
Ambrose’s son had suffered like a man. He bragged about his boy at poker games and to relatives. My father will carry those words, Ambrose’s love and respect, close to his heart for the next six decades.
Absentmindedly on this October evening, my father rubs the scar. The gash on his left hand is faded now, the crescent moon mark barely visible. The sun dips below the trees outside as my two younger sisters and I try to visualize Ambrose, his bravado, his pride for our father. Would we have grown close to our grandfather, forgiven him if we had had the chance?
“I don’t know if I would have liked him,” Janice says.
“I probably would have hugged him if I met him,” Joanie adds.
My father shakes his head at the thought of his daughter embracing Ambrose.
“He’s still my grandfather, our blood,” Joanie says. “He had to live with the guilt.”
The conversation pauses as my father tries to explain his animosity, the memories of his mother who struggled to feed and clothe her two sons. One vision continues to haunt him, the image of his mother bent over a sink, scrubbing dirty pans in the back room of a restaurant.
“Every night, Billy and I had to sit at the counter and eat our dinners there while she washed dishes,” my father says, his voice breaking. “It was painful as hell.”
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