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Sarah Ann Rennie bent over her Singer sewing machine. She wanted to get a start on her sewing before it got too dark. She hated sewing under the lamp and having to squint; she wanted to save her eyes. She had cut up a shirt of Martin’s, her oldest, and was making it into two shirts for Bernard, the baby. She smiled at her own ingenuity. She knew her long dead mother would be pleased. Her fingers moved in unison, pushing the blue cotton under the needle, as her right foot worked the pedal.
On the black pot-bellied stove was a huge steel pot full of potatoes, carrots, and turnips from Sarah’s root cellar. Sarah had them on slow boil. She’d round out the meal with a bit of salt fish and some of the bread she made every day. She might even let the children have some molasses, though, like all the women in Lord’s Cove and the rest of the communities on the coast, she had to spare it along through the winter.
Sarah was a Fitzpatrick before she married Patrick Rennie of nearby Lamaline. She was born in Lord’s Cove in 1892 and baptized seven weeks later when they could get handy to the priest at Allan’s Island, right by Lamaline. Her father still lived next door to her in Lord’s Cove, alongside The Pond on the eastern side of the cove. The children came right away: Martin, Albert, Rita, Patrick, named for his father, Margaret, and Bernard. There would probably be more, Sarah knew, and when she thought of this, she smiled.
She glanced at baby Bernard as she sewed. At eighteen months, his cheeks were round and pink, the picture of health. He was lively and Sarah had tied him into his high chair. Blond curls framed his face and he called out as he banged his rattle on his high chair table. He was already a handful, this child, Sarah thought, laughing at him as she took a scissors to the cloth in her hands.
Nine-year-old Rita and seven-year-old Patrick played with a spinning top in the pantry. Their little sister, Margaret, only four, was in there with them. Sarah could hear the whir of the top and then the thud as it hit the floor. Then she heard the scuff of Rita’s and Patrick’s shoes on the plank floor. They might be playing school now or house, she thought, alongside the barrels of herring, mackerel, and cod that stood against the pantry wall. Above them hung a brace of rabbits and a row of jars, filled with pickled onions and beets. There were jam jars there, too, containing blueberries and strawberries. Sarah even had some rhubarb jam left, though her children loved it and it was November. Patrick and his sisters were particularly close, little mates, their mother called them. Sarah let them idle with their games before supper and their lessons. They’d have a long dark winter ahead of them and all that trekking to school in the cold, poor mites. And Rita was getting old enough to be a real help to her. She’d let them play when they could.
When the tremor came, Sarah was too face-and-eyes into her sewing machine to notice it. Her foot pushed heavily on the pedal as the needle dove into the pieces of cotton, tying them together. The clack-clack of the machine quickened as she worked and the earth trembled. In the pantry, Rita and Patrick stopped their play as the quake began and laughed at the tremor.
Across the harbour in Lord’s Cove, a group of fishermen played cards at Prosper Walsh’s. They were glad for the leisure. They had spent every waking hour from June until September on the water or bringing their fish in to the beaches for the women to cure. At sea they went to the same grounds their fathers and grandfathers fished. They caught squid and slammed it onto the dozens of hooks on the lines they let out into the water. When they hauled the lines in, they tore codfish off the hooks and threw them into the bellies of their dories. Some days the men roasted in the sun; other days the fog drifted up from the St. Pierre Bank and seeped into their bones. Their wrists constantly itched and pained with the salt water blisters they called water pups. Their backs ached from the bending over; their hands and fingers grew red with nicks and cuts. At night they flopped on their beds, dead weights. During the fall and winter they hunted partridge and snared rabbits, cut wood, and repaired their fishing gear, making new nets and trawls. But, unlike the summer, in fall and winter there was time for a Christmas dance, some mummering, and the odd game of cards with friends.
Patrick Rennie, Sarah’s husband, laughed out loud when he won a hand. “Look Martin! Look Albert!” he called to his oldest sons. “Your father’s won!” He might have been awarded the crown jewels for the smile on his face, russet with years of fishing. The boys smiled, delighted to be among the men. Martin, just into his teens, had been on the water all summer with his father and had not returned to school; he was a man now, a fisherman. Albert intended to follow him.
They were starting to run low on rum and someone mentioned that there was none left in the village.
“Never mind,” one of the card players said. “A few of the fellows have gone over to St. Pierre. I daresay that’s what their errand was for. They should be back this evening. And they might have a drink for us!”
The men sat around the Walshs’ kitchen table while the boys stood behind them, peeking at their cards. Half empty cups of tea stood on the table, as did a few glasses of rum. Suddenly the table shook and the cups and glasses did a little jig. Patrick was the first to laugh, triggering a similar reaction in most of his friends. His sons giggled as well.
But then Prosper Walsh spoke up.
“That was no laughing matter,” he said. His dark eyes fixed on each man and boy, one by one. “Hear what I’m saying. That was an earthquake. And there’s going to be a tidal wave next.”
“Go ’way with you, Prosper,” one of the men said as he shuffled the deck of cards.
But Prosper shook his head. He had been on schooner crews and had travelled to places these shore fishermen had never been: the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, North Africa. He had been in earthquakes, seen tidal waves, lived through the eyes of southern hurricanes.
“No, fellows,” he said. “It’s no joke. I’m telling you there’s going to be a tidal wave. Look—there’s going to be a big storm, here onshore.”
“Have another drink, Prosper,” one of the fishermen said, bringing gales of laughter from the others.
“We’ve got to get all the women and children to dry land,” Prosper pleaded. “It won’t be safe right down in the village.”
“Are you going to build an ark, too?” the same fisherman asked.
“God help us if I’m right,” said Prosper. “This whole place will be swamped by a great big sea while you fellows play cards.”
As Prosper spoke, young Martin Rennie found he couldn’t laugh with the rest of the boys and men, even as his father and brother did. In his chest was a monkey’s fist that kept twisting tighter and tighter. By the end of the conversation he was as stiff as a cold junk with fear.
Lord’s Cove lies at the tip of the Burin Peninsula and is shaped like a horseshoe, with high hills rising way up out of the sea ringing the harbour. Lord’s Cove is likely named after the rainbowfeathered Harlequin ducks that frequent its shores and were nicknamed lords and ladies by the island’s early settlers.
One family was living in Lord’s Cove by 1800, at least for the duration of the summer, to fish; they might have repaired to the less exposed woods for the winter, as most early rural Newfoundlanders did. They had no doctor or nurse, just their own common sense and the kitchen medicine their mothers bred into their bones. By the middle of the century, the fifty fishermen of Lord’s Cove had nineteen boats from which they caught more than five hundred quintals of codfish as well as four barrels of salmon, worth more than five hundred pounds. They had cattle, milch cows, and sheep as insurance against hunger. They also had eighty-five acres of land under cultivation. Ten years later their children were taking lessons, in a house, not a school—it would be another half century before they’d have one.
By 1921, eight years before the earth rumbled for a full five minutes on a beautiful November evening, there were 208 people living in Lord’s Cove. In its harbour were forty-six boats and seventeen fishing rooms. They had built a community.
Unlike nearby Point May and Taylo
r’s Bay, Lord’s Cove wasn’t built on flat land and surrounded by meadows and semi-tundra with the woods way in behind. Here the trees came almost right up to the village, combining with the hills and jumble of twostorey clapboard houses to make for a cozy feeling. The rich cod fishing grounds were just offshore, too, giving the men of Lord’s Cove an advantage that their brethren in more sheltered parts of Placentia Bay and elsewhere in Newfoundland lacked.
An hour or more had passed and Prosper Walsh had abandoned his friends at their card game as his heart ached at their indifference to his warning. Young Martin Rennie followed him out the door, casting a backward glance at his father, Patrick, and brother, Albert, still enjoying the game. Prosper ignored the boy at his heels and banged on his neighbour’s door, calling out, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Bruised from his experience with the card players, he didn’t wait to gauge anyone’s reaction this time. Instead, he went from one house to another as if in a barn dance, calling as loudly as he could, “We’re going to have a tidal wave! Get to higher ground.”
Martin saw two women standing in the pathway between their houses, looking after Prosper as he sped along banging on doors.
“I believe him,” said one. “I’m getting my youngsters and going up to the woods.”
“My husband is not back yet from the cards,” her friend responded, shaking her head. “He’s not worried. Why should I be?”
“I’m not waiting for my husband,” came the reply. “I’m the captain of the shore crew anyway.”
Martin was glued to the ground but he willed his feet to move. He didn’t follow Prosper this time. He headed back to the Walsh’s kitchen; he would try and convince his father and brother that Prosper was right and that they must act quickly to get their mother Sarah and the little children to the safety of the woods.
3
To the south, Nan and Herbert Hillier were walking to Lamaline from their home in Point au Gaul for an Orange Lodge meeting scheduled for seven o’clock that evening. Nan had spent the day baking blueberry pies and sponge cakes for the gathering. She had picked the blueberries that fall with the help of her two eldest, Leslie, ten, and Ruby, eight; the berries had been the fruit of a bumper crop. Ruby had helped her with the sponge cakes, too. Then Nan and her husband packed the baked goods in a suitcase for the three mile journey. It was a beautiful evening; with the sun about to go down in a cloudless sky, the autumn air was bracing, just the way Nan liked it. There was no wind and hence, almost no noise from the sea, something they were not used to.
At about the halfway point between Point au Gaul and Lamaline, the earth began to tremble and Nan and Herbert froze in their boots. Nan looked up to see telegraph wires vibrating and emitting a loud buzz, as if they might explode. She drew toward Herbert, too shocked to speak. She tried to steady her feet on the hard ground but the rumbling of the earth continued a full minute. Then it stopped.
When it was over she cried, “Herbert, what’s happening?”
Her husband, a veteran of the first world war, had been to southern climes and recognized what he had just witnessed. “It’s an earth tremor, Nan,” he said gently.
“Will we go back home?” Nan asked anxiously, thinking of their children. Besides Leslie and Ruby, she had two little boys, Lawson and Charlie. She wondered if they had felt the tremor too, and were frightened. She assumed it went all the way to Point au Gaul, seeing as it travelled on the telegraph wires like that.
Herbert stomped his feet as if to demonstrate the steadiness of the earth. He smiled broadly. “Solid again!” he said. “No, it’s nothing. We’ll go on.”
Nan, in her shyness, always deferred to Herbert. She looked around, trying to convince herself that everything had returned to normal. She relaxed and breathed in the comfort of the clean air.
They crossed the three-hundred-foot-long Salmonier Bridge, bringing them into the next community. In Lamaline everyone was talking about the rumbling; it seemed that no one had experienced such a thing before. Some of the women told Nan their houses had shaken as if they would never stop. They had run outside in fright and been too afraid to go back into their homes. When it was over, they finally went inside to find dishes and glassware scattered and broken all over their kitchen floors. Although the earth seemed to have returned to its usual quietude, they were still frightened. When Herbert registered the women’s fear, he came over and explained the nature of earth tremors to them. Then he added, “It’s over and finished.”
But, try as she might, Nan could not stop thinking of her children back in Point au Gaul.
Point au Gaul lies at the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, flat and exposed to the North Atlantic Ocean, not far from St. Pierre Bank and north of the famous Grand Banks that had been a food basket for numerous nations for centuries. At Point au Gaul a narrow beach runs for half a mile, separating the cold waves from the level grasslands that reach far inland to the low-lying coniferous woods. The name Point au Gaul may be a translation of Frenchman’s Point, a reference to the first European settler, a man from France called Hillier. The area was of vital importance to French fishermen for many years; they recognized its easy access to abundant cod stocks and the usefulness of its flat land and beaches for drying fish.
The settlers of Point au Gaul had strong connections to the nearby French island of St. Pierre, where they traded their surplus vegetables and sometimes met the man or woman they would marry. Over the years, French families moved into the village—the Martins, Millons, and Roberes among them. With one eye on the lucrative fishery in the area, a merchant set up shop around the turn of the century.
In 1921, the village’s fifty-eight fishermen along with thirtyeight women working on the beach had produced fish products worth $13,328—a considerable sum. By November, 1929, Point au Gaul was a vigorous community of well over two hundred people, a good size outport for this part of the Burin Peninsula. Most of the forty-five houses straddled the grasses that bordered the narrow beach in Point au Gaul. They were, then, very close to the waves of the North Atlantic. For them, this represented riches, not danger.
Back home in Point au Gaul that crisp November evening, the tremor was all the talk as well. No one understood what was going on. Twelve-year-old Caroline Hillier, a very distant relative of Nan’s, felt the hairs on her head stiffen as the rumbling seemed to go on and on. She had been in her family’s house, helping in the kitchen. Like many in the village, Caroline had run outside with her mother and her toddler brother, Ben, to see what was happening and to get away from the weird sound of dishes rattling. But there was no way to escape the thunder that accompanied the shaking. Caroline bit her lip as she listened to the older people talk of the mystery and her breathing grew rapid and shallow. She clutched her mother’s hand and touched little Ben’s stockinged foot, dangling as his mother held him. The human contact reassured her and she calmed slightly, but the terrible shaking of the ground below them continued. And then, just as suddenly as it had come, it halted.
“Thank God!” someone called out.
“It’s not the end of the world, then,” said another neighbour in relief.
“Not yet anyway,” another weighed in, trying to sound lighthearted.
They looked at the sky, as if they hoped the face of God might appear to tell them not to worry. But there was nothing in the sky, not a single fluffy cloud, not a single black-backed gull or sooty shearwater. The air was crisp and clear and a windless graveyard stillness descended upon the village and the rest of the coast. Though their hearts still fluttered in their chests, it was impossible to believe that anything untoward could happen now. And clearly “the Big Thump,” as the people of Point au Gaul had already begun to call it, was over.
Still jumpy, Caroline scanned the village with her eyes. It was then that she saw Joe Miller, an old man from France who had moved to Point au Gaul. He seems to be up to something, Caroline thought from her station on an incline known as “Up the Hill.” Jo
e Miller was on the level ground that adjoined the beach and the fishing rooms known as “Down the Town.” He was on his knees. Caroline let go of her mother’s hand and Ben’s little foot and rushed Down the Town. She shimmied her way into the small crowd that had by now gathered around old Joe. She saw that his ear was pressed to the ground and his eyes were closed. The group watched him in silence as dusk drew in on this strangest of nights. He remained in his position for several minutes.
Finally, Joe hauled himself up and stood. He folded his arms in front of his chest and announced, “Prepare yourselves for a tidal wave.”
“What?”
“Prepare yourselves for a tidal wave,” he repeated in his thick French accent.
“A tidal wave indeed,” one man said. “Joe, it’s a perfectly calm evening.”
Joe pursed his lips but said nothing. Caroline stared at him. The little crowd murmured among themselves. How could there be any kind of storm on an evening like this? She saw Joe shrug as the crowd began to disperse.
Caroline was inclined to agree with them. She was getting fed up with all this rumbling and dire talk. She wanted to get back to her own house. Her father’s birthday, the twenty-first of November, was in a few days and they were having a party! Caroline could never remember her father celebrating his birthday before, which only added to the excitement.
“Yes, child, this is the first one he’s ever marked,” her mother had said to her as they added raisins to the fruitcake they were making. They’d have a sponge cake but he loved fruitcake so they were making that as well. He could take it with him when he went on his next work trip. The idea for the celebration came from Thomas, Caroline’s father. One quiet black night in late August, he told his wife, “I feel the need to visit with my close friends, with my buddies. I want to have a little celebration with them.”
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