Tsunami

by Maura Hanrahan

  The day after the funeral Lizzie’s spinning wheel, which she had been using the day of the tsunami, washed up on the Point au Gaul beach. It was intact and Nan took it into her own home to keep. A day later, a child playing in a small brook about a hundred yards inland found a prize teapot that Lizzie once owned. The teapot lid was missing but there wasn’t a chip out of the pot.

  The newly widowed Lydia Hillier, too, grieved heavily, even as she awaited the birth of her third child. She also faced a practical problem in that the main source of her family income was gone. Her nineteen-year-old stepson, Harold, would have to be the breadwinner now. But Harold’s store and fishing gear had been swept away. And she worried that relations with her stepchildren were not always smooth. This was their house first, Lydia reminded herself worriedly, before she married their father. She reached far inside herself to comfort Caroline who cried ceaselessly for her father. Little Ben was so quiet it worried Lydia. Still a toddler, he was too young for her to know how much he understood. At least I still have my children, Lydia kept telling herself.

  Her neighbour, John Walsh, no longer had anything. The sixty-six-year-old bachelor was in poor health but had somehow managed to jog up the hill to safety before the first wave cracked his little dwelling in two. Then it turned the clapboard into splinters and carried it out to sea. John Walsh turned around from the top of the hill with tears streaming down his ruddy fisherman’s cheeks. He had no bed now, he knew, no bedclothes, no sugar or tea, no stove to cook on or keep him warm. He had only the clothes on his back. He saw that, in addition to his house, his stage was demolished. He knew that his trawl lines would be gone, too, as would his 140-fathom, nine-inch manila rope. Where was his boat? He figured that was wrecked too. At his age, he’d have to start all over, somehow. Sixty-eight-year-old Manuel and sixty-one-year-old Jessie Inkpen had spent their whole lives in Stepaside, Burin, a little cove named after the home village of its first English settlers. The Inkpens had prospered and lived in a ten room, three-storey house, built near the water. By November of 1929, Manuel was in poor health and increasingly dependent on Jessie and on Bertha, their live-in maid.

  Bertha had gone out visiting for the evening and the couple was having a cup of tea after their supper of fish and brewis when the first wave struck Stepaside. Manuel and Jessie found themselves knee-deep in gelid salt water as they sat at their kitchen table, and stood, shocked at the cold on their legs.

  “My God!” Jessie cried.

  “We’d best get out,” said Manuel, still holding his cup of tea.

  “Shall we bring anything?” Jessie asked. “Shall we put our coats on?”

  “I don’t think so, dear,” her husband answered. “I think we better get moving quickly before the water rises up.”

  Their legs already numb with cold, they pushed one foot in front of the other, until they reached the back door, the one nearest the kitchen. Jessie, stronger than her husband at this stage in their lives, pushed against it and heaved. It opened and they stepped onto a flake, their own.

  “It seems steady,” she said to Manuel. “Come on.”

  She regretted listening to Manuel and not taking his cane.

  As soon as the elderly couple stood on the flake it pushed off from the shore and floated to sea.

  “Good God!” said Manuel.

  Jessie’s face whitened. Her eyes scanned the village. Flakes and stages were destroyed. Dories were bottom up or cut in two as if giant knives had come down from the heavens. Cords of firewood drifted alongside the flake that had become their raft. Were they going to die like this? Jessie decided she had to do something.

  “Help!” she cried. “Someone help us!”

  “Help!” Manuel joined her.

  “Don’t strain yourself, dear,” Jessie said gently. She worried about the effect of this on his health. She never imagined they’d be floating out in the bay on a flake in November.

  “Help!” she yelled again.

  Men began appearing from the houses on the high ground. Jessie saw them point to the old couple on the flake in the middle of the cove. In spite of her predicament, she almost smiled.

  Manuel was looking behind them, out to sea.

  “I wonder will there be another flood?” he said.

  “Hush, now,” Jessie answered. “Our neighbours are on their way to rescue us. See how they’re getting a dory out?”

  Manuel nodded. He had begun to shiver. Jessie, too, was chilled and could not feel her feet. Then the water began to rise again and the boards of the flake began to creak. The swell broke the flake in two, throwing Manuel and Jessie into the sea. Jessie screamed and trod water madly, trying to find bottom. Manuel was too stunned to speak but his feet, as numb as they were, found the sea floor. He raised a frozen arm to grab hold of Jessie but she was too far away, still screaming. Then she stopped.

  “I’m all right!” she called out. “I can stand up! On my toes!”

  “My God!” said Manuel. How long could they last like this? The sight of his wife’s face pointed at the sky, her hair covered in cold ocean water, tore at him.

  “Hold onto a plank,” Manuel cried. “It’ll keep you afloat.”

  He saw Jessie clutch one and gasp in relief as she did so.

  “Are they still coming?” she called.

  “They are,” said Manuel. “They’re almost here.”

  Two Stepaside men hauled Jessie first and then Manuel into the dory when it arrived alongside the flake. The men rowed quickly to the beach, casting worried glances at their frozen passengers. Then they carried the Inkpens ashore and up a steep bank to a large house where most of their neighbours fearfully waited for more flooding.

  Bertha was already there when Jessie and Manuel were carried in.

  “A fine night for a cruise,” the maid said, her face wet with tears.

  “Terrible flooding,” Manuel said, his face grey. “Our kitchen floor is all wet.”

  “Mr. Inkpen,” said Bertha. “Didn’t you see the big wave? It was monstrous. Sure, it took all the stages and flakes out!”

  As the women took off Jessie’s stockings and slippers and dried her feet, one of the men said, “The big wave is after receding again and will be back again soon. All the houses and everything on lower ground is in danger of being swept away.”

  “Oh my goodness,” said Jessie. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

  “It’s just as well you didn’t,” said Bertha. “There’d be no point to it, the situation you were in.”

  The women took blankets off the stove and wrapped Manuel and Jessie in them. They pushed hot toddies into their hands and urged them to drink.

  “Here it comes!” someone called from the window. “Here comes the wave!”

  The villagers rushed outdoors to watch the wall of water crush the Inkpens’ home and virtually every stage and flake in Stepaside. The roar startled Manuel this time and the reality of his experience caused his heart to flutter and pearls of sweat to pour down his face. Still seated, he grabbed Jessie’s hand. Besides their house, furniture, linen, crockery, and clothing, the sea took Manuel’s wharf, barn, two stores, and fishing gear. The old couple’s sheep and ten hens drowned as well.

  When Manuel learned all this after the second wave pulled back, he sobbed into Jessie’s breast.

  “I’m too old for this,” he cried.

  10

  Sarah Rennie of Lord’s Cove fed her youngest children, Rita, Patrick, Margaret, and Bernard, their supper. They gobbled down their vegetables—hers were good eaters, not like some children in the village, thank God—and happily chewed their salt fish. They knew some lassie bread was waiting if they ate it all, that was her promise.

  Sarah kept some potatoes, carrots, and fish in the pot for her husband, Patrick, and her older sons, Martin and Albert. She hadn’t expected them home, this being a special night for the Lord’s Cove men to get together for cards. Every bit of time away from work was deserved for them; for her, too, when it came, as it o
ccasionally did. Patrick’s two missing fingers were testimony to his own diligence. She knew she wouldn’t see him till the wee hours. She expected the boys home much earlier than that, though. Albert had school tomorrow, she had reminded him as they headed out with their father.

  “Don’t be late now,” she had said.

  Four-year-old Margaret had barely swallowed her lassie bread when her head began to loll.

  “Upstairs for you, little maid,” Sarah said, gathering the child in her arms. When she came downstairs from tucking her youngest daughter in her cot, Sarah returned to her sewing machine. Baby Bernard was still not tired—he rarely was, Sarah sighed—so she secured him in his high chair and gave him his rattle again. “Bababa,” he said as he banged it on the wooden tray.

  “You two should get at your lessons now” Sarah said to Rita and young Patrick, running a line of blue thread into the bobber on her Singer.

  Just then the sound of thunder drowned out her children’s responses and Sarah’s skirts were anchored in icy water. She screamed, her eyes wide in horror. Sarah could not scream again because she was suddenly immersed in a mountainous wave. Her house was borne out on the water, heading for the Atlantic. Then the wave returned and threw it into the middle of The Pond with a great heartless thud.

  The noise had drawn Patrick Rennie from Prosper Walsh’s house and he now stood on a hill above the village with his heart ripped in two. “My wife and children are in there!” he screamed, tearing the lining of his throat.

  “They’re all drowned,” one fisherman whispered to another.

  “Yes, they’d have to be,” his friend agreed grimly.

  The men put their arms around Patrick’s strong shoulders, but then he disappeared like a shot, followed by his sons, Martin and Albert. All three ran toward The Pond, stopping abruptly at the shore.

  “Sarah!” Patrick called out.

  “Mom!” the boys cried. “Mom! Rita!”

  “Sarah, answer me! Sarah!”

  But there only came silence. Behind them the harbour was empty of sea water, its rocky bottom entirely exposed. The moon was luminous, throwing whiteness throughout the village.

  Patrick ran back and forth on the shore of The Pond. Like most fishermen, he could not swim; there had never been any time for such leisure in the summer. He tore at his hair. The meaning of the silence ate into him, devouring his soul.

  “Sarah!” he cried.

  “Get out of there!” someone called suddenly.

  Martin glanced at the dry harbour bottom and realized that another wave might be on its way.

  “Come on, Dad,” he said firmly, taking his father by the elbow. The boy had no intention of losing his father. Slowly and in a stupor Patrick backed away from The Pond. But as he walked up the hill, he kept looking back at what was now the graveyard of his family.

  For the past five years, eighteen-year-old Mary Walsh of Lord’s Cove had worked in a hotel in St. Pierre during the winter and spring and helped a French woman there raise her three children. Every summer she returned home to make fish for her father. Mary’s mother had died not too long before from an illness that had plagued her for years, leaving Mary and her younger brother, Bertram, motherless. Like most Roman Catholics, Mrs. Walsh had left this life with a lighted candle in her clasped hands, supported by the loving hands of a stronger relative. Mary’s mother had expired before the candle had burned more than an inch down. It was a memory that seared Mary’s young brain.

  That year, 1929, Mary was late going back to St. Pierre, so on a November night she saw the rocky harbour bottom for the first time in her life.

  “Pop!” she called out from the front porch. “There’s no water in the cove. It’s all rocks.”

  “What?” her father, Jim, answered incredulously.

  “Come and see!” Mary insisted.

  As soon as her father joined her in the doorway, they saw the first wave coming. All around them, people were running around shouting frantically. The wave seemed as if it was coming from the sky, it was so high. As it came closer, it seemed to pick up speed. Its nasty edge was unmistakable.

  Mary’s head spun round when her father ran back into the house and upstairs. She fought back panic. Everyone else was running away from their houses to higher ground. Mary stood frozen to the linoleum in the porch, her breathing shallow. What should she do? What was her father doing?

  Then Jim rushed back down the stairs, his footfalls heavy on the steps. In his hands was the candle that had led Mary’s mother to the afterlife. Mary’s eyes glistened with moisture, the roar of the wave outside almost forgotten. Wordlessly, Jim jumped into his boots and went out to the bank where the capstan was and stuck the candle down in a piece of chain. Mary watched him light it and back away. Then he turned and ran, grabbed his daughter, and rushed her to the hills above the village.

  As the second wave hit Lord’s Cove, the candle remained lit, a tiny fleck of light surrounded by wild waves that somehow did not come close to it. The little light did not go out even as the third wave roared into the beach and demolished flakes, stages, dories, skiffs, and houses.

  The tsunami did untold damage in Lord’s Cove, affecting virtually every family. The men wondered how they would fish next spring. Tusa Chappalla, John Collier, Francis Ferrie, David Fitzpatrick, James Fitzpatrick, Thomas Hodge, and William Lamb were among the many whose stages were ripped to bits by the waves. Other fishermen—Martin Fitzpatrick, Clement Harnett, John Herlidan, Frederick Hennebury, Clotaire Isaacs, and Eugene Papail among them— lost their dories and trap skiffs as well as their stages and stores.

  The women saw that from now on even curing fish would be a problem, since some of beaches were washed away. One of these belonged to Prosper Walsh, who had done so much to warn people of the coming disaster. Prosper, with a wife and four dependent children, had built up his eight foot high beach with a wooden and rock breakwater, costing him $150.00. The tsunami washed it all away. Even more worrying, the giant waves seemed to have robbed the forty-six-year-old man of his eyesight. As the last wave receded, so did Prosper’s vision, so that from then on he saw everything through a blur.

  Upstairs in the Rennie house, four-year-old Margaret had been slipping into the heaviness of nighttime sleep when the first wave approached. She lazily turned her head on the pillow her mother, Sarah, had puffed up for her, and glanced at the lamp that burned at the head of the stairs. Then the house shook as if ten gales were bearing down on it and the lamp went out. Margaret felt the shock of a frigid wetness and then nothing.

  The three waves that slammed into Lord’s Cove were between sixteen and fifty feet high. They hit the harbour at almost 130 kilometres an hour, clearing the little cove of everything it had held.

  The Rennie house, containing Margaret, her mother, Sarah, and siblings Rita, Patrick, and Bernard, was dragged into the harbour and then thrown back into The Pond, where it now lay, halfsubmerged. Patrick Sr., Sarah’s husband, howled, half-mad, at the top of the hill, where his friends had led him. His surviving sons, Martin and Albert, stood hollow-faced by his side, too stunned to speak. Every few minutes Albert balled his hands and rubbed his eyes as if he could change the sight in front of him by doing so.

  After the third wave the sea returned to its pre-tsunami calmness, the very state that had deceived them so. The moon enveloped the still cove in a light that seemed strangely protective, though it revealed the splinters that had been stages and flakes and now clogged up the harbour. When an hour had passed with no sign of another wave, Patrick’s friend, John Joe Fitzpatrick, turned to him and said, “I think we’ll try and get to your house.”

  Another neighbour, Herb Fitzpatrick, nodded in agreement.

  “It’s calm now, Pat,” he said. “And I expect it’ll stay that way.”

  “We’ll do what we can, Pat,” John Joe added.

  He patted Martin and Albert on the shoulders as he began to move down the hill, Herb by his side.

  “Mind your old man, boys,
” he called back.

  Martin and Albert closed in on their father. They were still numb with shock themselves.

  As they neared The Pond, the men met Jim Walsh, who had lost virtually nothing to the waves, thanks to his wife’s death candle. Jim had just come from Fred Hennebury’s property where the two men had tried in vain to recover the bodies of Hennebury’s sheep. The animals had been swept away by one of the waves and then pushed under a fishing store on the next incoming wave. They were barred in by a boat that got jammed there by the final wave. All the sheep drowned.

  Jim was desperate to help his neighbours, but was at a loss as to how. Herb and John Joe told him they needed a boat to put in The Pond to go out to the Rennie house.

  “Mine is all in one piece,” Jim said. “We just have to get it hauled over there.”

  Adrenalin pumped through the men’s veins as they lugged the dory across the beach and over the scrap of land to The Pond. Other fishermen carried the oars. Then the three of them, John Joe, Jim, and Herb, jumped into the dory and rowed to the house tilting in the water, their hearts galloping in fear. When they reached it they saw that the cold water came up to the ceiling of the first floor. From the shore of The Pond, they heard a woman scream.

  Suddenly, the house rose up as if to make their task easier. Pond and sea water drained out of it, followed by pots, pans, and even table legs. Then they saw the high chair, horizontal and still holding baby Bernard. John Joe reached in the broken window and pulled the chair toward the dory, trying to keep as steady as he could. The sound of his own breathing was all he could hear as he cut the child from the chair and passed him to Herb, who had removed his coat to wrap little Bernard in. They found Rita next, and then her brother, Patrick. Their mother, Sarah, was under the kitchen table, next to the sewing machine—it seemed she did not even have time to move away from her perch.

  Only young Margaret was missing. The men could see clearly through the first floor of the house and she was not there. They decided to row back to shore with their sad, sad cargo.