Thursday's Storm

by Darrell Duke

  Furthermore, Jimmy Houlihan’s ties to this Fox Harbour tragedy went beyond his radio and marriage to a lost crew member’s daughter. During teacher training at St. Bon’s College, St. John’s, in the 1920s, he was good friends and teammates with Tom Furlong, a son of the to-be-lost schooner’s namesake, Annie Healy Furlong. She was childhood friends with most of the schooner’s crew, and while she’d been living in the city for eighteen years prior to the schooner’s end in 1927, she visited Fox Harbour with her children as often as time permitted. It was still home. Her life, too, would never be the same. All in all, the fact Jimmy Houlihan and Tom Furlong were buddies in the 1920s was a shoo-in to that side of the family. Without that connection, obtaining the information I did from that vital side of the story may never have happened.

  So, that covered the land side of the story. Now, in order to properly recreate the storm-at-sea portion of the tale, I needed at least one person with such experience. Luckily for the story’s sake, I had the great fortune of meeting and befriending Captain John Russell, formerly of Tickle Cove, Bonavista Bay South, and lastly of Bonavista proper. Captain Russell spent most of his long life at sea, and he had experienced all elements of that great force of nature, coupled with wind, rain, sleet, and snow. Like the crew of the Annie Healy, Captain Russell had experienced a hurricane while fishing off Cape St. Mary’s. But unlike the Annie Healy crew, he and his crew survived, albeit not until after a long, hard, two-day battle, where his schooner was left almost derelict and was carried sixty or more miles away by heavy currents and gale-force winds. The storm scene depicted in this story was co-written by Captain Russell, and the acute attention to detail came only from his experiences and sharp memory. He’d been there, and without him this story would lack the action and probable traumatic familiarity the crew endured during the storm. Captain Russell remained my best friend until his death in 2012. He was 105 years and five months old.

  This is not a history of Fox Harbour. It is the story of the lost crew of the fishing schooner Annie Healy, as told to me by some of the children and grandchildren of the crew, along with others associated with Fox Harbour, Placentia Bay, in the summer of 1927.

  PART 1

  Fox Harbour, Placentia Bay,

  Newfoundland

  Tuesday, August 16, 1927

  Chapter One

  The Foleys

  Last week Jack Foley said he’s never going handy to a boat again. He’s scarcely stopped saying it since. He’d been fishing for the Healy merchants of Fox Harbour since he was a boy. First for old Richard. Now for Jim and Mike, Richard’s sons.

  “Enough of the sea,” he says, his voice hardly ever rising above a whisper. “What do I ever get out of it, anyway? Poor knees an’ a bad back.”

  “And don’t forget the list of things we owes the Healys for,” says Lize, Jack’s wife, her usual response to the same old complaints she’s been putting up with for the past six days. “And it gettin’ neither bit smaller, either, that list.”

  “’Tis not enough fish left in Placentia Bay to pay for it all. ’Tis not like I’m able to go off to the States like the young crowd ’round here. What odds about it now,” he grumbles, banging his pipe hard on the table.

  The sound always grates on Lize’s nerves.

  “Saints preserve us,” she says, facing the stove and rolling her eyes.

  She flips the flattened dough frying on the stovetop. “Ah, Jack, b’y, keep your gob shut, will ya? You have me all sharoused!”

  “And what in the name of God is an old man like me still doing out in a boat, anyway?” he starts again, paying no heed. “I’m not able to work till all hours of the night, like I could one time. Ah, the company I’m liable to miss. But never the cursed sea.”

  “Mind your mouth, b’y!” she scorns. “You’re neither a hurt nor a service to them men, I know.”

  Lize waits in aggravation for a wisecrack or at least for the clumping of Jack’s big boots traipsing across the floor and out the door. But she doesn’t get either. She sits back in her rocker and picks up her knitting.

  “At least Gus never died at sea,” Jack moans like it’s the first time he’s said it today.

  Lize agrees with a nod of her head, quickly forgetting the argument. She leans out from her rocker and stretches her long neck to see in around the doorway of the hall, where Gus’s picture hangs. Too disarmed for the moment to offer a brazen remark, she closes her eyes and mumbles a quick prayer for their dead son.

  “You’re good for nothing, Jack!” she mutters under her breath at last, eyes still closed, sick of looking at him.

  She’s trying again to have the kitchen to herself, but her words aren’t loud enough for Jack to hear over the swiping of the axe blade. He’s making shavings from the handful of splits he’s thrown on the floor alongside the stove.

  “Spare them ’long now, Lize,” he says of the kindling.

  “Yeah!” she says sarcastically, as if she’s witnessing his saving the world from eternal damnation. “Don’t know what we’d do wit’out ya,” she slurs.

  Her lips pressed tightly together, she says nothing else, only “mmm,” allowing her attention to fall peacefully into each stitch of the sock half made in her bony hands.

  Jack pays little mind to Lize’s insults. He knows he’ll never be the man he once was. She has a right to complain when he’s laid up with his bad back on the daybed half the time and she with so much to do. At the best of times, though, Lize doesn’t need much of an excuse to call Jack good for nothing. It’s as if she’s practising for the times ahead when she won’t be in a good way and there’ll be no one around to take the brunt of her frustrations.

  Jack is an easy target for his wife, hardly ever responding to her attempts to get him going. This makes her worse. Although this badness of hers never makes its way into the confession box, part of her daily prayers include little requests for forgiveness. Silently, she acknowledges how hard life might be without him. But she’s hardly going to say the like of that to him, afraid he might get above himself.

  Jack sees Lize’s mad face—the eyebrows drawn tightly together and the pursed lips. He holds his breath and reaches past her to the long sideboard, the one from Lize’s father’s house, here for the past twenty years since the old man died. Jack grabs his pipe and tobacco, doing his best to avoid the look of the devil in his wife’s eyes, as she temporarily halts her knitting. He prepares for a long afternoon out of the house.

  Out in the shed Jack turns sideways to get through the mess of wood and tools and junk he’s brought home over the years, mostly things off wrecked schooners for which he may never have any use. He gets somewhat comfortable on his cot made of brin bags and last year’s hay. Every so often he gets up and stands to the bench, knowing Lize is making frequent trips to the kitchen window ensuring he’s busy at something, mending this or that.

  Most of Jack’s fifty-seven years have been used up at sea. The time between trips to sea and in over the hills for wood have been spent here in Fox Harbour, where he and Lize were born, and the only place they’ve ever lived. Little mind is paid to what goes on outside their lives locally, much less to the outside world. They hear bits and pieces of news from their daughters in the States, but that’s it. The big story these days, according to their girls, is the airplane Pride of Detroit, scheduled to be the first to take flight from the new airstrip in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, on the twenty-seventh of August.

  Every family in Fox Harbour has at least one good story, their own, the one that’s better than anyone else’s. And all are far superior to some foolish tale of machinery traversing the skies like a bird.

  “How in the name of God do a piece of metal fly in the sky when an anchor that two men are able to handle can keep a forty-ton boat in the one place? That’s what I’d like to know. All foolishness, if ya ask me,” Jack says to himself, glad Lize isn�
��t there to say no one asked for his opinion.

  He thinks back to the spring, that time out in the boat when they saw the red light in the sky and the sound of a thousand make-and-break engines filled the air and all around the water. Like the rest of the crew there that night, he’s content to believe, yes, indeed, it was the Devil himself. What else could it have been?

  Neither Jack nor Lize could care less about an airplane, but they suppose it’s all right to mention it to a few people when they ask how their daughters are getting on, living away and taking the time to write of it in their letters.

  “Everyone from here has someone in the States, don’t they,” Lize says, paying no mind to the airplane story.

  Jack appears from behind the Daily News at the kitchen table, nodding in agreement. He’s glad to be in out of the shed.

  Lize’s face relaxes again, and Jack sees vague traces of the fine-looking woman she once was. They hate bickering over foolishness, things that seem to take up so much of their time, and the things they always end up agreeing they have no control over.

  “Yes, girl. God knows we’re not the only ones left here to fend for ourselves, Lize, girl,” Jack says, grabbing her from her rocker and dancing her around three times while humming a made-up tune.

  “Go on, b’y, will ya, ya auld fool,” she says, pretending to want to get clear of him.

  “’Twill soon be time to have a crowd over again for a time, to put a few more scuff marks on me floor,” she says, out of breath and back in her chair.

  A meek smile skims the deep lines around her mouth.

  “Perhaps next week, when I gets . . .” Jack stops and rattles the paper.

  “When ya gets back from fishin’, ’tis what I knows you were gonna say, Jack Fowlou!” Lize is satisfied. “Coddin’ me barefaced, now, is all you’re at all week.”

  Jack says nothing. He’s surprised to see an article about the many Newfoundlanders who’ve taken up residence in the States.

  “Would ya listen to this?” he says, ignoring her taunting at the truth.

  Young men and women alike from all ends of the island have been taking the train to St. John’s and catching passage on steamships traversing the eastern seaboard to Ellis Island and Boston, mainly, in a mad exodus for the past ten years. There, men continue to fish, and for the first time in their lives have the option to seek a berth on more than one or two vessels, and a chance to make money. Others work for the railroad while some climb hundreds of feet into the sky early every morning to put up high-rise buildings, held by nothing more than the pledge of another day’s work tomorrow, and better yet one they don’t have to do on weekends.

  “A steel beam, now, on a concrete foundation—not much contest for a swaying schooner mast on a bottomless movin’ sea,” Jack reassures Lize. He tosses and shakes his head, wondering what will ever become of the world; it’s all changing so fast.

  He thinks back to when he was eighteen, when the railway finally made its way in from Whitbourne to the Jersey side of Placentia; no longer did they have to spend weeks scrounging passage on a ship bound for St. John’s to see if supplies could be had any cheaper. But it was never the case, anyway, cheaper prices, and he supposes much of his life was a waste of time. No sense in looking back, he always says. He’s about to bring up the stupidity of the men flying the airplane again, but he can’t be bothered.

  “Lot of young girls from here finds work as maids. Domestic servants, they calls themselves,” Lize says, again staying clear of Jack’s most recent ramble.

  “Yes, an’ some gets married and does the same work for free,” he laughs.

  “Don’t be talkin’!” Lize mutters, turning over a big flapjack on top of the stove. “Anyhow, Jack, b’y, everyone knows ya got to fish to keep alive.”

  Jack sits quietly at the table, waiting for his share of the fried dough. Quitting fishing only exists in theory, but he feels he has a right to complain, with the way the poor fishery has been the past number of years.

  Lize, too, knows this fancy will soon pass. She can handle the bit of complaining, no problem. She’s not bad at it herself, according to Jack.

  They’re no different than any other couple around, clinging to the good times and fighting to scrape away the bad. As Catholics, Jack says God is responsible for the works, so what’s the use in worrying? But he only says that.

  Each year’s seasons are mindlessly depicted by the chores defining their lives. In late summer and fall, the women pick berries while the men cut logs and continue fishing. Jack’s cords of wood are cut and piled in over the hill, on The Barrens, and will grow throughout the fall months, once the fishing dies down. If it ever picks up.

  The coming winter, like all the rest, will be passed with song and gossip, with men knitting traps and nets, playing tricks on one another for a laugh, and sawing, splitting, and piling their wood. They will go to the wakes of neighbours, inevitable with the winter’s chills, with all the wood and coal going to fight off the consumption.

  The women never stop: knitting and darning underwear, socks, caps, and cuffs, hooking mats and rugs, and sewing heavy quilts out of scraps of old clothes. Not to mention making sails for schooners and skiffs, rearing housefuls of young ones, and tending to their men who are perpetually hungry and worked half to death.

  “’Twould be cheaper to have a horse again than to feed you, Jack,” Lize says with a little smile, although she knows he knows she’s serious.

  Logs and longers will be hauled out of the woods over paths through the snow and used throughout the spring to build sheds and flakes and boats, and to replace palings on garden fences and sticks on animal pens.

  Lize scrubs Jack’s other shirt against the glass washboard in a big black pot. She hangs the worn garment to dry on the line, which stretches the length of the kitchen ceiling beams to catch the heat of the stove. Then she cleans vegetables from the garden to be stowed away in the cellar up behind the house. The kettle hardly takes a breath all day, boiling water for the loose tea keeping them going.

  Jack says he’d like to afford enough paint to finish the house next spring. What paint he did have went on and washed off the exposed studs during the typical cold spring, when it rained night and day.

  “’Twould be some good to afford boards to cover the house, too,” Lize says, looking out the window and pointing her head toward a clapboarded home farther up the road.

  “Perhaps there’ll be enough fish this time ’round for that,” Jack says.

  Lize smirks. “I thought ya said you were stayin’ home out if it”

  “I am,” he says dryly.

  Caulking hammers echo through the air as men make away with the leaks in their boat hulls. The big, strong arms of men push heavy wooden planers over rough lumber and haul spoke shaves as they clean longers of their sticky bark. Youngsters catch conners, flatfish, and sculpins and relentlessly swear, screech, and shout.

  “I stepped on a fookin’ whore’s egg,” one young girl cries, hopping around on one bare foot, holding the other bleeding one.

  Lize tut-tuts and bangs the window down.

  “I s’pose we can spare a bit of wood for the church,” she says warily.

  “Mind, now! All ya does is fret over the priest and never havin’ enough wood in the church when we hardly ever sees ’im,” Jack grumbles.

  “We can’t well turn our backs on ’im, either, now, can we, Jack?” She’s fretting more than usual.

  The complaints and the swearing will be taken care of in the confession box, but how can she keep bringing a scattered yaffle of wood for the priest when they have a job to keep themselves warm half the time? Jack’s back is bad a lot, and with everyone else in Fox Harbour living the same way, they can hardly ask for a bit of wood.

  “I must be out of me mind, Jack,” Lize says. “Remember years ago when the pr
iest hit Harb?” she says to change the subject.

  Jack’s half-hearted grunt of acknowledgement is interrupted by a noise—someone in the porch.

  “Need a hand with anyt’ing, Jack?” the visitor asks. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Lize.”

  “Come in, Charlie, b’y. How’re ya gettin’ on?” Lize asks. “How’s Mary Jane?”

  “The best kind, me dear, the best kind,” Charlie says.

  “How’s the Annie Healy comin’ ’long, Charlie?” Jack asks.

  “The best kind, Jack, the best kind. Ya never guess what they hauled out of ’er last week.”

  “Besides n’er fish?” Jack laughs.

  “A gun!” Charlie says, excited. “A real old cannon. ’Twas down amongst the beach rocks in the ballast.”

  “Go on, b’y! I wonder where that come from?” Jack asks.

  “I don’t know, b’y, but perhaps our luck’ll change this time ’round, now that ’tis offa the boat,” Charlie says in an attempt to sound optimistic. “Jim Healy said the French likely used it when they were here two or three hundred year ago.”

  “Talkin’ ’bout Annie Healy,” Lize butts in, “Mrs. So-and-So said they see her down be the big flakes t’day.”

  Charlie smiles. “I had a fine chat with her just now. She’s out from S’n John’s with her young ones for a day’r two. Were ya about t’ tell a story when I come in, Mrs. Lize?”