by Darrell Duke
The foresail topmast cracks off.
“Look out!” Charlie shouts, as wood and sail fall to the deck, just missing the men at the windlass.
The jib topsail tears away from the bowsprit and disappears on the wind. Jim and Michael dive to the deck to avoid flying debris.
Captain Mullins knows he has to take a northwest course to get the schooner past the False Cape and Cape St. Mary’s and into the deep waters of Placentia Bay. She’ll be safe there.
Mountainous seas throw the schooner on her beam ends. After a long thirty seconds or so, she uprights again, sending dory oars, trawls, and kegs into the seething sea.
Atop the massive waves, the crew sees several boats attempting to navigate the dangerous reefs outside Norther’ Head, likely on their way to St. Bride’s, where just Sunday past they sat in a lovely meadow, enjoying a spell, chatting with other men after Mass.
“Up with the mains’l. All the way,” Captain Mullins orders.
“Jaysus Christ, Mullins, ’tis too much wind. She’ll never handle it,” Jim shouts.
“Get it up! ’Tis out of here we’re gettin’!” Mullins screams back.
“Christ have mercy,” Charlie cries, as he, Michael, and Jim put all their weight into hoisting the mainsail. The heavy boom beats them in the guts after each pull as the Annie is knocked about like the toy boats their fathers once made for them.
The rope around Charlie’s right forearm keeps him from falling completely overboard when the wind carries him backwards and over the rail. His broad back smacks off the water as the Annie rolls. Jim grabs Charlie’s boot, twisting it so it doesn’t come off, and pulls him back to the deck. They continue with the harrowing strain of raising the mainsail until it’s all the way up and secured. With that, the schooner rises out of the water and turns running. The mainmast light casing shatters, sending shards of clear glass to the deck. Michael gets another cut to his face. The lantern from inside the casing flies through the air fifty or sixty feet before crashing into the wall of sea surrounding the schooner.
“We can make St. Bride’s, Father,” Michael shouts, staggering to catch his balance, holding his chest still searing with pain.
“Too many boats headin’ to one place, Michael,” his father roars back. “No room, an’ we’ll end up on the rocks. We’ll fare all right once we’re in the middle of the bay.”
“Father! Your leg!” Michael yells.
“Can’t even feel it,” the captain yells back.
A few hundred feet from the Annie’s stern, across maddening waves, Captain John Power struggles to keep the Chase intact.
From another schooner nearby in the race for St. Bride’s, Mullins’s old Long Harbour friend, Peter Murphy, doesn’t like what he sees: the Annie Healy under full sail and heading away from land.
Chapter fourteen
The Storm At Home
The storm batters Fox Harbour. The wild, howling wind scratches and tugs at homes, stables, stores, stages, and flakes. Felt is ripped from rooftops and fish from flakes, shattering glass in windows, sending it crashing to the rock foundations below. The tallest wild rose bush branches in gardens snap and large trees on all sides of the town are torn from the ground. Roots and all.
Mothers and wives are headlong into the rosary, praying for the safety of their sons and husbands at sea. With Mary Jane Sampson’s birthday time on the minds of many, prayers are said so the gathering will go ahead. The whistling and whirring of the wind in stoves, pipes, and chimneys is deafening. Breakfast is quickly forgotten by youngsters peeking outdoors to catch a glimpse of the wind’s wonderful command.
Drying codfish and their coverings of branches and birch rinds are whisked through the air like paper, much of it ending up in the harbour. The rest flies over the road and into gardens, smacking off fences, houses, and stables where sheep are baaing and cows mooing and moving about with fright.
Shore boys chase fish, slipping and sliding, gathering what they can. They can’t get over the wind with the sun still shining, and how last night’s red sky had promised nothing in the way of this. No one hears their curses and complaints.
Around Healy’s premises, shore boys Billy Penny and Cyril Leary have an awful job collecting fish and everything else blowing around. The wind lifts their slim bodies as they scramble down and fumble over the steps of the wet and slippery flakes. Sheets of water lifted and thrown from the sea slow them down even more. Their hands and the sides of their legs are scraped and torn by nail heads and large splinters impossible to avoid. Running in every direction, the young fellows do what they’re told without hesitation. They dump fish under the shaking and squeaking linny of the big store, yelling at one another to watch out for this and that flying through the air. Through a broken window of the store, Jim Healy’s pet crow bawls a few words at the lads. The linny is jumping up and down, its four-by-four wooden support posts pounding the ground. The nails attaching it to the house twist and screech until the whole thing collapses on top of the fish and rain barrels beneath. They knew this would happen and there’s no sense in trying to fix it now; at least that much fish is safe, trapped under the linny.
Overturned punts by the water’s edges somersault across the road, demolishing fences, outhouses, and well covers. The few clothesline poles still attached to their lines spin and leap in every direction.
The wind howling across the mouth of the harbour picks The Green clean. Everything not nailed down is sent through the air, making it increasingly difficult for men fighting to save their small boats. Gear once stowed in wooden boxes, barrels, and tubs on wharves and stageheads floats in a huge mess along the shore, all the way to where the sea meets the brook.
Clothes that managed to stay on lines are taken in and hung above stoves to finish drying when it’s fit to light a fire. Brave boys marvel over the speed of their iron barrel hoops rolling madly under the sway of the wind until their mothers or older brothers grab them by the ears and point them back home.
The noise of scattering debris is unbearable, with the whir of the wind leading the band of destruction. A mangled chorus of disturbed horses and cattle and chickens mixes in with the great blows of the gale. The harbour’s water level rises to meet the road and, in places, washes over. Muddy trenches are carved and men have to lay wooden planks down to move scared horses across.
Children who managed to sneak out are soon rushed indoors and led beneath stairs and under tables where they’re told they’ll be safe. Bottles of holy water are emptied while windows smash and crash all around them. Babies bawl, cats gale, and dogs whimper and howl while mothers and older children try in vain to quiet and comfort all.
Brittle kerosene-stained pages of old prayer books rustle beneath the crippled fingers of elderly women praying in loud whispers, rubbing the faces off the saints of their rosary beads. Plastic and ceramic statues of Jesus, Mary, and Good Saint Joseph stand guard. On windowsills they face windows and doors, except where wind and debris have broken panes of glass. It’s the end of the world, some say, with all the booming and breaking, and the Lord Himself in pieces on the floor.
Oblivious to the storm, some old men are lured toward the water. They trudge through flattened grass and broken flowers, fretting over their sons and friends, boats and gear. They’re helpless and can’t stand the shame accompanying the feeling.
“Will Daddy be home soon, Mam?” Ellen Bruce asks her mother.
Liz holds her daughter close to her side, unable to get a word out. The very thought of never seeing Pad again is heavy in their breasts, stealing most of the air in their lungs.
Uncle Watt scratches his grey head.
“I don’t know, me dear. I don’t know. I never see a gale like this in forty year,” he shouts over the racket. “I never see the like. ’Tis a good t’ing for us The Isaacs are there, keepin’ the waves down. “’Tis a good t’ing. The
poor crowd on The Rams, too.”
Watt stands, unusually quiet, peering out the front kitchen window. The usual strength in his voice is absent, and what traces of vigour are left fall into mumbled prayers for Pad and the rest of the Annie’s crew.
Around dinnertime, fifteen loaves of bread lie cooling in Mary Jane Sampson’s kitchen. She peeks through the window past Healy’s big house to the water for a sign of the Annie Healy. People are going in and out of Healy’s store, and by the way they mope out, she knows they have nothing to tell. She’s better off waiting for someone to come to her door with the good news that the men are back safely. Her boiled molasses cake has fallen in the middle, but that’s no odds. She pities the poor shore boys still chasing fish in such a state, while Billy begs to go outdoors, certain his best friend, Liz Kelly, is out enjoying the bit of excitement.
“When this storm is over, ya can go out beatin’ the paths, Billy. Not a bit sooner,” she warns him.
Mary Jane knows that when the Annie is anchored in the harbour this day the fish won’t be brought in until later, on account of all the mess to clean up. But perhaps they might wait till tomorrow and her birthday time might start a bit earlier. Her baking will be the talk of Fox Harbour once all hands have a few drinks in, and being an old woman of forty-five won’t be so bad after all.
Making his way in over the hill to check on Bridge King and her young ones, Bridge’s father, William Dreaddy, can hardly catch his breath. With one hand he holds onto the needled branches of the spruce trees lining the path while the other keeps his cap tightly to his chest. Stopping at the top of the garden, he wipes his eyes left watery from the wind. He can see the waves pushing in over the land behind the house, and the dirty foam of the angry sea blows through the air. The small house seems to make a face at him, tilting back slightly to get out of the way of the wind. Trees around the soaked meadow dance like savages, trying hard to free themselves from the ground. William hops over the overflowing trench in his hip rubbers and carefully unlatches the length of rubber stretched over the post, keeping the gate closed. He quickly changes his mind, undoing the latch and driving the few scared sheep from the garden up into the woods where they might find a bit of shelter.
Inside the house, Bridge is cursing the storm and fretting over Jim. The baby in her belly kicks like mad for a way out. She’s worried the stress of it all will send her into labour this day and she wonders if Mrs. Mart will be able to make it in time to deliver the child. She’s scared by the possibility of complications from the stress, and of dying in childbirth the way many poor women in Fox Harbour have, leaving Jim alone to fend for himself and their growing family.
“They’ll be in soon, I s’pose, Daddy?” Bridge says, trying to cover her nervousness, and as if he will have an answer.
“I s’pect the b’ys are gone in to S’n Bride’s, or perhaps Trepassey, ’pendin’ on where they were when the wind struck,” Mr. King says.
Through a continuous stream of salt spray hitting the rattling windows, the sunlight casts strange, ever-changing shadows on the faces of the young ones. They’re huddled together on the daybed, where they’re scared, seen, and not heard.
Chapter fifteen
Southeast of Merasheen Bank
11:00 a.m., August 25, 1927
The sun is shining brilliantly. The wind rages from the southwest at ninety miles an hour.
Hurled atop giant waves and thrown headlong into even bigger mountains of water, Jim Harris’s schooner lists starboard, almost capsizing.
Walls of salt spray and dirty foam darken the water and air. A schooner, half-submerged with both masts gone, is in a sinking position, her nose underwater. The last thing the captain from St. Joseph’s needs.
Barrelling by the derelict hulk, Harris’s schooner smashes through lifeless bodies, puncheon tubs, and heavy scraps of sail canvas. The crewmen aboard Harris’s boat are reluctant. They have their own lives to worry about. Their own families are at home. But orders are given to try and rescue a man in the water.
Two of Harris’s men grasping their schooner’s rails wait for the right moment to reach out and snatch the drowning man. Freezing salt water slaps their faces, rushing over their tired bodies already numb from the cold. They wait forever.
When the moment comes, one of Harris’s men extends an arm to the fisherman struggling to keep afloat amidst a mess of trawl lines, kegs, and spars. The drowning man has one arm savagely wrapped around the cracked, splintered mainsail spar of the battered schooner. Reaching for the man trying to save him, he bawls out. Their hands miss by a couple of feet, and the undertow caused by the passing schooner robs the drowning man of his last words. He is sucked violently, head first, into the black water, along with a pile of wood and canvas from the battered boat. The yellowish froth of the sea turns brown with his blood.
Harris’s crew is helpless. They can hardly see each other for the water washing over them and their boat, let alone spot the man in the water. They try to remember the place where he went under, but it’s impossible with the sea rising and falling, twirling and crashing upon their deck. One second they’re watching the sinking schooner lifted high by the sea; the next a wall of water comes between them and the wreck. The wall drops without warning and the wreck rises up in front of their boat. They’re sure it will land on them. The heavy current of the waves rushing across the deck and out through the scuppers and over the rails keeps the men clinging to whatever they can find. They shout to one another that they think they see the drowned man. But it’s always a piece of wood or something. They’re sure the poor soul is long dragged far away by the undercurrent, or tangled on the ocean floor in seaweed and in the nets of their forefathers.
The sea exhales, throwing Harris’s schooner on her beam ends. When the boat is uprighted, they decide to keep going. It’s too dangerous. Until they look back. Like a wounded beast on the swell, the sinking schooner rises again. Another man is seen, lashed to two dories stacked on deck.
The boat’s wood splitting, cracking, and snapping can be heard through the roar of the wind and lashing sea. Forged nails and iron spikes shriek as they’re warped and plucked from the schooner’s hull.
At first the men on board Harris’s boat presume the second man is dead. Then he screams. In the mayhem his words are indecipherable.
Captain Harris orders his crew to turn his schooner around again.
The man has moved from the dories. He’s clinging to a rope, and being thrashed like a bell clapper against the schooner’s deck, a warping spruce wall at his back.
With another agonizing roll, a thunderous roar comes from within the ship. When she comes back up, the man is nowhere to be seen.
Then, about ten feet from the wreck, he’s spotted again.
Harris’s weary men manage to manoeuvre their vessel around the sinking ship. Passing by the man, they extend ten-foot gaffs. He doesn’t have the strength to raise his arms.
Harris’s schooner is thrown headlong, again, into a mountain of water. It tips back and climbs the wave, crashing through the crest. This time it keeps going.
The schooner wreck, picked up by another massive wave, falls on her side like a dying horse. After a violent jerk and a few spins, she turns bottom-up and is carried across the bay, toward Argentia.
Chapter sixteen
Argentia, 2:00 p.m.
People stare into the ocean. From meadows above the beaches, they gasp, and sigh, and wonder, both silently and aloud. Who owns the boat? Who’s on it? If anyone. Their eyes comb the stretch of rounded boulders where the salt water continues to pound the land. The edges of the eroded cliffs of black bog are littered with trawl kegs, nets, spars, and other wooden objects too mangled and mashed together to make out. In the marsh covering the bog lie long lengths of wood—old schooner masts clawed up from the ocean floor by the storm. They were thrown there this morning when the
winds were at their peak. They’re useless. Too heavy to lift and too waterlogged to burn.
The crowd is growing despite the remaining strong winds. The clouds are scarce and it’s raining hard. The sun is still bright. With the wind they figure the rain could be blowing from anywhere, far away.
The freshly sharpened, worn-down blades of their father’s scythes reflect the sun in the uneven meadows of flattened grass.
The first of the crowd here today came to check on their crops. Most expected the worst and got much more. Seaweed blown off potato beds fills the drills running through and around the fenceless gardens. Tiny skeletons of capelin—dug into the topsoil to feed the turnips and carrots—are exposed, their dirt blankets gone on the wind. A summer’s hard work ruined. They’re furious over their great losses.
Clumsy lupine stalks on the periphery of the fields wobble and dance fiercely before cracking off. Their grey, fuzzy seed pods scatter. Pitcher plants in the surrounding bog act as if nothing’s going on, continuing to make meals of oblivious spiders and flies busily lapping rainwater from the cups of the flowers.
The sea has gone mad. They’ve never seen the like. The eldest of the men in the crowd says it’s liable to wash in over the entire Argentia peninsula and they should be home preparing for the worst. The debris spread along the shoreline is the least of their concerns. The schooner, bottom-up and spinning viciously with the savage tide, comes into better view. The women in the crowd start to roar and bawl. A few husbands belonged to Argentia are out fishing with crews on boats from Dunville and Red Island. They’re unaccounted for and speculation is taken to a new level.
Another old man mumbles how the Lord is about to pull the plug in the bottom of the bay, taking the works to Hell. Some tell him he’s off his head and don’t be so foolish, while others know he’s just scared and move closer to offer a bit of comfort.